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‘So you see, the story was not quite as you were told’: Maleficent, Dance, Disney, and Cynicism as the choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberal precarity
Helena Hammond
Abstract:
Dance bequeaths a conflicted legacy for resisting neoliberalism: the same portfolio careers; pick-up companies; and freelance working practices through which the artist-entrepreneur negotiates and survives the exigencies of the neoliberal market have themselves been co-opted by neoliberal economics as blueprints for labour practices in ways unimagined and never intended by arts practitioners. ‘The freelancer’ to quote Lauren Berlant (76) ‘is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism’.1 Looking beyond dance’s unwitting complicity in the neoliberal contracting of the body, this paper focuses on dance as an emergent critical aesthetics that calls attention to the incorporation of the geopolitical by the post-statist neoliberal project.
Its case study is Maleficent (2014), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of Sleeping Beauty’s slighted fairy Carabosse. Maleficent’s status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character’s conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa’s choreography for the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film’s narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent’s aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place.
This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation…has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine’s ballets for Diaghilev...’.2 Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider Maleficent as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested 11 The fuller quotation reads ‘the freelancer is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism, the person on contract, who makes short-term deals for obligation and thrives through the hustle over the long haul. She prefers entrepreneurial precarity to the too closeness of the world.’ (Berlant: 76). Zygmunt Bauman comments similarly but less sanguinely, for he does not share what might, from Berlant’s slightly ambiguous account, be construed as neoliberal precarity’s redemptory feature, namely its potential as a strategy for managing an individual’s relationship with the world. According to Bauman’s characterization, ‘an ideology of privatisation’ is ‘a new ideology for a new individualised society: as Ulrich Beck has written, individual men and women are now expected, pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems, and to implement such solutions individually, with the help of individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims the futility (indeed, counter-productivity) of solidarity…This is also an ideology made to the measure of the new society of consumers. It re-presents the world as warehouse of potential objects of consumption…’Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Happiness in a society of individuals’, Soundings, 38 (Spring 2008) pp. 19-28; pp. 20-21.
2 Sergei Eisenstein, Notes on the General History of Film (1948), quoted in Khitrova, p. 83
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– relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault’s final series of Collège de France lectures3 will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault’s account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place.
Maleficent’s critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories - those to do with The Sleeping Beauty especially - and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance’s philosophical intent - this paper argues - that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou’s concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and - so it would follow - less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested.
Keywords: The Sleeping Beauty (ballet), Maleficent; Carabosse; pantomime dance; Disney animation; Michel Foucault; Cynic Philosophy; Neoliberalism; David Harvey; land grab; enclosure; pedestrianism; gender politics; Alain Badiou; Charles Perrault; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
‘Let us tell an old story anew and we will see how well you know it…So you see, the story was not quite as you were told.’
The lines of narration which respectively open and close Maleficent, screenplay for the film written by Linda Woolverton.
‘One thing is certain: the only way to be faithful to a classic work is to take such a risk: avoiding it, sticking to the traditional letter, is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic. In other words the only way to keep a classical work alive is to treat it as ‘open’, as pointing towards the future; or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classic
3 These lectures were subsequently published, in an English translation, as The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II) Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, general editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, English series editor Arnold I Davidson, transl. by G Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011, henceforth to be referred to as Foucault.
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work were a film requiring a chemical for development which is invented after the fact. In this manner, it is only today that we can get the full picture.’
Slavoj Žižek, discussing ‘numerous recent attempts to stage classical operas not only by transposing them into a different (most often contemporary) era but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself’, ‘Afterword by Slavoj Žižek’, pp. 161-225, in Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, London: Verso, 2010 p. 172.
This paper is concerned with Maleficent (2014), Angelina Jolie’s popular cinema
radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of The Sleeping Beauty ballet’s slighted fairy,
Carabosse. The first part of this discussion identifies the film’s potential for critique of
neoliberalism. Thematically speaking, this is seen to rest, especially, with Maleficent’s
mobilization of the intertwined themes of sexual violence, war, land grab, and labour, female
labour in particular. If neoliberalism depends upon fundamental changes in discursive
formations in order to succeed, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2009) and others have suggested, this
begs the question of how cultural representations, among other discursive practices, might
operate as sites ‘from which’, according to Raewyn Connell, ‘the neoliberal project can
effectively be confronted and perhaps turned back’ (Connell: 35). The discussion which
follows nominates Maleficent, in its insistence on values that resist and call into question
some of neoliberalism’s founding precepts, as arguably one such site.
Consequently, while this paper remains alert to Maleficent’s shortcomings where
articulations of race, ethnicity, and class are concerned,4 the discussion that follows is as
committed to exploring those dimensions which might account for the film’s efficacy as
affect work. In this respect, this paper’s particular and enduring concern is with the way in
which Maleficent’s searching analysis of neoliberalism is heavily dependent on dance.
Indeed, so indebted is Maleficent to dance, this article argues, that the process of analysis
4 For recent consideration of these themes in the Disney corpus but without focus on Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty specifically, see Cheu, 2013; Breaux, 2010.
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which it sets in motion can best be understood as one of choreo-philosophical critique. It is
Maleficent’s status as choreo-philosophical critique which is the central focus of the second
part of this article. In this context, special emphasis will be placed on the legacy of Cynic
philosophy in and for dance; on its import for The Sleeping Beauty ballet and Maleficent in
particular. Attention here will turn to Foucauldian analysis of Cynic thinking in order to
demonstrate that Maleficent, taking its cue from The Sleeping Beauty’s Carabosse, is strongly
marked by a conjunction of dance and Cynic (philosophical) values and practices.
Demonstrating Maleficent’s indebtedness to Cynic philosophy also helps this article make the
case for dance practices and Cynic values - already close cognates of one another - when they
are so conjoined, as a particularly effective frame for analysing neoliberalism.5 For the Cynic
privileging – in Foucault’s eyes - of the vie autre supports alternative conceptualisations of
economic wealth creation and distribution in place of neoliberal ones. On these grounds, then,
Maleficent can take its place alongside other strands of (dance) performance, (cinema) art,
and literature which, in calling attention to neoliberalism’s precarity effect - its instigation of
a ‘micro-politics of insecurity’ to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s term - might work
eventually to resist and so ease that effect.
As the editors of Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times,
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee take seriously, and in terms not dissimilar to
those of Raewyn Connell already cited, ‘the potential…of the conditions of activism, which,
despite commodification and bowdlerization in the neoliberal era, also reveals itself as a
productive force for politics and the constitution of critical subjectivities and solidarities.’
5 In the much debated context of relating Foucauldian thinking to the critique of neoliberalism, it is relevant to quote Stuart Elden. Foucault’s 1979 Birth of Biopolitics lecture course, Elden writes, ‘…has received a lot of attention for its analysis of neoliberalism…Yet his focus, contrary to those who wish to appropriate him as either a supporter or critic of neoliberalism, is historical rather than political. Or, perhaps better, it is an attempt to grasp the historical conditions of political order, rather than an endorsement of or opposition to a particular regime.’ Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade, Cambridge: Polity, 2016 p. 103.
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(Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 5). Recognition of ‘the lurking promise of political resistance
within the bounds of commodified popular and mainstream media’, is intrinsic to Banet-
Weiser and Mukherjee’s investigation of ‘social action [that] is increasingly styled by and
manifest through commercialized popular culture’ (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 4-5).
There are, of course, tensions inherent in this distinctly non-Jamesonian6 investment in, and
recognition of, commercialized popular culture’s activist potential. It seems especially
relevant to acknowledge these given the authors’ commitment to ‘re-evaluate Marxist
theories of social power and resistance…to think[] through the consolidation of commodity
activism precisely as it redefines material histories of capitalist power, identity construction,
and resistance’ (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 4). Yet despite these tensions, their study is
relevant for considering Maleficent. This would anyway be the case in view of Maleficent’s
popular culture status. It seems especially so given that the ‘social activist programs’ of Jolie
and of her then husband, Brad Pitt, respectively merit individual chapter-length case studies
(Trope; Fox Gotham, in Weiser and Mukherjee) in their collection.
Part One: Maleficent: Dance, Disney, and Neoliberal Precarity
Like shooting fish in a barrel? Disney: historiography, hegemony, and neoliberalism
This is arguably a particularly interesting juncture at which to research and write on
the dialogue between dance and Disney. Through Maleficent, this complex, nuanced, and
enduring dialogue with dance continues, shaping and informing the contemporary Disney
legacy film. Maleficent, released in 2014, can be termed one such Disney legacy film; a new
phenomenon involving the remaking of classic Disney fairy tale animations as non-animated,
live-action feature films: Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, would follow in 2015;
6 For Jameson’s now classic discussion of the perceived impossibility of late capitalist popular culture to enter into effective political critique, given the extent to which ‘postmodernism replicates or reproduces – reinforces – the logic of consumer capitalism’ (p. 144), see Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, pp. 127-144 in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited with an introduction by Hal Foster, New York: The New Press, 2002.
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Beauty and the Beast, directed by Bill Condon, in 2017. Significantly, the Disney legacy
film has emerged as a category side by side with populist film and television treatments that
enact and enable at least some degree of meta-reflection on the fraught, discriminatory
history and working practices that form part of the historic legacies of the Disney enterprise.
Saving Mr Banks (2013), featuring Emma Thompson as Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers
arguably stands in this vein: The film offers - at least to some extent - a subjugated history,
given its focus on the unsung female labour underpinning the Disney enterprise. In the US,
the PBS broadcast of the ‘American Experience’ two-part Walt Disney documentary in 2015,
anticipating the 2016 50th anniversary of Walt Disney’s death, is another example.7 In the
UK, Disney commemoration has taken a somewhat different course in the run up to this
landmark anniversary. A chief example of this alternative reflection on the Disney legacy is
Dismaland, an apocalyptic riff on Disneyland erected in the coastal town of Weston-super-
Mare in the summer of 2015. Featuring a ‘dilapidated Disney castle towering over Banksy’s
“bemusement park”’ (Luke: 35), Dismaland overtly referenced the 1959 Disney Sleeping
Beauty animation since Disney’s cinematic logo, in recent iterations, is a ‘mash-up of the
Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty castle dominat[ing] a pastoral landscape dotted with lights’
(Cecire: 245). Once dismantled, the bemusement park’s ‘leftover crew’, to quote
Dismaland’s website, ‘were recycled into aid workers. They’ve since travelled to the Calais
migrant camp, and so far have completed 12 dwellings, a community centre… and a
children’s play park’ Dismaland’s website informed. That is, until the Calais camp was itself
dismantled in autumn 2016. Maleficent might be aligned with this more self-reflexive strand
of popular culture engagement with the Disney legacy.
According to Deconstructing Disney authors Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan,
who in turn quote Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, authors of a landmark study on
7 These paired documentaries were subsequently broadcast in the UK by the BBC in December 2016.
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Disney and right wing politics, ‘as early as 1971…“attacking Disney [wa]s no novelty”’
(Byrne and McQuillan: 1). And this critique of what Byrne and McQuillan term ‘the right-
wing agenda more or less implicit in Disney films’(Byrne and McQuillan: 1) has endured, in
studies such as Elizabeth Bell et al’s From Mouse to Mermaid, on which the present
discussion will indeed draw. The comprehensiveness of this critique suggests that there is
little more that can usefully be added where Disney and cultural imperialism are concerned.
Yet, as Byrne and McQuillan say of the post-1989 feature-length Disney animations on
which they focus, their interest in these films lies less with ‘naming and shaming individuals’
and more ‘with the totality of a system which puts in play a set of privileged ideological
operators only to have them returned against that system by the text which it produces’
(Byrne and McQuillan: 20). Critical response to Maleficent similarly suggests that this film
cannot be wholly subsumed within a dominant reading of Disney as entirely the hegemonic
articulation of purely imperialist cultural interests. The Guardian’s Charlie Lyne praised
Maleficent for its ‘metatextual postmodernism’ (Lyne: 23); for The Independent’s Geoffrey
Macnab, Maleficent is ‘a knowing and witty reinvention of an old fairy tale that looks as if it
owes much to Marina Warner and Angela Carter (and to Jolie’s own celebrity status and
story)’ (Macnab: 37); and The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey found Jolie ‘freer and funnier than
she has ever been on screen’, so that Maleficent is ‘a textbook example of how to engineer a
comeback’ (Gilbey: 12). Even two years after its release, and as this article is being finished,
Maleficent is still garnering plaudits as ‘that genuinely feminist film’ in critical reception of
The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016) (O’Sullivan: 35). The latter, according to reviewers,
draws heavily on the ‘origin-story-come-sequel’ format so familiar from Maleficent but with
none of the intelligence which many critics were quick to see as so manifest in the Jolie film.
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Viewed in this light, and in the context of what, for the purposes of this article will be
termed Critical Disney Studies (CDS)8, Maleficent can be seen to contribute to the
articulation of a ‘feminine cinematics’ (Bainbridge: 62). In proposing this term, Caroline
Bainbridge draws on Luce Irigaray’s thinking on the role of mediation in the construction of
female subjectivity, in order to understand the cinema screen as constituting a membrane as
‘a means of establishing the importance of forms of mediation for the female subject’
(Bainbridge: 46). In this context, Bainbridge has ‘contemporary women’s cinema’
specifically in mind, that is, films ‘directed by women, produced independently of
Hollywood studios and [which] share a concern with matters of female subjectivity’
(Bainbridge: 66). And yet, as will be seen, Maleficent, despite its Disney credentials
nonetheless qualifies, in some significant ways, as contemporary women’s cinema: Indeed,
one mark of its indexing to ballet’s version of Sleeping Beauty is the extent to which
Maleficent, too, has a female-dominated cast and origins which lie in a female-centric fable.
It also has a female screenwriter. Cinema’s female spectator-subject, an area of special focus
for Bainbridge’s notion of feminine cinematics, is as intrinsically bound up with Maleficent.
The film was one of the top five highest grossing films of 2014 and Jolie’s ‘biggest box
office debut to date’, taking $70m (£41m) at the US box office in its first weekend. The BBC
understood Maleficent’s popular success in gendered terms, as that of a ‘woman’s film
pushing the all-male action film, X-Men: Days of Future off the number 1 slot’ (BBC,
2014a). Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw saw things similarly, writing of how Maleficent
succeeded in ‘smacking those uppity X-Men down to second place at the US box office’
(Bradshaw: 8).
Cartoons as ‘screen ballet’: Maleficent, The Sleeping Beauty, Disney and Dance8 In the context of CDS, Alexandre Bohas, The Political Economy of Disney: The Cultural Capitalism of Hollywood, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016 might be termed a recent contribution. Adopting ‘a CPE [Cultural Political Economy] perspective’, Bohas advocates an approach which ‘refer[s] to sociological concepts and cultural studies but also to world-economy theories which adopt a global focus on the Disney Company.’ (Bohas, p. 3).
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The conjunction of malevolence and magnificence in the name given to the film’s
titular character - etymologically her name is the adjective deriving from maleficia, meaning
‘particular harms inflicted [by a person] on individuals’ (Demos: 21) - declares from the
outset the movie’s status as a reimagining ‘of Sleeping Beauty [told] from the point of view
of the [Disney] villainess’ (Macnab: 37). That is, of Maleficent, the evil, and therefore much
maligned fairy in Disney’s 1959 animated feature-length Sleeping Beauty. This 1959 Disney
animation was, in its turn, heavily indebted to the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, as evidenced by
the film’s reliance on key sections of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, ‘unblushingly pinched by
Disney [from the composer]’, as Anthony Lane puts it (Lane: 110), for its musical
soundtrack. The legacy of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty comes down through to
Maleficent via the latter’s retention, as theme song, of Once Upon a Dream from the 1959
animation. Once Upon a Dream re-works the Garland Waltz which Tchaikovsky wrote for
The Sleeping Beauty’s first act, in effect the ballet’s second act given its prologue plus three
acts format. In the ballet, this waltz functions as a transgenerational massing of the fairy tale
kingdom’s peasant third estate, assembled in the palace grounds in tribute to Aurora’s coming
of age. Newly equipped with Disney lyrics, by Sammy Fain and Jack Lawrence, the waltz is
danced as a pivotal duet by Aurora and the Prince in the 1959 animation, so that it fixes that
film’s romantic settlement. The Garland Waltz endures also in Lana Del Rey’s interpretation
of Once Upon a Dream as the Maleficent theme tune. Re-expressed by Del Rey in a more
disturbingly Gothic minor key, the song no longer harmonises hegemonic values of class or
gender. In fact, for feminist philosopher Nina Power, Del Rey’s Money, Power, Glory,
released only a year after Maleficent and ‘ostensibly about a hypocritical religious figure,
could just as easily be read as a feminist or reparations revenge anthem’ (Power, 2014) .
Online fan postings recognise Del Rey’s Once Upon a Dream as Maleficent’s theme song, in
similar terms.
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Dance in general, and ballet in particular, have been recognized, through the work
of several scholars, but particularly that of Esther Leslie, as primary aesthetic drivers for Walt
Disney’s feature-length animations. The leading early Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a
one-time admirer of early Disney cartoons due to their avant-gardist aesthetics, even likened
the animator to a choreographer, exclaiming that ‘Disney is the brilliant master and
unsurpassed genius in the creation of audiovisual equivalents in music of the independent
movement of lines and a graphic interpretation of the inner flow of the music (more of the
melody than of the rhythm!)’ (Eisenstein quoted in Leslie: 248; italics are his). Viewed
‘according to Eisenstein’s logic [Daria Khitrova maintains], Fokine and Diaghilev are, in a
sense, “forerunners” of Walt Disney…As he later explained in his book of memoirs, dancing
and drawing were inseparable twins’ (Khitrova: 83). As Leslie has also shown, Igor
Stravinsky similarly admired Disney, especially in light of Disney’s animation to accompany
part of the composer’s Ballets Russes Rite of Spring ballet score, for inclusion in Fantasia
(1940). Stravinsky visited Disney’s Californian Burbank studios to check how this work was
progressing in 1939, declaring to Time Magazine the following year that ‘Disney’s
palaeontological cataclysm was what he had in mind all along in The Rite of Spring’ (Leslie:
166-167). This success prompted Stravinsky to sell Disney an option on three more pieces,
even if the professional relationship between the two men would eventually sour (Leslie:
166-167).
As Leslie also points out, figures writing on, or working in, dance in the 1930s, went to
similar lengths to stress the Disney-ballet conjunction:
‘[Jean] Prevost [writing in 1938] note[d] that the [Disney cartoon series] Silly Symphonies are precursors of a new kind of art-music form similar to opera or ballet, but with much greater possibilities than both of those…Adrian Stokes compares classical ballet and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse in his book Tonight the Ballet. Anthony Asquith in an essay on filming ballet in 1936 cites Disney’s Silly Symphonies as an example of “ballet constructed in film terms”. In 1934 Arnold Haskell’s Balletomania claimed that “Mickey
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Mouse seems to provide the ballet need on film; a strong personality artificially created out of a pattern. Musically, too, it would be difficult to imagine a more perfect screen ballet”.’ (Leslie: 104).
Where particular feature-length Disney animations are concerned, these points of
interconnection between ballet and Disney have been traced by Elizabeth Bell. According to
Bell
‘the constructed bodies of the young women in Disney’s three earliest tales…are not drawn in prosaic strokes of cartoon corporeality, but in the formal and poetic lines of classical ballet…the entire [1959] film of Sleeping Beauty was filmed in live action before [being] drawn’, so that ‘the markers of class…are covertly embodied in the metaphors of classical dance. Royal lineage and bearing are personified in the erect, ceremonial carriage of ballet…[to the extent that] classical dance carriage and royal bearing are interchangeable in Disney animation…’ (Bell: 52).
Bell stresses how this identification with ballet was not restricted to female characters: ‘In the
Disney landscape, the dancing heroines are partnered by the silent ciphers of nineteenth-
century classical ballet…Indeed Disney is reported to have chosen dancer Louis Hightower to
model for [Cinderella’s] Prince Charming’ (Bell: 53). Dance-trained Helene Stanley served
as the live-action model for Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty, with surviving dance
footage of her performing on the models stage for the latter included in Picture Perfect, cited
below. By the 1950s and Disney’s feature-length Sleeping Beauty, it seemed as though this
excessive reliance on ballet was to Disney’s detriment; as if ballet’s perceived limitations
were rubbing off on animation at the studio. In fact so closely does Esther Leslie’s
characterisation of the aesthetic dominating Disney in the 1950s - as being ‘excessively
detailed’, marked by ‘pernickety realism’, exuding ‘magical radiance’- echo charges
commonly levelled at ballet in general, and at The Sleeping Beauty in particular, that it is
worth pursuing these parallels a bit further here. For Richard Schickel, writing on Cinderella
and Sleeping Beauty Disney animations, at a distance of some twenty-seven years from the
latter’s 1959 premiere,
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‘detail was piled on detail, technical effect on technical effect, until the story was virtually buried under their weight. It was an art of limited – some would say non-existent – sensibility, a style that laboured to recreate the trifles of real movement, that fussed over decorative elements, that refused to consider the possibilities in the dictum that less is more. The wonderful simplicity that Disney’s graphic art naturally possessed in the beginning and that he might have distrusted as betraying its humble origins, disappeared. In the late films complexity of draughtsmanship was used to demonstrate virtuosity and often became an end in itself, a way of demonstrating what was a kind of growth in technical resourcefulness but not, unfortunately, in artfulness.’ (Schickel quoted in Leslie, 290).
Schickel’s critique of Disney is equally applicable to ballet, which is frequently accused of
privileging technical stunts and empty virtuosity over thematic substance; of evacuating
content from style.
This evaluation is shared by animation historian Charles Solomon, who similarly
deems the dependence of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty on dance as being at animation’s
expense: ‘Both human characters [Princess Aurora and Prince Philip] seem too close to the
live-action reference to be very interesting in animation. Although rendered with
consummate skill, their waltz in the forest seemed dull’ (Charles Solomon quoted in Davis,
2014: 165). Sleeping Beauty’s animators, to quote Leslie, ‘were requested to study a full-
length live-action version, and Disney told his artists to make the characters “as real as
possible, near-flesh-and-blood”’ (Leslie: 295). This means that ontologically speaking, the
roots of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty must in part lie firmly in live dance performance.
The action was danced first, this dance was captured as live-action reference footage, from
which thousands of drawings were in turn made, coloured, finished and - only then, finally -
animated. Indeed, of all the Disney feature length animations, the connection to ballet is
perhaps strongest in the case of the studio’s Sleeping Beauty: as Charles Solomon observes,
‘Sleeping Beauty is of course one of the great storybook ballets and animation, like ballet, is a
form of choreographed motion. Everything is planned, its rhythms are worked out, and
discussed just as fine dance is.’.9 ‘The animators would [even] listen to the Tchaikovsky
9 Solomon in Picture Perfect: The Making of Walt Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (2008), producer: Barbara Toennies, documentary short (43 minutes), 2008, accessed via youtube, March 2017. Henceforth to be referred
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score’ adds fellow Disney historian Russell Schroeder (Schroeder in Picture Perfect…). The
labour involved in this transposition of dance performance into animation was also highly
gendered, and in terms not unfamiliar from ballet: the workforce of inkers and painters was
female, while the animators were male. ‘Working conditions [at the Burbank studio] were
factory-like’ writes Leslie, ‘a six-day working week was standard’ with ‘poor pay and
working practices that organised Disney’s exploitation of the work force in terms that were
highly gendered’ having triggered a general strike at Disney in 1941. ‘They make less than
house painters. The girls are the lowest paid in the entire cartoon industry’ urged a strike
flyer advocating a boycott of theatres showing Disney pictures (Leslie 207; 208; 210). And
much like the original 1890 Mariinsky Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty which, as the high water-
mark of ballet à grand spectacle was hugely expensive and never again attempted on such a
scale in Russia, the costs involved in the lavish spectacle of the 1959 animation ensured that
‘Sleeping Beauty was truly the end of an era of that kind of Disney film making’ (Picture
Perfect…).
Disney’s indebtedness to dance extends into the twenty-first century, through
Maleficent. This must necessarily follow from the film’s dialogue with the Disney legacy.
For, in taking on this legacy, given its reliance on ballet, Maleficent has, in some quite
significant sense, to be entering into dialogue with ballet as well. The film’s Moors thrive as
a fairy protectorate in female gendered terms redolent both of Charles Perrault’s La belle au
bois dormant and the Imperial Russian ballet The Sleeping Beauty, premiered in St.
Petersburg in 1890 and a work which also has its literary basis in Perrault. Significantly, the
film’s closing credits are careful to acknowledge Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation
and Perrault’s seventeenth-century literary account of the fairy tale as its twin sources. In
fact, the Disney Sleeping Beauty animation is so closely led by the redaction of Perrault
to as Picture Perfect….
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presented by the ballet’s libretto, as to suggest that the studio’s access to Perrault’s account
was, in effect, routed via, and mediated by, the ballet. The Disney studio’s acknowledgment
of Perrault, then, actually serves to strengthen the bond between its 1959 film and the late
nineteenth-century balletic treatment of the fairy tale and so – it must follow – ultimately
between the same ballet and Maleficent. Dance scholar Sally Banes stresses the distinctions
between the ballet and Perrault:
To look at the ballet The Sleeping Beauty is a different matter entirely than reading Perrault’s tale, for a number of reasons. First, the female characters created by the ballet turn out to be far more complex than those on the page…[second,] the authors of the ballet chose not to include the second part of the Perrault tale, in which Beauty and her children are threatened by her mother-in-law (Banes: 48).10
Apparently taking its cue from the ballet, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty animation similarly
dispenses with the second half of Perrault’s original plot. Meanwhile, in its very focus on the
tale’s malevolent fairy, a figure who, as Banes also points out, is neither named or described
by Perrault, Maleficent honours the ballet’s commitment to the role of Carabosse which,
together with that of her alter ego, the Lilac Fairy, it (the ballet) had ‘significantly enlarged’
(Banes: 47; 49). The heavy dependence of the 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation on certain
sections of Tchaikovsky’s ballet music for Sleeping Beauty, and not others, is another
indicator of Disney’s reliance on ballet’s mediation of Perrault, for its rendition of the fairy
tale. As Walt Disney himself said to camera in The Peter Tchaikovsky Story, made for
television by the Disney Studios to be broadcast in 1959, in the run-up to the release of the
animation, ‘our inspiration for Sleeping Beauty was the wonderful score written more than
seventy-five years ago by Peter Tchaikovsky for his ballet version of The Sleeping Beauty’.11
10And here Banes acknowledges the suggestion made by fellow dance historian Giannandrea Poesio, that the ballet followed an 1864 Russian translation of Perrault’s tales by Ivan Turgenev in which The Sleeping Beauty was similarly redacted to include only the first half of its plot (see Banes, note 30, p. 240).
11 The Peter Tchaikovsky Story, directed Charles Barton, 1959. It seems that Disney miscalculated the date of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score by a few years – the ballet was actually only first performed in 1890.
14
It is unlikely that ballet productions of The Sleeping Beauty staged in its prologue-
and-three-acts balletic entirety would have been overly familiar to West Coast, American
audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. That is, with the notable exception of the full length
version of this ballet toured by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet: In 1950, for instance, the company
included The Sleeping Beauty on its North American tour, performing at the Los Angeles
‘Shrine auditorium, with an audience full of film stars. The Shrine holds nearly seven
thousand people; the Company played to full houses for two weeks.’ (Anderson: 111). The
‘story[line]’ for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was, apparently, ‘pretty well set from 1952’
(Picture Perfect…). It is likely, however, that Disney personnel would have had much more
ready access to Aurora’s Wedding, a one-act redaction of the ballet. Also performed under
its French title (Le Mariage d’Aurore), this ballet, devised by Serge Diaghilev in 1922 as a
less wieldy, truncated, and so more economically viable, version of the full length Sleeping
Beauty, was regularly performed by his Ballets Russes company. In the decades following
Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Aurora’s Wedding became a staple of Colonel de Basil’s Ballets
Russes de Monte Carlo. An audit of the log of productions, annual performance numbers,
and tour details compiled in the notebook of that company’s rehearsal director, Serge
Leonidovich Grigoriev, now housed in the Harvard Theatre Collection, indicates that
Aurora’s Wedding was the third most performed ballet in an extensive repertoire, being
danced 864 times between 1932 and 1954, and was a work regularly programmed on the
West Coast leg of annual US tours. 12 The log shows that de Basil’s company danced
Aurora’s Wedding in Los Angeles in the years 1935-1938 inclusive, and then again in 1940
and 1947, for instance. Disney’s familiarity with Aurora’s Wedding is suggested, too, by the
particular reliance of the studio’s 1959 animation, the best part of a decade in the making, on
those musical numbers from Tchaikovsky’s full Sleeping Beauty score included as part of the
12 MS Thr 414.1 (67) Howard D. Rothschild Collection on Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University, Camb., Mass., accessed summer 2014.
15
orchestral arrangement for this one-act redaction. In George Bruns’s arrangement of
Tchaikovsky’s score for Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is not overly identified -
as might be expected - with Carabosse’s musical theme from the ballet, which is a feature of
the overture to the full-length ballet, and is heard again in its prologue; first; and second acts.
This omission seems less surprising, however, given that Carabosse’s theme is not included
in the reduced score for Aurora’s Wedding. Instead, music for the third-act Puss in Boots and
White Cat divertissement, which is frequently retained in this one-act version of the ballet,
serves as Maleficent’s musical accompaniment at critical, culminating points in the 1959
animation so that it, in effect, becomes her musical motif. Carabosse’s own theme is
occasionally drawn upon and associated with Maleficent in the Disney animation but to a
lesser extent.
Maleficent’s indebtedness to the Tchaikovsky-Petipa Sleeping Beauty, like that of the
1959 animation, is multi-faceted, so continuing the ongoing connection between this ballet
and Disney. Particularly noteworthy is the legacy of the ballet’s already commented upon
female-centrism - of its ‘“feminine microcosm”’ to borrow Arlene Croce’s term (quoted in
Banes: 49) - transmitted along a matriarchal line of descent from the ballet (1890) to Disney
animation (1959) to live-action film (2014). The importance of Maleficent’s female-centric
world for that film’s capacity to critique neoliberalist excess, invites further scrutiny of the
striking congruence of this dance-indebted, gendered identity with the potential for political
analysis. This congruence is particularly felt in Maleficent’s key thematics; it is borne out in
the film’s rewriting of Disney’s stepmother-as-abuser trope, especially. For the sourcing of
Maleficent’s predicament, in the 2014 film, to an originating act of violent socio-economic
disenfranchisement is also highly familiar from Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890);
in particular from the ballet’s characterization of its malevolent fairy, Carabosse. As Croce
describes her, in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s 1946 production, Carabosse is a ‘heavily aged,
16
insulted old queen’ (Croce: 371). And the ballet’s audience gauges that Carabosse’s bout of
extreme vengefulness when, in an act of crass social exclusion, she is left off the invitation
list for Princess Aurora’s christening, results - like her malevolent predicament in general -
from an originating act that makes this latest social slight psychically impossible for her to
bear. That act, unspecified in the ballet, is elaborated upon in the film: In an early scene,
Maleficent, ‘the strongest fairy of them all…the winged creature who rose to be protector of
The Moors, a [moorland] kingdom which needed neither king nor queen and [where
everyone] trusted one another’ (Maleficent narration), is shorn of her wings in an act of land-
grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence.
This act betokens rape for Jolie. In an interview with BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s
Hour (BBC, 2014b), Jolie spoke of how she read the loss of Maleficent’s wings in the film as
the figuration of rape which she had confronted in her special envoy work for the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees. The legacies of sexual violence which she had
encountered in Bosnia had prompted Jolie to direct her first feature film, In the Land of
Blood and Honey (2011), about the Bosnia conflict of the 1990s; to work to establish the
Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI); and to co-host the four-day Global Summit to
End Sexual Violence in Conflict, held in London in June 2014. Jolie has since been
appointed Visiting Professor in Practice at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security of the
London School of Economics. Moving the focus of the Woman’s Hour interview, which was
conducted at the four-day summit, to Maleficent, the film having had its London premiere the
month before, Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray observed:
‘There’s a very interesting scene in your latest film, Maleficent, the backstory of Sleeping Beauty’s wicked witch where she is effectively raped – her wings are torn away. What, having gone through all the experiences that you’ve had in recent years did you hope the message of that film would be?’
Jolie responded in the following terms:
17
‘It was beautifully written by Linda Woolverton and we did, there was the question - and of course it’s a Disney movie – and so the point is she comes to this christening and curses the child and why would she do this? But in essence the question was asked what could make a woman become so dark…[that] something would have to be so violent, so aggressive and so of course for us we were very conscious –the writer and I – that it was a metaphor for rape and that this would be the thing that would make her lose sight of that and then at a certain point, the question of this story is, what could possibly bring her back? Umm, and it is an extreme, Disney version of that but at the core it is, it is abuse and how the abused then have a choice of either abusing others or overcoming and, er, remaining loving, open people.’ (BBC, 2014b)
Some feminist blogs responded to Maleficent’s figuration of sexual violence by
raising important questions to do with the aestheticisation of rape which they perceive in the
film. Feminist Fiction, for instance, deemed Maleficent ‘certainly worthy of discussion…
with lots of fantastic ideas…and fundamental themes [that] are still solid’, but lamented
encountering ‘metaphorical rape as a plot device yet again.’(Thomas, 2014). Even putting
aside the aestheticisation of sexual violence through its cinematic representation as, however
important, ultimately beyond this article’s central focus, here the film’s indexing of Jolie’s
autobiographical experience is significant. This indexation extended to the film’s reception
by film critics, with some (i.e. Gilbey; Macnab) connecting - overly reductively, in the eyes
of others - Maleficent’s loss of wings to the preventative double mastectomy Jolie had
recently undergone prior to the film, ‘after learning she had an 87 per cent risk of developing
breast cancer’ (Hiscock: 3). The film audience’s identification with Jolie in the archetypal
Jungian sense, which this sort of autobiographical referencing both enables and results from,
is understood by this paper as a key vector in how Maleficent works its affective power,
something to be returned to later. This is certainly how the film was received at the time of
its release, The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey noting: ‘The crossover between actor and character
gives the audience the impression that we are sneaking a peak into the performer’s psyche,
while the autobiographical element deepens the fiction in turn.’ (Gilbey: 13).
‘Maleficent' and Neoliberalism: Sexual violence, war, and land grab
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In ‘After neoliberalism: The need for a gender revolution’, Beatrix Campbell calls on
the term ‘new wars’ which Mary Kaldor uses, in order to define those
‘new modes of armed conflict that are proliferating across the flexible frontiers of globalised capitalism, between and within states. Violence is franchised out to auxiliary militias, security corporations and freelancing warlords…their networks of criminal free trade and spatial domination overpower the best efforts of “new democracies” from Soweto to Sao Paulo. As Kaldor insists, rape and pillage are the modus operandi of “new wars”: they should not be seen as collateral damage. Neoliberal capitalism radiates violence…violence is not unthinking visceral primitive; [rather] it is produced by and productive of, power and control over land.’ (Campbell: 12).13
For Campbell, then, ‘the violence that neoliberal capitalisation generates is an integral part of
its evolving gender settlement’, something that she terms as its ‘neopatriarchy’ (Campbell:
12). It is precisely this same land grab-motivated sexual violence that is experienced by
Maleficent. The bonds of romantic interspecies love that unfolded between the young
Maleficent and the human Stefan, who is one such ‘freelancing warlord’, to use Campbell’s
term, are violently betrayed when he delivers her severed wings to the dying king of his
human kingdom, securing that kingdom for himself in exchange for this fairy bounty.
Consequently, Maleficent can be read as a film that maps the relationship of humans to land
as one of ethnobiological precarity; of human interspecies violence. ‘I had wings once. They
were stolen from me. That’s all I wish to say about it. I had wings once. They were big and
strong: they never faltered’ Maleficent explains to Aurora later in the film. The effect of
Stefan’s violence in the service of patriarchal authority is to constrain Maleficent’s motility,
confining her to a more conventionally feminine, and literally more pedestrian, female
motility. In this way, Maleficent’s containment is a variant of the classic feminist
phenomenological reading of the socialization of the female body as itself amounting to
another kind of enclosure. Iris Marion Young, according to Bonnie Mann, ‘tells us that as the
13 For further discussion see Christine Chinkin and Mary Kaldor, ‘Gender and New Wars’, Journal of International Affairs 67 (1) (2013) 167-190
19
body-subject moves, she gathers the world around her into lived relations of space (2005a:
39) and particular modalities of feminine spatiality emerge’. Quoting Young, Mann writes of
how
enclosure is one modality of feminine spatiality, since the space of the “I can” for women tends to be gathered tightly and held close, and is represented by girls as enclosed by high walls. Feminine space is thus severed into a dual structure, in which a tightly drawn “here” is cut off from a “yonder” into which the body-subject can see, but into which she cannot move.’ (Mann: 83, italics are hers).
The subsequent loss of Maleficent’s wings renders her previously aerial
choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; every day and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied
vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies in the ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, must substitute
more mundane mime in their place. If, as Elizabeth Bell points out, the ‘performance
affection’ of ‘Disney’s evil women, the beautiful witches, queens and stepmothers’ is cast
(interestingly in terms not unlike those allocated to ballet’s Carabosse) in ‘metaphors [that]
are not borrowed from the bodies of classical dancers’, Maleficent productively complicates
this simple equation, in revealing the original, pre-trauma motility of its titular character as
aerial, and so hyper-virtuosic. Maleficent’s unfolding negotiation of the constraints of
enclosure is highly significant for the film’s potential as critique of neoliberalism since, for
David Harvey, enclosure is so intrinsic to the pursuit of neoliberalist policies.
There is a tendency to think of David Harvey’s work on neoliberalism principally in
terms of his landmark studies of neoliberalism and the urbanization of capital (1999; 2007b).
Yet Harvey has also directed attention to the relationship between land and capitalism. In
thinking about the place that land has come to occupy for the neoliberal corporatised state,
Harvey specifically understands this relationship as one of land grab. Land grab might be
described as a sort of late capitalist riff on the enclosure movement. Indeed, Harvey
understands globalization as entailing a new round of ‘“enclosure of the commons”
(everything from the privatisation of social housing in Britain, of the ejido system of peasant
20
landholding in Mexico, of community services such as water provision in Argentina and
South Africa) [that] has opened up new terrains for surplus [capital] absorption.’ (Harvey,
2007a: 64-65). Heralding early capitalism’s embrace of an emergent agrarian economy,
enclosure, in its eighteenth-century variant, entailed the erosion of common land rights to
roam; graze livestock; and subsist, and their replacement by a more intensively worked,
capitalized and - critically - enclosed rural economy.14 According to E.P. Thompson,
enclosure in eighteenth-century Britain amounted to ‘a plain enough case of class robbery’
(Thompson quoted in Kain et al: 2). ‘Of course’, Robert Marzec points out, ‘this long history
of the land’s privatization [ ] amounts to no more than a preamble to the kind of massive,
planetary-wide enclosures we are seeing today.’ (Marzec: 84). Maleficent, we are told by
the film’s narration, often liked ‘to wander alone’, and her ambulatory, pedestrian motility
might be taken as an embodied insistence on the pre-enclosure ethics of the right to roam.
And Maleficent’s female identity is not insignificant here, allowing the film to join in
‘challenging and over-writing the powerful (art-) historical figure of the solo male walker’
identified by Stephen Daniels et al (Daniels: 1) as an enduring masculinist trope of western
inscriptions of territory. Maleficent’s enfranchising pedestrianism amounts, then, to a
feminine, counter-hegemonic critique of capitalist, and now neoliberal, economics of land.
Citing Harvey’s The New Imperialism, Nigel Thrift has also commented, in terms strikingly
similar to Harvey’s, on the ‘increasing exploitation of large parts of the world through what
Marx calls primitive accumulation’: ‘It is clear’ writes Thrift, ‘that a considerable area of the
globe is being ravaged by force, dispossession and enclosure as part of a search for mass
commodities like oil, gas, gems and timber, using all of the usual suspects: guns, barbed wire
and the law.’ (Thrift: 30).
14 For a discussion of the enclosure movement in eighteenth-century Naples and Sicily, for instance, see Hammond (2013), pp. 121-126 and 137-42 especially.
21
Thrift’s position is part of a consensus on neoliberal land economy: Writing in a
similar vein, Thomas Nail especially identifies the resurgence of enclosure with the last
decade; as a phenomenon of the financial crisis: ‘Foreign investors and governments have
acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions of small farmers in
poor countries’ (Nail: 1). Stuart Hall et al view ‘the buying up of vast tracts of land’ as
intrinsic to the ‘particular global character of neoliberalism….[as part of neoliberalism’s]
planetary search for new assets in which to speculate’ (Hall, Massey, and Rustin: 10). And
Roger Kain et al remind us of how, in terms of its ‘historical, legal meaning’, ‘enclosure
involved the removal of communal rights, controls or ownership over a piece of land and its
conversion into “severalty”, that is a state where the owner had sole control over its use, and
access to it.’ (Kain et al: 1). Indeed, as the ‘protector of the Moors’, Maleficent fiercely
defends this territory from the designs of the neighbouring marauder state, so preserving its
pre-enclosure open spaces from the dictates of purely economic yield. Maleficent, her
supernatural powers of protection diminished but not extinguished by the loss of her wings,
resists the ‘ontological anxiety’ intrinsic to enclosure and according to which
land – and nature in general – came to be reimagined in the socio-political consciousness as an enemy in need of domestication, and the people working the land, especially those rioting against enclosures and the inequalities they produced, as recalcitrant vagabonds in need of discipline and incarceration. (Marzec: 84).
Consequently Maleficent, as she is realised in the feature film bearing her name, is
able to resist and reverse Maleficent’s identity in the Disney Sleeping Beauty animation. In
that 1959 film, she was, to quote Kathleen Coyne Kelly, synonymous with ‘the antithesis of
benign nature’ (Kelly: 197). As enclosure involved ‘a land broken down and arranged so that
it became more obedient and useful’, a land literally subject to ‘husbandry’ (Marzec: 87),
Maleficent is also able to undo the identification of landscape in rigidly gendered terms,
according to which the tamed, enclosed landscape was always read as feminised.
22
Speaking in 2011 at a New York event on land grab in India – though he stresses that
the practice is as endemic in Africa and China, as land in those regions is also increasingly
capitalized - Harvey stressed how in most economic theories, land is treated as a side issue,
with the result that land is not considered as fundamentally as it should be. This is despite the
fact that, according to Harvey, the bourgeoisie has made more money out of land speculation
than factory production, and that since the start of the post-2008 financial crisis, surplus
capital drives land grab as capital has run out of options in trying to find a secure source of
profitability, heralding a shift from property markets to land. Land grab in China, Africa, and
India has rendered land subservient to corporate interests. And yet despite land grab
becoming much more prominent, Harvey points to the absence of a theoretical model to
understand the economics of land grab, and the resulting economy of dispossession which
land grab in turn triggers (Harvey 2011). Maleficent’s staging of land grab as a key driver of
the contemporary neoliberal project could be read precisely in light of the ‘growing
awareness of environmental problems [which] seems likely to create serious new difficulties
of legitimation for neoliberal regimes’ (Connell: 35). ‘You will not have the Moors, not now,
not ever!’ Maleficent declares to the bellicose king as she defends ‘the Moors and its
treasures’ from the marauder designs of his neighbouring kingdom; ‘the greedy, envious
humans who want to invade her moorland kingdom’ (Macnab: 37). Maleficent, then,
arguably contributes to an ‘emergent critical aesthetics’, to borrow a term from Lauren
Berlant who – significantly - especially nominates film as a driver of the new aesthetics15.
This is meant in the sense that Maleficent calls attention to institutions and categories that had
previously fallen outside the critique of neoliberalism: namely the incorporation of previously
unenclosed land mass as latterly part of the neoliberal project.15 ‘In the present from which I am writing about the present’, states Berlant ‘conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically. Cinema and other recording forms not only archive what is being lost but track what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms make it possible to relocate within conventions the fantasy of sovereign life unfolding from actions.’ (Berlant: 7).
23
Labour and gender in ‘Maleficent’ i) male labour with particular reference to Marx on the
working day
One particular scene in Maleficent could be construed as staging, in textbook Marxist
terms, the struggle between the capitalist exploiter-sovereign King Stefan and the foreman of
his exploited proletariat iron workers, over the length of the working day. Discussing how
Karl Marx inferred certain general laws of motion of capital from his theory of surplus value,
David Harvey, in his commentary on Marx’s method in Capital, cites as a paradigmatic
example, Marx’s demonstration
‘that capital-accumulation depended upon extracting more value from the labourers than they needed to reproduce themselves. This meant that capitalists had to control the time of the labourer and from this derived the competitive necessity to extend the working day for as long as possible and within that day to push the intensity of labouring to its limits. When Marx asks the question: do we see struggles over the length of the working day going on around us all of the time, do we see perpetual attempts to control the time of others and to increase intensity in the labour- process, then the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ (and he had all the factory-inspectors’ reports to prove it). Struggles over working time are largely ignored in conventional economics, whereas Marx insists that they are foundational.’ (Harvey, 2012: 7-8)
Awakening from a nightmare about Maleficent with cries of ‘she’s coming, she’s
coming!’, King Stefan goes straight to the foreman of the iron foundry. Forcibly rousting the
foreman from his slumber in the middle of night, the king orders him to start up the forges
and immediately put the iron smelters to work: Iron is capable of burning fairies, the infant
Maleficent had explained to the child Stefan at the film’s start when, in their first, tentative
handshake, she had recoiled from the inadvertent touch of his metal ring. Given its fairy-
extinguishing properties, iron therefore forms the mainstay of the arsenal of King Stefan’s
army in the war it wages against Maleficent and her Moors kingdom; a weapon in the king’s
increasingly desperate campaign to defeat and destroy Maleficent. The ensuing struggle
between the capitalist king and ironworkers’ foreman is worth reproducing and commenting
further upon here:
24
Stefan: ‘Where are your workers?’
Foreman: ‘In their beds your majesty.’
Stefan: ‘Get them back to work without delay!’
Foreman: ‘They’re exhausted sire but I’ll have them back to work at first light.’
Stefan (violently assaulting the Foreman): ‘But I need them back to work NOW!’
Foreman: ‘It’s the wee hours.’
Stefan: ‘Aye, it’s the wee hours. So wake them and get them back to work now.
We’re running out of time!’
This scene is suggestive of Marxist economic theory; particularly in its representation
of the workers’ production of surplus capital. To bear this out, it is helpful here to turn to
David Harvey’s commentary once more, this time on the commons. As Harvey has pointed
out, ‘the spiralling degradation of common land and [of] common labor resources…at the
hands of capital’ are two sides of the same coin (Harvey 2011: 107). This is because, for
Harvey, the abuse of the factory labourer and of land are two aspects of the same
phenomenon: the loss of commons. In fact, according to Harvey,
‘socially necessary labor time, is the capitalist common…the common is not therefore something extant once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is continuously being produced. The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetary form.’ (Harvey 2011: 105)
Labour, in Harvey’s account, is thus territory’s corollary as ‘individualized capital
accumulation perpetually threatens to destroy the two basic common property resources that
undergird all forms of production: the labourer and the land’ (Harvey: 106). Gaining
credence and adherents in some unexpected quarters, this Marxist account of the operations
and effect of the neoliberal labour economy is fast coming to assume the position of
something approaching a classic economic reading.16 The film’s identification of the 16 George Osborne, UK Conservative politician and former Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e. Treasury Secretary or Finance Minister), recently observed: ‘In Marx’s…Das Capital…his argument was that in a modern capitalist
25
enclosure of the commons as a masculinist endeavour is in keeping with its construction of
political and territorial economies along gendered lines, according to which Maleficent is
entrusted with the protectorate of the pre-enclosure Moors commons, so that this is conceived
of as a female project.
The fastening of bellicose associations to the film’s representation of captialized
labour further contributes to its gendered identity and association with neoliberal land grab:
With the race to produce and bear arms staged by the film in these terms, war, as it is
conceived of in Maleficent, is consequently redolent not only of the kinds of wars currently
waged in the interests of neoliberal land grab, as this article has already identified. It is
reminiscent too, as the ‘working hours’ scene eloquently demonstrates, of those earlier
European conflicts which, pitting state against state, were key agents in the early modern
state’s transition from a feudal to capital-based economy. ‘The nation-state’, to quote Harry
Harootunian, is the ‘the trajectory of capitalism[’s]… enthusiastic political partner’, one ‘that
enables [its – capitalism’s] expansion’ (Harootunian: 481). And Brecht - to cite a key
dramaturgical and, for the purposes of this article’s preoccupation with performance as
neoliberal critique, highly cognate, example - understood seventeenth-century Europe,
ravaged by The Thirty Years War, in precisely these terms, in his play Mother Courage and
her Children (1939): War denoted capitalism for Brecht, or, as he put it, ‘the continuation of
business by other means’ (Brecht quoted in Thomson: 10). The characterization, in
Maleficent, of the relationship between sovereign and foreman also chimes with Maurizio
Lazzarato’s nomination of ‘the main difference’ between Keynesian liberal and neoliberal
economics. This ‘is that, for neoliberalism, it is the freedom of the enterprise and the
entrepreneur which needs to be produced and organized, whilst the freedom of the worker
country, the people who own the money – the capital – would get more and more of the rewards and the people who provided the labour would get less and less of a share, and you could argue that that’s something you’re seeing [now] in globalisation.’. George Osborne, interviewed by economist and fellow former Conservative government minister, Jim O’Neill, as part of ‘Fixing Globalisation’, an episode of BBC Radio 4’s The New World current affairs programme (episode first broadcast on Friday January 6, 2017).
26
and that of the consumer who were at the centre of Keynesian liberalism are made
subordinate.’ (Lazzarato: 120).
In this way Maleficent is able to point simultaneously to the centrality of war for
contemporary neoliberal political economy, as well as to the equally central implication of
European warfare in the emergence of the capitalist economic settlement which had furnished
the preconditions necessary for neoliberalism in the first place.17 Again to quote Lazzarato,
who in turn draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, ‘capital acts as a powerful
“point of subjectivation constituting everyone as subjects, but some, the capitalists, are
enunciators, whilst the others, the proletariat, are enunciated, subjected to technical
machines”.’ (Lazzarato: 126). King Stefan is one such capitalist enunciator, just as the
foreman of his ironworks is a member of the enunciated proletariat. According to Patrick D.
Murphy, Disney animation has typically been consistent ‘in reflecting the cultural drive
toward nature through promoting a capitalist work ethic among dwarfs, princes, mice,
servants, and heavily anthropomorphized animals’ (Murphy: 58). In its identification of King
Stefan’s human kingdom with the capitalist exploitation of natural and human resources,
Maleficent, it might be said, goes some way towards offering - to borrow Diana Coole’s term
- ‘a critical political economy or phenomenology of a world where global capitalism
condemns millions to virtual slavery and poverty’ (Coole, 2001). Constructing the human
kingdom in this way, Maleficent draws on steampunk conventions.18 Steampunk narratives
frequently reverse science and fantasy fiction’s investment in imaginary, futurist utopias. In
their place, steampunk conjures apocalyptic cities and kingdoms which, despite their often
17 In this sense, Maleficent might be said to articulate a Galbraithian commitment to the importance of economic history for understanding modern, or contemporary economics. See, for instance, John Kenneth Galbraith, A History of Economics: The Past as the Present, London: Penguin Books, 1987. 18 This reading chimes with what Disney styles the ‘steampunk-inspired dragon’, featured as Maleficent’s contribution to parades at the Walt Disney World theme park (Orlando, Florida), where its appearances are accompanied by an arrangement of Carabosse’s theme from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score. In the 1959 Disney animation Maleficent transforms herself into a dragon and in Maleficent, the titular character transforms her loyal raven into a dragon, to aid her final defeat of King Stefan.
27
historicised settings, project visions of neoliberalism’s endgame as one of anarchic
deregulation and extreme alienation.
Here it is also highly significant that the parallels established in Maleficent between
capitalist and - to borrow a key term from the vocabularies used to critique neoliberalism -
precariant, seem to be drawn in terms designed deliberately to resonate with the film
audience’s lived experience of neoliberalism. Intrinsic to this process of audience
identification is the way in which, from the outset, the film is careful to characterize the
distinctions between Stefan’s human kingdom and Maleficent’s realm of The Moors in the
sharpest terms. Again, to quote Maleficent’s opening lines of narration:
‘In one kingdom lived folk like you and me [present writer’s emphasis] with a vain and greedy king to rule over them: They were forever discontent and envious of the wealth and beauty of their neighbours. For, in the other kingdom, the Moors, lived every manner of strange and wonderful creatures and they needed neither king nor queen but trusted in one another.’
The narration expressly identifies the film’s viewers with ‘folk like you and me’ who, as the
subjects of Stefan’s human kingdom, are left to look on enviously at the neighbouring Moors,
a territory replete with abundant natural beauty and resources, and populated by many and
various richly divergent communities who live together in interspecies harmony. Free from
the despotic and tyrannical sovereign rule to which the inhabitants of Stefan’s kingdom are
subject, the citizens of the Moors enjoy instead the benevolent protection of the fairies.
Significantly, gender plays an important role in establishing the two kingdoms as highly
divergent kinds of territorial and social organisation. ‘Vain and greedy’ Stefan depends, for
the imposition of his war thirsty and repressive regime, on a male phalanx of bellicose
generals and lieutenants.
Labour and gender in ‘Maleficent’ ii) female agency, surrogacy, and women’s
unacknowledged labour
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The wounds and scars with which violence marks Maleficent, as it had Carabosse in
the ballet, are sutured, in the film, by the surrogate mothering of the motherless young
princess Aurora that Maleficent eventually takes on. Maleficent’s neomatriarchy, escaping
the biological essentialism of reproductive motherhood in favour of surrogacy defined in
terms that open surrogacy to men as well as to women, chimes with feminist readings of
unacknowledged female domestic labour. Stella Sandford, for instance, drawing on Sara
Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, and Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of
Interruption, reminds us that
‘“child bearing” is a relatively minor part of what she [Ruddick] called “mothering” or “maternal work”, and many mothers will not have done it at all. In Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters pregnancy and birth are similarly not essential to mothering. (The inevitable corollary of this - welcomed by both Ruddick and Baraitser – is that it is not exclusively women who can be mothers.)…From a different perspective it is also implicit in Ruddick’s claim that the distinction between “birthing labor” and “mothering” means that “all mothers are ‘adoptive’. To adopt is to commit oneself to protecting, nurturing, and training particular children. Even the most passionately loving birthgiver engages in a social adoptive act when she commits herself to sustain an infant in the world.” Of course, not all birthgivers will do this.’ (Sandford: endnotes xix and xx, p.11).
When the film is read in light of Sandford’s comments, a sort of playful, resistor-
neomatriarchy characterises Maleficent in the film, one that might be construed as a Feminist
response to Campbell’s reading of neoliberalism as neopatriarchy. This is even if this sort of
latitude granted to the film where its loosening of the conventional associations of women
with maternity is concerned, only seems permissible in Hollywood terms given the real-life
identification of Jolie with motherhood: she is both an adoptive and biological mother. As
Ryan Gilbey wrote at the time of the film’s release, ‘casting Angelina Jolie as a woman who
overcomes her natural antipathy to children is a joke we can all smile at: she and Pitt have
six’ (Gilbey: 13). And the casting of Jolie’s daughter, the five year-old Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, as
the infant Aurora who is rejected in the film by Maleficent, arguably works in the same vein,
to extend this latitude further.
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In this way, Maleficent, like the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, operates as a world of
female-centred endeavour. In 1890 The Sleeping Beauty, and the many subsequent versions
spawned by this Tchaikovsky-Petipa production, male roles are those of weak, bit players in
the ballet’s drama. It requires the ballet’s benevolent, Lilac Fairy (lilac denoting wisdom in
Russia, progenitor of present-day productions of the ballet), who is also the alter ego of the
ballet’s evil Carabosse, ancestral fairy to Maleficent, to tell the prince what to do: ‘Think…
kiss her!’ the Lilac Fairy mimes to the prince. In Maleficent the young Prince Philip
similarly procrastinates in his wooing of Aurora and the film actually extends this princely
ineffectiveness a stage further: In its failure to wake the sleeping princess, his kiss yields
nothing, thereby suspending - at least for a while - the narrative closure of the romantic happy
ending. Maleficent has to intervene: it is only her - by this stage benevolent and godmotherly
- kiss that eventually revives Aurora from her deep slumber. Consequently, for Elle Fanning,
cast as Aurora in the film, Maleficent is ‘more about sister love than romantic love’
(Maleficent press conference). The film’s remaining male characters - the old, ailing King
Henry and his successor the young King Stefan - are morally compromised and weakened by
their vanity or greed. And as kings, their fallibility additionally carries with it an implicit
critique of patriarchal structures and lineage. The reading offered here, in suggesting that
Disney is not entirely the vehicle for the perpetuation of patriarchal values and interests,
chimes with interpretations of how male authority is represented in the Disney canon more
generally: For Elizabeth Bell, ‘typical Disney king[s]…exert no control over their children,
their lackeys, their castles or their kingdoms [So that] through animation, Disney artists have
constructed a powerful critique of patriarchal discourse: the inefficacy of the divine right of
kings is both drawn and storied…’ (Bell: 55).
Maleficent’s retention of the female centric world of The Sleeping Beauty ballet
would seem to help furnish the pre-conditions for the film’s gendered critique of neoliberal
30
policies, policies which, for geographer Phil Hubbard, ‘are also about asserting the primacy
of virile masculinity’ (Hubbard quoted in Connell: 33). Here it is relevant to note too how, at
press conferences, as in her BBC Radio 4 interview already cited above, Jolie stressed that
Linda Woolverton’s screenplay for Maleficent had been a significant factor in her decision to
take on the film’s titular role (Maleficent press conference). As the author of Beauty and the
Beast (1991), with its characterisation of Belle as ‘an active, intelligent young wom[a]n’,
Woolverton had been the first female writer to author a ‘Disney tale/film screenplay’ (Bell:
53). Woolverton’s screenplay for Maleficent similarly refuses the re-enactment of what
Kimberly Lau, in her discussion of how Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love19
‘interrupts the confining legacy of this Sleeping Beauty tradition’, terms ‘the script of her
[Sleeping Beauty’s] patriarchal narrative inheritance.’ (Lau: 123; 133). This again chimes
with, and extends, the account of Perrault offered by the ballet: For feminist dance scholar
and historian Sally Banes, the ballet
‘engenders a mixed message, riddled with paradoxes, about women. As a court-bound and generated narrative one might presume that it would be relentlessly patriarchal. But ironically Beauty’s world is one in which men nearly disappear and women reign supreme, apparently contradicting the gendered messages of the literary versions of fairy tales that inspired the ballet.’ (Banes: 65).
And here Banes pushes this reading further, in order to argue that
‘for complex reasons, in the ballet version of The Sleeping Beauty various historical factors conspired to undermine the legacy of institutional sexism, and to create instead challenging, positive images of female power and autonomy on stage...[so that] one gets a picture of a completely matriarchal world… which …exists in the utopian, woman-centred world of many fairytales.’ (Banes: 65).
If Carabosse is already part of a matriarchal world in the balletic version of The
Sleeping Beauty, this is further accentuated in the film by the killing off, early on in its
narrative arc, of Aurora’s mother, thereby clearing the path for Maleficent’s eventual
adoption of a maternal, godmotherly role as her relationship with Aurora evolves from one of
19 This tale forms part of Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection (1979 and subsequent editions).
31
malevolent hostility to that of benevolent care. As has already been seen, coverage of the
film’s popular success was quick to pick up on its gendered identity. And here it is not
insignificant that both film and ballet source their account in the version of Sleeping Beauty
as recounted by Perrault. According to Kimberly Lau’s account of how Angela Carter’s
Bloody Chamber offers a critique of those hegemonic notions of gender and patriarchal
power enshrined in canonical versions of The Sleeping Beauty, it is in the Grimms’ version
‘when she is called Briar Rose’, that the princess is ‘at her most passive’:
‘Little Brier Rose’s womanly silence is particularly striking and especially socially significant when compared with Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, whose awakening is preordained and not dependent on the hero’s kiss and whose slumber is solitary as opposed to social. In Perrault’s 1697 “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Sleeping Beauty says to the approaching hero, “Is it you, my prince?...You have kept me waiting a long time!” (A. Carter 1977, 64). Up to this point, the two versions are fairly closely aligned, but the princess’s awakening signals their dramatic departure. In Perrault’s version, Sleeping Beauty engages the hero in conversation: “He was more tongue-tied than she, because she had had plenty of time to dream of what she would say to him’.” (Lau, 66).
Part two - Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberlism: Cynicism, Carabosse, dance and cinema
Carabosse and Maleficent as Diogenes: pedestrianism20 and the Cynic life
Much is made, in the film, of Maleficent’s pedestrianism; her predilection for
walking, as a figure who, the narration tells us early in the film, ‘often liked to wander alone’.
This manner of her walking, as a solitary, often cloaked, figure, always aided, from the
moment Maleficent is violently shorn of her wings, by a staff , is highly redolent of what
Frédéric Gros, in his Philosophy of Walking, terms ‘the Cynic’s Approach’. ‘Forever on the
move’, the Cynics, according to Gros, were ‘the only Greek sages who were authentic
walkers’ (Gros, 2015: 130-131):
20 Recent research trajectories make this consideration of pedestrianism in Maleficent and The Sleeping Beauty particularly topical. See, for instance, Chad Bryant, Arthur Burns, Paul Redman, eds., Walking Histories, 1800-1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; and Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, London: Chatto and Windus, 2016.
32
‘It was from their demeanour and physical appearance that they were recognised [Gros writes]. In the one hand they carried a stout staff, on their shoulders a thick piece of fabric that served as blanket, overcoat and roof…They did their walking not so much to teach as to provoke and upset…They insulted and shocked people with their verbal attacks (Gros, 2015: 131).
Gros’s editorship of Michel Foucault’s The Courage of the Truth21 makes him a reliable
interlocutor for Cynic thinking since ‘a large part of the 1984 course is devoted to a highly
original and one might even say abrasive presentation of ancient Cynicism.’ (Gros in
Foucault: 350). Foucault took a particular interest in Cynicism in this, his last series of
Collège de France lectures since the series was especially concerned with parrhēsia and ‘the
Cynics were recognised by their parrhēsia (free-spokenness)’ (Gros in Foucault: 351).
Foucault also views the Cynic life as possessing special scope for historical-critical
thinking. This is particularly due to the Cynic investment in a notion of truth arrived at via
breaking with all forms of existence in order to embrace the otherness of the alternative vie
autre; the ‘other life’. Cynicism’s potential for historical critique, especially through its
advocacy of the vie autre, makes it as effective a vehicle for the critique of neoliberal
hegemonies. Maleficent’s staging of the Cynic life is therefore crucial, this discussion argues,
for the nuanced, critical position which the film is able to adopt and articulate in relation to
neoliberalism generally. The range of affinities between Cynicism and Maleficent indicates
that a reading which considers the film in terms of its careful, painstaking even, articulation
of Cynic philosophy is especially worth pursuing. This seems particularly the case given the
stress that the Cynic life places on embodiment. Cynicism ‘has always been the poor relation
in the history of ancient philosophy’, writes Gros, in a paraphrase of Foucault (Gros in
Foucault: 350). Yet, at the same time, Foucault understands Cynicism as a branch of western
philosophical thinking that depends more, for its articulation, on the embodied life of its
adherents than on those other, written, modes which conventionally characterise
21 See note 3 above.
33
philosophical discourse. With its intrinsic emphasis on the lived experience of the body,
Cynicism is particularly well adapted for visualisation, and consequently for communication
via embodied performance that is constructed, originally and substantially, through dance and
then mediated via cinema.
Although Maleficent already displays many Cynic-like traits even before her betrayal
by Stefan, in a certain sense her Cynic existence is a societally useful response to Stefan’s
greed driven ill-treatment of her. For Stefan does not reckon with Maleficent’s
undiminished, defiant, and Cynic-like resolve defiantly to point up and resist the deficiencies
of his human kingdom. He bargains even less for her eventual salvation, through the -
equally Cynic-like - responsibility for Aurora’s wellbeing which Maleficent comes to
assume. Speaking truth to power; unconcealment; brazenness; the embrace of the elemental;
and breaking - in as many senses and as radically as possible - with the conventional life, are
all paradigmatic traits of Cynic philosophy, as it was articulated in Hellenistic Greece and
then ancient Rome. ‘But to what do you owe Diogenes’ staff and his parrhēsia?’ Emperor
Julian asked critically of the fourth-century AD Cynic, Heracleios, comparing him
unfavourably with Diogenes, the most influential exponent of Cynicism (Foucault: 170). For
Foucault, ‘parrhēsia [that is, speaking all, hence speaking truth, ultimately to power] and
staff are thus linked together; the Cynic uses parrhēsia and carries the staff.’ (Foucault: 170).
These same Cynic traits are as equally representative of Maleficent, as she is characterised in
the film, and of Carabosse, as she is rendered in the ballet Sleeping Beauty. In fact this paper
will go on to suggest that through the genealogical line of Maleficent to Carabosse, the roots
of these paired characters’ embodiment of a highly distinctive set of Cynic behaviours
ultimately stretch much further back, to the ballet and beyond. Carabosse’s reliance, in the
ballet, on pantomime, with its origins in Hellenistic pan-mimesis – literally showing or
representing, everything – is actually the close cognate of Cynic parrhēsia since
34
‘etymologically parrhēsia is the activity that consists in saying everything: pan-rēma.’
(Foucault: 9). For now, though, it is helpful to concentrate on Carabosse, Maleficent and the
Cynic life.
Carabosse, Maleficent and the Cynic notion of the elementary
The Cynic was ‘devoid of a dwelling place and possessions alike’, ‘lived out of
doors’, ‘had no home…[and] slept in ditches…wrapped in his cloak’ (Gros, 2015: 132; 135).
Maleficent likewise sleeps out of doors. Shown, once, in the nocturnal shelter of a ruined
building, significantly, she is never represented domiciled. In the 1959 animation,
Maleficent’s ‘castle’ was, similarly, ‘a heap of stones’ (Kelly: 197), and ballet’s Carabosse,
devoid of a castle, is as itinerant. First encountered in Maleficent dwelling in the trees, and
flying, winged and bird-like, over canyons, steams and pools, the figure of Maleficent is
therefore associated from the outset with animality and the elemental, two defining qualities
of the Cynic’s life. Referring to her pejoratively as ‘the wing-ed creature’ and ‘an elf’, the
old King Henry underscores Maleficent’s association with animality. She is often glimpsed
in a bower and later in the film, the infant Aurora is intrigued by Maleficent’s reptile-skin
clad horns. Maleficent’s earliest acts are to heal a broken branch and to ‘deliver home’ to the
water the bounty which the young Stefan, the ‘human thief [who had been found] at the pool
of jewels’, had taken. ‘I’ll sleep in a tree and eat berries and black nuts [like you]’ the sixteen
year-old Aurora eagerly anticipates when, once reconciled with Maleficent later in the film,
she requests that she come to live with her, in her Moors kingdom. And, when Maleficent
discovers that the adult Stefan has violently torn her wings from her during a drugged sleep,
as a trophy to present to the ailing monarch of his human kingdom, she is shown waking up
in the open-air, by a stream. ‘Now for Foucault [writes Gros] this wandering destitution is
the manifest expression of a testing of experience by the truth This theme is crucial for it
35
allows the sudden appearance of a dimension which has largely been unnoticed by classical
Western philosophy: the elementary (l’élémentaire) (Gros in Foucault: 352):
‘The Cynics will put the question of the truth to life in its materiality, permitting that which resists absolutely to be brought to light: do I need feasts to feed myself, palaces to sleep? What really is necessary to live? Then, after ascetic reduction, the elementary rises to the surface, like a nappe of absolute necessity. There remains the earth for living, the starry sky as roof, and streams from which to drink.’ (Gros in Foucault: 352).
Malificent as the articulation of Cynic parrhēsia
‘Go away, go, go away: I don’t like children’ Maleficent declares to the infant
Aurora, ordering her to ‘Go along, go, go, go!’ By initially rejecting Aurora in this way - in
effect renouncing any bonds that resemble motherly attachment - Maleficent adopts another
classically Cynic position. For the Cynic, to quote Foucault, ‘is also the man [or indeed
woman] who roams, who is not integrated into society, has no household, family, hearth or
country’. In this way, the Cynic mode of life
‘brings to light, in their irreducible nakedness, those things which alone are indispensable to human life or which constitute its most elementary, rudimentary essence. In this sense, this mode of life simply reveals what life is in its independence, its fundamental freedom, and consequently it reveals what life ought to be.’ (Foucault: 171).
In Book III of the Discourses, by the ancient Greek, Stoic writer Epictetus, the Cynic says: “I
have no wife, no children, no governor’s palace but only the earth and sky and an old cloak.’
(Epictetus, discourse xxii, quoted by Foucault: 171). In this Cynic context, reduction of life
through, for instance, ‘absence of home’, does not equate with retreat from life. Quite the
reverse, in fact, since it is ‘the home [that] i[s] understood as the place of secret, of isolation,
and of protection from others’ (Foucault: 253). Similarly, lack of family implies neither
abdication from responsibility for, nor absence of interconnection with, the lives of others.
Rather, the opposite applies: the Cynic ‘must not marry…[since] he appears as a sort of
universal night-watchman who keeps watch over the sleep of humanity. As a universal night-
watchman, he must keep watch over all the others, over all those who are married, over all
36
those who [do] have children.’ (Foucault: 301). As protector of the Moors, Maleficent is
often seen keeping vigil at night. Carabosse is similarly identified with the nocturnal: for
Giannandra Poesio, ‘Carabosse is Winter, the night.’ (Poesio, 1993: 39). And even at her
most embittered, she recognises keeping watch over the newly-born Aurora as part of this
responsibility. ‘It’s going to starve with those three looking after it’ Maleficent observes
sarcastically of the well intentioned but comically inept child-rearing efforts of Fottle,
Knotgrass and Thistlewit. This ‘trio of [female] fairies who sought to foster peace and
goodwill’ (Maleficent narration) and were in attendance at Aurora’s christening, is
subsequently entrusted by King Stefan with care of his daughter until her sixteenth birthday.
The Cynic might be outside, writes Gros, but
‘it was from that elsewhere, that exteriority to the world of men, that he could equate low private acts and public vices. It was from that outside that he barracked, mocked and threw together the private and the public as a brace of petty human expedients.’ (Gros, 2015: 136)
Similarly unencumbered, Maleficent is also able to extrapolate the political from the
personal and vice versa, thereby practising one of Cynicism’s central tenets. That is, to adopt
- and so honour - the parathesiastic position of ‘bringing back the question of truth to the
question of its political conditions’ (Foucault: 68). ‘He did this to me so he would be king’
Maleficent declares, despite being sparing in her speech - a trait that is also in the Cynic
tradition - on hearing the news of Stefan’s coronation as king of the human kingdom, on the
death of the old king. Personal betrayal begets political power, she observes. The notion of
parrhēsia, which Foucault understands as ‘free spokenness or truth telling’, is always, for
Foucault, ‘first of all and fundamentally a political notion.’ (Foucault: 8). It involves ‘telling
the truth without concealment, reserve, empty manner of speech, or rhetorical device which
might encode or hide it’ (Foucault: 10). Consequently, ‘the act of truth…involves some form
of courage’ (Foucault: 27).
37
Maleficent as Cynic monarch and the Cynic conception of sovereignty
In common with the Cynics, Maleficent has the courage to speak out, to speak truth to
power: ‘You will not have the Moors, not now, not ever!’ is her battlefield cry to Henry, the
old king of the human kingdom. In defeating the tyrannical king, Maleficent contributes to
the critique of patriarchy which, as we have already seen, endures at the heart of
neoliberalism. In this scene Maleficent undertakes the classic
Cynic mission [which] takes the form of a battle. It has a polemical bellicose character….[s]he - the Cynic - is essentially, fundamentally, and constantly an aggressive benefactor whose main instrument is, of course, the famous diatribe…He attacks his enemies, that is to say, he attacks the vices afflicting men, affecting those he is speaking to in particular, but also humankind in general. (Foucault: 279)
And King Henry is every bit the stock ‘unjust, tyrannical, sovereign’ (Foucault: 282), against
which Maleficent as Cynic-sovereign must pit herself, as the king’s coughing and wheezing,
deathbed speech illustrates:
When I ascended to the throne I promised the people that one day I would take the Moors and its treasures. Each of you swore allegiance to me and to that cause. Defeated in battle? Is that to be my legacy?..Kill the wing-ed creature. Avenge me! And upon my death you will take the crown.
‘You are no king to me’ is Maleficent’s defiant retort as the armour-clad, horse mounted
Henry leads a massed army into battle, set on ‘crush[ing]’ the ‘mysterious Moors’. ‘This
stance of the Cynic as anti-king king, as the true king who, by the very truth of his monarchy,
denounces and reveals the illusion of political kingship, is very important in Cynicism’ writes
Foucault (Foucault: 275). Maleficent’s exchange with Henry is highly redolent of the
encounter between the founder Cynic thinker, Diogenes, and the political king, Alexander.
Like Alexander, Henry is ‘a king, a king of the world, a political king…To exercise his
monarchy he needs an army, guards, allies, he needs armor (he appears with his sword)’
(Foucault: 276). And, as the philosopher-monarch; the Cynic-monarch, Maleficent is - to
paraphrase Foucault - the perpetual, immutable, and true sovereign. Her Diogenes-like role is
38
to show ‘how hollow, illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is’ and, so something
which, as Cynic-sovereign, Maleficent must struggle against ‘in humanity, in relation to
humanity, and for the whole of humanity’. (Foucault: 275; 280). Consequently ‘there is a
physical interventionism, a social interventionism of the Cynics’ (Foucault: 279) - a point that
will be returned to later - since, in defeating the tyrannical king, Maleficent contributes to the
critique of patriarchy which, as we have seen, endures at the heart of neoliberalism.
Maleficent, The Sleeping Beauty, and the brazen Cynic life
The Cynic’s struggle for and with humanity should not, however, be mistaken for
attachment to the exemplary, or even decorous, life. For ‘indifference to the opinion of
others and to the structures of power and its representatives…found in Cynicism’ (Foucault:
318) and typified by Maleficent too, results in the no less Cynic capacity for the unconcealed,
ultimately scandalous, life. The brazen, scandalous life is made most manifest in Maleficent’s
Christening scene. As the pivotal moment in the film’s narrative arc, it is also the scene that
is most faithful to the 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty animation. Indeed, for Jolie, it was the
most daunting scene in the movie to build dramatically, precisely because of its heavy
indebtedness to the 1959 original (Maleficent press conference). This, in turn, would indicate
that the Cynic perspective articulated in this scene in Maleficent was embedded in the earlier
film too. The roots of Maleficent’s articulation of Cynic thinking, then, extend at least as far
back as the 1959 Sleeping Beauty. And in its turn, that film’s handling of the Christening
scene is strikingly close to the way in which this scene is treated in ballet’s staging of the
fairy tale. Cyril Beaumont remembers how, in the ‘magnificent first scene of the
Christening’ in The Sleeping Princess, the Ballets Russes’ 1921-1922 full length version of
The Sleeping Beauty, performed in London only, ‘life moved at a stately pace until suddenly
interrupted by the appearance of the Wicked Fairy [i.e. Carabosse], who arrived in her coach
drawn by rats. But she, too, had dignity, she was majestic even in her wrath’ (italics are the
39
present writer’s).22 Judging by Beaumont’s recollection, it seems that Enrico Cecchetti, in re-
creating, for Diaghilev’s London version, the role of Carabosse which he had first performed
in the original 1890 St. Petersburg production, honoured the familiar Cynic conjunction of
sovereignty and brazenness.
Like the Cynic who ‘heads for all the big public gatherings’ (Foucault: 254), and as
Carabosse had done before her, Maleficent, in front of ‘all manner of people’ (Maleficent:
narration) invited as guests to the Christening, shows characteristic Cynic brazenness in
doing nothing to mask or temper her tempestuous, vengeful anger. Rather, ‘lost in hatred [of
King Stefan] and revenge’ as Maleficent later recalls, she vents the full force of her
suprahuman spleen by cursing the king’s innocent new-born child. This overt, uninhibited,
and highly public display of anger and evil qualifies as stock Cynic behaviour for
‘[Cynic] non-concealment, far from being the resumption and acceptance of those traditional rules of propriety which mean that one would blush to commit evil before others, must be the blaze of the human being’s naturalness in full view of all. This blaze of the naturalness which scandalizes, which transforms into scandal the non-concealment of existence limited by traditional propriety, manifests itself in the famous Cynic behaviour.’ (Foucault: 254).
Good and evil co-exist in Maleficent then, just as, in Cynic thinking, nature is construed as
subject to the intrusion of human malevolence: ‘If there is something bad in us or if we do
something bad, is this not [asks the Cynic] because men have added to nature with their
habits, opinions and conventions?’(Foucault: 254). The characterisation of Maleficent in the
Disney 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation also bears this out: ‘she rules over creatures who are
perversions of the good animals of the forest and, most damningly, she uses magic for evil’
(Kelly: 197). And the live-action Maleficent continues, some five-plus decades later, to
subscribe to this same Cynic position, as the closing lines of the film’s voice-over narration
make clear. Here, the narrator - whose identity is only at this point revealed as the aged
22 Beaumont quoted in Garafola: 222-223.
40
Aurora, a figure who is heard but never seen - reminds the viewer: ‘My kingdom was united
not by hero or villain as legend had predicted, but by one who was both hero and villain.
And her name was Maleficent.’
Deploying the philosophically important theme of non-concealment but freeing it
from all the conventional principles, the philosophical life, in the hands of the Cynics,
becomes, for Foucault, the vie autre, a ‘life that appears radically other than all other forms of
life’ (Foucault: 255). Life becomes the ‘bios philosophikos’ (Foucault: 265), the
philosophical - and so true - life, when it abandons all those accumulated conventions which,
accruing to philosophical discourse, stood as obstacles in the path of the proper integration of
the philosophical life with philosophical practice. Since
‘while loudly proclaiming that philosophy is fundamentally not just a form of discourse, but also a mode of life, Western philosophy [to quote Foucault]…progressively eliminated or at least neglected and marginalised the problem of this philosophical life , which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice.’ (Foucault: 235).
Cynicism interests Foucault ‘because it was both the most rudimentary and most
radical form in which the question of this particular form of life, the philosophical life…was
raised.’ (Foucault: 237). Maleficent, too, articulates this classically Cynic position. For if
Cynicism, as described by Foucault, ‘tak[es] up the most traditional themes of classical
philosophy’ and subjects them precisely to what Foucault terms a ‘sort of alteration, a sort of
transvaluation’ (Foucault: 314; 253) it seems that the film follows the same process. The
temporal sovereignty of ‘the human kingdom’, characterised in Maleficent by ‘folly’,
‘temptations’, ‘greed’ and ‘ambition’, is reversed by this process of transvaluation: kings
Henry and Stefan are floored - quite literally - by the might of Maleficent’s true sovereignty
as Cynic-monarch. Unconcealment - the open, entirely disclosed life - is similarly taken up
by the film. But here again, Maleficent joins with Cynicism in ‘explod[ing] the code of
propriety with which this principle remained, implicitly or explicitly, associated’ so that the
41
unconcealed life becomes ‘the shameless life, the life in anaideia (the brazen life).’
(Foucault: 255).
Cynicism and ‘Maleficent’ as the choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberalism
The Cynic, stresses Foucault, is not some ‘forgotten figure in ancient philosophy, but
an historical category which,..runs through the whole of western history’. Maleficent, it might
be said, stands testament to the ongoing endurance of this ‘transhistorical Cynicism’
(Foucault: 174). For it is hard not to see Cynicism’s ‘idea of a mode of life as the irruptive,
violent, scandalous manifestation of the truth [that] is and was part of revolutionary practice’
(Foucault: 183), working to inform Maleficent, freighting the film with some of its capacity
to critique neoliberalism. Foucault, as Gros points out, ‘shows how this [Cynicism’s] other
life is at the same time the criticism of the existing world and supports the call for “an other
world (mondre autre).” The true life thus manifests itself as an other life giving rise to the
demand for a different world.’ (Gros in Foucault: 354). Alert to Cynicism’s striking affinity,
here, with revolutionary movements urging socio-political change, Foucault goes so far as to
identify ‘[revolutionary] political practice since the nineteenth century’ as the second great
medium of Cynicism in European culture (the first having been, for Foucault, Christianity,
Medieval ‘asceticism and monasticism’ especially, though he sees ‘Christian Cynicism’
enduring into the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation movements as
well) (Foucault: 186; 182; 183). Maleficent’s response to what the film’s narration terms ‘the
greed of the human kingdom’ is emblematic of Foucault’s elision of Cynicism with political
activism. Her call for a different world expressed, with characteristic Cynic dual emphasis on
walking and on style of existence as the embodiment of the true life - ‘bearing witness by
one’s life in the form of a style of existence’ (Foucault: 184) - is articulated with special force
in one particular scene. Here, the figure of Maleficent, cloaked and with staff Diogenes-like
in hand, courses purposefully through the landscape. Her path is lined, to either immediate
42
side of her, by dry stone walls, the ubiquitous markers of rural territorial enclosure. Such is
the power of Maleficent’s irruptive force that these walls dissolve, as if sucked into the vortex
of a tornado. This scene, it might be said, makes tangible the extent to which witnessing
truth, in the Cynic sense, involves
‘testimony given, manifested, and authenticated by an existence, a form of life in the most concrete and material sense of the word; bearing witness to the truth by and in one’s body, dress, mode of comportment, way of acting, reacting and comporting oneself. The very body of the truth is made possible in a certain style of life.’ (Foucault: 173).
Literally combusting in her wake, the pulverised stones of the walls ascend in a plume behind
Maleficent, as if they are an animated extension of her Cynic’s cloak. The film then cuts to a
panoramic view of the Moors kingdom, revealing it, by contrast, to be entirely unencumbered
by land boundaries; markers; or divisions, of any kind. Maleficent’s action – her
revolutionary moment - renders the land of the human kingdom in similar terms; as a terrain
untrammelled by human demarcation. Her combustive effect, resulting in demolition of the
enclosure walls and transmutation of the landscape, is then, in a very literal sense, the
‘dissonant irruption of the “true life” in the midst of the chorus of lies and pretences, of accepted injustice and concealed iniquities [through which] the Cynic makes “an other world” loom up on the horizon, the advent of which would presuppose the transformation of the present world. This critique, presupposing a continuous work on self and an instruction to others, should be interpreted as a political task. And this “philosophical militancy,” as Foucault calls it, is even the noblest and highest politics: it is the great politeuesthai of Epictetus.’ (Gros in Foucault:354)
The implications, for embodiment, of the Cynic scenario described here by Gros, are
both unexpected, at least within the context of western philosophy, and highly relevant to this
article’s concern with reading Maleficent as meaningful, choreo-philosophically rendered,
critique of neoliberalism. They are unexpected in the sense that the Cynic’s much desired
‘dissonant irruption of the “true life”’ reverses the problematic status too often consigned to
embodiment by - broadly speaking and with the notable exception of phenomenology - the
conventional, governing orthodoxies of western philosophical thinking: As entrusted agent
of transformation; much needed vessel for pursuit of the Cynic ‘true’ life, the body is, by
43
contrast, no longer obstacle in the path to the philosophical life but rather the catalyst
indispensable for its realisation. Indeed, according to Foucault, the ‘relationship of physical,
corporal conformity…between the Cynic and truth,’ means that the Cynic is ‘the very being
of the true, rendered visible through the body.’ (Foucault: 310).
One dividend of a new, Foucault-enabled attentiveness to the subversive, Cynic
potential routed via Carabosse, and extended another remove by the more fully historicised
account of that character’s life story drawn in the figure of Maleficent, might be to encourage
us, as dance scholars to return to, and re-evaluate, Foucault. For Cynicism, in Foucault’s
understanding and extended analysis, relies upon a highly motile and ambulatory; agental
rather than subjugated, notion of embodiment, one which at times also calls to mind a
theatricalised, indeed dancing, body. Foucault repeatedly places emphasis, for instance, on
the ‘Cynic’s body and comportment’; on how it is the job of the Cynic ‘to prove with the
qualities of his [or her] body’ (Foucault: 310); on Cynicism as less ‘a doctrine’ and much
more ‘an attitude, a way of being’ (Foucault: 178). Foucault’s many observations on
Cynicism offered immediately above might bring into question; or be brought into useful
dialogue with, Foucault’s supposed antipathy to dance and its close cognates; his apparent
‘anti-phenomenological perspective’ to quote dance anthropologist Sally Ann Ness (Ness:
23). This is something which the present author plans to write on more fully elsewhere.
Cynicism’s reliance on embodiment, for its realisation, remains the focus here. For
this has important implications for the sorts of claims which might be made for Maleficent as
substantive, choreo-philosophically rendered critique of neoliberalism. As has already been
demonstrated in some depth, Maleficent’s critique of neoliberalism relies heavily on the
film’s staging of Cynic philosophy. It is the film’s perceived marked scope for neoliberal
critique which remains this article’s central concern. And so it is relevant to demonstrate
here, as the present discussion reaches its penultimate stages, the extent to which Cynicism,
44
dance and cinema - the populist cinema epitomised by Maleficent especially – are in fact
close correlates of one another. For this correlation is key, it will be suggested, for the
establishment of Maleficent as the sort of secure platform required for mounting such
effective critique.
Choreography, cinema, dance and/as the embodiment of Cynic philosophy
Cynic philosophy, privileging embodiment and unconcealment, and dispensing with
the capture of philosophy as text-based discourse in favour of philosophy as the lived life, is
especially well correlated with dance and cinema. Much of this correlation has to do with the
extent to which Cynicism is unusually well designed for articulation routed theatrically
through the body. This is especially the case given that ‘the Cynic tradition…contains no, or
very few, theoretical texts’ (Foucault: 202). ‘Generally speaking’ elaborates Gros, ‘they [the
Cynics] neglected the art of writing…It is precisely this theoretical poverty that Foucault
takes up in order to make Cynicism the pure movement of a radical revaluation of
philosophical truth, placed in the context of praxis, test of life, and transformation of the
world.’ (Gros in Foucault: 350-351). In view of this absence of textual supports on the one
hand, and the emphasis placed on the lived life as the bios philosophikos, on the other, the ‘
principle of non-concealment’ becomes a guiding tenet of Cynic philosophy, as has already
been seen. Non-concealment, in turn relies, according to Foucault on ‘dramatization’; that is,
on ‘theatrical staging of the principle of non-concealment’. Indeed for Foucault, ‘by the very
fact of this radicalization [that is – in the present writer’s understanding of Foucault - its
rendering through the theatrical]’, ‘non-concealment…appears radically other and irreducible
to all other lives’ (Foucault: 254).
Cynicism, according to Foucault, ‘presents itself essentially as a certain form of
parrhēsia, of truth telling, but which finds its instrument, its site, its point of emergence in the
45
very life of the person who must thus manifest or speak the truth in the form of a
manifestation of existence.’ (Foucault: 217) As, in this way, an embodied philosophy,
Cynicism displays strong affinities with theatre generally and, given Cynicism’s emphasis on
the body’s lived, in-the-world dimensions, with dance in particular. This same privileging of
embodiment makes Cynicism’s cinematic representation especially viable. And if, on this
basis, (Cynic) philosophy, dance and cinema are natural allies, this seems especially the case
where Maleficent is concerned. No mere blank cinematic tablet for the inscription of Cynic
values, Maleficent, on the grounds of its dance inheritance and its cinematic form – its
popular cinema genre in particular - already seems to amount to a certain kind of practice of
philosophy.
Indeed when Maleficent is considered in light of Alain Badiou’s (actually highly
dance-indebted even if this aspect is little acknowledged) arguments for cinema as
philosophy, this film would already seem to qualify as choreo-philosophical. This is even
before the film’s representation of values, values which - this article argues - are highly
redolent of Cynic philosophy, is taken into account. According to Badiou, cinema’s claim to
status as philosophy is staked on grounds to do with qualities that are intrinsic to cinema’s
form:
philosophy doesn’t have to produce the thinking of the work of art because the work of art thinks all by itself and produces truth. A film is a proposition in thought, a movement of thought, a thought connected, so to speak, to its artistic disposition. How does this thought exist and get transmitted? It’s transmitted through the experience of viewing the film, through its movement. It’s not what’s said in the film, it’s not how the plot is organised that count; it’s the very movement that transmits the film’s thought. It’s an individual element that’s transmitted by every important film, but it touches on a form of the universal. (Badiou, 2013a: 18)
Of special significance for the notion of the choreo-philosophical suggested by this article, is
the extent to which Badiou’s understanding of cinema as philosophy rests on what is, for him,
cinema’s inescapably choreographic aspect. In this regard, it is relevant to note the use of the
46
term ‘movement’ three times in the extract of Badiou’s writing reproduced here. Ironically,
while Badiou’s thinking on dance, precluding the possibility of dance as art, has proved
problematic for dance theory (see Clark, 2011), Badiou’s claims for cinema as philosophy
seem to depend precisely on a perceived relationship between cinema and dance. In the
context of Badiou’s understanding of cinema’s relationship with the other arts - a relationship
on which, according to Badiou, cinema depends for its status as philosophy – it seems that
dance is recognised as an art, a status Badiou otherwise denies to dance.23 Understanding
cinema as ‘“the seventh art,” which defines it as having an intimate relationship with all the
other arts’, Badiou emphasises that ‘the use of choreography is absolutely crucial as an
intrinsic element of the [cinema’s] mise en scène.’ (Badiou, 2013a: 7). Badiou’s claims for
cinema as philosophy rely very precisely, then, upon a willingness to recognise cinema’s
motile, choreographic, indeed dancerly, dimension.24
The case made by this article for Maleficent as philosophy seems to gain further
traction from the extent to which it chimes closely with the argument Alain Badiou makes for
cinema as popular philosophy. This is even if, at first glance, the congruence - no less
relevant to this article’s particular concerns - of Badiou’s arguments for cinema as popular
philosophy with those Foucault makes for Cynicism as popular philosophy, seems more
23 On the latter, see ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought’, pp. 57-71 in Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, transl. Alberto Toscano, California: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 69-70: ‘Dance is not an art…Dance is not an art because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body. I will say that dance is precisely what shows us that the body is capable of as art. It provides us with the exact degree to which, at a given moment, it is capable of it. But to say that the body is capable of art does not mean making an “art of the body”. Dance signals towards this artistic capacity of the body without thereby defining a singular art. To say that the body, qua body, is capable of art, is to exhibit it as a thought body. Not as a thought caught in a body, but as a body that thinks. This is the function of dance: the thought body showing itself under the vanishing sign of a capacity for art.’. There is not the scope here to pursue, in greater depth, the fuller implications of either this quotation or, indeed, of the essay from which it is drawn. 24 Here it is perhaps salient also to note that, as part of this same consideration of cinema, Badiou seems to conceive of dance and cinema as cognate allies, investing both with similarly positive associations and effects: ‘I write about a film because it has produced some effect on me…I’m not a film critic, I don’t confer legitimacy on films. But, philosophically, I ask myself why I was affected by a film and I accept the situation of being affected by a film that’s not part of the pantheon of auteurs…[Similarly] I like Viennese waltzes and the tango. I know that those genres don’t have the stamp of musical legitimacy, but I’m not going to fight it: if I talk about them, if I’m affected by them, I’ll try to understand why. Their way of bearing witness to time has affected me, and I’ll give back to them what they’ve given me.’ (Badiou, 2013: 20).
47
striking still. Both sets of congruence appear tenable in light of the conditions which, for
Badiou, determine cinema’s ‘unique relationship with philosophy’. For the sake of clarity
the status that cinema and Cynicism share as popular philosophy will be considered first.
Badiou’s conception of cinema as ‘philosophical experiment’ rests on what he terms ‘the five
ways of thinking cinema’ (Badiou, 2013b: 208).25 Third among these, is cinema’s
relationship to the other arts. Here, Badiou has in mind how ‘cinema opens up all the arts,
strips them of their aristocratic value…cinema is like the popularization of all the arts’
(Badiou, 2013b: 210). This is especially the case, according to Badiou, in view of the way
that cinema, as the seventh art, that is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, marks ‘the democratization of
the other six.’ (Badiou, 2013b: 210). Cinema’s ‘democratic power’, therefore, lies ‘in its
ability to “popularise” these arts and their Ideas’ (Ling: 47). According to Alex Ling, here
lies a central crux in the case Badiou builds for ‘cinema’s affinity with philosophy’, since
cinema, ‘like philosophy’, ‘is simply the “common” ground on which other artistic truths are
re-presented and re-arranged’ (Ling: 47). For Badiou, ‘“after the philosophy of cinema must
come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema”’ (Badiou quoted in Ling: 47). From this
it also follows, writes Ling, that Badiou’s concept of ‘philosophy as cinema would mean not
only the “active democratisation”…of artistic, scientific, amorous and political truths but also
their subsequent popularisation. Hence Badiou’s promising allusion to the spectre of a “mass
philosophy”.’ (Ling: 47).
Foucault makes a remarkably similar claim for Cynicism: Possessing only an
‘entirely rudimentary’ doctrinal framework and ‘addressed to a wide and consequently not
very cultured public’, Cynicism is, for Foucault, popular philosophy (Foucault: 202). In
these accounts, Cynicism and cinema are both characterised by their populist tendencies and
appeal; indeed it is precisely on the grounds of these democratising capacities that the claims
25 See especially chapter 27: ‘Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation’, pp. 202-232 in Badiou, 2013.
48
for cinema as philosophy (Badiou), and for Cyncism as philosophy (Foucault), are
respectively staked. It would seem, then, that the cases made here by Foucault and Badiou
align closely. As has already been explored in some depth, the thematics explored in
Maleficent closely coincide with the priorities of Cynic philosophy. And, Maleficent, by
virtue of its cinematic form, is as axiomatic of Badiou’s notion of cinema as popular
philosophy, as it is definitive of Foucault’s notion of Cynic philosophy, in terms of its
thematics. Indeed the Disney film encapsulates, paradigmatically, the relationship which, for
Badiou, structures the relationship between cinema and the arts more generally, and is
intrinsic to the claims he makes for cinema as philosophy. For the Disney film involves
Badiou’s ‘democratisation’ and ‘popularisation’ of the arts criterion for cinema-as-
philosophy to a heightened degree. The 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation, for instance, brings
Tchaikovsky’s music; ballet; versions of European, and especially Medieval and
Renaissance, architecture, painting and visual culture, to new and massed audiences. With
the emergence of home video in the 1980s, for instance, Disney sold three million copies of
the Sleeping Beauty animation in 1986 alone.26 For Charles Solomon, ‘this is a film that says
animation is art’ (Perfect Picture…). ‘Sleeping Beauty is like going to the symphony’
another Disney scholar observes: ‘you don’t have to get so heavily in[to] the story. It’s the
same thing as enjoying great art. People buy art. They put it in their home. They enjoy
looking at it every day. I find this movie very much like that.’ (Perfect Picture…). And
fellow Disney historian Russell Schroeder points out that George Bruns’s Oscar-nominated
arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score for the 1959 Sleeping Beauty was ‘recorded in a
state of the art studio in Germany’.
The production values of Disney’s 1959 short film The Peter Tchaikovsky Story, itself
conceived as a television tie-in to promote the upcoming Sleeping Beauty animation, were
26 Bohas, p. 118.
49
similarly geared to popularising the arts.27 In this vein The Peter Tchaikovsky Story included
extended sections of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1953 film version of Swan Lake featuring Galina
Ulanova. In terms of its concept, format and style, the programme owed much to
Kompozitor Glinka, with several scenes reproducing, exactly, those of the film. This 1952
Soviet feature film, directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, who had earlier served as co-director on
several of Sergei Eisenstein’s films, ‘became an international triumph’ and was released in
the USA as Man of Music. Composer Glinka (Mitchell, 2004: 72-73). The Peter Tchaikovsky
Story also drew on other strategies which, working in tandem with the Sleeping Beauty
animation, democratised access to the arts: the programme presented itself as both
television’s first stereo simulcast, requiring the assistance of local radio stations, and as
television’s first widescreen presentation. Both of these features were ultimately geared to
the screening, for television audiences, of those extended sections of the Sleeping Beauty
animation which were included in the programme.
Read through the lens of Badiou’s theory, cinema, then, and popular cinema
especially, share with Cynicism an understanding of philosophy as necessarily democratic;
accessible; and popular. The pantomime dance to which Carabosse and so, ultimately, also
Maleficent, are so indebted is indexed to a no less Cynicism-dependent understanding of
philosophy as popular; lived out in the world; performance-based; and subversive. It is to
this indexing of pantomime dance with Cynicism that this article finally turns.
Maleficent and Carabosse; pantomime dance and parrhēsia: a genealogy
Mime functions for Carabosse as walking operates for Maleficent: as a habitual mode
of embodiment and communication. Carabosse’s mime and Maleficent’s pedestrianism
respectively amount to alternative forms of motility or physicality, ones adopted perforce, as
the result - for both characters - of an acute personal trauma experienced in earlier life. A
27 For a discussion of the history of Disney productions for television see Bohas, pp. 62-65.
50
traumatic episode, implicitly acknowledged but unspecified in the ballet, consigns mime to
Carabosse so that she becomes the only character in The Sleeping Beauty to whom virtuosic,
danse d’école vocabularies of classical ballet are denied. In Maleficent’s case, the
originating incident is elaborated upon: it is the violent loss of her wings that deprives
Maleficent of her previous aerial motility – her vertiginous aerial dance28 every bit as
virtuosic as classical ballet. In fact, viewed in this light, Maleficent’s pedestrianism can itself
be read as the distilled residue of Carabosse’s danse d’école-deprived, and hence
pedestrianized, mime. Maleficent’s powers of flight are only restored to her at an advanced
stage in the film, when Aurora upturns the glass in which Stefan had encased the severed
wings, thereby releasing these and their accompanying superhuman powers back to
Maleficent. Empowered in this way, Maleficent, as the true Cynic sovereign, who has by
now also become Aurora’s adoptive mother, is finally able to vanquish and dispatch King
Stefan, Aurora’s bellicose, biological father.
This present discussion, however, maintains its focus on Carabosse’s mime and
Maleficent’s pedestrianism. Not only since these modalities of gesture and movement are
respectively more representative of each character’s particular physicality, taken overall. But
also because the potential for political subversion which, I hope to show, is as integral to
Carabosse’s mime as it is inherent to Maleficent’s pedestrianism, goes some way towards
making the case for dance’s capacity for critique. Demonstrating that the subversive
potential for neoliberal critique realised in Maleficent is circuited via; and no less innate to,
the Sleeping Beauty ballet, is significant not only for enhancing an understanding both of
Disney’s two Sleeping Beauty films - one animated and the other live action - and of the
ballet which inspired them: Drawing attention in this way to the radical tendencies
encountered even in a dance work such as Sleeping Beauty, where they might not readily be 28
According to vertical dancer Kate Lawrence, aerial dance refers to ‘dance practices that take place in mid-air’ (Lawrence: 49).
51
expected, helps build the argument for dance’s capacity for socio-political critique more
generally.
If the role of Carabosse is highly and intrinsically relevant to any consideration of
Maleficent, it is equally central to the case I have made elsewhere for viewing the original
1890 Mariinsky production of The Sleeping Beauty as a danced affirmation of contemporary
Romanov tsarist rule, cast in the historical image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Valois and Bourbon France.29 Viewed in this context, some inescapable and far reaching
parallels seem to exist between Carabosse and Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589): Carabosse,
as she is characterized in the original Russian 1890 production, is iconographically rendered
in terms strikingly redolent of Catherine, the Italian-born wife of Henry II of Valois, King of
France (1519-1559), who was subsequently dowager queen of early modern king of France
during her sons’ extended regency. There is neither the scope nor the need to elaborate
further on this reading and the symbolism which, it argues, both figures share. It is enough to
say here that the same bellicose associations of war, massacre, and bloodshed fastened to the
Catholic, foreign dowager queen by her French contemporaries – and by the Protestant
factions within their midst especially – resonate very clearly in the havoc which Carabosse
wreaks in the ballet. For her actions similarly commit the apparently lifeless bodies of
Sleeping Beauty’s court society, like all the other subjects in the ballet’s kingdom, to a
century of slumber.30 In summary, when viewed through the lens of nineteenth-century
theatrical convention, Carabosse embodies the same associations of social strife, and
potentially regicidal rebellion that had been attached to Catherine de’ Medici and which
would, in turn, attach themselves to Maleficent also. Indeed, in Maleficent’s actual
29 See, in particular, Hammond 2007a; 2007b; but also Hammond 2010, 63-67 especially.30 This can be read as a reworking in theatrical terms of the same century of sedition; regicide; and rebellion which, culminating in the Fronde, the mid-seventeenth-century revolt of the corporations of royal officers that together constituted the French civil service, Catherine de’ Medici is conventionally, if erroneously, ultimately held responsible for.
52
vanquishing of King Stefan, Carabosse’s regicidal tendencies from the ballet are, in effect,
realised.
In the case of Carabosse, social and civil unrest register, for instance, in the ‘irruptive’
quality of the chromatic scale through which Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score
characterises Carabosse musically; in her entrances which are customarily managed via stage
left, and so redolent - for nineteenth-century audiences at least - of malevolence.31 They are
detectable, as well, in the consistently en dedans direction of Carabosse’s movement, so that
this is always turned in on itself and towards the body, rather than directed outwards, en
dehors, and so in terms that would be more legible to the audience.32 Associations of strife
and insurgency are palpable, too, in the grotesquerie embodied by Carabosse and her retinue
of squabbling pages. They are discernible, as well, in the original creation of the role of
Carabosse, in the 1890 Imperial Russian production, by (panto)mime artist and dancer Enrico
Cecchetti. Created, in this way, by a male pantomime, the gender indeterminacy that results
from casting the role en travesti arguably adds significantly to its subversive potential. As a
consequence of its pantomime, travesty, and pedestrian dimensions, the role of Carabosse is
freighted with the same associations of turmoil, social unrest, and potential for inducing
counter-hegemonic insurgency familiar from Maleficent. Carabosse, then, articulates many
of the same key values of Cynic philosophy - and to a strikingly similar extent - which
Maleficent embodies. Indeed, this congruence is hardly surprising given that the role of
Maleficent functions to furnish the character of Carabosse with her earlier life back story.
According to Tim Scholl, for Sleeping Beauty’s original ballet librettist, Ivan
Vsevolozhsky, in ‘building his libretto around Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant
(1697)…Perrault was but a link in the chain of a legend that stretches back [at least] to The
Saga of the Volsungs, the old Norse saga recorded in the thirteenth century…’ (Scholl: 34). 31 The latter is a point also made by Poesio: 46.32 This same point is also made by Banes (51) who in turn credits this observation to Fedor Lupukhov.
53
In terms of chronological range, the same can be said of the conjunction of mime, travesty
dance and political subversiveness embodied in the role of Carabosse: For this, too, arguably
reaches much further back; even to as far back as the gendered indeterminacy and political
instability configured in pantomime dance in the ancient Greek city-state and its Roman
legatees. And from this it follows that the Cynic behaviours and philosophy which
Maleficent ‘inherits’ from Carabosse ultimately extend back to ancient Greek pantomime
dance also. This chronological reach should not come as a surprise. For the Cynic,
according to Foucault is not a ‘forgotten figure in ancient philosophy, but an historical
category which…runs through the whole of western history…this transhistorical Cynicism.’
(Foucault: 174). Pantomime dance was especially associated with civil disturbance and
unrest - themes possessing particular Cynic significance as we have already seen - in the
minds of Late Antique commentators such as Prokopios of Gaza and Anastosios, as Ruth
Webb has demonstrated (Webb, 200633: 10; Webb, 2008: 147; 201).
One stop in the inevitably complicated route of transmission between pantomime’s
ancient prototype, incorporated as one kind of dance performance in late antiquity, and its
nineteenth-century dance theatre mime variant, is Italian commedia dell’arte, a mediation of
antique pantomime for the post-classical era Italian peninsula. Particularly in view of its
early efforts at the codification of ‘a more uniform and standard language of gesture’,
commedia dell’arte found lasting influence. Many of its ‘rules, principles and conventions…
survived after its decline, being assimilated into drama, opera and ballet.’ (Poesio: 41). In a
recent radio essay broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day 2016, ‘historian, and former Reith
lecturer’, Marina Warner, characterises present-day pantomime in terms strikingly similar to
those in which its earlier, and especially dance indebted, variants are understood by this
article. Pantomime is, for Warner, ‘a free arena for risqué caricature’. It features ‘evil
33 I am very grateful to the author for kindly providing me with a manuscript copy of this conference paper, my having originally heard the paper delivered in that format.
54
villains…standing in for some of the ogres and tyrants prospering around the globe today’
and ‘actors adlibbing on the issues of our time from the back legs of a horse’. ‘Working in a
very old forum for people’s speech’ continues Warner:
‘…the patent lesson of traditional pantomime is an important one and it goes to the heart of ideals about freedom of thought in a democracy. You can see beneath appearances and you can hear another story beneath the lines…while keeping [y]our hands cupped to shield the little candle of hope that new times are coming.’ (Warner, 2016).
The pantomime most local to me, Richmond Theatre’s Christmas season Sleeping
Beauty, whose December 2016 run ended as work on this article also drew to a close, bears
out Warner’s reading: For, according to The Stage, the ‘biggest gag of the evening…[is]
when she [Carabosse, played by Maureen Lipman] is transformed into an instantly
recognisable [dinner party guest] facsimile of [British prime minister] Theresa May’ (Vale)
issuing the shrill cry of ‘breadsticks mean breadsticks’.34 And ‘I Wanna Be Evil’, the
signature number sung by this production’s Carabosse, articulates a stock Cynic sentiment.
Carabosse, then, speaks parrhesiastic truth to power, at least for the theatre’s local Richmond
Park constituency. For earlier the same month, this parliamentary seat had hosted a by-
election fought and won by a candidate with a manifesto pledge to campaign for a
parliamentary vote before the invocation of article 50, the trigger for a member state to
withdraw from membership of the EU.
British pantomime is a ‘migrant from the continent, for it was brought by Italian
strolling players’ observes Warner (Warner, 2016). The retention, from the Tchaikovsky-
Petipa Sleeping Beauty, of the names of Carabosse and that of her more benevolent alter ego,
the Lilac Fairy, as those given to the bad and good fairies in the Richmond Theatre
production, suggests that ballet, together with Warner’s ‘Italian strolling players’, has played
an important role, in Britain at least, as international mediator of pantomime. And in the
34 As a barely disguised echo of May’s trademark ‘Brexit means Brexit’ mantra, the effect of the latter - at least for UK audiences - was instantly and comically to associate this production’s Carabosse with that country’s prime minister.
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context of Carabosse’s mime-only pedestrianized theatrical language in the Tchaikovsky-
Petipa Sleeping Beauty, the predominantly Italian associations which pantomime held in
nineteenth-century ballet’s regard would have conveniently functioned as another theatrical
marker of Catherine de’ Medici’s ‘outsider’, foreign status, particularly as she was an Italian
from Medici Florence. These Italian associations of the Carabosse-Catherine de’ Medici
mime role are ones that Cecchetti’s own Italian nationality, as a native of the Marches, would
have amplified further still.
The extent to which the subversive political strategies and pantomime dance practices,
practices that Carabosse would inherit to such striking effect, had become closely intertwined
with one another in the ancient Greek city-state and its Roman successor, is strikingly
redolent of Cynic philosophy. The proliferation of these practices on the one hand, and the
emergence of Cynic thinking, on the other, were, after all, contemporaneous with one another
in Hellenistic Greece. In this context, the ‘mimes’ jokes (skommata) about political leaders’,
were indicative of their ‘freedom of speech (parrhēsia)’ (Webb 2008: 118-119), just as, in
that period, the same commitment to say all; to speak fearlessly of everything, was enshrined
as centrally, in Cynic philosophy. As has already been pointed out, and as Webb’s equation
of mime with parrhēsia also indicates, pantomime, with its origins in panto-mimesis and
meaning literally to show; to represent, everything, is the close, dance cognate of Cynic
parrhēsia; the compunction to say everything. The pantomimes’ potential ‘as a conduit for
popular expression’; their ‘depictions of transgressions [that] shone a pitiless spotlight on the
boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable in society’; so that the dancers’
‘subverted and laid bare the conventions of society’ (Webb 2008: 119; 137) are also already
familiar. For they call to mind Carabosse, Maleficent and these characters’ shared reliance
upon embodied practices and theatricality. This reliance is very similar to that on which,
according to Foucault, the Cynic articulation of societal critique also depended. The resulting
56
associations cemented between ‘pantomime performance and civil strife’, and between the
‘dancer’ and ‘violence, [and] danger’, meant that, according to the commentary of Prokopios
of Gaza, the pantomimes’ dances were indeed ‘a direct cause of civil strife’ (Webb, 2008:
147; 201). These same charges against the pantomime dancer were also levelled against the
Cynic of course. And Carabosse is regarded similarly in The Sleeping Beauty; as a harbinger
of social strife who, according to this ballet’s conceptual logic, must therefore - like her
Cynic philosopher and pantomime dancer predecessors - be checked and contained.
Much was also made by contemporaries of the gender indeterminacy of ancient Greek
pantomimes; of their ability to take on female as well as male identities. A connection was
drawn, on the basis of ‘the dancers’ indeterminate gender…between their disruption of nature
and their audience’s disruption of nature and [ultimately] their audience’s disruption of civic
order.’ (Webb, 2008: 201). This gender indeterminacy lives on, and is similarly politicised,
in Carabosse. For, given that pantomime was seen as inherently transvestite in its original
late antique Greek setting, some of these traces arguably spill over to extend and reinforce the
complicated gender identification already invested in the role of Carabosse by its being
played en travesti. Anxieties, triggered by the ancient Greek pantomime dancer’s practice of
playing female roles, as well as the social construction of dance as a female activity, led,
Ruth Webb suggests, to something akin to a state of moral panic over the gendered
indeterminacy of the pantomime dancer’s body. Negative discussions of pantomime, were
‘expressed most clearly in terms of the dancer’s refusal to adhere to “natural” gender
categories’ (Webb, 2006: 9). The root of the concern for commentators such as
Amphilochios lay, according to Webb, in the ‘highly unstable nature of the pantomime
dancer’s body’: As the dancers ‘taking on female roles…don’t become female in a biological
sense’ the dancer is left ‘in a limbo, caught between the natural state of masculinity and the
inaccessible state of femininity.’ (Webb, 2006: 9-10). Prokopios played up ‘the association
57
between civic disturbance and the pantomimes’ performances’: ‘His reasoning is as follows
[writes Webb]: dancers impersonated women, their acts stirred up the crowds, from whence
(hothen) there were riots.’ (Webb, 2006: 10).
In this way, Webb argues, ‘the overturning of natural distinctions – the natural order –
within the dancers’ bodies is mirrored by the overturning of the natural order in the cities, i.e.
in violence and strife.’ (Webb, 2006: 10). Beyond this propensity for subverting societal
norms through strategies that relied upon a particularly embodied notion of performativity,
pantomime dancers shared other Cynic-like traits. These included the possession of populist
rather than intellectual appeal. For pantomime dancers, possibly due to the particularly
embodied nature of their performance, suffered the same lack of prestige experienced by
Cynic thinkers: ‘[ancient Greek and Roman] mime and pantomime dance, in their reliance
on gesture and visual spectacle…largely failed to gain respect among the intellectual elite in
their own periods.’ (Webb, 2008: 222). The same equation of gender impersonation with
potential for insurgency familiar from pantomime dance, lives on in the conjunction of
travesty and riotous insurgency embodied in the figure of Carabosse. In the case of
Maleficent, this character’s disruption of gender norms manifests itself in her initial rejection
of conventional maternalism rather than in the adoption of travesty performance per se.
Other traits, no less central to Cynic thinking and equally encountered in the performance of
pantomime dancers, live on also, in the characterisation of Carabosse and Maleficent. For
instance, following the precedent set by the Cynic-like pantomime dancers, Carabosse and
Maleficent do not shirk speaking truth to power, fearlessly and when they deem that
circumstances dictate - disruptively.
According to pragmatic philosopher Richard Shusterman:
Philosophy should be transformational instead of foundational. Rather than a metascience for grounding our current cognitive and cultural activities, it should be cultural criticism that aims to reconstruct our practices so as to improve the
58
experienced quality of our lives. Improved experience, not originary truth, is the ultimate philosophical goal and criterion.’ (Shusterman quoted in Decker, 96)
While one might wish for a more conciliatory and productive dialogue between
pragmatic and other forms of philosophy - i.e. analytic - than Shusterman seems prepared to
countenance, the role which he envisages for philosophy is salient here. For Malificent, this
article has tried to suggest, is ‘cultural criticism that aims to reconstruct our practices so as to
improve the experienced quality of our lives’. The embodiment, in the figure of the film’s
titular character, of Cynicism with its ‘little importance in the history of doctrines.
Considerable importance in the history of arts of living and the history of philosophy as mode
of life’ to quote Foucault (Foucault: 315), is intrinsic to this process. Maleficent, then, would
seem to fulfil, paradigmatically, the definition of philosophy as this is formulated by
Shusterman and other pragmatic thinkers. Indeed a genealogical analysis of the roles of
Carabosse and Maleficent suggests that there is little that is coincidental between the
configuration of Carabosse as a mime role, and the sorts of socio-political thematics which
this role explores and stages for the audience. This resulting raised awareness in turn paves
the way for establishing affiliations between the sorts of dance lineages inherited, via ballet’s
The Sleeping Beauty, by Maleficent on the one hand, and Cynicism, as a particularly
embodied philosophy, on the other. Engaging with Cynic philosophy through dance in this
way enables Maleficent not only to enter into some substantive, extended, and innovative
critique of neoliberalism. It also enables this recent, cinematic- and therefore particularly
widely circulated - evocation of ballet’s Carabosse to escape those stock readings of the
female body as first and foremost ‘natural’ and fecund, to be tamed by masculinist regimes of
enclosure. Cynic philosophy, therefore, allows for the identification of Maleficent with
nature while at the same time resisting and overcoming the regimes of biological essentialism
according to which nature has consistently been gendered in western accounts of landscape.
59
These stances adopted by Maleficent, in their manifest forms of ‘indifference…to the [exact
same] structures of power and its representatives that are [in other words, as are] found in
Cynicism’ (Foucault: 318) are, of course, in and of themselves the articulation of a classically
Cynic position.
That these are the achievements of a female character, an ostensibly evil one at that,
who is drawn, ultimately, from a ballet all too often acknowledged only to be dismissed as
quickly, as variously anodyne; narrative-poor; or as an exhaustive dance primer of a certain
kind, might be especially worthy of pause and comment. For one thing, they invite us to look
again, with fresh eyes, at the final words of narration in Maleficent’s closing moments. When
the last, ‘so you see, the story was not quite as you were told’, line of Woolverton’s
screenplay is re-considered in this light, it not only sounds an invitation to re-visit a time-
worn fairy tale. It stands, too, as a call to re-evaluate a ballet whose guardianship - through
its characterisation of Carabosse - of pantomime dance’s socio-political subversive potential,
reaching far back to ancient Greece, has endured for some century and a quarter. A
guardianship that, for all the apparent familiarity of The Sleeping Beauty as a ballet, has
somehow hitherto passed unnoticed and unremarked upon.
Critical Disney Studies, then, not only ushers in, but also cedes important ground to;
directs the spotlight on, dance studies. A dance studies newly attuned, that is, to the capacity
of a dance work such as The Sleeping Beauty to articulate complex philosophical concepts
and critical frames through its thematic and aesthetic armature, and to generate subsequent
ones, i.e. those articulated in Maleficent. That this capacity has thus far passed largely
unacknowledged even in a dance work perceived to be as intrinsically bound up with western
dance theatre as The Sleeping Beauty, might in itself suggest this line of enquiry as one
which, capable of broader application, is worth pursuing. And the readiness such an
approach entails, to re-visit some of the key interlocutors for those same philosophical
60
concepts, might make such an approach especially valuable. For, if Foucault’s actually
highly phenomenological account of Cynic philosophy is any indication, returning, with
newly opened eyes, to those thinkers whose legacy for dance has hitherto been deemed
problematic, might make this project one that is doubly worthwhile for dance studies.
University of Roehampton
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