SPOILERS for Damsel. And 1981’s Dragonslayer.
When I was a kid, there was a movie called Dragonslayer that played on cable over and over. It featured a cross-dressing girl and Peter MacNicol as the titular hero, which in retrospect is hilarious but was bizarre even at the time. It also had a dragon that demanded–and received–virgin girls as regular sacrifices, which leads me to the new Millie Bobby Brown movie, Damsel.
This is a Netflix movie about a fictional kingdom that owes an ancient debt to the dragon that lives in their nearby mountain, just like in Dragonslayer. Why these people don’t just move to dragon-free mountains, I do not know. But San Francisco is still there on the San Andreas fault, and New Orleans and Venice are still there slowly sinking into the sea. Tokyo, Auckland, Arequipa, and Naples are all built near active volcanoes. People are stupid, I guess is what I’m saying. And in the case of dragon-infested cities, virgin girls are a cheap price to pay. And it always ends up being the poor families who have to pay with the lives of their daughters.
In Dragonslayer, this was made clear by having the king rig the lottery that was held twice-yearly to choose who would be fed to the dragon. To her credit, when his daughter found out that her name was kept out of the lottery, she rigged the next one so that ONLY she could be chosen, sacrificing herself to make up for her father’s great sin of privilege. (How anyone in Gen X could grow up to be a Republican when we were raised on movies like this is beyond me.) In Damsel, the ruling family go about rigging their sacrifice differently, because their dragon–a female voiced by the incomparable Shohreh Aghdashloo–can smell the royalty in their blood.
Brown’s Elodie, whose father leads a small and starving realm, is brought to the wealthy kingdom of Aurea to marry the prince. She, along with her father, little sister, and stepmother, remark at the spooky dragon decor but are more impressed by the richness of their surroundings. After the fairytale wedding, there’s a strange ceremony up in the mountain that involves mingling the newlyweds’ blood, and then the groom tosses his bride into a chasm to die. So romantic!
The story that’s told, by both the Queen (Robin Wright chewing scenery) and the dragon herself, is that centuries ago, the King of Aurea killed the dragon’s children, and therefore every generation of the royal family must repay her by sacrificing three daughters of their own. They don’t, of course; they buy poor women, make them royal by marriage, add a dash of their royal blood so it smells right, and sacrifice them instead. Aurea’s royal family sucks. They’re killing innocent young women, shirking their debt to the dragon, and acting like utter snobs while doing so.
The most shocking part about this set-up, though, is that the Queen actually tells Elodie’s doting father what her plan is–and he agrees! He willingly sends his daughter to be dragon fodder, all the while letting her think she’s getting married to a rich, handsome prince. He does it, we are to believe, in order to save his people from famine. But Elodie was established as a character who might choose to do that on her own–why not give her the choice? Regardless, her dad is awful. Her betrothed, the handsome prince, is very charming and seems tortured by his habit of marrying women and then throwing them to their death. The current King of Aurea doesn’t say a word that I can recall. The men here are pathetic.
In the dragon’s lair, Elodie slowly learns the truth about the past of this land and about her own strength. Other girls, former sacrifices, left her clues in the caves, along with their names, helping her survive long enough to understand. By the time she emerges, she’s a full-on warrior armed with the rage of all the women thrown into that pit before her. That her rage is turned against a powerful female dragon and a powerful queen only makes the situation more interesting–this is the anger of young women against the internalized misogyny of all the Aunt Lydias who have held them down. Or at least it should be.
Damsel tries hard to turn the damsel-in-distress trope on its head, with only minimal success. The movie just isn’t that good, unfortunately. Elodie is meant to be a smart, resourceful heroine, but she makes stupid choices whenever the script requires it. She’s meant to be brave, but she does a lot of screaming and crying when it would be smarter to stay silent. She’s just not written that well. Nothing in this movie is written well enough, frankly, and that’s a shame. This cast of women deserved another draft or two.
That’s the thing, though. I grew up watching a silly movie that was always on in the background, where the heroes were a girl who dressed as a boy so that she didn’t have to be sacrificed to a dragon, and Peter MacNicol as a dorky wannabe wizard. Once she was outed as female, that was it for the dragonslaying of our heroine, so the dorky kid ended up being the dragonslayer. Women were expendable in that time (meaning the 1980s, not the setting of the film), nothing but sacrifices or love interests. Never the hero, and certainly not the dragon. Now we have a movie literally designed to be on in the background…and the tables have entirely turned.
The hero in Damsel is a woman. The villain is a woman. The dragon is a woman. The dragon’s murdered children were daughters. And the only expendable, useless people in this movie? Men, the lot of them. Is that progress? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s an overcorrection. But if this is all we’ve got? For now, I’ll take it.
