When you think Disney, <\/em>you think of bright colors, a mouse, princesses, enchanted castles, music and song, and possibly overpriced theme parks. <\/em>But perhaps above all, you think of childhood. Disney specializes in a certain kind of entertainment (or marketing). It speaks to children, including the inner sort\u2014those who are still under the age of 12 and those of us who remember being so once upon a time. Disney is all about nostalgia.<\/p>\n My kids are just now old enough to sit through a family movie night, which suddenly makes it urgent for me to find family-friendly movies. In a sign of how successful Disney has been at cornering this particular market, my first thought was to put the Disney canon in my Netflix queue. Somewhere, a Disney marketing executive is patting himself on the back.<\/p>\n The thing is, sometimes Disney makes a real gem. For every cynical, manipulative, market-driven cut-and-paste effort like Hercules<\/em> (1997), there is an Aladdin<\/em> (1992) or Lion King<\/em> (1994).<\/p>\n Above all, there is Beauty and the Beast<\/em> (1991), the first animated movie ever to be nominated for Best Picture\u2014back when they only nominated five movies per year and the honor actually meant something. It won the Golden Globe for Best Musical\/Comedy, was turned into a Broadway musical, has been preserved on the National Film Registry, and is IMDB\u2019s 230th<\/sup> greatest movie<\/a> of all time. It is easily the best hand-drawn animated movie ever made and, considering they don\u2019t make them any more, probably the best that ever will be made.<\/p>\n I.<\/p>\n Beauty and the Beast<\/em>, based on an 18th<\/sup> century fairy tale, is about a (beautiful) French peasant girl who yearns for adventure but becomes imprisoned in an enchanted castle (of course) whose master is a hideous beast. The beast is really a handsome prince under a spell for having mistreated an enchantress disguised as an ugly old woman. Because he judged others on their looks, he himself is condemned to beastly ugliness unless he can learn to love and be loved. Along comes Belle, who obligingly falls in love with him. And they lived happily ever after. So, it\u2019d be easy to criticize the storyline for basically romanticizing Stockholm Syndrome<\/a>. Perhaps the original fairy tale gave a bit more depth to the love story, but in the cartoon there is little reason for Belle to actually fall in love with the Beast other than his few mild efforts not to dismember her. He did, after all, kidnap her father and imprison him for life<\/em> for a mild act of trespassing. To force her into spending time with him, he starves her into submission. They fall in love after he rescues her from a pack of ravenous wolves.<\/p>\n On the other hand, it is equally easy to praise the movie for reflecting a nice little moral about how true beauty is within. Remember God\u2019s words to Samuel when anointing David (\u201cDo not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart,\u201d 1 Samuel 16:7<\/a>). The very concept of \u201cinward beauty\u201d probably comes from 1 Peter 3:3-5<\/a>, which explicitly contrasts the beauty of \u201coutward adornment\u201d with that of the \u201cinner self.\u201d<\/p>\n But just for fun, let\u2019s pick on a few other, subtler themes instead.<\/p>\n II.<\/p>\n Note how the movie plays with gender. Belle is a well-developed, interesting character. She is an oddball and a bookworm who yearns for an interesting life. \u201cI want much more than this provincial life,\u201d she sings, \u201cI want adventure in the great wide somewhere, I want it more than I can tell.\u201d Part of her charm is that she is feisty, ambitious, energetic\u2014and a little combative. She has \u201cso much more than they\u2019ve got planned,\u201d with \u201cthey\u201d being, presumably, the townsfolk. Belle isn\u2019t a woman who is going to let the world tell her what to do or who to be. This is a story of female empowerment (except for the part where she falls in love with her jailer).<\/p>\n By contrast, the male characters in the story are thin caricatures. (Which, come to think of it, is true of pretty much all Disney movies, isn\u2019t it? When was the last time a Disney prince was anything other than Charming or Arrogant, or both?) Gaston, the burly man\u2019s man out to marry Belle, is praised in song for being manly, with reference to fighting, wrestling, biceps, spitting, being physically large (as a barge!), shooting, wearing boots, and hunting. These make him a \u201cman among men,\u201d as they sing. Gaston is pompous and vain, held up for mockery and contempt\u2014him and all his manly attributes with him.<\/p>\n The Beast is another caricature of overwrought masculinity: all aggression, anger, muscle, and shouting. Belle comes to love him as he submits to her civilizing influence: he becomes good insofar as he becomes tame.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m not<\/em> going to complain that Gaston and the Beast are actually just fine the way they are and that Disney is being disrespectful towards masculinity by mocking and taming them, respectively. Men who are as arrogant and vain as Gaston or brutal and angry as the Beast\u2014and I\u2019ve known a few\u2014aren\u2019t good models of masculinity by any stretch. Maybe Disney is hitting a few inoffensive targets along the way\u2014what\u2019s wrong with wearing boots?\u2014by way of collateral damage.<\/p>\n No, my complaint is that Disney could have put just a tiny bit more effort into developing believable, non-caricatured male characters. Boys need fairy tales too. I suppose they have them in the likes of Star Wars<\/em>\u2014which is now a Disney property, so I guess it evens out.<\/p>\n III.<\/p>\n But my bigger complaint about Beauty and the Beast<\/em>\u2014and many, many other movies\u2014is the Salvation-By-Romance trope. Beast is redeemed by learning to love\u2014specifically, by falling into romantic love with a pretty girl. It seems to me that lots of movies use the idea that men become better human beings by falling in love; that falling in love makes their past faults forgivable; that catching a girl is enough to change his nature from brute to gentleman. All you need is love. <\/a><\/p>\n Beauty and the Beast<\/em> explicitly relies on this trope more than most movies. We are told at the beginning that when Beast was cursed, he was given the ability to break the curse \u201cif he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return.\u201d Love, in this view, is something to be merited by effort and hard work\u2014specifically, work at moral improvement. If I work hard enough, I deserve<\/em> to be loved by you. That\u2019s why the act of loving is conflated with moral goodness: the things you do to earn<\/em> another\u2019s love are acts of general moral worth.<\/p>\n My problem with this is twofold. First, real love is neither earned nor given like an entitlement: it should be given like a gift. Belle\u2019s love for Beast is more like pride in a well-trained puppy, while real love should be mutually respectful care between equals.<\/p>\n Second, insofar as love is crucial to moral growth, it is agape<\/em>, not eros.<\/em> The world has elevated romantic love to be a cardinal virtue, such that we are cleansed and elevated by finding someone to fall in love with. This borrows heavily from Biblical rhetoric, but not Biblical theology. It is true that \u201cGod is love,\u201d (1 John 4:8<\/a>), that love is the greatest of theological virtues (1 Corinthians 13:13<\/a>), and that Christians should be noticeably different from the world precisely because we love one another (John 13:35<\/a>). But none of these verses are talking about romance. They are talking about agape<\/em>, self-sacrificial concern for another\u2019s good. If you\u2019re unfamiliar with the different kinds of love, go read The Four Loves<\/em> by C.S. Lewis<\/a>.<\/p>\n To state the obvious, romance is not<\/em> a virtue. It is a pleasant by-product of friendship between men and women\u2014one on display throughout the Song of Solomon. But it is 19th<\/sup> century idolatry, not Biblical wisdom, to hold up romantic love as a virtuous ideal that makes us better human beings. \u201cFalling in love\u201d is neither difficult nor rare, and therefore not particularly praiseworthy. The worst criminals in the world will enjoy romance given the right circumstances.<\/p>\n IV.<\/p>\n It is true that women civilize men. It is no threat to masculinity to recognize the obvious truth\u2014as old as civilization itself\u2014that much of what men do, they do to win the praise of pretty girls. That\u2019s an old-fashioned way of looking at gender\u2014and I mean that as a compliment. Beauty and the Beast<\/em> gets at least that much right. But insofar as the story implies that our ability to woo a woman makes us better people, or that we merit love by our efforts, or that romance is an ennobling virtue, Beauty and the Beast <\/em>is a fine hymn to the church of Disney and the cult of romance. I\u2019m not trying to be a stooge about a delightful film. Don\u2019t get me wrong: I thoroughly enjoy the movie and am happy to let my kids watch it (although we\u2019ll have a talk when they\u2019re older). But if you think I\u2019m over-analyzing things, don\u2019t get me started on The Little Mermaid<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The classic tale of women’s empowerment, Stockholm Syndrome, and the cult of romance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7,605],"tags":[42,363,364],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animation","category-films","category-imdb","tag-disney","tag-gary-trousdale","tag-kirk-wise"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/b\/b4\/Beauty_and_the_beast.jpg\")
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