Beauty and the Beast

ALEX

There’s a Beauty and the Beast tale happening even between these two Beauty and the Beast films. Cocteau’s is the more beastly of the two: an obtuse fairy tale springing up from the unconscious via folklore, and presented to the public as is. It does not go out of the way to explain itself, or to connect to a human universality. Disney’s film takes this raw material and applies a loving and domesticating hand to all its parts, making the savage implications (like bestiality?) palatable and even relatable.

JADE 

This is what Disney does with all its fairytales! It’s almost an argument against beauty’s taming force. The original fairy tales, like Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, are so much more magical and emotional than their soft-edged Disney descendants. Of course it’s useful that the essential elements of a tale become increasingly accessible and transmittable to culture at large, but applying too much beauty to the more brutal elements of fairytale robs them of their dream-like wonder and inexplicability.

ALEX

Such is always the Beast’s argument against being tamed. The deciding factor is, I think, posterity. The Beast can be as magical and inexplicable as he likes, but will never create children without the Beauty. These fairy tales would never spread like wildflowers into the imaginations of millions of children without the softening influence of Disney. Of course, it’s an eternal tension that requires either more Beast or more Beauty depending on the context of the moment. 

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One of the stranger parts of Cocteau’s version is the climax, when a transfigured Beast is revealed to be a beautiful prince played by the very same actor as Avenant (this can be regarded as the Gaston character in the film). The strangeness is only heightened when they use the precious last minutes and last words of the film to mention the similarity the prince now has to Avenant. Does she mind it, he asks? No, she replies, providing not much more context than a closed smile. The pair of destiny ascends hand-in-hand into the clouds.

This is the loose existential thread I carried with me into our viewing of Disney’s film. Avenant is apparently a twin to the Beast. So is Gaston somehow a twin to the Beast? Yet the Disney version brought more and more sense to this theory with every scene. The musical number in the tavern that sings Gaston’s praises is a firm establishment of Gaston’s overt and overpowering beastliness. His every encounter with Belle shows his desperate need of being housebroken to the demands of civilized life.

JADE 

If we read Beauty and the Beast as an arranged marriage story, your reading makes sense. The man Beauty is expected to marry is unsuitable to her; she instead decides to tame something far more rough and ugly.

ALEX

By the time the Beast and Gaston were joined in a life or death struggle on the palace’s rooftops, I was completely along for the narrative ride in my own mind: These are two aspects of the same psyche, at war with each other. Gaston is the outside layer of a suitor, and the Beast is how this suitor views himself in the privacy of his heart. To be rejected by your love is a man’s ultimate and archetypal coming-of-age trial. He must choose to grow from this catastrophe, or else sink into victimhood, fast growing into resentment.

Gaston is all the Beast’s immature character traits, shown in a relationship of addiction to the self. In his heart he knows that these aspects of himself are in direct contradiction to his true desires, yet he’s convinced that letting go of these things would mean death. When the Beast shows mercy to Gaston, and the natural course of things takes Gaston to a self-chosen oblivion, we’re seeing a poetic rendition of how a psyche heals itself. It doesn’t happen by violence and punishment (the Beast does not kill Gaston when he has the chance), but by focusing ever more completely on the ideal of one’s desire and allowing the rest of life to take its natural course.

JADE

I’m interested in how the Beauty character is portrayed in each film. In Cocteau’s film, Belle begins as a distinctly humble Cinderella kind of character laboring away on her knees, and transforms into something far more glamorous, returning to her family home transformed, wearing royal finery. Her long veil sparkles as she stands up to her evil sisters for the first time. On the other hand, Disney’s Belle doesn’t change much at all. Sure, she changes clothes, but her character is mostly a static force for the Beast to react to. In this sense, Disney’s film is more the Beast’s tale of transformation, exploring deeply the nuances of his emotions.

ALEX

While visually static, we do see a traditional (and male?) hero’s journey in Disney’s Belle. She can’t integrate with her town, can’t find common ground with anyone but her father, then slowly develops a lasting love relationship and from that, a life that is fully her own. She acts heroically to better her own life. Cocteau’s Belle performs the same basic magic of the anima upon her Beast, but doesn’t do much herself or grow in any important way. In Cocteau’s film, Belle is a consistent perspective of morally righteous beauty that takes on different surface images for poetic and symbolic purposes.

JADE

It would be interesting if a Beauty and the Beast story told more specifically about the moment when Beauty becomes conscious of her own taming effect. This is the moment when Beauty is turned from a girl to a woman by her own self-awareness. She suddenly realizes, “I am that which tames.” Beastliness has deepened the Beauty; she has become intense enough to channel her beauty more completely.

When she is walking around her town frustrated by its provinciality, she just sings about it and rolls her eyes. She finds a sly and passive way to throw Gaston out of her house. Beauty begins in a passive state, and is even self-sacrificial, trading places with her father as prisoner. But when she’s in the Beast’s castle, she begins to assert herself and her own agency. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Cocteau’s Beauty tells the Beast. Disney’s Beauty gets into shouting matches with him. Her stubborn vision of how things ought to be moves from a bookworm’s daydream into a living reality, as she shapes the Beast little by little.

ALEX

It’s the presence of such an extreme counterpart that’s freeing up her expression. There’s really no appearances to uphold other than her own morality, now that she's living with a literal animal. Her growing assertiveness is directed at taming the Beast, yet it’s the Beast that’s giving her a living embodiment of what assertiveness even looks like.

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Cocteau’s Belle develops primarily by visual poetry. She begins as a Cinderella image, cleaning the floor in maid’s clothes while being the obviously superior woman of the family, in terms of looks. She returns to the village later as the same person inside, but now dressed in the sparkling regalia of a royal princess. The stark contrast of Beauty against a drab rural background remains the same, but the images illustrate that a radiant nobility is growing from her person, to include her clothing, then finally to include her partner.

JADE

What is poetry? This is a question you and I are continually asking each other. While there is word play present in the title of the film “La Belle et Le Bette,” the dialogue of the film is decidedly simple, non-lyrical, not especially clever or complex. Instead, the bare bones simplicity of language creates space for the dream experience to be more directly channeled. 

Cocteau’s film forgoes nuance for caricature: instead of making something remotely believable, Cocteau leans into the unreality of fairytale, forcing the audience to suspend disbelief from the very start so that by the time we have entered the enchanted castle,  we are already very much under his spell. The simple design of the set only serves to increase this enchantment. Cocteau manages to do with film images what most poets try to do with words: He distills the essence of things. Cocteau has extracted poetry from language and used it in a different way. Through poetic images he creates the hyperreal. 

The enchanted palace acts as a third character in the tale. Hands holding candelabras point Belle in the direction she needs to go, while blinking eyes of caryatids observe the fairytale unfolding. In the Disney film, the enchantment of the palace reaches complete comedy with household objects that bicker, tell jokes, give advice, and are often more humane and level-headed than our romantic heroes. Indeed, the enchantment of the palace is the final transformation that takes place in Disney: Once the Beast becomes Adam, the castle’s gargoyles turn to angels and the dark shadowy turrets become ivory towers wrapped in wisteria. In Cocteau’s film the enchanted objects are more subtle, but both settings create the sensation of a benevolent universe, bent on bringing the unlikely couple together.

ALEX

I love that insight, that the palace represents a benevolent universe, changing the couple by friction and grace into their more ideal forms. Is nature itself benevolent, prior to the application of human will? By simply tending to its own affairs, nature at least holds a mirror of karmic justice up to the players on the stage, showing them the form of their souls but leaving them free to react however they will. The Beast makes his love for Belle real by finally setting her free to do whatever her heart desires. By this he is cooperating with nature’s hidden benevolence, helping the magic-at-large to transform our heroes.