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Looks at the transformation of female villains in more recent Disney films

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Writing about Disney's 2016 Moana, Slate's Chinen notes, "There is no grand nefarious villain" in the film, a sentiment echoed by several other critics who instead focus their attention elsewhere. Yet there is, at least temporarily, a real villain in the film: Te Kā, the demon who must be overcome in order for the title character to save the world. Huge, furious, and formidable, Te Kā appears almost unstoppable. The film's big revelation-that Te Kā is actually a transformed Te Fiti, the benevolent island goddess transformed into a lava demon-might explain why critics have been slow to label the monstrous incarnation a villain. She defies easy categorization and eludes simple labels. After all, Te Fiti/Te Kā is unique among Disney villains, particularly female villains, in her transformation from benevolent to monstrous and back again. The film allows her an unprecedented return to an earlier form, sparing her the fate of so many of her predecessors. Viewers, so well-versed in the familiar tropes Disney has long employed-especially those involving the evil woman who is ultimately destroyed-might have a hard time recognizing such an innovation in Moana.

In this essay, we begin with a discussion of the angel/monster trope in general, illustrating how this patriarchal shorthand offers limited options for female characters and reaffirms the idea that women whose behavior transgresses traditional gender roles deserve punishment. Next, we analyze Disney villainesses specifically, focusing on those films with female protagonists and antagonists, women set up in binary opposition to each other. We pay special attention to those villainesses whose evil ultimately manifests in physical monstrosity, showing how these films always end with their deaths. Finally, we show how Moana breaks this convention, letting its monstrous woman not only live, but return to her earlier form and save the world. Moreover, the film allows its heroic titular character to play a key role in this transformation back, making what could have been a story about how one (good) woman defeats another (monstrous) woman instead a story of feminist empathy and sisterhood. In this way, Moana, already noteworthy for its embrace of a Polynesian heroine, also deserves attention for its progressive rewriting of what is possible for unconventional women in these films.

"[L]ook in that mirror": Evil Women versus Innocent Heroines

In order to understand how Disney villainesses have been scripted historically and how Moana sets a new precedent, we must first understand the angel/monster trope more fully, particularly how it manifests in art. As Lois Tyson reminds us, there are only two roles for women in a patriarchal culture: they are "'good girls' (gentle, submissive, virginal, angelic) or 'bad girls' (violent, aggressive, worldly, monstrous)." While the good girl is rewarded for her virtue, the woman who rebels or pushes back finds one label left for her: "that of a monster." Such labels work, of course, to control women and affirm male dominance, encouraging behavior that strengthens the patriarchy and punishing actions that threaten it, holding up as natural and timeless ideas that are in fact constructions serving to perpetuate oppression. In their groundbreaking work The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar show how these limiting female roles find expression in art and literature, writing of "those mystic masks male artists have fastened over [a woman's] face both to lessen their dread of her 'inconstancy' and-by identifying her with the 'eternal types' they have themselves invented-to possess her more thoroughly." Explaining how both creators and audiences are nevertheless drawn to the female monster/villain, Gilbert and Gubar note that she is "a magical creature of the lower world who is a kind of antithetical mirror image of the angel," and carries "mysterious power." Indeed, in her "very freakishness [she] possess[es] unhealthy energies, powerful and dangerous arts." In other words, both artists and their audiences are fascinated by the monstrous female and the potential she possesses, even if ultimately, the patriarchal ideology demands her defeat, silence, and punishment.

As a substantial body of scholarship on Disney illustrates, the precise tropes that Gilbert, Gubar, and Tyson identify are reflected in these popular and influential films. Disney Animation Studios has produced fifty-six films, nine of which have female antagonists in conflict with female protagonists and which perpetuate the binaries described above. Lisa Rowe Fraustino shows how, even today, early Disney movies influence viewers as they "ideal[ize] the dream of romance that leads to the making of the traditional patriarchal family" and "continue to seduce girls toward their own erasure and disempowerment." Though, as we discuss below, some progress has been made in depictions of heroines (good girls/angels) in recent Disney films, until Moana, Disney could not seem to imagine any other option but punishment and (often) death for the bad girl who becomes truly monstrous.

Disney villainesses have long fascinated audiences and critics, especially when compared to the virtuous women they oppose. Using language that echoes Gilbert and Gubar, Elizabeth Bell notes that in contrast to the good girls in these films, Disney's "wicked women harbor depths of power that are ultimately unknowable but bespeak a cultural trepidation for unchecked femininity." Similarly, Davis writes of the price Disney villainesses must pay (especially in the early films), noting "evil never goes unpunished." mportantly, Jill Birnie Henke, Diane Zimmerman Umble, and Nancy J. Smith contend, "In Disney's versions of these tales, women are more often pitted against one another than supportive of one another." Yet these evil women still dazzle with their power and agency. Sometimes embracing transformation and monstrosity, "[t]hey change themselves into other things when functioning in their usual form is not working for them. They actively seek to control not only their lives but also their circumstances. They are strong, fearless, and often very creative. They are mature, powerful, and independent. In short, they are everything that their female victims are not." So, too, do Henke et al. write of "Disney's evil females" who are "magnificent in their strength, presence, and rage." Similarly, Stacy L. Smith and Amy D. Granados examine children's films with heroines, including Snow White, and find "an often repulsive," "older, power hungry hag" seeking power who "may be threatened by the good virgin." Tactics past villainesses employed are extreme, and often made even more horrifying by juxtaposing either a sneering and unattractive adult woman or, conversely, a beautiful femme fatale with a lovely, young, innocent female.

In large part because there are so few biological mothers present in these films, Disney also frequently includes villainesses who reject or abuse their surrogate mother roles, accentuating their non-nurturing behaviors and atrocities toward children and adolescents. Litsa Renee Tanner, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund contend that while there has been a positive trend in Disney films featuring quality fathering, these roles have supplanted quality mothering roles. Suzan G. Brydon agrees, stating that Disney mothers are often nonexistent in the films or they are killed in early scenes. While she celebrates positive fathering roles in films such as Finding Nemo, she argues that "much could be gained if Disney chose to position a father engaged in significant 'mothering' or nurture while the mother is still alive and well and in the home." Without a biological mother around, the female antagonist may assume the role, but her lack of normative nurturing qualities only contributes to her vilification. Similarly, Davis explains that "particularly in the cases of Snow White and Cinderella, what is left for the main character is a 'maternal' figure in the form of a stepmother who is openly against the young girl in her care, doing everything she can to oppress the girl and keep her from finding love."

Beginning in 1937 with Disney's first full-length feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and continuing through 2010's Tangled, older women who cannot accept aging see younger heroines as adversaries. Like the Evil Queen, most of the earlier villains are clearly identified as evil when they first appear on screen, in large part because they transgressed their nurturing, care-giving gender role and lack any redeeming qualities. Additionally, these villains often value appearance over intelligence, a theme Mia Adessa Towbin , Shelley A. Haddock , Toni Schindler Zimmerman , Lori K.Lund, and Litsa Renee Tanner find in their analysis. The envious Evil Queen is immediately pitted against her beautiful nemesis when she directs the Huntsman to "Take [Snow White] far into the forest. Find some secluded glade where she can pick wildflowers. And there...you will kill her!" The narcissistic Queen is obsessed with being the most attractive woman in the land, as she asks the mirror, "Who is the fairest one of all?" When she does not receive personal validation, she sets out to destroy the woman who was deemed fairer. When the Huntsman fails to return with Snow White's Heart, she takes matters into her own hands and creates a poisoned apple, one bite of which will close the victim's eyes "forever in the sleeping death." The impetus for this narcissism is unexplained, and her selfishness is juxtaposed with the virginal Snow White who lovingly cares for a home and seven male dwarfs.

Mother Gothel in Tangled, much like the Evil Queen, is focused on her own beauty and youth. While standing with Rapunzel, gazing into a mirror, she quips, "Rapunzel, look in that mirror. You know what I see? I see a strong, confident, beautiful young lady. Oh look, you're here, too." Her joke-that she looks just as good if not better than her daughter-also calls to mind Gilbert and Gubar's concept of the monstrous transgressive woman as the "antithetical mirror image of the angel." Audiences can see that though Gothel is physically attractive, she is Rapunzel's opposite, a kind of dark double whose attempts to pass as the angel are grotesque. Jeana DelRosso explains that Gothel kidnaps the child solely for "the magical qualities of the girl's hair, of which Gothel requires regular doses, like a drug addiction, to maintain her youth." She keeps Rapunzel in the tower, singing "Mother Knows Best" while she "paints a world of terror." DelRosso adds, "The only purpose served by Gothel's quest for eternal youth is, indeed, youth-and its accompanying beauty."[^fn 22] She denies Rapunzel freedom and relationships for her own physical self-preservation. Both the Evil Queen and Gothel's monstrosity manifests in their obsession with youth and vitality, an obsession depicted as evil and unnatural in light of their age and competition with their daughter figures.

Similarly, the villainess in Sleeping Beauty embodies traits that set her in sharp contrast to the movie's title character. Maleficent apparates uninvited at Aurora's christening and, noting the various attendees, states, "I really felt quite distressed at not receiving an invitation." When a fairy tells her she is not wanted, she replies, "Oh dear, what an awkward situation. I had hoped it was merely due to some oversight." She then curses the child, stating, "Before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die." Unlike previous villains with evident, albeit deviant, motivations, what drives Maleficent is unknown, making her even more treacherous. It is unclear what Maleficent had done in the past to warrant the rejection, and it is also unclear whether simply not being invited drives her to curse the child. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas write, "Her aloofness and treachery made it difficult to understand her motives much of the time...[S]he was so domineering in both attitude and design that no one even thought of questioning what she was doing." As the christening is the first scene in the film, she is immediately established as the villain, and her first action-cursing a newborn baby, the epitome of evil-shows how fundamentally unfeminine and monstrous she is.

Ursula the Sea Witch demonstrates a different kind of monstrosity focused on self-gratification and power. She manipulates Ariel into signing a contract in The Little Mermaid. She then sabotages all chances the girl has to meet its terms. Ursula seeks to claim King Triton's power, arguing, "In my day, we had fantastical feasts when I lived in the palace. And now, look at me-wasted away to practically nothing-banished and exiled and practically starving, while he and his flimsy fish-folk celebrate." Determined to bring the king down, she focuses on his beloved daughter, seeing her as the potential "key to Triton's undoing." After King Triton sacrifices himself and his crown to save his daughter, Ursula shows that she is willing to use her power to terrify and rule as a tyrant, exclaiming, "You pitiful, insignificant fools! Now I am the ruler of all the ocean! The waves obey my every whim! The sea and all its spoils bow to my power!" As the brutish villain, Ursula seeks to dominate by controlling the beautiful mermaid who seeks love and marriage. In this way, Ursula interrupts Ariel's attempts to fit into patriarchal ideas; as such, as we discuss below, she draws a gruesome and definitive punishment.

As this brief analysis shows, in films with female protagonists, Disney villainesses have not been well-rounded characters. Whether their motivations are unexplained or they are driven by financial greed, a desire for power, or vanity, they have been unsympathetic, vile bullies. What put them on these deviant paths is rarely explained, at least not in any way that stands up to close examination; in other words, we have not witnessed their initial transformation from good to evil. Rather the stories these movies tell consistently have been tales of preexisting malevolence disrupting the peaceful lives of the innocents-evil versus good, and good must win. These women garner little sympathy, in large part because their motivations are either selfish or unclear. They are, rather simply, just bad, rejecting their proper roles and behaving poorly. Moreover, they demonstrate a kind of monomania, so focused on their evil goals that their utter defeat appears to be the only possible resolution. Johnston and Thomas write, "While greed undoubtedly motivates many dark characters, several of our classic female villains wanted only one thing and were so obsessed with attaining this that their whole lives revolved around the prize. They would kill anyone who confronted them, fight with anything in their power to get what they wanted." These villainesses not only direct their ire at the innocent, young females, but they are often depicted controlling men, a blatant transgression of their gender role. The Evil Queen makes demands on the Huntsman and Mother Gothel directs the Stabbington Brothers, while Maleficent and Ursula make the kings appear weak. Thus, with their (sometimes) masculine looks, their obsession with self-gratification and vanity, or their unreasonable demands of men, they transgress gender roles and become monsters. As we discuss below, TeKā is not driven by such greed or quests for power; she reacts to having been violated. This, perhaps for the first time in Disney animation history, opens up the possibility of compassion for the villain.

"All the powers of hell!": Villainesses' Physical Transformations

Each of the four villainesses discussed above literally transforms into a more vile form immediately before her particularly gruesome end. In this way, the transformations function as a point of no return for these villainesses and a clear sign that their ugly and monstrous exteriors reflect the ugliness inside of them. In fact, their transformations highlight more than ever the stark difference between them and the films' protagonists, the "good girls." So, too, does a man (or group of men), defending the film's heroine, play a key role in the villainess's demise, allowing the patriarchy to strike back against these transgressive women. The message in each of these films is clear: for the truly monstrous female, especially the woman who attacks the film's heroine, there can be no redemption.

As discussed above, the Evil Queen transforms into an old, haggard witch, yet she has had the power of witchcraft all along; it is only with her outward transformation-right down to the wart on her nose and her cackling laugh-that the truth about her inner nature is fully revealed and sealed. Though she calls her transformation a "disguise so complete no one will ever suspect" that it is her, audiences are led to believe that, deep down at least, this version of her is the truest. The ingredients in her transformation spell further distance her from her "good girl" victim: in contrast to Snow White's youth, goodness, and gentleness, the Queen drinks a concoction of symbols of age and decay ("mummy dust"), fear ("a scream of fright"), and scorn ("a blast of wind to fan my hate"). So good and pure is Snow White, though, that she still reaches out to the Queen in her disguise, treating her like a poor old woman in need. Thus, the Queen is further able to manipulate Snow White by exploiting her "good girl" behavior, tricking her into letting the old woman into the house and eventually eating the apple. Significantly, viewers do not see Snow White as she sickens and collapses, but rather watch as the Queen observes her doing so, smiling in delight at each stage of the girl's decline: "Her breath will still....her blood congeal. Now I'll be the fairest in the land!" At this point, there can be no return-no going back. The Queen must pay not only for her vanity, but for her monstrous assault on an innocent girl, especially egregious because of the stepmother's betrayal of her maternal role. Pursued by the dwarfs and various woodland creatures, she climbs a rocky mountainside and finds herself trapped on a ledge. In her attempts to release a boulder to topple the dwarfs, she falls backward, and the loosened boulder rolls back and follows her over the cliff. Adding a particularly gruesome touch, the vultures fly down towards the unseen corpse. Bell has noted that this scene, like many others in films where the evil woman meets her demise (including Sleeping Beauty), is marked by two events: "the collective and unified effort of all the other characters in the films, and the upheaval of natural forces-rock slides, ocean storms, and cliff precipices. Together they reestablish the control and stability of the cultural and natural order and the destruction of the transgressive feminine." Thus the Evil Queen, a monster inside and outside, meets what the patriarchy would see as a just punishment for her misbehavior.

Tangled's Mother Gothel, the other mother figure/villainess who allows selfish vanity to overpower any maternal impulses, also pays the ultimate price for her transgressions. Furious that Rapunzel might leave her, she stabs Flynn when he arrives at the tower. She then begins to drag Rapunzel away in chains. Rapunzel makes a deal to stop resisting and obey, provided Gothel will allow her to use the healing powers of her hair to save Flynn. Placing her own vanity above her adopted daughter's happiness, she represents a clear threat to the patriarchy's emphasis on marriage. Thus it is appropriate that Flynn takes the action that leads to Gothel's transformation and demise, cutting Rapunzel's hair. The hair turns brown, releasing all magical powers, and Gothel instantly begins to change. Her hair goes white, her skin wrinkles, and she screams and writhes in pain. Pascal, the chameleon, trips her with Rapunzel's hair and she plummets out of the tower. Before she can hit the ground, all traces of her have disappeared, except her clothing. Once she has completely vanished from the film, Rapunzel can be united not only with Flynn, but also with her biological parents, including her (completely silent) mother, the antithesis of Gothel.

The two transforming villainesses with less clear motives-Maleficent and Ursula-also meet their demise after becoming outwardly the monsters that they clearly are on the inside. Both, too, die at the hands of princes determined to save and avenge rather helpless princesses. In Sleeping Beauty, as Prince Phillip arrives at the castle to rescue Aurora, Maleficent screams, "Now shall you deal with me, oh prince! And all the powers of hell!" Her language here, including a direct reference to hell, indicates just how evil she is. Next she transforms into a fire-breathing dragon. A battle ensues, culminating in the dragon being stabbed in the chest and plummeting over the cliff. Her death is especially graphic, as the wound from the sword drips blood and she not only falls from the cliff, but falls through fire. When Phillip looks down, only ashes remain. Similarly, Ursula, upon assuming King Triton's powers and donning his crown, transforms into a giant version of herself. Her trident creates a whirlpool that raises an old ship from the bottom of the ocean. Prince Eric boards the ship and, while Ursula is distracted by her attempts to kill Ariel, drives the ship's bowsprit into Ursula's abdomen. She is electrified and then dragged under by the ship's weight, disappearing into the depths of the sea. Her death allows those she has imprisoned-including the king-to transform back, symbolically setting everything "right" again.

"[O]ne who was both hero and villain": The "Bad Girls" Who Live

As Aisha Harris, Davis, and others have noted, recently Disney has made some progress in depicting more fully defined female characters or at least female characters with more agency and nuance. In fact, female characters in two recent films- Frozen (2013) and Maleficent (2014)-share traits with Te-Fiti/Te Kā, providing if not outright predecessors, indications nonetheless of shifting attitudes about what women who resist the "good girl" label can do in these movies. Writing about these two films, Benjamin Justice memorably explains, "The signs have been unmistakable: Disney's fairy-tale view of gender has finally reached puberty," implying that while there is still work to do, these movies show that some progress has been made. Significantly, both films feature women who are victimized by others and take a temporary turn towards villainy in response to their pain. This addition to the plot-a motivation for their actions that goes beyond greed, ambition, envy, or pure malevolence-opens up the possibility of change. Thus, so too do both films depict the villainess's shift back towards goodness, a redemption facilitated by love and empathy from another woman.

Frozen's Elsa, one of the film's two female protagonists, is a reluctant and almost accidental villain, driven to destruction and isolation not by her own desires for wealth or power, but by rejection from others, a rejection stemming from her inability to conform to others' expectations. In her most memorable scene, as she sings "Let It Go," she explains that she will no longer be the "good girl [she's] always [had] to be," and finds power and freedom in her defiance of the "rules" that held her back before: "It's time to see what I can do/ To test the limits and break through /No right, no wrong, no rules for me, / I'm free!" Here what could be read as a "bad girl" song is actually a song of liberation, breaking free from unfair restrictions. Yet despite this embrace of rule-breaking, ultimately, Elsa returns to her community, drawn back in by the love of her sister, who is willing to die to save her. This sisterly bond between the two women is, the film explains, "An act of true love [that] will thaw a frozen heart." In a move we will see repeated in both Maleficent and Moana, the love that saves is reimagined not as romantic, but sisterly. As Justice notes, such moves allow for female characters who "are capable and complex people," while romantic love tropes "are left in tatters." In this way, Frozen shows viewers that Disney films are beginning to rewrite ideas about female power, friendship, and agency.

Similarly, the title character in Maleficent, a rewriting of 1959's Sleeping Beauty, begins the film as loving and benevolent, only becoming the iconic villainess audiences recognize in response to a grotesque violation from the man she once loved, who cuts off her wings for his own power and advancement. Because it is inherently about rewriting the story of someone once thought of as a villainess, Maleficent is much more explicit in stating its revisionary goals, as its narrator explains that the story is not one of a "hero or a villain," but "one who was both hero and villain." Justice writes of how this "fully feminist retelling...dispenses utterly with every major sexist element of the original," giving us a protagonist who is "a full person, good and evil, powerful and vulnerable, vengeful and loving." The film carefully traces Maleficent's journey back to goodness-how, in the narrator's words, "her heart was made bright again"-facilitated almost entirely by her affection for Aurora, the child she cursed in anger and who, even when she learns the truth, stands by the woman who she sees as a mother figure. Just as significant, the "true love's kiss" that wakes the sleeping Aurora comes not from a prince, but from Maleficent herself, a bold refiguring of the well-known trope, allowing women to see each other as allies and not rivals.

Importantly, unlike Te Kā, even at their most villainous, neither Elsa nor the 2014 Maleficent is truly evil-and neither film wants viewers to see the characters this way. Viewers are reminded that these women are first and foremost the protagonists of their stories, wronged and misguided, but understandable, with what made them good still there, if deeply concealed. Justice's contradictory language is telling, as he calls Maleficent an "antagonist-hero" at one point, but also refers to her as the film's protagonist. Similarly, in a review of Frozen, Fallon writes that despite her destructive actions, "she's never the antagonist." Moreover, because viewers know the Disney formula well, they expect the eventual change back to good behavior, simply because protagonists in these films are good people who win. In contrast, Moana holds back this information-and Te Kā's original identity-until the film's climax. And, significantly, except for some new clothes, neither Maleficent nor Elsa transform physically, least of all into monstrous figures. Thus, both films indicate the beginnings of a shift towards more possibilities for female characters who defy conventions, but it is not until Moana that a Disney film includes a female character who transforms into a villainous monster yet escapes death.

"You know who you are": Moana's Villain Changes Back

Moana opened to widespread critical acclaim, embraced not just for its animation and music, but also for its Pacific Islander setting, characters, and voice cast. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen calls the film "contemporary Disney at its finest." In The Atlantic, Christopher Orr writes that it is an "absolute delight, a lush, exuberant quest fable full of big musical numbers and featuring perhaps the most stunning visuals of any Disney film to date." Similarly, Harris argues that the movie proves that Disney has entered a "third golden age, one in which progressivism and a commitment to inclusion are not only powerful artistic decisions but profitable business ones." She further links Moana to three recent predecessors- Frozen, Zootopia, and Big Hero 6-arguing that these films "have managed to sidestep a lot of the issues of female and racial representation to which previous Disney films have fallen victim, at a time when audience demand for diversity in its storytelling is keener than ever." These reviews demonstrate a recognition that Moana serves as another step forward for Disney's handling of social issues, including gender.

Virtually absent from these discussions, though, is an acknowledgement of perhaps a more subtle step forward: the film's reimagining of the monstrous female villain. By and large, critics are mostly silent on the character who represents Moana's most formidable opponent: Te Kā. For instance, in another article, Harris creates a chart illustrating certain Moana character's predecessors in other Disney films. She refers to the giant crab, Tamatoa, as "the closest thing Moana has to a villain," but completely leaves out Te Fiti/Te Kā. Chinen, quoted above as claiming there is "no grand...villain" in the movie, does address Te Fiti/Te Kā, but calls the revelation that they are one in the same a "flimsy plot contrivance" which nevertheless raises "some intriguing questions about cause and effect," specifically regarding "premonitions" of Western contact and its role in "ecological blight." Perhaps these critics do not have much to say about Te Fiti/Te Kā because she is unlike any character in Disney's history. We argue, in fact, that Te Fiti/Te Kā indeed plays the role of the antagonist/villain, but also the role of benevolent mother, and even the woman in need of rescue. Because she fills all of these roles and in fact moves between them, even transforming physically into something truly monstrous, she presents a challenge to confining binaries and a recognition that women are capable of embodying more than one kind of identity. Moreover, Moana's actions at the end of the film, chiefly her embrace of Te Kā even in her most monstrous form, invites viewers to imagine new possibilities for reconciliation between the heroine and the transformed villain.

Key to understanding why Te Fiti/Te Kā confounds easy definition is her initial role as a force for good. She is, on the surface, in many ways a traditional Disney "good" mother, recalling for instance, Mrs. Jumbo from Dumbo, Rapunzel's biological mother in Tangled, Sarabi in The Lion King, or the mother in Bambi. In her initial incarnation, Te Fiti is pure and powerful, creating life itself. As the opening narration, delivered by Gramma Tala, explains, "In the beginning there was only ocean. Until the Mother Island emerged: Te Fiti. Her heart held the greatest power ever known. It could create life itself. And Te Fiti shared it with the world." The language and imagery here is that of the classic maternal figure, praised for her fertility, though Te Fiti has even more power than the mother figures named above. So, too, does the film echo the heart imagery from Frozen and Maleficent, indicating the continued importance of this symbol of goodness and love, especially for female characters. Depicted as beautiful, green, and smiling, with outspread arms, she gives generously, creating lush islands all around her. So impressive is her power, though, that others seek it out for themselves.

As she settles into a slumber, she takes on a new role: that of the victim. Like the 2014 Maleficent, she is violated by a man who, in pursuit of his own goals, seeks the part of her that gives her strength. The demigod Maui, a shape-shifting trickster figure, steals her heart, the source of her benevolent power, a theft with immediate and disastrous results. Robbed of her heart and the source of her power, her very body-the entire island-suffers and transforms. Immediately, black smoke envelops the now-crumbling island. From here, Te Fiti symbolically moves into another variation of the virtuous woman: an innocent in need of rescue. Such salvation, though, will come from abroad and, as the film switches to focus on Moana, Te Fiti must wait for her champion to arrive. "One day," Gramma tells the children gathered around her, "the heart will be found by someone who will journey beyond our reef, find Maui, deliver him across the ocean to restore Te Fiti's heart, and save us all." Like the sleeping or imprisoned princesses before her, Te Fiti awaits help. Thus, in the first five minutes of the film, she actually epitomizes all the aspects of Disney's good female characters: loving mother, innocent victim, and seemingly helpless damsel in distress.

When viewers next encounter Te Fiti, so dramatic is her transformation that they are at first unaware that it is actually her. Unlike the villains who precede her or the good-girls-turned-temporary-bad-girls in Maleficent and Frozen, viewers are given no indication that Te Fiti is Te-Kā. Yet the true implication of her violation actually has been revealed in the film's prologue, as Gramma Tala explains, "without her heart, Te Fiti began to crumble, giving birth to a terrible darkness." The language here is revealing, as Te Fiti's maternity becomes "terrible" and destructive. When Moana finally arrives at her destination, she witnesses the effects of that "birth" of darkness. All that appears to remain of the original Mother Island is a shadow of her form, visible under the surface of the ocean, and a lifeless rocky landscape. In Te Fiti's place, Te Kā, the rage-filled creature whose very body contains fire, crawls and lunges like a beast. Recalling angry, betrayed women like Jane Eyre 's (1847) Bertha Mason (right down to a predilection for fire), barely a trace remains of what she once was. Te Kā is as ugly and terrifying as Te Fiti is beautiful and benevolent. While Te Fiti's open arms created islands full of life, Te Kā throws fireballs at Moana and Maui, aiming to destroy them. In marked contrast to Te Fiti's silence, Te Kā screams and roars, though she cannot or will not articulate any specific words. Pure rage-without pause or reason-drives her forward as even her lopped-off hands regrow in her unrelenting drive to annihilate. As our analysis of previous dramatic transformations into monstrosity demonstrates, there is no precedent for any possibility other than death for such a female villain, especially as she stands directly in the way of the heroine's quest.

Thus what happens next-Te Kā's transformation back to Te Fiti-is an extraordinary event in a Disney film, one catalyzed by a moment of female recognition, empathy, and empowerment, foreshadowed by similar moments in Frozen and Maleficent. Moana notices the one trace of Te Kā's former identity-the mark where her heart once was-and realizes just who she is facing. "Let her come to me," she tells the Ocean, which separates to clear a path. Moana walks towards Te Kā, who screams as she crawls towards her. Moana's unflinching gesture of acceptance and reconciliation signals a further imagining of a new kind of resolution and an awareness that women need not be permanently defined by rigid roles of good or bad, beautiful or monstrous. Transformation back is possible. As Te Kā gets closer, Moana sings a song affirming this realization. She begins, "I have crossed the horizon to find you. / I know your name. / They have stolen the heart from inside you, / But this does not define you." Significantly, she understands the source of Te Kā's rage-she has been robbed and violated-but Moana points out that her response need not define her ultimate destiny. She adds, "This is not who you are. / You know who you are. / Who you truly are." As the two come face to face and Moana whispers the last two lines, she presses her forehead to Te Kā's and returns the heart. Instantly, the monster's rocky and fiery exterior breaks away, revealing the green goddess within. While Gilbert and Gubar write of the monster that is concealed "behind" or even "within" the angel, here it is the angel who lives inside the monster, thus making possible re-transformation. Just as quickly, Te Fiti's touch begins to restore life to the land. A moment of empathy and compassion from one woman to another, therefore, saves both of them, and opens up the possibility of another ending for a transformed and monstrous female villain: the possibility of redemption and transformation back. The film ends not with punishment or vengeance from or towards Te Kā, but instead with renewal, empathy, and celebration.

Importantly, even as Moana signals steps forward in Disney's treatment of the monstrous female villain, Te Fiti is not a fully realized character and her original form is, in many ways, still quite traditional. Her identifying feature is, after all, her heart. Plus, she is still silent and in fact less expressive than Te Kā, giving weight to the trope of the silent "good girl." Moreover, after her initial burst of benevolent re-creation of the island (and her gifts of a new hook for Maui and a boat for Moana), she settles back into a slumber, her agency seemingly giving way to passivity. Equally important, at least symbolically, some of what is potentially transgressive about the monstrous is more or less shut down with TeFiti's return to her peaceful self. She is, in the end, back to being just and only the "good girl."

Yet it is important to remember that she does not exist in isolation. As many critics have pointed out, the film has at its center a daring and adventurous heroine whose agency and bravery save her world. Peter Travers argues that the minutiae of the film's plot does not matter nearly as much as Moana herself, a new kind of Disney heroine: "The point here is Moana's growing independence, her lack of a love interest and the quietly revolutionary way her body differs from the skinny-Barbie image of most Disney princesses." Beyond this, her gender itself never presents an obstacle for Moana. As Andrew Lapin notes, "the matter-of-fact way the film gets to treat its female protagonist is especially heartening. Her adversaries doubt her not because of her gender, but merely because of her youth." Unlike previous heroines including Snow White and Sleeping Beauty's Aurora, who sleep through their own rescues, or The Little Mermaid 's Ariel, who watches as Eric battles Ursula, Moana plays an active role in rescuing not just herself, but her people-and the monster. Also of note are the other female characters in the film, including Moana's mother and grandmother, who support and even encourage her quest when her father attempts to hold her back. Thus, in a film filled with strong, dynamic, and supportive women, Te Fiti's silence and ultimate passivity is less striking and disappointing than it might be in a film with fewer kinds of women. After all, though she is ultimately passive, she does live and her life enables those around her, including dynamic women like Moana, to thrive.

"But this does not define you": Conclusion

In his Atlantic review, though he admits to greatly admiring the film, Orr is somewhat dismissive of Moana's plot and characterization, calling it "a conventional story featuring just enough innovation to feel current." Orr's focus here is mostly on Moana herself, as he calls her a "princess by another name," while acknowledging the "cunning wink" Disney uses to "inculcate itself against the charge that it is yet another of the studio's unwoke princess movies." Yet, as we have shown, such a dismissal of the film's novelty ignores a key innovation in a well-worn formula: giving viewers for the first time a transformed female monster who escapes death. For most of Disney Animation Studios' ninety-plus-year history, women who transgress too far-who turn physically monstrous-were offered no fate other than punishing death. Following in the careful gender-progressive footsteps of other recent Disney films, though, Moana writes a new kind of ending for the villainous female monster: she lives and even thrives. Such a move might seem minor, especially given the limitations implicit in TeFiti's transformation back to the "good girl," as discussed above. And, as we have shown, the innovation is so new as to be almost unrecognizable; most critics and viewers have not picked up on it. But as Justice argues, it is vital to analyze and critique these films precisely because they are so influential, particularly as they employ familiar gender tropes. He reminds us that the kinds of stories that Disney tells "are told for a purpose. They are a form of social education...They imagine dilemmas and offer a range of permissible solutions, labeling socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior, demarcating good and evil, exploring existential questions, binding the teller and the audience into a common understanding of community identity." In other words, these films help shape how viewers imagine themselves and how they think about identity, agency, and morality. Te Fiti/Te Kā's journey, though imperfect in its depiction, sends a clear message to viewers that they can and should imagine new possibilities for women who transgress.

Notes

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'This is not who you are:' Disney Transforms the Female Monster | Response

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Writing about Disney's 2016 Moana, Slate's Chinen notes, "There is no grand nefarious villain" in the film, a sentiment echoed by several other critics who instead focus their attention elsewhere. Yet there is, at least temporarily, a real villain in the film: Te Kā, the demon who must be overcome in order for the title character to save the world.

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Gender roles, also known as gender stereotypes, are defined as the " socially constructed roles, behaviors , activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and...

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Representation of romantic love in films ... 

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Representation of romantic love in films ... 

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Valentine's Day isn't the only time we're bombarded with pink hearts and heteronormative expectations. Those societal prompts are everywhere. Pop songs, rom-coms, and awkward dinner table conversations around the world convey the expectation that, once you reach a certain age, you'll find your "other half," fall madly in love, and settle down to a life of commitment and monogamy and children.

But as Carrie Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, points out in her recently published book, What Love Is, that concept of love is actually the product of a very narrow social script.

Jenkins' critique of romance is shaped by her own polyamorous relationships, but she argues that the flaws in contemporary society's version of romantic love are relevant to everyone. "It's harming people," she says-not just those who, like herself, do not fit the conventional script of monogamy and marriage.

Though the social script of romantic love today has recently expanded to allow for same-sex romance, it still expects everlasting couples who stay together till death do you part. Such expectations are damaging for those who don't wish to follow such a narrative, argues Jenkins. This applies to those in polyamorous relationships but also single people, and those who don't want children. There's so much pressure that some couples have kids because it's seen as the inevitable right thing to do, she says, which is harmful for both the kids and parents.

Love is a hugely messy concept, and Jenkins argues that it incorporates both a biological side and a socially constructed side. The biological element refers to the physical behavior (the fluctuating hormones and shifts in brain activity) of those who are in love, and is a reflection of our evolutionary need for such ties. But it's the social script that shapes our norms and expectations of romance, such as the contemporary belief that true love will be permanent and monogamous.

Though this social construct can shift over time, Jenkins says, that doesn't happen easily. "Some people think it's made up like fiction is made up, but I'm trying to say it's made up like the law is made up," says Jenkins. "We made it, but now it's real."

Ultimately, this means that Jenkins cannot truly consider her polyamorous relationships to be an example of romantic love. Though she may feel love-and has the hormones and brain activity associated with that feeling-Jenkins' relationships simply do not fit the social definition of romance.

Our notion of romantic love is also harmful for those in heterosexual monogamous marriages, says Jenkins, as the contemporary concept of love itself is very sexist. For example, the "Cinderella story," in which a woman is rescued by a more wealthy, powerful, high-status man, is still a prevalent tale of what's considered romantic.

"This idea that it's very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes," she says. "This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life."

It remains very rare for women to earn more than their husbands and, even when they do, women still tend to do a greater share of the household chores (it's hypothesized that high female earners take on more housework in a bid to compensate for the threat their salary poses to the gender roles.) Jenkins believes that this disparity is a reflection of our Cinderella tales of romance.

It's impossible to predict exactly how the social script around love will change in the coming decades, says Jenkins. There are early signs that the importance of permanence in romantic love is starting to fade, with talk of short-term renewable marriage contracts.More people seem to believe that a romantic relationship can be successful even if it ends by choice, rather than one partner dying.

Jenkins believes that opening up the social construct of romantic love will ultimately be positive for everyone, even those who end up following the traditional script.

"If you give people more choices and they choose to be monogamous, then that's great. It means they've looked at all the possibilities and made a conscious choice to be in that kind of relationship," she says. "I think it's better to do things with awareness rather than because it's the only option available."

In other words, Jenkins argues, true romance needn't look anything like Cinderella's love story. But if you do want to get married until death do you part, it's much more romantic to do so out of choice-rather than because it's the only acceptable option.

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A polyamorous philosopher explains what we all get wrong about romantic love

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Valentine's Day isn't the only time we're bombarded with pink hearts and heteronormative expectations. Those societal prompts are everywhere. Pop songs, rom-coms, and awkward dinner table conversations around the world convey the expectation that, once you reach a certain age, you'll find your "other half," fall madly in love, and settle down to a life of commitment and monogamy and children.

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Plato

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How are men and women depicted? How are relationships in films presented? Does this fall into the trap of essentialiism (people have a innate purpose/destiny). Does this reflect Cixous' ideas of binary gender oppositions?

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The plots of romance movies are fairly predictable: Two romantically challenged characters will meet, realize they're destined to be together, encounter a series of problems meant to separate them, but by the end they'll be wrapped in each other's arms. Cue the credits.

Sure, these fictional stories almost never mirror the trajectories of real-life romances - but good luck telling that to our subconsciouses.

Watching these story lines unfold over and over again can distort our vision of love, said Alisa Ruby Bash, a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based marriage and family therapist.

"I often see young, single women who really want to get married but feel that if their date doesn't sweep them off their feet like the opening scene of a romantic comedy, that it is not worth a second date," she said.

If you've ever ended what, in hindsight, seemed like a promising relationship, go ahead and blame it on your obsession with romantic films or those Disney princess movies you watched as a kid.

"We've all grown up with that Disney model of, 'What is love?'" said Mia Adler Ozair, a clinical psychotherapist from Los Angeles and mother of nine. She said she has explained to her children, including her 5-year-old daughter, that the relationship dynamics depicted in these films don't represent reality. Real love is much more complicated.

So, while you're enjoying an entertaining romance, at least be discerning when watching it. Here are seven romantic tropes found in many love stories, which several experts jumped at the opportunity to debunk.

"There's a passivity in (destiny) thought," Malkin said. "But love is participatory. You have to collaborate. You have to engage it. It doesn't just happen to us."

Those whose actions align more closely with growth beliefs approach love in an active way and work to improve themselves and their relationships. As a result, they tend to "have happier, longer relationships because they (understand) that love is only as strong as our commitment to it," Malkin said.

Malkin said the idea of "the one" is dangerous because it makes people think their love lives are outside of their control.

Mary-Lou Galician, lead professor for Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication's online program, who teaches about how love is portrayed through media, said this concept is used liberally in film and television because it's convenient. If two people need to fall in love over the span of a TV show or movie for a story to work, it has to be immediate.

While people from different walks of life can certainly fall in love, the more dissimilar the day-to-day rituals and preferences of two people, the less likely they are to last, Tibbals said. Ultimately, people with vastly different world views or styles aren't likely to be compatible.

"Reality is not so seamless," Tibbals said. "Tragedy happens. Life happens. People just grow in different directions."

One (admittedly undramatic) path to enduring happiness with one you love?

"We need to honestly tell our partner when something doesn't work or when it makes us feel angry or rejected," said Juliana Neiman, a marriage and family therapist in New York.

Galician said fighting is prevalent in entertainment only because of the need for conflict - often the peg upon which a story's plot is hung.

Fighting can make a couple question whether they're a good match, but never fighting can have the same effect. Galician said it's imperative not to confuse fighting with passion. Plenty of happy couples never fight, and many others do.

Neiman said occasional flare-ups are fine as long as they don't happen every day and don't result in physical violence or mental manipulation.

Sometimes movie characters who are especially thoughtful and resilient can change the people they love who are flawed.

"(This idea) puts a lot of pressure on the fixer," said Galician. It can also open that person up to relationship abuse, she added.

Unfortunately, we must accept that sometimes love is powerless to external forces. Love cannot cure illness, or prevent people from dying.

"When you think about how people deal with grief and loss, there's a lot of resentment and stress," said Tibbals. These dramatically unromantic circumstances can tear even the most devoted couples apart.

"Although you need love to get through the inevitable issues that will arise, there are too many instances where it is simply not enough to make a marriage work," Bash said.

She added that divisions on the unromantic but important subject of finances can decimate a relationship, especially if one partner likes to save and the other likes to spend.

"Financial infidelity or irresponsibility can be more devastating to discover than sexual infidelity for some couples," she said. "A couple has to decide what kind of life they want and work together to achieve their goals."

Romantic storylines may very well amplify our expectations of love beyond what will ever be feasible, but they do add some benefit, Ozair said: "(They) remind us to be optimistic about love and open to adventure ... and hit at our deep-seated hope that love will find a way."

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Hollywood's relationship myths can wreak havoc on real-life romance

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The plots of romance movies are fairly predictable: Two romantically challenged characters will meet, realize they're destined to be together, encounter a series of problems meant to separate them, but by the end they'll be wrapped in each other's arms. Cue the credits.

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Creation and corruption in Middle-earth

Part of the answer is found in Tolkien's other great chronicle of Middle-earth, The Silmarillion, which recounts the larger mythic context of Middle-earth, beginning (notwithstanding his antipathy for allegory) with a magnificent allegorical retelling of the Creation and the Fall according to Genesis 1-3.

Here Tolkien does name the creator-God of Middle-earth, Eru ("the One," also called Ilúvatar, "All-Father"), as well as the mighty spirit Melkor, who rebelled against Eru and went into darkness. We also learn that Sauron, maker of the One Ring, is himself an agent of this Melkor. Tolkien thus establishes a direct relationship between the theistic, even Judeo-Christian cosmology of The Silmarillion and the war for the One Ring recounted in The Lord of the Rings.

In the latter work itself there is no mention of Eru, nor is there any explicitly religious component to the characters' behavior. Even so, Tolkien's Catholic Christian worldview not only stands behind the saga of the Ring in its prehistory, but surrounds and suffuses it in its overarching themes and imaginative structures.

His faith is not the only aspect of Tolkien's inner life or personal experiences that bears upon the story. Other influences include Tolkien's love of languages, his early youth in a Shire-like pre-industrial Warwickshire, his love of trees and nature generally and corresponding dislike of engines and machines, and his experiences in World War I, where he encountered plain rural Englishmen performing everyday acts of great heroism.

But it was Tolkien's deeply held Catholic faith that most profoundly shaped his work. Though he rightly insisted The Lord of the Rings is not an allegorical work, the fact is that Tolkien thought, imagined, and wrote as a Catholic, and his work bears the clear signs of his faith, as he fully intended it should.

"The Shadow mocks, it cannot make"

The Judeo-Christian conception of creation and the fall, and of the preeminence of good over evil, is an important theme not only in The Silmarillion but also in The Lord of the Rings, where we find evil in Middle-earth depicted as a corruption and distortion of prior and fundamental goodness. In particular, just as Melkor and Sauron are fallen Ainur or angelic beings, the evil creatures and races of Middle-earth are always corrupted or distorted versions of the good ones.

For example, there are the trolls, "bred in mockery" of the tree-like Ents; the orcs, corrupted or misbred descendants of the Elves; and the fearsome Nazgûl or Black Riders, wraiths of human kings. Likewise, the evil wizard Saruman is a fallen Istari, and even Gollum is a withered hobbit.

The underlying principle is illuminated in a key exchange between Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins, as they travel through the dark land of Mordor "where Shadows lie," on a mission to destroy the evil Ring. When Sam wonders if the evil orcs eat and drink food and water like ordinary creatures, or if perhaps they live on poison and foul air, Frodo replies:

"No, they eat and drink, Sam. The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Foul waters and foul meats they'll take, if they can get no better, but not poison."

There is no possibility here, as perhaps there is with the two sides of the Force in George Lucas's Star Wars films, of a dualistic interpretation of good and evil as equal and opposite forces, yin and yang, twin sides of one coin. In Tolkien's vision, goodness is primordial, evil derivative; and, whatever tragedies and horrors may be visited upon this world, they shall not have the final word.

This sense of eschatological hope becomes exceptionally clear in one memorable passage during the journey through Mordor, in which Sam has a kind of epiphany:

The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master's, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
Mere "defiance" of evil is a natural or pagan virtue (the evil giants will win in the end, said the Norse warriors, but we go to die with the gods). But hope, in Christian thought, is a theological virtue, and it is this eschatological hope that fills Sam's heart.

"Something else at work"

This sense of hope in Middle-earth is also rooted in an undefined but definite awareness of Providence. The name of Eru may not be spoken in The Lord of the Rings, but his will is evident from the outset, when Gandalf explains to Frodo the significance of the evil Ring being discovered by his uncle Bilbo, a humble hobbit. In that seemingly chance occurence, Gandalf says,

"...there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, andnot by its maker. In which case you also weremeant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought."

Gandalf can "put it no plainer," of course, because in this story Tolkien wishes to avoid explicit entanglement with religious doctrine. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is clear.

The hand of Providence is seen at various points throughout the drama of the story, but nowhere more clearly than in the climactic scene at Mount Doom, where two central characters struggling with evil both succumb, yet in the conflict of their evil wills not evil but good is served.

In the hands of another writer, such an ending might be seen as coincidental, ironic, absurdist, or even deus ex machina. As written by Tolkien, however, it is the inevitable result of the collision between the inexorable designs of Providence and the limitations of his fallen cast of characters. It is here that Tolkien most emphatically rejects an allegorizing interpretation: Frodo may be a Christ-like figure in many ways, but he is not, like Lewis's lion Aslan, an allegorical representation of Christ himself. Where Christ triumphed, Frodo fails, yet the designs of Providence are still served.

Echoes of sorrow

Frodo's ultimate failure at Mount Doom is also important for another reason: It strikes, even on the brink of victory, a note of sorrow and loss that pervades these books.

For all its signs of Providence and eschatological hope, The Lord of the Rings is not the story of ultimate victory of good over evil, but only of one important battle far in a mythical past.

Far from a Revelation-22-like epiphany of eternal glory in which every tear is wiped away, Tolkien's story resonates with elegiac sorrow and acute awareness of things lost never to be regained. Again and again we are made aware of all that once was and shall never be again (or never again till the world is renewed). The Ents never find their Ent-wives; Frodo never returns to Lothlórien; the Elves depart forever into the West.

All of this is shaped by the author's consciousness of the fallenness of the world and the inevitable sorrows of this life. "I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic," Tolkien once wrote to a friend, "so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."

This is precisely the sensibility that Tolkien's own "legend" embodies. "Samples or glimpses of final victory" there certainly are, but also sorrow and tragedy and loss. Even in the very end, victory is tempered by signs of sorrow and loss: Frodo's failure at Mount Doom; the scouring of the Shire; the departure of the Elves.

"Glimpses of final victory"

Despite these climactic sorrowful elements, Tolkien's conclusion avoids the device of a climactic tragedy or heroic death, like the death of Thorin Oakenshield at the climax of The Hobbit, the prelude to The Lord of the Rings. In that story, Thorin redeemed himself from his obstinacy toward Bilbo by dying valiantly in the Battle of Five Armies.

In The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, no one is required to die in order to destroy the dark lord and his evil ring, or even to perish in the final struggle against him. Frodo and Sam, Aragorn and Faramir, Gandalf and Gimli and Legolas, Merry and Pippin - all survive the final conflict (one supporting character, aged Théoden, does die in battle with the Nazgûul). Of course an important character does perish with the ring and its master, but in doing so he isn't sacrificing himself, but reaping judgment, being consumed by the evil of his own choosing. In the end, the only true horror is a soul that goes into the fire, and even that serves the designs of Providence.

That Tolkien avoided a climactic sacrificial death in The Lord of the Rings is not due to some failure on his part to appreciate the dramatic merits of such a device, but because in this ending he was doing something different. Some victories come only at the cost of some final sacrifice or loss, but this, Tolkien believed, is not the deepest truth about the conflict of good and evil, and the "final victory" over evil of which legends can offer only "samples or glimpses" turns on no such loss.

The elements of sorrow and fallenness in Tolkien's ending forbid an allegorical-eschatological interpretation, yet in the absence of a climactic tragedy and the survival of all the companions it's possible to see "samples or glimpses of final victory."

Indeed, the element of hope is so strong that Samwise can even wonder aloud, "Is everything sad going to come untrue?" To which the answer is: Yes, but not here, alas, not now. Here in Middle-earth there is still hard work to be done, future shadows to be fought, and, somewhere in the unspecified future, redemption still to be accomplished by the one whose saving work is only remotely echoed in the great deeds of Frodo and Gandalf and Aragorn.

Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn: Priest, prophet, king

In fact, Frodo Baggins, Gandalf the Grey, and Aragorn each in a remote way embody one of the three aspects of Christ's ministry as priest, prophet, and king. Each also undergoes a kind of sacrificial "death" and rebirth.

The priestly role belongs to Frodo, who bears a burden of terrible evil on behalf of the whole world, like Christ carrying his cross. Frodo's via dolorosa or way of sorrows is at the very heart of Tolkien's story, just as the crucifixion narratives are at the heart of the gospels accounts. As Christ descended into the grave, Frodo journeys into Mordor, the Land of Death, and there suffers a deathlike state in the lair of the giant spider Shelob before awakening to complete his task. And, as Christ ascended into heaven, Frodo's life in Middle-earth comes to an end when he departs over the sea into the mythical West with the Elves, which is as much to say, into paradise.

Gandalf is the prophet, revealing hidden knowledge, working wonders, teaching others the way. Evoking the saving death and resurrection of Christ, Gandalf does battle with the powers of hell to save his friends, sacrificing himself and descending into the nether regions before being triumphantly reborn in greater power and glory as Gandalf the White. As with Frodo, Gandalf's sojourn in Middle-earth ends with his final voyage over the sea into the West.

Finally, there is Aragorn, the crownless destined to be king. Besides being a messianic king of prophecy, Aragorn also dimly reflects the saving work of Christ by walking the Paths of the Dead and offering peace to the spirits there imprisoned, anticipating in a way the Harrowing of Hell. (The oath-breaking spirits Aragorn encounters on the Paths of the Dead, who cannot rest in peace until they expiate their treason, suggest a kind of purgatorial state.)

"Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!"

As the passion of Christ is dimly echoed in the struggles of Tolkien's three heroes, so the place of Mary in Catholic faith and piety is reflected in another key figure of Middle-earth: Galadriel, the elven Queen of Lothlórien. Tolkien himself explicitly acknowledged this connection, observing in a letter to a friend, "I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary." In another letter he remarked that it is upon our Lady that "all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded."

Once again, this isn't to say that Galadriel is an allegorical representation of the Blessed Virgin, any more than Frodo or Gandalf or Aragorn are direct representations of Christ. The actual relationship is more subtle: In imagining a glorious and immortal Queen of a paradisiacal realm, and in depicting the devotion of others to her, Tolkien could hardly help drawing on the actual devotion in his religious tradition to a glorified Queen of a divine realm.

Indeed, in being drawn to create such a character in the first place, Tolkien's imagination was informed and fired by his faith and piety. Had he been, for instance, a Southern Baptist, or a Dutch Calvinist, doubtless Galadriel either would never have existed at all, or would at any rate have been an entirely different figure.

It's in the devotion she inspires, most especially in the dwarf Gimli, that Galadriel's Marian resonances are most apparent. Gimli's heart belongs to his immortal Queen as unreservedly as the heart of St. Louis de Montford or St. Maximillian Kolbe to the Queen of Heaven, and through Gimli the reader, even the non-Catholic or non-Christian reader, has a kind of window into the world of such devotion.

Galadriel is not the only elven Queen with Marian associations. The elvish hymns sung in praise of Elbereth resonate with Marian hymnody; a number of writers have observed similarities between the following lines of Tolkien's poetry and a well-known Marian hymn Tolkien would have known from childhood.

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western seas!
O light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!...
O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western seas.

Note the themes common to these lines and those that follow (the singer as wanderer in a remote land; the far-off Queen as a source of light and guidance; the repeated association of the Queen with starlight and the sea):

Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star,
Guide of the wand'rer here below:
Thrown on life's surge, we claim thy care -
Save us from peril and from woe.
Mother of Christ, star of the sea,
Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.

These ethereal queens aren't the books' only elvish element with specifically Catholic resonance. The "waybread" or lembas of the Elves, given to the members of the Fellowship in Lothlórien, has clear eucharistic overtones. "Wafers" (Tolkien's word) of this extraordinary food, we read,

had a virtue without which [Frodo and Sam] would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam's mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.

Corruption and conversion; weakness and strength

Although Tolkien never explains just how the wearer of the One Ring, at least if he is a titan like Sauron or Gandalf, takes advantage of its power to dominate others, another aspect of the Ring's power is vividly realized throughout the books: its seductive power over the one who carries it. Gollum was consumed by it, Bilbo begins to suffer its deleterious effects, Gandalf and Galadriel refuse even to touch it, Boromir succumbs to its attraction, and even Frodo battles its allure all the way to Mount Doom before finally falling under its spell. Frodo may be a type of Christ, but only a type, and all types ultimately fall short of the reality.

Side by side with this depiction of the allure of evil is an acknowledgment of the possibility of conversion and redemption. Even Gollum, after years of enslavement and degeneration, seems to respond to Frodo's mercy by rising almost to the brink of redemption, struggling between good and evil before falling back into darkness.

Boromir, on the other hand, genuinely repents of his moment of weakness, and is redeemed, not only by an act of reparation that costs him his life, but also by making confession of his wrongdoing to another. As for Frodo, he is finally saved not by last-minute repentance, but by a preemptive providence, a strange grace that uses Gollum's concupiscence to give Frodo another chance. Thus, Frodo's own mercy to Gollum becomes a factor in his deliverance from the consequences of his ultimate failure.

Why does Frodo eventually succumb to the power of the Ring? A more revealing question might be why he endures against it as long as he does. To put it a third way, why do the great powers of Middle-earth, wizards and rulers of Elves, elect to entrust this most dangerous of artifacts to the keeping of a defenseless hobbit, a creature of comfort and humble domesticity? Why not trust to the strength and cunning of Aragorn, the power of Elrond, the art of Gandalf?

In part, the answer lies in the element of surprise. The Council at Rivendell gambles on sending the Ring straight into Mordor in the keeping of an insignificant creature partly because this is the one move the Enemy would not anticipate.

But there's more to it. There's a reason Gandalf finds it encouraging that the mysterious ways of fate brought the Ring into the possession of a hobbit rather than a warrior or wizard or elf, and why, of the mixed fellowship that departs Rivendell for Mordor, Frodo and no other is the Ring-bearer. Frodo's very lack of power, either physical or mystical, is itself seen as a sign of hope. The powerless can be less likely to trust to themselves, less likely to fall prey to hubris and presumption, more available as instruments of grace or divine action. Tolkien's unlikely heroes reflect the paradoxes of St. Paul: "When I am weak, then am I strong" and "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise."

Peter Jackson's films (some spoilers)

With all three films of Peter Jackson's epic The Lord of the Rings adaptation at last complete (with the notable caveat of next year's The Return of the King extended edition release), it is finally possible to take stock of the film project as a whole, and the extent to which the religious significance of the books has, and has not, carried over into the films.

Jackson and his collaborators have been quite candid that, while not sharing Tolkien's religious beliefs, they brought to the project an awareness of Tolkien's faith, and a desire to honor his themes and to avoid imposing their own "baggage" onto the films (cf. "The Return of the King: Filmmakers contemplate journey, significance of books and films").

Of course, some of the books' religiously themed elements are so central that it would be impossible to avoid them altogether without gutting the books. Even so, the filmmakers' openness to these themes was undoubtedly a helpful factor, and indeed in some cases it seems they have actually gone beyond the text in introducing religiously evocative elements that resonate with and reinforce the story's existing religious themes.

Christological resonances. One obvious example of an apparently deliberate appropriation by the filmmakers of the Christian resonances of the books is the death and return of Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Gandalf's self-sacrifice and descent into the nether world in the Mines of Moria during the battle with the demonic Balrog is the dramatic center and major set piece of the first film. The Balrog itself is as hellish as Jackson's conceptual artists and the Weta effects people could make it: a thing of smoke and flame straight out of the book. In a nice extra-textual gloss, as Gandalf falls into the abyss, we see his arms extended cruciform on either side.

The Christological echoes are even more distinct in The Two Towers with Gandalf's return. Shining like a painting of the risen Christ, or like the ascended Jesus appearing to St. Paul on the Damascus road, Gandalf the White appears to his followers, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, who like the disciples are at first unable to recognize him. In fact, like Mary Magdalene, they initially suppose him to be someone else. Then, when they do recognize him, Legolas, overcome with joy and awe, drops to his knees.

The Christological story-arcs of Frodo and Aragorn are also in evidence in the films. Frodo walks his via dolorosa or "way of sorrows" to Mount Doom like Jesus making his way to Calvary. As Jesus bore the sins of mankind, Frodo bears a great burden of evil on behalf of the world, and as he approaches the Cracks of Doom the Ring becomes as much a crushing weight as the wood of the cross.

In The Return of the King Jackson gives us Frodo's death and rebirth, descending into the depths of Shelob's lair, wrapped in a shroud of spider silk, placed in the "sepulchre" of Cirith Ungol.

Among three central characters, only Aragorn has no death-and-rebirth story-arc in the books - though he does brave the Paths of the Dead and free the restless souls who have yet to make atonement for their earthly sins, a plot thread that is dramatically realized in the film version of The Return of the King.

However, the films invent for Aragorn a death-and-rebirth story-arc not found in the books. In a skirmish with orcs and Wargs, Aragorn falls off a cliff and is borne away by a river, not rejoining his friends until Helm's Deep. While this whole sequence wasn't written by Tolkien, and fans may debate the merits of introducing it in the film, on a thematic level the motif of death and rebirth is certainly present in Tolkien, and Aragorn's status as a Christlike king is reinforced by the expansion.

The films also enhance Aragorn's Christlike associations with an added scene in the expanded edition of The Fellowship of the Ring that has Marian resonances also.

In this scene we see Aragorn at Rivendell at the grave of his mother. Marking his mother's grave is a statue clearly reminiscent of Catholic Marian statuary; thus Aragorn's mother is associated with Mary just as Aragorn himself is associated with Christ. More, Aragorn is honoring his mother in death, as Catholic tradition teaches that Christ much more honored Mary at her death by assuming her body and soul into heaven. (Of course nothing like the Assumption happens to Aragorn's mother, but then Jesus is a much greater king than Aragorn.)

Elven imagery. The moral order of Tolkien's world is also reflected in the films' explicit acknowledgment of the derivation of evil races and creatures from good ones: Saruman says in Fellowship that the orcs "were once elves," the origins of Gollum and the Nazgûl are discussed, and Saruman's own former goodness is implied - though of the fall of Sauron we hear nothing as yet.

Jackson strikes the right note of elegiac sense of tragedy and loss right from the start, with the first words of Fellowship 's opening voiceover. Gandalf's cryptic reference to Providence is also in the first film, in very much the same words, though transposed for dramatic effect from Bag End to the Mines of Moria.

As depicted in Jackson's Fellowship, Galadriel offers little, alas, in the way of Marian resonance - though her depiction in the extended edition is certainly a marked improvement over the theatrical release. Strangely aloof and even ominous in her main scene in the original version of the film, the Lady of Lothlórien is much warmer and gentler in the newly added gift-giving sequence in which the Fellowship resumes their journey. Also, Gimli's devotion to the Lady, only amusingly foreshadowed in the theatrical release, is finally touched upon in the extended edition, though the subsequent two films unfortunately neglect it entirely.

The lembas of the Elves is also mentioned in the latter two films (and the extended edition of Fellowship), but with little eucharistic resonance, with the possible exception of the fact that Gollum, who is unworthy, cannot eat it. Of the Elves' liturgical hymn-like poetry there is no sign (though the elvish realms of Rivendell and Lothlórien are heralded by generically ethereal choral arrangements not wholly unevocative of the world of sacred music).

Evil and redemption. One of the most potent themes in all three films is the seductive allure of the Ring. The ring's power is evoked partly through effective performances from Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis, Sean Bean, and Ian Holm (and briefly by Sean Astin as Samwise), and partly through Jackson's canny direction and attention to detail.

This theme reaches its dramatic apex at the critical moment in The Return of the King when Frodo's Christological resonances give way to mortal weakness and failure. At the same time, there is also the the providential grace that rewards him for his mercy and heroic sacrifice by sparing him the consequences of his actions and giving him the opportunity to repent. (There's more to say about the film version of this scene, but I will delay addressing this until after the film opens.)

The theme of conversion and redemption is also touchingly realized in Boromir's final moments in Fellowship, in which the spiritual significance of Boromir's confession to Aragorn is enhanced by another extra-textual gloss: a ritual gesture of blessing from Aragorn that "almost looks like a pre-Christian sign of the cross," as author Joseph Pearce commented in an interview with columnist Terry Mattingly.

Other glosses. Besides such suggestive details as Aragorn's ritual blessing gesture and the cruciform posture of Gandalf's falling body, the films also include explicitly religious themes that, while not present in the books, are fittingly evocative of the religious element of Tolkien's inspiration.

For example, the films explicitly refer to life after death, and even include an instance of prayer for the dead. In The Return of the King, in the siege on Minas Tirith, Gandalf tells Pippin that death is not the end, and goes on to speak in evocative imagery of the afterlife. In Two Towers, upon hearing that two of his comrades are dead, Legolas utters an unsubtitled snatch of Elvish that a remarkable website on Elvish helpfully translates as "[May] they find peace after death," a prayer that resonates with the Catholic practice of praying for the dead.

Another religiously significant addition is the elf princess Arwen's intercessory prayer for "grace" to be given to Frodo. In Fellowship, seeking to save Frodo from the forces of Mordor, Arwen prays, like Moses or St. Paul expressing their willingness to be accursed for the sake of God's people, that any "grace" given to her should instead pass to Frodo to save his life.

The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is an extraordinary cinematic tribute to a great work of Catholic imagination. While not equalling the religious vision of the books, the films honor that vision in a way that Christian viewers can appreciate, and that for non-Christian postmoderns may represent a rare encounter with an unironic vision of good and evil, a moral vision of evil as derivative of good and of the ever-present human susceptibility to temptation. In the landscape of modern Hollywood, The Lord of the Rings is a rare beacon of light.

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Faith and fantasy: Tolkien the Catholic, The Lord of the Rings, and Peter Jackson's film trilogy | Decent Films - SDG Reviews

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Creation and corruption in Middle-earth Part of the answer is found in Tolkien's other great chronicle of Middle-earth, The Silmarillion, which recounts the larger mythic context of Middle-earth, beginning (notwithstanding his antipathy for allegory) with a magnificent allegorical retelling of the Creation and the Fall according to Genesis 1-3.

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I like the cartoon Jean Paul Sartre in this ...

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Mother Forkin' Morals with Dr. Todd May - Part 1: Existentialism - The Good Place (Exclusive)

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Watch the clip and answer the following questions:
1. Which Philosophers believe in 'essentialism'?
2. How does Jean Paul Sartre counter essentialism?
3. According to existentialists what is absurdity?
4. What does it mean to live authentically?
5. How does existentialism tear down any possible normative ethical theories?

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Existentialism: Crash Course Philosophy #16

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Existentialism and Feminist Existentialism 

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Existentialism and Feminist Existentialism 

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With the Star Wars epic adventure, George Lucas has taken the world on a journey that (so far) has lasted four decades. It began in 1977 with a film that was ahead of its time and yet nostalgic. It was the height of the Cold War, which by definition is something so ambiguous that the ambiguity of it all only heightens the fear. We worried about so many indefinable things, including nuclear holocaust and World War III, but Lucas gave us "A New Hope" by telling us a story about Nazis in space.

In the midst of the Cold War, Star Wars reminded the Western world of the last time that it was easy to tell good from evil. For many people, it also solidified their suspicion that communism (in whatever form it may take) was no less a threat to freedom than fascism.

And so we have the Galactic Empire, a fascist regime in which a ruling tyrant enslaves an ever-widening sphere of victims through violence and fear. We have the Rebel Alliance, reminiscent of the French resistance, engaging in almost hopeless guerrilla warfare against the evil empire for the sake of freedom. And to add a flavor of holy crusade, we have the Jedi Knights, warrior saints reminiscent of the Templars or other medieval militant holy men. They even use swords, of the laser variety. The Death Star, a moon-sized station with the power of complete destruction. is a metaphor for the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, but it is also a symbol of the absolute power of an invincible government that exists only for the benefit of those in power and considers the vast majority of people expendable.

Within the universe of Star Wars is its version of an unholy trinity. There, Darth Vader is the film's antichrist, and the emperor is the "beast," true unredeemable evil. But rather than the devil, evil is energized by the dark side of "the Force."

What is the Force? According to Obi-Wan Kenobi, "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." We are told that the Force controls your actions, but it also obeys your commands (if you're a Jedi, that is).

"May the Force be with you," is a blessing, but the truth is that the Force is not always good. It could be said that the Force is neutral, and that it is the way a person uses it that makes it good or bad, but there is a dark side to the Force that goes beyond simple misuse of it. The dark side tempts people. It seduces people - as it did to Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader. Before we ever know about Anakin, we are told that Darth Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force. Perhaps this simply means that he was tempted to use the Force for evil - that the temptation of personal power was too much for him to resist. But it seems to mean more than that. It seems to imply that there is a dark side of the Force that exists as an entity, whether anyone misuses it or not. This brings up the question of whether evil is a thing that exists, or whether it is only the rejection of good.

It's clear that the Force is some kind of divinity. But with the inherent dualism of the light and dark sides, it is more like the deity of Zoroastrianism than the Judeo-Christian concept of God. In fact, it was Zoroastrian priests who followed the star to Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus - so, in a way, the Jedi are Magi. They follow (and use) the good, or light, side of the Force, which is never really defined but seems to have something to do with defending the freedom of those who are potential slaves of the empire. Their mortal enemies, the Sith, follow (and use) the dark side of the Force, which is described in terms of anger, fear, and aggression. For anyone who gives in to these, the dark side will dominate their destiny. Nevertheless, both the Jedi and the Sith are believers. The rebels believe in the Force, and so does Darth Vader. It is the military and mercenaries such as Han Solo (at first) who are the unbelievers.

Although Luke Skywalker is the primary hero of the original three films, it is really a team effort. All of the main characters go through the hero's journey:

Han Solo is the unbeliever who is converted, and he has his own death and resurrection when he is frozen in carbonite.

Luke goes through a death and resurrection when he's pulled under the sludge in the garbage compactor.

Leia is enslaved by Jabba the Hut, but she's the one who kills him (she is not rescued by anyone else who would be a savior to her).

All the heroes go through their ordeals, and they are all on a path toward salvation, but Obi-Wan is the primary Christ figure because his death is voluntary.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka "Old Ben" Kenobi, is described as a hermit, a wizard, and a crazy old man. When we first see him, he's dressed like Jesus in all those old gospel movies, and he "raises" Luke, who had been knocked out by the Tusken Raiders. He is the master, the teacher of the Force.

As his confrontation with his former student and archenemy Darth Vader approaches, Obi-Wan says to Luke, "You can't win - but there are alternatives to fighting." The alternative he chooses at the decisive moment is to sacrifice himself. After he turns off the tractor beam, restoring freedom to the heroes, he basically gives up and lets Vader kill him. But first he warns Vader, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." He fights Vader just long enough so that when he is killed, Luke will witness his death. He has confronted evil, but in a way that does not embrace aggression (for that is part of the dark side). And in confronting evil, he has victory over it through his voluntary sacrifice. Of course, that victory is more of a spiritual victory than an actual defeat of the enemy, but it does distract the enemy long enough to allow Luke, Leia, and Han to escape. But more important, Obi-Wan's death allows him to be present with Luke at crucial moments later in the story, guiding him in ways that he never could in bodily form.

After Obi-Wan gives up the fight, and Darth Vader swings his light saber for the death blow, Obi-Wan's body disappears, leaving only his monastic robes lying on the floor. There is no body left to bury. But Luke can hear Obi-Wan's voice, and Obi-Wan will come back to him in visions. In Episode V, he comes to Luke and tells him to go to Yoda to complete his training, passing the apprentice on to a new master. This is a resurrection of sorts, though not a bodily one. Therefore, it is somewhat gnostic in its view of the afterlife. The same thing happens when Yoda dies. There is no body left, but Yoda will appear in visions.

Interestingly, in one of these visions, Obi-Wan tells Luke that he will need to kill Darth Vader to become a true Jedi. This seems to contradict Obi-Wan's advice about finding alternatives to fighting. Maybe Obi-Wan's earlier point was to find an alternative to fighting in those situations in which you can't win. Now, however, he believes that Luke can, and must, kill his own father. But Luke has learned Obi-Wan's lessons even better than Obi-Wan has, because Luke refuses to kill Vader. Instead, he will risk his life for the good that he believes is still within his father. In a way, Luke has surpassed his mentor and become a second savior, following the example of the original. His sacrifice is less voluntary, it seems, because as he goes into the ordeal, he believes that he will be able to convince his father to turn away from the dark side. Nevertheless, just as Obi-Wan defeated Vader by confronting him without aggression, now Luke confronts Vader - and the emperor - without aggression. Of course, there is a moment of anger when Luke feels he must protect Leia, but in the end, Luke sacrifices himself, and we see that Darth Vader can be saved after all. This happens, however, only because Vader himself finally switches sides and turns on the emperor, sacrificing himself to save Luke.

Soteriology of Star Wars

Before we look at salvation, let's take a look at damnation. In Star Wars, the fate worse than death is to become a machine. Technology is a tool of the dark side, and the Death Star is the ultimate technological manifestation of evil. The real threats to life and freedom in Star Wars are fascist and military atheism and technology in the wrong hands. So, for a person to become a machine is damnation. It is to lose one's humanity (one's mind and free will). When Obi-Wan Kenobi is describing Darth Vader to Luke, he says, "He's more machine now than man." This means that Obi-Wan believes Vader is beyond redemption. But Luke saw the man in the machine. He said, "I can save him. I can turn him back to the good side. I have to try." Luke cuts off Vader's mechanical hand, which is a reversal of the ominous moment when Vader cut off his human hand, and it is the moment when Vader begins to become less of a machine and more of a man.

Still, Luke's plan backfired. It was only when the emperor tried to kill Luke that Vader turned away from the dark side, turned against the emperor, and intervened to save Luke. It was said that if Vader was going to be saved, he would have to "let go of his hate." But he never hated Luke; he only wanted him to join the family business. It wasn't letting go of hate that changed him; it was accepting Luke's love. Luke's cries of "Father, please!" stirred up compassion in Vader, and he became human again when he chose family over power.

Vader's unmasking was his rejection of the very technology that was keeping him alive and his return to humanity: he knew he would die, but he also knew he was saved. So, although the dark side had dominated his destiny for all of his adult life, Vader avoided the fate of damnation by turning toward the light. Another word for this kind of turning is repentance. And we know that he was saved because at the end of Episode VI, Anakin Skywalker appears in a vision with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, and we can tell by their smiles that in the spiritual realm, all is forgiven. Apparently, he was not beyond redemption after all.

Thus, on one level, salvation in Star Wars is repentance. It is turning away from the dark side (anger, fear, and aggression) and toward the good. It is a choice. Although there is unselfish sacrifice on the part of the characters, it is not the kind of vicarious sacrifice we mean when we say that Jesus died for us. Rather, it is a sacrifice that elicits a response in others, and it is that response that saves them (or not). Obi-Wan did not save Luke. In fact, he was wrong about Luke having to kill his father. What saved Luke was his response to Obi-Wan's sacrifice. Luke followed what Obi-Wan did, not what Obi-Wan said. Then Luke became a kind of savior by following Obi-Wan's example. But it was not Luke's sacrifice that saved Vader. What saved Vader was his own repentance after seeing that Luke was willing to sacrifice himself. This kind of salvation by example is one of the hallmarks of Arianism. In Arianism, it is not the death of the savior that saves you; it is your response to the savior's death and your willingness to follow in the savior's footsteps.

Therefore, salvation in Star Wars is not by divine intervention (if, indeed, the Force could be said to intervene in anything); rather one saves himself by following the example of the previous savior. In a way, one then becomes one's own savior, setting the example for others. It sounds like a good thing, but ultimately it rejects the idea of the atonement: that God came into history in the Incarnation to rescue us.

Star Wars is as much an antichrist story as it is a Christ story (an antagonist is the hero of his own story, after all). And the message here is that even an antichrist can be saved. But more than that, even an antichrist can become a savior. The only problem is that, in order to do that, the antichrist in question (or anyone for that matter) would really have to save himself by following the example of some previous savior, and enact his own passion in which he is willing to sacrifice himself to reject evil.

Arianism is a Christology of ascent (the person becomes a savior). As an Arian savior, Obi-Wan Kenobi is not the divine Son of God, and with the addition of a gnostic cosmology, the "divinity" in Star Wars (the Force) is too impersonal to be thought of as "Father" anyway.

Obi-Wan is, of course, human. As far as being unique among humanity, he is a Jedi, and that's rare. There is always the risk of spiritual elitism here. He sacrifices himself voluntarily, so he gets points for that. And although he doesn't have a bodily resurrection, he reappears a lot so he has to get partial points for resurrection.

In our next article, we'll look deeper at the script, scripture and humanity of

Editor's note: This article is adapted from a chapter in From Star Wars to Superman: Christ Figures in Science Fiction and Superhero Films, which is available from Sophia Institute Press.

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Examining the Christian Imagery of Star Wars

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With the Star Wars epic adventure, George Lucas has taken the world on a journey that (so far) has lasted four decades. It began in 1977 with a film that was ahead of its time and yet nostalgic. It was the height of the Cold War, which by definition is something so ambiguous that the ambiguity ...

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Does Hollywood reflect and encourage an essentialist and dualist view of the world? Is this a problem?

Choose a genre:
- Science Fiction (Star Wars)
- Fantasy (Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings)
- Romance
- Disney

Read the associated articles and think about:
- Whether these films encourage a dualist way of looking at the world in terms of good/evil, light/dark, male/female etc.
- Whether they promote an essentialist view of human nature (that we have an innate purpose/destiny which determines our life)
- Whether you think this is a problem/how this might influence society
- Whether there are any examples of film within the genre which deviate from the norm - any examples of characters who decide their own purpose?

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Is Harry Potter the work of the devil or the best contemporary retelling of the Christian Gospel?

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Additional ideas from Ancient Greek Philosophers ... 

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Additional ideas from Ancient Greek Philosophers ... 

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Awesome hard sci-fi film! If you're looking for something deep to watch over Easter would highly recommend! Has a lot of application to questions of knowledge, time and language :)

This is just a trailer which gives you a bit of an idea. I think the full film might be available on on Amazon Prime

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The full series is available on Netflix but you will find some clips on YouTube. Useful for topics like the Problem of Evil and Arguments for God's existence ...

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Who is God in Islam? - Story of God Episode 3

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Documentaries, films, TV shows and video clips ... 

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Documentaries, films, TV shows and video clips ... 

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Who do you think presents the best approach to religious language?

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In depth discussion of falsification ... 

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In depth discussion of falsification ... 

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This is essentially university level stuff but it might help you to understand some of the ideas put forward

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Can Belief in God be Disproven by Evidence?  Theology and Falsification; R.M. Hare and B. Mitchell

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Where do they differ?

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What do they have in common?

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This can relate to lots of different topics we have studied but might give you further ideas to bring into essays ...

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Karl Popper, Science, & Pseudoscience: Crash Course Philosophy #8

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Good overview of the issues with language ... 

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Good overview of the issues with language ... 

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1. How helpful is Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ in terms of understanding language?

2. How could the ‘beetle in a box’ idea be applied to question of cognitive vs non-cognitive and to ideas about God?

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Language & Meaning: Crash Course Philosophy #26

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Antony or Anthony? It's Antony - I've no idea why this extract misspells Flew's first name (but lots of other places do too - books, journalists, websites)

In Flew's parable, the clearing in the jungle represents the world. The flowers represent order, beauty and goodness that we find in the world (for example, thethat saw in nature in the Design Argument) . The weeds represent disorder, suffering and evil (so this parable links to the Problem of Evil & Suffering).

The explorer who believes in a gardener represents a religious believer and the gardener represents God. The other explorer (Flew calls him the "Sceptic" because he doubts things that aren't supported by evidence) represents an atheist, rather like .

The Sceptic/atheist accuses the believer of believing in a God who is now no different from an imaginary God - or no God at all - because this God doesn't seem to do anything that can be disproved or contradicted.

There's a link here to Religious Experience, which Flew seems to ignore. Believers often claim that God DOES appear to them. If Flew added this into his Parable, he would have to include a scene where the gardener does appear, but only one of the explorers could see him!

The fact that the clearing contains both "" and "" links to 's idea that the universe is religiously ambiguous: it supports both a religious and an atheistic interpretation.

Flew interprets the Parable of the Gardener and explains what it shows about religious belief. In particular, he explains how religious belief dies " the death by a thousand qualifications".

Flew argues that religious belief starts as """ an assertion" but thinks it gets reduced step by step" and ends up as a picture preference" - just an act of imagination. This is like the explorer who starts off believing in a flesh-and-blood gardener but, when this belief runs into difficulties, ends up believing in an invisible, untouchable, undetectable gardener.

Flew admits that this sort of process happens in other areas of human thought. He gives the (" I think, rather odd) example of sexual love, which some people think is just biology and hormones, but other people think is a spiritual connection between two souls (Flew mentions Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love). Now souls cannot be detected by science and spiritual connections cannot be measured or tested. Most people who believe in spiritual love will admit that their language is symbolic. This is what Flew calls (stopping, calling a halt) the process of qualification" (the tendency to make the original assertion more and more complicated). However, he thinks religious people don't do this. They keep on qualifying their idea of God rather than giving up on it.

Flew concludes with a memorable (and often quoted) phrase. He says that beliefs like this suffer

death by a thousand qualifications - Antony Flew

In other words, if you qualify an idea so much that it can never be disproved, you "kill" it by making it meaningless.

"death by a thousand qualifications" is a jokey reference to the "death by a thousand cuts". This was a form of execution in Ancient China (it was known as lingchi) which caused a slow, lingering death. The "death by a thousand cuts" became a phrase in English for any slow, drawn-out way of destroying something. Flew suggests that the "death by a thousand qualifications" does to ideas what the "death by a thousand cuts" used to do to prisoners - it kills them but very slowly.

Flew is attacking a development in Christian theology that happened in the 19th century and became very widespread in the 20th century. This is the idea of liberal religion, pioneered by philosophers like Paul Tillich . Tillich often did not use the word "God" at all, talking instead of "the ground of being". Tillich believed that God was beyond all possibility of literal description. We could use symbols to communicate the reality we sometimes call God, but no symbol can do any more than 'gesture' at the ground of being.

Tillich is widely regarded as the most important Christian theologian of the 20th century. But not everyone likes the direction he took theology in...

Another liberal Christian who features in this course is John Hick. Hick follows Tillich in avoiding the word "God" and using instead the phrase . Liberal believers aren't just being awkward: they have good philosophical reasons. Immanuel Kant argued that, although we can experience and describe phenomenal reality, God would be part of the ultimate noumenal reality which is completely beyond our knowledge or our powers of description.

However, Flew is not just attacking liberal Christians. His criticism extends to all religious believers.

Flew thinks he has identified the key problem with religious language - it isn't falsifiable. He draws a distinction between liberal and traditional religious language (although he doesn't call it by these names).

Flew gives some examples of religious propositions that illustrate his point:

Flew describes these as """ "" " assertions" - propositions or truth-claims. He is aware that there are liberal believers (like Paul Tillich ), who think these sentences mean something different: they are crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics". For example, a believer like Tillich might use God has a plan" to mean " I believe in a fundamental moral order to the universe" or God created the world" to mean " We must live our lives as if there was a purpose behind them". However, Flew doesn't think this sort of liberal belief is properly orthodox" (ie it's not genuine religion) or practically effective" (ie he doesn't think it'll ever catch on with the majority of believers).

Flew makes it clear that he is criticising believers who say these things in the traditional sense - people who believe in an all-powerful spirit that creates the world, loves his creations and has a plan for them.

If you say that God has a plan, then it must be possible (in theory) for things to happen that go against that plan. If God's plan is that anything can happen, then that's not really a plan at all.

Similarly, saying God created the world means that certain other theories about how the world came to be here must be ruled out (such as the view that the world has always existed or that it came about by chance). If any explanation of the origin of the world is compatible with the view that God created it, then you're not really saying anything by claiming that God created the world.

Finally, the claim that God loves us must mean that there are some things he wouldn't allow to happen to us. If God's love is the sort of thing that allows anything to happen to humans (even atrocities like the Holocaust) then it isn't love at all in any understandable sense and you're not saying anything by claiming God loves us.

Darwin's ideas created the modern split between liberals and fundamentalists. The liberals accepted scientific findings but changed their understanding of God as a creator. James McCosh suggested that evolution was merely the process by which God created life while Charles Kingsley argued that evolution made God seem more wise and powerful, not less, because he didn't create things personally but allowed them to create each other. The fundamentalists rejected scientific findings but kept their traditional understanding of God creating animals and humans on the Sixth Day ('Creationism').

The liberals are "qualifying" their original beliefs

The fundamentalists believe in spite of contradictory evidence (evidence of dinosaurs living millions of years before humans is treated as a hoax)

Flew spells out the Falsification Principle (without actually calling it that) and how it applies to religious language.

Flew gives a famous and clear summary of the Falsification Principle with this line:

To assert that such-and-such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such-and-such is not the case - Antony Flew

Therefore, a statement that isn't DENYING anything isn't really CLAIMING anything either. Flew calls statements that makes claims that might be true " assertions" but argues that religious statements aren't really assertions at all, because they're not saying anything that can be denied.

Although Flew doesn't use the word, he's accusing religious statements of being meaningless. He says they sound like statements, but when you try to find out how they could be disproved, you discover they're not really assertions at all.

Flew particularly targets liberal religious language which has (he thinks) been to the point where it has become meaningless.

In terms of the Darwin debate, you might agree that liberal Christians have reduced God to something that just means "the evolutionary process" and doesn't actually " do anything. A world without a God like this in it would look exactly the same as our world: it would still have evolution. God has been protected from attack by science but only at the cost of making him completely redundant. The idea of God has died the death by a thousand qualifications".

Fundamentalist Christians who reject Darwinian science have a different problem. By rejecting scientific criticism, they also protect their idea of God from being disproved - but they also make it a meaningless idea. Religious beliefs that can't be disproved by any sort of real world evidence aren't really beliefs about the real world. They've failed the falsification test too.

Flew challenges the other symposiasts (the other philosophers contributing to his - and Basil Mitchell) to answer his question: what would count for them as disproof of God? If the answer is "Nothing" then, Flew suggests, belief in God is meaningless.

Flew gives an example of a child dying from throat cancer, whose father frantically searches for a cure. God, however, " reveals no obvious sign of concern". Yet religious believers say God loves his children just like a father loves his child. Normally, if a father was unconcerned about his child's fatal illness, that would disprove his claim to love his child. Why doesn't God's (apparent) lack of concern disprove the belief that he is a loving Heavenly Father?

Religious believers have explanations for God's apparent lack of concern. Flew (with heavy irony) suggests two of them:

1. God does love us, but his love is "not a merely human love" - perhaps he wants the child to be with him in heaven

2. God does love us but his love is "an inscrutable love" - perhaps he is testing the family's faith or punishing them for their sins

"inscrutable" means "impossible to make sense of"

Flew doesn't argue with these explanations (). Instead he asks a different question. How much does this family have to go through before it becomes reasonable to doubt God's love (or existence)? Or put another way, how much horror is too much to be compatible with a belief that God loves us? When doers the word "love" lose all meaning?

Flew doesn't say it explicitly, but his conclusion is that, if a believer maintains a belief in a loving God REGARDLESS of what happens, then that belief is a meaningless belief. There has to be SOMETHING that would count against God's love.

These three scenarios might be enough to persuade some people that there is no God, or no loving God at any rate. But we don't have to be so far-fetched. History has provided examples just as ghastly:

Although Flew focuses on the idea of a loving God, there are other things that might falsify religious belief:

If archaeologists discovered Jesus' skeleton, proving he never rose from the dead, would this falsify the central belief of Christianity?

If a copy of the Quran was discovered from a century before the life of Muhammad, would this falsify Muslim beliefs?

If the answer to these questions is "Yes" then these religious beliefs are falsifiable, because they are making an assertion that can be denied.

I'm not saying either of these things are likely, but religious believers need to consider them as a hypothetical possibility. If such things would count as "disproof", then religious beliefs are falsifiable and therefore meaningful. But if religious believers would carry on believing in spite of this sort of disproof, then their beliefs aren't falsifiable or meaningful.

Flew (and many other atheists) suspect that religious believers would carry on believing, despite this sort of disproof.

Fundamentalists would deny the evidence was genuine

Liberals wouldtheir understanding of what it means to 'rise from the dead' or be a 'prophet'.

However, a religious response comes from John Frame who proposes a different version of the Parable of the Gardener:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there, pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away: "There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle," he said; "this must be some trick. Someone is trying to discredit our previous findings." They pitch camp. Every day the gardener arrives, tends the plot. Soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. "He's only doing it because we're here-to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden." The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener's status. Then the skeptic tries a last resort: "Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It's still a hoax!" Finally the believer despairs: "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener?"

Frame isn't arguing against the Falsification Principle. His response is a(Latin for "you too"), sometimes called an appeal to hypocrisy. Frame is suggesting that atheist beliefs are also non-falsifiable. He is challenging atheists with a similar question to Flew's: what would count as disproof of the belief that there is no God?

If atheists pick holes in every proof of God's existence (including treating them as mirages or hallucinations), then atheism is also unfalsifiable - and therefore meaningless. This argument is developed further by in the next section.

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Antony or Anthony? It's Antony - I've no idea why this extract misspells Flew's first name (but lots of other places do too - books, journalists, websites) In Flew's parable, the clearing in the jungle represents the world. The flowers represent order, beauty and goodness that we find in the world (for example, thethat saw in nature in the Design Argument) .

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This will be a space to discuss what we have been looking at. I will add video clips/articles extra things that I find. Feel free to comment, debate and add your own resources and web links :)

I'm going to try to keep things colour coded so it's clear how things all relate ;)