Shadows of Darkness and Light

by annanimm (Joanne Richardson)

Aurora, the dawn, the princess of light and goodness who is blessed by fairies to always have a
smile on her face, has a dark, malefic shadow. When Aurora meets Maleficent (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYemY3xFsB4), she says, “I know who you are. You’ve been
watching me my whole life. Your shadow has been following me ever since I was small.” She
invites the shadow to come out from the dark forest so she can look upon her face. Maleficent
answers “then you’ll be afraid.” In this short but brilliant pre-release teaser clip (which doesn’t
correspond to the actual timeline of events in the film), when Maleficent steps out from the
darkness, a wall of thorns immediately rises up around the enchanted forest, separating the
shadow world of dark, mythical creatures from the human kingdom of light. It sounds like a
perfect Jungian account of our first encounter with the shadow – when we first get a glimpse of
parts of ourselves that frighten us and we habitually repress, we erect impassible walls to keep
them out.

The shadow is most often represented as the darker elements of our self – the ones that our
culture tends to disparage as shameful or destructive – which we hide, deny, repress or project
as “faults” onto other people. Shadows are formed because as children we learn to construct a
likable persona or social mask (our conscious, ego personality), in order to get love and
approval from parents, educators and peers, which we feel we we need in order to survive.
Everything that doesn’t fit this childish construction of the persona, we banish into shadowy
fragments and splintered subpersonalities that we grow up unaware of. Since our attention is
focused on keeping up the facade of the persona, the neglected aspects of the personality
threaten to periodically come out to rage and storm the walls and to sabotage our conscious
intentions. In order to maintain the persona, the shadow aspects of our personality are projected
outwardly and defensively, by demonizing others. When we encounter these aspects in other
people they immediately push all kinds of painful triggers because they still live in us but we
are denying them – it’s like we’re confronted with a reflection in a mirror that we don’t want to
see and we retaliate against the reflection by trying to smash the mirror in anger. However, it is
not only “dark”and destructive qualities that are banished into the netherworlds of the
subconscious, but many hidden gifts and latent potentials as well – like creativity, imagination,
heightened intuition, our sixth sense, and possibly even our innocence, joy and enchanted view
of the world – because at some point we came to believe that others deemed them unacceptable.
Jung calls these the more benevolent and imaginative repressed aspects the golden shadow,
although there is a deeper sense in which there is “gold” hidden under even the darkest, most
destructive and socially unacceptable shadows, since they are all attempts, sometimes through
misdirected, round-about detours, to fulfill a positive need for self-actualization. That is why all
shadows can be transmuted into gold through the alchemy of individuation.

Unlike other films that dramatize the shadow theme, Maleficent contains a series of interesting
reversals that make it difficult to maintain a typical reading. It’s easy to glimpse the differences
by comparing it to one of the strongest examples of the shadow theme in Hollywood, the (first)
Star Wars trilogy. In The Empire Strikes Back, during his training to become a Jedi warrior by
balancing his inner conflicts and learning to channel “the force,” Luke Skywalker is confronted
by something dark and disturbing. While in the forest with Yoda, he literally goes down the
rabbit hole of his unconscious where he faces his most dangerous enemy – himself. The enemy
appears to him in the guise of Darth Vader, the paragon of a malevolent, alienated and inhuman
power, but after Luke cuts off Vader’s head with his sword of light, he sees that behind
Vader’s dark mask is his (Luke’s) own face. In The Return of the Jedi, Luke achieves
sovereignty by balancing the light and darkness within himself. In the final battle scene, when
Luke faces Darth Vader – who he has discovered was once his father before he transformed
into the malevolent Vader – he throws down his sword and refuses to fight his father, affirming
that Vader cannot be pure evil and there must be some good left in his soul. And, in response to
this act of compassion, Vader sacrifices his life to save Luke from the Emperor. The lesson
behind the story is that the shadow cannot be defeated or vanquished through battle, but that it
begins to dissolve when it receives the unexpected gift of love and acceptance. In the end,
Vader is able to remove his inhuman shadow helmet and become Anakin Skywalker again
before he dies.

On the surface of things, it seems like there’s similar shadow plot in Maleficent. Aurora
encounters her shadow – an evil fairy who exhibits exactly the opposite qualities from her own
innocent goodness, a fairy who has cursed her to fall into an eternal death-sleep at the age of
16. But Aurora refuses to see Maleficent as evil, she interprets her as a “fairy godmother” and
showers her with love, gratitude, laugher and joy. She embraces Maleficent, sinister costume
and horns and all. By the end, Maleficent’s shadow-mask is dissolved, and the curse on Aurora
is broken when she receives “true love’s kiss” not by the suitor prince but by Maleficent
herself, the only character in the film who can actually perform the shadow work of
reconciliation. Maleficent is won over to the light, her heart has been softened, and she
recaptures her lost self and receives back her wings. She is no longer a dark figure but an
integrated self, “both hero and villain.”

This is how I read the film the first time I saw it, perhaps because I was familiar with the
shadow theme from other films and sought to impose it, unchanged. But something felt not
quite right about this interpretation. There are too many reversals in Maleficent to fit the familiar
dark shadow plot. In the Star Wars trilogy, it is Luke Skywalker who comes face to face with
his malevolent shadow, and the saga is a chronicle of how he is transformed by the encounter
and comes to embrace the darkness in Vader that is also himself. But the story in Maleficent is
not about Aurora embracing her dark shadow – she is all sweetness and light at the beginning
and although she experiences one moment of pain, she remains more or less unchanged until
the end. The story is about Maleficent’s journey of transformation, which then poses the
question of who or what exactly is the shadow in the film. The entire plot is a series of
reversals from the start. The reason the thorny wall goes up around the Moors is not to keep the
shadow out; it is constructed by Maleficent to keep the human world out. The world of fairies
and mythical creatures that inhabits the Moors is innocent, close to nature, seemingly
predisposed towards goodness and cooperation, joyful, playful and profoundly anarchistic. As
we’re told at the beginning, the Moors needs no ruler or hierarchy, unlike the other world of
mankind, which is ruled by kings and despots. In the other world, men (the gender term is
strongly implied by the film) lust for power in the form of domination over others and make
pacts with dark forces to achieve it.

Maleficent, in her innocence as a young fairy who knows nothing about the games of power of
the other world, is betrayed by the man she loves. Stefan plots to meet her in a solitary spot in
the forest, slips a drug in her drink, and after she falls unconscious, he cuts off her wings to
prove his power and loyalty to the dying king in the hope of becoming his successor. The
wings are the symbolic and actual source of Maleficent’s power, which allow her to soar high
and low and to connect, with joyful generosity, to the other beings in her world. It is a different
kind of power than than the aspiration to dominate others, which is common in the world of
men. In what is unmistakably an allegory of a rape scene, after her wings have been cut,
Maleficent wakes up wounded and screaming, barely able to walk. The cane she conjures as a
walking crutch after her wounding becomes the symbol of her domination, of her scepter as
Queen of the Moors. In this first part of the story, it is Stefan who is Maleficent’s dark
shadow, and because she ignores this and refuses to recognize the darkness that is in him and
also in her, she succumbs to the unconscious, gravitational pull of that darkness and is
transformed into a personification of Stefan’s malevolence, loosing all contact with her
previous innocent, childlike self. She becomes an inverted mirror of her enemy, driven by the
desire to recapture the power she has lost by seeking to gain power over others, which is
illustrated by her act of self-coronation as Queen and by the other creatures of the Moors
bowing uncomfortably and fearfully to her. She also becomes driven by resentment – she
wants to get back at Stefan, in an eye for an eye fashion, and to wound him where it hurts the
most. She tries to win power on same terms as the world that has wounded her.

This is a story about suffering trauma, falling into the pit of powerlessness and despair, rising
out of it through anger, and the eventual reconciliation that doesn’t simply recapture the power
that was lost but transcends it. Many reviews of the film have played upon its feminist plot
because it is a story that unfolds between two women, while the men in the story are portrayed
either as personifications of evil without any redeeming qualities, like Stefan and his
predecessor king, or, at best, as charming buffoons, like Prince Philip, who plays no significant
role other than to provide some comic relief and to illustrate the empty fantasy of a prince
saving the damsel in distress. Read through this prism, it is men – and, implicitly, patriarchy –
that conceive of and use power as an instrument of domination. And Maleficent is driven by
her anger over having been abused by their power into mimicking it in order to survive. In the
end, she can only be “saved” when she recaptures her lost feminine power by becoming a
loving, maternal-figure to Aurora. Although I don’t want to deny that this subtext exists in the
film, it seems to limit the manifold richness of the narrative into a single, narrow path.

Upon second sight, it appears to me that Maleficent is a story about the golden shadow, an
allegory of developing from childhood into adulthood, and of how the self integrates and
eventually overcomes experiences of loss, pain and trauma. When we experience traumatic
events that leave us feeling as if we’ve been abused and betrayed by those we love, the
immediate feeling of abjection and powerlessness causes us to loose our wings, our capacity to
soar, our innocence, playfulness and fascination with the miraculous beings around us. The
world literally becomes dark, morose, death-like. This also happens when there isn’t an
overwhelmingly debilitating traumatic event. It can take place through a gradual process of
socialization, as we come into contact with a common-sensical, adult world that measures
power by accomplishment and by climbing the ladder of success (from living in a barn with
animals to ruling in a castle). In response, we begin to let go, in small pieces instead of all at
once, of our golden qualities of innocence, trust and joy, and to transform ourselves into the
facade of the persona by mirroring the values and type of power that make up the consensus
reality we encounter. Maleficent creates a dark persona as the result of an experience of trauma,
which, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing her victimization through a series of self-destructive
choices. To me it seems that Maleficent is actually “saved” from her path of self-destruction
when she reconnects to the inner child that she has forsaken in the external mirror of Aurora.
There are numerous scenes in the film in which Maleficent sees Aurora literally double the
same gestures and behavior she displayed as a child, which make it clear that it is Aurora who
is Maleficent’s mirror and not the other way around. At the end Maleficent re-integrates what
she has repressed by embracing her golden shadow.
It seems natural that the first emotion we experience after a traumatic event that leave us
inextricably weakened, feeling as if our power has been amputated, is rage. Anger is a power, a
kind of energy that feels better (and is energetically of a higher vibration) than the depressive
abjection of utter powerlessness. Blaming others for abusing or betraying us is the first step of
a process of catharsis, and without it we cannot move on (I doubt there can be any genuine
forgiveness without feeling a powerful surge of initial rage). It is worse not to give into that
rage, to repress it. When emotions are repressed, they get stored as fragments of congealed,
blocked energy in the cellular memory of the body and manifest as all kinds of imbalances and
dis-ease. But most feelings – if we think of them simply as emotional surges, as living currents
of energy circulating though the body – take only minutes to pass through unrestricted and be
fully discharged, if we experience them fully and with awareness. What most often happens is
that instead of experiencing and discharging a painful emotion, we begin to recycle it over and
over again and to keep it alive by spinning stories about the evil other people have inflicted
upon us and thus endlessly re-digesting the initial pain. And the rage that is otherwise
necessary for a cathartic release becomes transformed into a resentment that eats away at our
soul and robs us of the magical qualities of trust, spontaneity and pleasure, which are forced to
go underground. There’s a world of difference between feeling a few moments of rage
powerfully surge through the body, even multiple times until it is released, and keeping
emotions of anger and revenge alive by re-digesting them for 16 years. What Nietzsche calls
resentment is a kind of victim-consciousness that needs to blame others for one’s lot in life ,
which tries to get back at them either in a reciprocal eye for an eye fashion, by seeking to
dominate them, or, when this is not possible because of a physical imbalance of power, then by
imagining fantastic victories in heaven or a kind of inner victory in this life by enjoying the
“superiority” of one’s moral character. It is because many people repress their golden shadow
by becoming hardened and embittered after a traumatic experience that they live lives which are
devoid of genuine empowerment (of expanding one’s own power by uplifting others) and also
devoid of the feeling of truly being alive and enjoying the pleasures of the body and the
miraculousness of other creatures in the world. Repressing the golden shadow means
repressing the essential life-energy, creativity and joy that flows through it.

The wounding Maleficent experiences leads her to erect defenses against her oppressor (by
creating a wall of thorns to keep him out), which become defenses against the rest of the world
and also against herself. She interprets her former self, the innocent, trusting, good-hearted,
joyful, child-like self as a form of vulnerability and weakness and tries to stamp out all traces of
it from the persona of power as domination that she constructs. But the inner child she has
repressed still lives in the recesses of her heart – and as she confesses to the sleeping Aurora at
the end, the child manages to steal back her heart. By encountering this magical child in Aurora,
Maleficent is reminded of everything that she has lost through her transformation into a persona
of worldly power. She literally falls in love with her golden shadow, which she has banished
through a curse of eternal sleep. Through her journey, Maleficent relearns the power of a love
that is expressed through joy, enchantment and an empathic connection to others, and lets go of
her desire for power as domination. And the reconciliation at the end is not a simple return to
what she was before her “fall.” It is a second, mature innocence that has integrated the darkness
that is within the world and within herself. There can be no understanding of innocence unless
there is also a knowledge of the darkness of resentment and revenge, and there can be no magic
of experiencing the generous power of a love that doesn’t demand anything unless one faces
the darkness of a power that dominates and instrumentalists others as a means to an end.
Uniting both shadows of darkness and light allows Maleficent to become an authentic self.
Owning one’s shadow leads to integration, to a kind of sovereignty or self-mastery that arises
from being able to balance the contradictory forces and energies within the self.

Maleficent contains many wonderful reversals of the classical fairy tale genre, but its most
significant disruption is overturning a sense of clear boundaries between good and evil.
Thinking about this reversal made me recall a Cherokee story I once heard, and just came
across again through an inspired synchronicity (http://dreamrly.com/2014/11/22/fairy-tale-
friday-two-wolves-cherokee). In the story, a grandfather tells his grandson that we all have to
undergo an inner “battle” between our two wolves, the evil wolf of anger, envy, greed, guilt,
resentment and falseness vs. the good wolf of joy, peace, love, generosity, compassion and
truth. The grandfather concludes by saying the wolf who wins the battle is the wolf we choose
to feed. Of course, there’s a profound truth to be grasped by the fact that our character and our
world is shaped by what we give most of our focus to, and that we will have a significantly
more fulfilling life by focusing on daily rituals that reinforce the habits of joy, love and
generosity. But attempting to starve the other “evil” wolf by not feeding it with any attention at
all doesn’t necessarily vanquish it. Sometimes it grows all the more powerful through our
attempt to banish it from conscious awareness, threatening to explode and bare its fangs at the
slightest provocation. What Maleficent (as well as the Star Wars trilogy) suggests is that to
“win” we have to let go of the idea of a “battle” between the light and dark forces in ourselves,
and to leave behind the self-loathing inherent in that model of the relationship between the I and
I. Integration is an inner alchemy that is capable of transforming shadows through the magical
act of acceptance and love.

The shadow, or shadows, in a more pluralistic sense of fragmented subpersonalities, are

integral to who we are. Repressing our shadows of darkness and light not only dismisses their
positive potential, but keeps us in a relationship of being perpetual strangers to ourselves, like
unconscious actors sleepwalking through a performance of an incomprehensible role. What
Maleficent lets go of after her self-transformation is the role of the persona – symbolically, she
not only receives her wings back but removes her frightening and constricting black turban and
lets down her hair again. When we unite with our shadows, we are no longer trying to hide
anything from ourselves and from others and are able to fully express who we are in a truthful,
genuine and vulnerable way. The power of this radical self-expression also transforms our
relations with others – we stop projecting our own stuff onto them and are able to tap into an
openness and receptivity that is vast enough to behold them in their fullness – masks, shadows,
horns and all.