‘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:

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‘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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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:

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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.

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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

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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.

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‘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.

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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

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‘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).

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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.

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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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