Argumentative Jujitsu in the Gender War
As someone who hadn’t seen the first Maleficent movie, I didn’t know what to expect from the second movie. But of course, I had to go for the second one since my 8 yo daughter wanted to see it. Plus, it had stuck in my head when she’d recently pointed at a giant poster of a wax museum in Goa and identified the statues as being those of Harry Potter, Modi, and… Maleficent . (Apparently, she only knows Angelina Jolie in her Maleficent avatar). The movie was a pleasant surprise. It was “not a fairy tale”, like one of the characters in the movie said. There’s the evil, scheming Queen Ingrith who knows how to push Maleficent’s buttons, thereby starting a war that she can blame on the latter. And the men in the movie are mostly inconsequential props. The woman-as-central-and-bad-characters theme reminded me of a line by Laurie Penny where she expressed her (and everyone else’s) disappointment with how Game of Thrones ended: “by insisting that the women were crazy all along a...