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The Pink Tyrant
- Lejla Panjeta
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
High school. Wednesday. All the students wear pink sweaters, shirts, trousers, and skirts. Come any other day to our school, and you'll see the depressing black color on hormonal, buzzing teenagers who didn't get much sleep the previous night. But come Wednesday, we all wear pink with big smiles on our faces. Our chemistry professor is dressed entirely in pink and purple: clothing, shoes, stockings, bags, glasses, pencils, notebooks, nails, hairpins…teaching how to fix poison while smiling. Those not in pink or purple are immediately called to the front, and no matter what knowledge they show, it results in a catastrophic fail. I survived Wednesdays in high school, not realizing that I’d encounter similar authoritarian figures at university, in offices, and later at parents’ meetings. This breed of teacher is ever-present and everlasting.
Joseph Campbell, master of the perpetuating ideas and patterns in myths, reminds us that every hero must meet a mentor on their journey. The mentor teaches, guides, and bestows gifts. Some great examples from movies are Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings), Dumbledore (Harry Potter), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars), Mr. Miyagi (Karate Kid), John Keating (Dead Poets Society), Sean Maguire (Good Will Hunting), or Katherine Wilson (Mona Lisa Smile). Hollywood loves a good professor—the one who ignores the rules, throws away tradition, tosses curriculum into the recycle bin, and unlocks the great potential of their students. A saying: “I cannot teach anyone anything; I can only make them think,” commonly attributed to Socrates, is a building block on which American culture is created. But where there is the Wise Old Man or Woman, there is also their shadow, a Dark Mentor figure similar to the Villain Threshold Guardian. With Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), we have a common denominator for this archetype: Dolores Umbridge.
The shadow of the mentor
Dolores Jane Umbridge, played brilliantly by Imelda Staunton in her nauseatingly sweet pink sweaters and her horrifying smile, may well be the most despised character in the Harry Potter series. Beneath her twisted archetype of the Mentor lies something far more unsettling and unfortunately familiar. She is the dark elixir of every institutional trauma, every bureaucratic abuse of power, and every teacher who ever said, “Because I said so.” She is not just a bad educator. Her Mentor archetype has run wild; that sacred guide of young minds has morphed into a petty despot, armed with quills, rules, and a terrifying love of order and blind obedience.
If Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is the mentor leading young Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) toward self-knowledge, then Umbridge is the anti-mentor. She offers no knowledge, only obedience. Her lessons are devoid of curiosity. She instructs students not to think, but to obey. She is an indoctrinator of obedience; she is a propagandist with pink laced trimmings. Her inflated ego is attached to a persona, the false self-crafted image to impress the world. Umbridge hides her tyranny under kitten plates and pink pencils. Her unconscious seethes with sadistic impulses, projected onto students under the noble guise of discipline. Umbridge's teaching style eliminates dialogue and suppresses creativity and curiosity. She is the classic repressor, evil in a pink cardigan. Knowledge is dangerous in her world, particularly the kind that encourages independent thought. There’s an Orwellian flavor to her methods. If Big Brother had a favorite niece, it would be Dolores. Umbridge is a symbol of the administrative mind: obedient, unimaginative, and utterly devoid of empathy. Aldous Huxley warned us in Brave New World that the future will come with smiles and sedatives. Umbridge delivers—she smiles as she carves rules onto children's hands and tortures them with forbidden veritaserum. The true terror is that she believes she is helping.
The real monsters wear pink
Dolores Umbridge fits the criteria for what some psychologists call the “Dark Triad”: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. She sees herself as the savior of Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic. She manipulates her way to power using flattery and fear. She is mundanely evil—not like Voldemort, who is of the realm of fantasy. She’s the vice-principal who calls our parents because our socks were the wrong shade of gray or pink. She embodies Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” not a grand villain, but a petty bureaucrat with too much power and too little soul. She doesn’t fear chaos. She fears thought. Neil deGrasse Tyson describes education as the lighting of a fuse, igniting curiosity in the vast unknown. Instead, Dolores Umbridge would blow the fuse and punish you for possessing the match. Tyson might argue that children are born scientists who ask why, and Umbridge’s classroom is where that instinct dies. She is filling the vessel and not rekindling the flame. Chomsky’s concept of “manufacturing consent” and “selection of obedience” applies to her classroom. She is the ultimate manifestation of what Vogler calls the “mentor who seeks to control the hero,” a teacher who blocks growth while pretending to nurture it. Her classroom is not a place of transformation but stagnation; it's Northrop Frye’s winter cycle—a psychopathic grid with frozen rules and passive-aggressive floral patterns.
There’s a certain irony that Harry Potter’s most terrifying villain isn’t Voldemort, who literally has no nose, but Umbridge, who wears pink brooches and speaks in a sugary lilt. Why? Because we must have met her. Not in the Forbidden Forest, but in staff meetings, government offices, and schools. We’ve seen that tight-lipped smile after being told: “That is the policy.” Umbridge is what happens when authority forgets its purpose. A true teacher, as Socrates, Tyson, and Campbell remind us, does not impose ideas but guides and liberates minds. Umbridge binds them. The Teacher archetype should embody vision, empathy, challenge, and transformation. At its worst, it becomes a rigid apparatus of the dictatorship, stifling the very spirit it was meant to uplift. Dolores Umbridge reminds us that the Teacher is not automatically a force for good. It is a role that carries enormous potential for both illumination and oppression. Campbell would say that every hero must slay a dragon. In Harry Potter, that dragon wears pink and writes detentions.
The Teacher archetype should embody vision, empathy, challenge, and transformation. At its worst, it becomes a rigid apparatus of the dictatorship, stifling the very spirit it was meant to uplift.
If your professor loves the rules more than the reason or creativity; the order more than the ideas and thinking; the sound of her/his voice more than your questions—you may not be in a classroom. You may be in prison…with Dolores, the guardian of the status quo. The real professors challenge the status quo. Keating inspires with verse, Watson with art history, Sean with grief-handling, and Mr. Miyagi with self-control. They are professors seeking not facts, but awakening to passion and possibility. They remind us that the true Teacher doesn’t give answers, but rather asks the questions, and occasionally, they do it while standing on a desk. Umbridge would have a nervous breakdown in Keating's carpe diem classroom. Dolores represents what happens when the sacred trust of the teacher is twisted into surveillance, punishment, and power play. She is the gatekeeper of mediocrity and the jailer of imagination, with a smile. Dolores Umbridge is the shadow of pedagogy, and she exists and persists in every education system all around the world. Like a monster myth brought to life.
MythBlast authored by:
Dr. Lejla Panjeta is a Professor of Film Studies and Visual Communication. She was a professor and guest lecturer in many international and Bosnian universities. She also directed and produced in theatre, worked in film production, and authored documentary films. She curated university exhibitions and film projects. She won awards for her artistic and academic works. She is the author and editor of books on film studies, art, and communication. Her recent publication was the bilingual illustrated encyclopedic guide – Filmbook, made for everyone from 8 to 108 years old. Her research interests are in the fields of aesthetics, propaganda, communication, visual arts, cultural and film studies, and mythology. https://independent.academia.edu/LejlaPanjeta
This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Teacher.
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