Maleficent trends

The movie Maleficent which opened recently seems to be an interesting confluence of a few recent unfortunate trends in modern pop culture storytelling. I'm thinking about it right now, so I will record these thoughts. The two trends in particular are the "dark re-imagining" of fairy tales, and the perceived need to explain villains away. Let's explore, shall we?

The DARK RE-IMAGINING of a CLASSIC FAIRY TALE
Alice In Wonderland got it. Little Red Riding Hood got it. Snow White got it TWICE in one year. Now it's Sleeping Beauty's turn. The DARK, GRITTY "re-imagining" of a fairy tale Disney property. This one is so ironic it is practically a cure for anemia. Because if you spend like five minutes doing the knowledge, you find out that fairy tales were FUCKED UP. Dark? That's not even the half of it. Read some of the original works sometime. Does the wolf eat Red Riding Hood in the end? Yes! Does Sleeping Beauty get raped? Yes! These were the prevailing myths of their era, and like any era's myths, reflective of the time they came from. And that time was FUCKED the FUCK UP to the FUCKED DEGREE.

And then, in the last century, Disney cleaned up all these gruesome, grisly, quite frankly disturbing stories into something that was "suitable for children" -- so out went all the violence, and the rape, and the murders, and the fucked up unhappily ever after endings, and the entire story of Bluebeard (because just TRY fitting THAT into the Disney formula) and in came the bright colors, and the catchy sing-songs, and the cute comic relief characters. And to entire generations who couldn't be bothered doing the five minutes of knowledge mentioned above, those ARE what fairy tales are. Not gruesome time capsules of a far less civilized era. Cutesy, and magical, and princess-erific.

Now, in this century, with the culture's obsession with DARK and GRITTY, those cutesy colorful sanitized sing-along stories have no place. They seem strangely irrelevant. So instead we now have the wholly modern "dark re-imagining" that is entirely ignorant of how very dark the originals' imagining could be in the first place. Maleficent falls squarely into this trend. Go back and read Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty. Then watch Angelina Jolie ham it up with enhanced cheekbones against a green screen. I'm just saying.

The SAD BACKSTORY of a CLASSIC VILLAIN
Ah, villains. They don't make them like they used to. Time was, you could just be deliciously evil and chew up scenery for the sake of being deliciously evil and chewing up scenery. Now every villain has to have a thoroughly dumb origin story that EXPLAINS why they're so deliciously evil and prone to chewing scenery. Darth Vader is sad because he misses his mommy. Hannibal Lecter is sad because Nazis ate his little sister. Boba Fett is sad because his dad got his head cut off. Dracula is sad because his wife is dead. The Wicked Witch Of The West is sad because... I don't remember, actually. It's been a long time since I read that book. My point is, everyone is sad, sad, sad. So sad! Maleficent is just the latest victim of the "needs an explanation for the evulz" trend.

Now, I'm not against villains with well-rounded, fully-sketched out characters and a clear motivation for their villainy. Magneto, for example, is a villain who cannot survive without his ties to the Holocaust, and specifically being sad because of said Holocaust. Frankenstein's Monster was always infused with tragic motivations for his monstrous deeds. But Darth Vader, man? Hannibal Lecter? Come on! Can't evil just be evil for the sake of being evil? Especially in stories that aren't meant to be realistic psychological studies of human nature but are intended as pure escapism? Just let them chew the damn scenery already! And now we have poor Maleficent, seemingly the last of the classic melodramatic evil mold, given a backstory that explains why she too is sad, so very sad indeed.

On second thought, it's just as well Bluebeard has been utterly forgotten. Because otherwise he'd probably be next in line with a dark re-imagining that explains why he, like his beard, is so blue.