Written by PTC | Published October 9, 2024
The battle between good and evil is at the heart of most fairy tales and children’s stories. So it is not surprising that classic Disney movies derived from those old tales have always contained some dark elements. The jealous, vain and wicked stepmother provides a stark contrast to highlight the winsome goodness of Snow White; Maleficent’s dragon gives the hero prince an enemy to vanquish to prove his courage and worthiness.
But in the tradition of these old fairy tales, the bad guys are clearly bad and are either ultimately defeated or transformed. The good guys are unmistakably good and either emerge victorious or die nobly in a good cause.
But dark themes are beginning to dominate much of Disney’s recent programming; and the lines between good and evil are getting blurred or completely obliterated.
On the heels of “Little Demon,” an animated series that has as its protagonist a thirteen-year-old antichrist (the result of a one-night-stand between a mortal wiccan woman and satan) that aired on the Disney-owned FXX network and is currently available to stream on Disney-owned Hulu, Disney announced that it acquired “Pauline,” a live-action series about a high school-aged girl who has a one night stand with the devil’s son and becomes pregnant with the antichrist. (Notice a theme developing?)
The premise of “Pauline,” disturbing as it is, could still have been used in service of a traditional tale about good triumphing over evil, but the problem with “Pauline” is that it conflates and confuses traditional notions about good and evil, so that in the end, viewers are left wondering whose side they should be on.
Lilith’s son, Lukas, is a sensitive modern man. He wasn’t looking for just a one-night-stand, he wants to pursue a relationship with Pauline, but she’s the one who puts up barriers because she has school to worry about and she’s applying for a competitive fellowship program in England and, well, she just doesn’t want a relationship. She just wanted sex. When Pauline learns she is pregnant, Lukas becomes fiercely protective of her and fully supportive of her decision to get an abortion. But when the demonic baby in her womb stops the abortion attempts by killing the doctors and nurses, Pauline must look for supernatural means to terminate her pregnancy.
She turns for help to Eira, the head of a creepy organization of community “do-gooders” who turn out to be angels. The angels promise to help her abort her baby, but are secretly planning to kill Pauline as well. Lilith, who for the purposes of this series is a stand-in for satan, convinces Pauline to keep the baby and give it to her.
There is no real moral center to the series; instead the demons of hell and angels from heaven are presented as yin and yang: chaos and order, both necessary to maintain balance in the universe. The lead angel, Eira turns out to be evil. Lukas, the son of satan, is the good guy. When Pauline’s best friend asks Lukas about the Bible, Lukas compares it to “The Lord of the Rings.” When asked if Jesus is real, Lukas tells him He is, “but He’s on our side.” Lukas also tells him that most of the priests in the Catholic Church, like his sidekick Tammo, are demons. Tammo asserts that angels invented the idea of good and evil to divide mankind. The soundtrack includes lines like “all the good girls go to hell… ’cause even God herself has enemies.”
English writer and critic G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any o the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”
Disney used to understand this delicate balance. Children know that evil exists. They need reassurance that it can be defeated. Today’s Disney views the world as an endless morass of moral equivalency, as with Pauline, or else as benign, self-indulgent fun, as with “Little Demon.” But where in today’s Disney will children be told that darkness can be defeated or that goodness is something worth aspiring to?