Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.