It's not until a really vital and vibrant myth envelopes you in its wings that you see just how wingless so many other myths are, and after some close examination I now know why...there's not enough red queens.
Myths and fairy tales are all rich with archetypes -- the shadow, the anima /animus, the wise old man, the wild man, the dark father, the evil queen, etc. but if you look at the most popular mythic franchises in Hollywood- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel-verse you find woefully no evil queens. There's Mordor, the Emperor, Lord Voldemort, and... so forth.
Only the Narnia and Twilight series have evil queens, and the latter especially is given raspberries by the fanboys who proclaim the Rings-Potter-Star Wars trifecta as the best sci fi-fantasy in Hollywood and Twilight a bunch of girly crap. Man, that's sexist. 99% of the characters in those three franchises you like are male; the bitches be all secondary, objectified and immaterial, and certainly not morally ambivalent, beyond good and evil.
We need more queens beyond good and evil, for it is there, beyond good and evil, where lurketh all archetypal forces: And the fantasy industry shows its nerdy, unlaid, apron-strung girlophobia by ignoring this archetype. Things get stale until a great evil queen shows up; she's like a breath of fresh, beyond good and evil air. Below is a list of red queens divided by archetypal role:
The (Primary) Red Queen:
Queen of Hearts - Alice in Wonderland
Victoria - Twilight
The White Witch -Chronicles of Narnia
Mrs. Iselin - The Manchurian Candidate
Imperious in her whims, she represents the unfulfilled potential of adulthood, when wealth and rank allows spoiled girls to sidestep full maturity and its accompanying humility. They are generally childless, preferring animal familiar lackeys--doting subservient cats, trolls, crows, ravens, mice, owls, hawks--they are vengeful and reserve special loathing for prettier, younger, naive, innocent girls.
The Secondary Variation: The Little (Sadistic) Princess
Fah Lo Suee - Mask of Fu Manchu
Princess Aura - Flash Gordon
Scarlett O'Hara - Gone with the Wind
Cleopatra- Caesar and Cleopatra
Carmen Sternwood - The Big Sleep
Drucilla - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Tollea / Naja - Cobra Woman
As her father notes to Marlow, Carmen is "still a little girl who likes to pull the wings off flies." These are girls grown up in wealth and power, untamed by empathic development, given too much free time and parental indulgence and are now egocentric hedonistic sadists who are obsessed by the few things left that they can't have -- usually that means naive men who are in love with someone else. So Scarlett pursues Ashley for decades, obsessed, until she gets him, realizes he sucks, and throws him away. Aura loves Flash, but largely no doubt because he loves Dale. If he were to turn around and confess his love back to Aura, she'd lose all interest; thus he does her a favor by giving her something to chase. Fah Lo Suee is the most unrepentant and therefore the hottest.
That's the thing, these girls may be hot messes but they're super sexy -- the hero is always a little tempted but he rises above it, which always pisses us off a little watching the film, but if he did give in and fool around with her, he'd be doomed, damned and destroyed. That doesn't mean we can't love her from afar, even obsess from beyond the screen, knowing we'll never have to risk actually running into her at a party.
The Tertiary Variation: Trickster
Julie Newmar as Catwoman - Batman (TV)
Rita Hayworth as Gilda
The Derevko Sisters - Alias
Mystique - X-Men
Catherine Trammel - Basic Instinct
All Marlene Dietrich roles for Josef Von Sternberg
She promises sex and delivers debt. She's whisked away on the day of your marriage ceremony and the next time you see her she says she's her evil twin. She takes your money and somehow you can't get mad at her because you know she doesn't really care about it. She is the embodiment of the trickster: intelligent, beyond good and evil, using her sex appeal as a lure but more for fun or, as in Irena Derevko, a deeply embedded plan to save the earth, or keep herself amused. Catwoman for example is evil, but Batman loves her and each self-sabotages their efforts to kill or catch each other. The chase is the thing. Stop her if you can.
The Quarternary Variation: The Ancient-Young Woman
Ursula - Little Mermaid
The Evil Queen - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
She - She
The Three Sisters - Suspiria, Inferno
Elizabeth Bathory - The Countess, I Vampiri, Countess Dracula, etc.
Jessica Lange and Maid - American Horror Story
The Red Queen (hologram) - Resident Evil series
She can be both young and old: the evil queen with her apple basket; Ursula with Ariel's voice; She before she steps into the fountain of youth the last time. They illustrate the 'swindle' behind youth and beauty. You see it, you fall in love, you marry it, and then it's gone. It withers away to age and ugliness and death in but a few decades, and then you look in the mirror and see you too are old and dying and somehow it's all her fault. Or if you're a woman, the queen is your mother, desperate to sabotage your maturity and somehow drain off your youthful bloom for herself. Or it can even be you, in the mirror mirror, realizing that even your own beauty isn't yours to keep. It fades with time as inescapably as the grinding of the clock.
So wise up punk-ass mainstream Hollywood! Don't be scared of the red queens! Help revive true myth, and breathe the salty air of your own mortal huskiness.
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