Sleeping Beauty (1959)

A powerful witch is not invited to a royal baby shower and so curses the baby: when the child turns 16 she will encounter a cursed spinning wheel and die. The king subsequently has all spinning wheels in the land burned. A question arises: how will anyone make textiles? It is clear that this is an overreaction to the possibility that the landowners will be made to work with their hands. Anyone whose power has been granted by an imaginary god will fear (and exploit) those who can actually transform raw material into use value. Marx viewed the power that the laborer possesses as a kind of alchemy, that is as real magic. “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, she at the same time changes her own nature.” This labor power is opposed to money, which is not magic at all but theft; money exploits this magic. Sleeping Beauty turns 16 and a lurid stairway opens up before her in the castle. She follows this to a high chamber where a luminous neon-green spinning wheel resides. Compelled by the transformative magic of labor-power she touches the spindle and is transported out of this movie. Where does she go? The movie does not care. And yet clearly this non-place is the red-hot center of this story. Could this be a zone of transgression indifferent to the world of kings and free from all exploitation? One can only speculate.