What Went Wrong with the Hunchback of Notre Dame?

From the beginnings of Hollywood through today, it can truly be said that there has never been a wholly accurate adaptation of Victor Hugo's literary classic, Notre-Dame de Paris. Perhaps this isn't so surprising, for the novel is a signature sprawling historical epic that examines everything from the lives of religious orders to Mediaeval architecture to Parisian class conflict to the very depths of obsession and depravity. At its heart, like Hugo's famed Les Misérables, it is an unflinching look at the brutality of civil society and poverty in the nineteenth century (through the metaphor of the Middle Ages). It is many things, reflecting on gender dynamics, the interplay of Church, State and Society, and the nature of romantic, fraternal and familial love. None of what it says, however, is amenable to the conventions of American filmmaking.

Consider this, the fourth chapter of the eighth book of Notre-Dame de Paris, with its entwined imagery of physical and emotional oppression, beginning with a bit of an architecture lesson. It is the speech of Claude Frollo to Esmeralda, and it is more powerful than any words placed in his mouth in cinema...

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

One of my most favourite places on Earth is the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. For more than 800 years it has stood at the centre of Paris - in fact, it marks kilometre 0 for all distance measurements in France - and in the centre of French history. It is an icon of the city and a sublimely beautiful example of the Mediaeval genius for both faith and art. It is also an example of endurance, having survived disaster, desecration, and dilapidation before being restored to its rightful place as a jewel in the crown of Christendom. As the government deliberated on whether or not to tear the venerable cathedral down, a popular novel by Victor Hugo reignited passion for everything about the romance of mediaevalism, patriotism, and religiousity that it represented. Notre-Dame was not only a symbol for the Church but for Romanticism's growing dissatisfaction with the failed promises of modernity. That is also what it represents for me: a living, ancient, enduring emblem of the romance of history, beauty, majesty, and faith.

Notre-Dame figured prominently in my two trips to Paris, once during a brief layover in 2008 when it was one of only three attractions I had time to visit (the others being the Eiffel Tower and Disneyland Paris) and again in 2013 when we passed it nearly every day for two weeks. I lost track of the number of times we stepped inside to offer devotion, but its presence, the weight of its ages and the innumerable people who have passed through it, seeped into my bones. In the words of Sinclair Lewis: "He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all."

If there was any one building of human construction that I would consider my spiritual home, it would be the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
   

Feminism and the Disney Princesses - Part II: Tropes vs. Men in Disney

In my original article Feminism and the Disney Princesses, I set out to address specific claims about how the canon of Disney fairy tale films represents its female protagonists. My approach was academic, engaging in a close viewing of the films to determine if these claims had any justifiable basis. While that article examined – and, I believe, ultimately refuted – claims that Disney's animated films present a negative image of women, the other side of the coin is whether they carry an otherwise patriarchal message.

Just as my previous analysis attempted to examine the films without intending to ignite a debate about feminism as a social construct, my discussion of male image in Disney is not intended to ignite debate about male advocacy and men's rights movements. I am a proponent of women's rights, freedoms, and social and economic justice, as well as unequivocally denouncing misogyny, violence towards and oppression of women, and thus am not throwing my fedora into the ring on any particular side. My goal is to employ academic analysis to answer the academic question of how male image is represented in Disney films. Do they reinforce a positive image of male domination and patriarchal power relationships? And more particularly, can the same lens of negative interpretation be brought to bear on them that is frequently brought to bear on Disney's representation of female characters?