Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast

In the words of the great Edwardian proponent of fairy tales G.K. Chesterton, the noble lesson behind the fable of the Beauty and the Beast is that one must be loved in order to become lovable... Someone treated like an animal will become an animal, someone treated with worth, dignity and beauty as a human being will become a human being.

Demonstrating this in the story itself is always difficult. It always proves problematic for writers and filmmakers to make a credible leap in projecting this wonderful truism into a tale about a woman who falls in love with a literal animal who is a vicious, abusive brute. That a romance with an animal would take on morally discomforting overtones is one thing. That he spends a good portion of the story being a monster within as well as a monster without makes it that much more troublesome. It is even open to modern criticisms that it teaches girls to stay in relationships with abusive men in the vain hope that their love will somehow shine through and heal the abuser.

Such is the secular interpretation. A more sacred one sees in the timeless story an allegory of the amor Dei, the love of God for humanity. In such a reading, humanity is the prince whose cruelty turns him into little more than a walking beast. From beyond the Beast's isolated world where, in the gaze of cruelty and hate, other people have become mere objects, the Father enters. The Beast, unable to conceive of the Father's motives of love, imprisons him in a deathly web of dogma. To liberate the Father, the Daughter most fair comes, whose relentless love redeems the Beast's humanity.

Of course, such an interpretation runs against the problem of the strenuous relationship between the two protagonists. French Surrealist artist Jean Cocteau suffers no less from this dilemma. In his 1946 film adaptation of the story, he practically dispenses with the attempt to justify how it is that the ingenue Belle comes to have affection for the Beast. Their relationship is civil for the most part, with the occasional shouting match and her constant spurning of his offer for marriage. On the one hand she has a growing respect for him, and on the other a kind of angry pity. One scene has her yelling at him to clean himself up and stop acting like such an animal. Their is a complex, uneasily romantic, relationship, as might be expected. Consistent with his literary form, the Beast is not the abusive character seen in other versions. His crime is to keep her captive, which he is able to do by her own sympathy. Nonetheless we must make the leap to accepting that somehow she sees something in him that is not apparent to us. Such is love!

It is a leap, however, that Cocteau asks of us from the beginning. In one of the most touching breaks with the fourth wall in cinema, the director begs the indulgence of the audience in allowing those magic words of childhood - "once upon a time" - to forgive any lapses. It is not difficult to forgive him either, for in the end the story is very charming and full of redeeming compassion. Whereas in the beginning of the film Cocteau begs the indulgence of our childlike sympathies, by the movie's close he tells us that being childlike may yet save our soul from becoming beastly and brutish. It was not any particular cruelty of Marais' Prince Ardent that caused him to be turned into a beast: it was his parents' disbelief in spirits and fairies that caused these supernatural beings to take their revenge upon them through their son.

The film's themes are further elaborated by understanding the drama at play beneath it. The same actor to play both the Beast and Belle's semi-villainous suitor, Jean Marais, was the gay lover of Jean Cocteau. Beauty and the Beast can easily stand as an allegory of the trials of homosexual affairs in an era before their social acceptance. To be lovable one must be loved, and love must search out the inner depths and inner identity of another to find that hidden self. That cannot be done while one is shutting themselves off from the world around them, reverting to a state that is feral and distorted by self-loathing.

However the story is treated, what truly stands out is the artistic direction and set design that portrays a quintessential haunted manor. In fact, it is said that the design elements of other, more famous Haunted Mansions were inspired by such pieces in Beauty and the Beast as the wall-mounted candelabras made of moving arms. There is an eerie aura of foreboding and mystery to the moving sculptures with their leering eyes, the aforementioned candle-holders, the doors that open and sheets that pull off themselves, and the billowing drapes in darkened corridors. The scene of Belle's arrival in the castle is in peak form, as she glides eerily past otherworldly enchantments. It frequently swings from the magical to the frightening, closely aligned to the classic horror films by Universal Studios and European Expressionists. It never reaches their full terror, though, since this is still a fairy tale. A very French fairy tale at that. Exteriors of the Beast's castle were filmed at the Château de la Roche Courbon and Château Raray, highlighting its French character.

Beauty and the Beast is an unsung classic, occupying a place in artistic film of the mid-century where, once discovered, it enshrines itself in the heart as a masterpiece.

Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast is a very old story type found in cultures around the world. In Switzerland it is The Bear Prince, in Denmark it is Beauty and the Horse, in Japan it is the tale of Monkey Son-in-Law, and in China it is The Fairy Serpent. The oldest known form is the star-crossed love of Cupid and Psyche from the second century AD.

The form in which we have it today was transcribed by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Originally published in French in 1756, the story is one of several told through the framing device of a governess imparting important lessons to her young female wards. This device might even be the truth, as La Belle et la Bête was written while Leprince de Beaumont was working as a governess in London, where she was able to establish a successful writing career, remarried (her first marriage to a wanton and a drunk was annulled), and was thereafter able to retire comfortably in Savoy. Leprince de Baumont's version may itself be a slimmed down revision of a version published by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot, Dame de Villeneuve in 1740, which numbers at over 200 pages. In that version, Belle is the daughter of a king and a good fairy, while the Beast is a victim of a wicked fairy whose advances he spurned. In both versions, the Beast is not a bad character who must learn his lesson. He is a victim, and the lesson to be learned is Belle's.

Like all fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast sustains many possible interpretations. If we take our lead from G.K. Chesterton, then "There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast'; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable." If we examine the social context presented in the work - Belle's family are the rising merchant class, the Nouveau riche - then we might see a cautionary tale about interactions with inherited aristocracies. If we take Leprince de Baumont's moral at face value, then it is that virtue makes a person truly lovable, not brains or looks.

The following translation derives from The Young Misses Magazine, Containing Dialogues between a Governess and Several Young Ladies of Quality Her Scholars, published in 1783. Illustrations are by Walter Crane from an 1874 edition.

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?

Corrections to the Disney Timeline

Recently, Tumblr user Aish's (disneynewsgroove)  historical timeline of Disney animated films made its way around social media. For the most part it was a very good attempt and it is easy to see where they opted several times to place the film either when the original story was published or the original film released. Of course, there are a few exceptions that we noted and wanted to point out in good fun, because we're a nitpicking blog dedicated to the real historical influences behind Disney films and that's what we do.

"YOU FORGOT ABOUT US!!!"
Rite of Spring, 4,500,000,000 to 65,000,000 BC

Feminism and the Disney Princesses

As such a significant cultural force, Disney and their Princesses franchise serve as a touchstone for gender issues that more often than not reach far beyond the actual content of the films upon which the franchise rests. Perhaps you have seen images like the one above before, or read certain feminist analyses of the Disney Princess films that arrive at similarly negative conclusions. Unfortunately, when such analyses present themselves as being "feminist," the resulting debate tends to focus on the nature and reach of feminism rather than more pedestrian concerns like whether the analysis is actually accurate to the source material. I am a proponent of women's rights, freedoms and social and economic justice, so I do not intend to make a criticism of feminism as such. It does seem to me that, sometimes, the legitimate concerns of feminism can override clear-thinking and sound research when analyzing works of art like Disney's animated films. What I hope to do by wading in with this article is nothing more than engage in the academic practice of closely and carefully summarizing the source documents - in this case the films - to determine whether these accusations are accurate without troubling to ignite a debate over feminism in-and-of itself.

The easiest accusations to dispense with are those which apparently missed the entire message of the film and arrived at a conclusion opposite to that message. For example, the above image states that the theme of Aladdin is that Jasmine's political worth is determined by her marriageability, which is true insofar as we're talking only of her political worth and even then it is only true up to the denouement. The overarching and (what one would think of as the) unmistakable theme of the film is that one's personal worth is determined by their character and not their economic, social or political rank. The Sultan does attempt to marry Jasmine off against her wishes, in accordance with the law of the land, which she actively rebels against. Jasmine goes so far as to flee the palace, whereupon she meets Aladdin, the thief who dreams of nothing more than being able to rise above his poverty and be afforded at least minimal human courtesies (though living in the palace would be awfully nice, he believes). After Jasmine is recovered and Aladdin comes across the magical lamp, he adopts the persona of Prince Ali Ababwa to woo her. For her part, Jasmine rebuffs his showiness and expresses absolute outrage at her father, Ababwa and Jafar discussing her fate without her consultation. It is only when she realizes that Ababwa is the same thief in the market that she softens to him. Jafar, the villain, also seeks the hand of Jasmine, but only for her political worth and her physical beauty. The villain is the one who degrades Jasmine, first figuratively and then literally after he acquires the lamp. In the end, when the villain is dispensed with, the Sultan realizes the error of his ways and changes the law to suit Jasmine. He recognizes the folly and disgrace of making his daughter act against her wishes, thus exercising his political power to enable Jasmine to marry the man of her own choosing, who himself has demonstrated that good character supersedes the merits of wealth and power.