This is a guest review by Caitlin Moran.
Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris is not the sort of book I would even remotely consider turning into a children’s movie, so I give the Disney studios credit for trying. Whoever read that dark, unsentimental tale of attempted rape, torture, lust, revenge, kidnapping and execution, and decided, “Yes, this would make a swell children’s movie” has a greater imagination than I do. Much of the book’s R-rated material has been watered down or removed, but the grim core remains in
Hunchback of Notre Dame, making this the darkest film of the 1990s Disney Renaissance.
Hunchback follows the lonely life of the titular hunchback, Quasimodo, who was forcibly taken from his mother and ensconced in Notre Dame by Frollo, a sanctimonious, scheming, positively vile judge (he adds “lecherous” to that litany by the end of the movie) whose sole purpose in life is to wipe the gypsy population of Paris out of existence. Quasi is tender and kind despite his exterior (which, while it is decried as hideous multiple times, is at worst a little disproportional and at best kind of cute), and longs for a life outside the cathedral. He gets his wish, of course, and ends up teaming up with Esmeralda, a gypsy, and Phoebus, a pretty-boy soldier hunk to save the gypsies from Frollo and Notre Dame from destruction.
Like most Disney movies,
Hunchback only gives us one female character with anything to do: Esmeralda, the smokin’ hot gypsy dancer who seduces every man who so much as looks at her. (Full disclosure: I had not one but two full Esmeralda costumes as a child, an Esmeralda action figure and an Esmeralda Barbie doll). Esmeralda may be the only hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold to ever appear in a Disney movie. She gives a rousing Medieval pole-dance at the Festival of Fools, but is the only onlooker moved by Quasimodo’s brutal humiliation after he is turned on by the crowd (she also follows up a stirring call for social justice by beating the crap out of Frollo’s soldiers). She dances in the street for money, but gives the most humble, heartfelt prayer for her people out of all the worshipers in Notre Dame, who only pray for money or fame, during the lovely “God Help the Outcast.”
And unlike Ariel in The Little Mermaid, whose tribulations are almost exclusively caused by her own narrow-minded pursuit of a dreamboat she’s never spoken to, Esmeralda is street-smart and clever; her eventual capture is facilitated accidentally by Phoebus and Quasimodo, who both see themselves as her male protector and likewise rush to save her, though she was doing perfectly well on her own, thank you very much.
So did Disney finally break away from the flimsy, strong-but-need-a-man-to-save-me heroines so ensconced in their tradition? Not quite. Because never before has a Disney heroine been so objectified as a symbol of lust. In fact, Disney gives Frollo an entire song, “Hellfire,” to explore how much he wants to bang her, complete with a giant blazing fireplace and hooded harbingers of damnation. I remember sitting in the theater as a seven-year-old with my mom, a Sour Patch Kid frozen halfway to my mouth. At the time my only thought was “They’re saying Hell in a Disney movie! Cool!” but upon rewatching the movie in high school I could only marvel at how much “Hellfire” serves as the most perfect rape apologia in all of animated film. “It’s not my fault,” Frollo sings, “I’m not to blame. It is the gypsy girl, the witch who set this flame.”
Dear God.
This is the fundamental problem with the movie, which purports to leave us with the message that what is on the inside is more important than what’s on the outside, but can’t resist having a sexpot heroine whose fundamental awesomeness (she crowd surfs! she wears a knife in her garter! she vanishes in puffs of smoke!) is overshadowed by fact that she’s a 15th century pin-up who ultimately needs to be saved (twice) by the men in her life.
Esmeralda, girl, you deserved better.
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Caitlin Moran is a recent graduate of Boston College. She lives in New York with her cat and a mini-donut maker. Oh, and a human roommate. She’s pretty cool too.
I could only marvel at how much “Hellfire” serves as the most perfect rape apologia in all of animated film. “It’s not my fault,” Frollo sings, “I’m not to blame. It is the gypsy girl, the witch who set this flame.”
I had the opposite reaction when I saw that movie as a young girl. It absolutely is rape apologia, but the fact that it was the villain speaking it made me recognize that his argument was wrong and awful and that he was a creepy creeper. I think that was the point.
@funnyfemynyst
Yes! That’s exactly what I got out of the movie when I watched it at twelve years old. I remember watching it once, being horrified, and forever afterward fastforwarding that scene, because it made me too angry.
“Hellfire” is about religious hypocrisy. Frollo is lusting over an individual who represents a people he has condemned as being morally unfit. This completely undermines his holier-than-thou attitude.
Hence the masked figures, which are a figment of his imagination, a manifestation of his guilt. They constantly berate him with the words “mea culpa” meaning “my fault,” a phrase people use to accept blame. Frollo, though, is too attached to his myopic notions of right and wrong, and refuses to admit his shame. The movie makes it very clear that he’s pathetic for this line of thinking.
And if what’s on the inside really is more important that what’s on the outside, should it matter that Esme looks like a 15th century pin-up? Or should it be more important that she is a strong, smart, compassionate person? The point seems to be that she is more than the sexpot whore men like Frollo see when they look at her.
Hmm, I didn’t really read ‘Hellfire’ as rape apologia. If anything, it’s showing the audience how twisted and hypocritical Frollo has become. The kids might not have picked up on this, and maybe they were going more for ‘artsy’ rather than instructive with the song, but you can hear the red-cloaked figures that surround him singing ‘Mea culpa’, which translates from Latin to ‘my fault’. The message it’s sending is that this guy has become so insulated in his own world pretty much that he no longer understands the meaning of his inner demons. What he saw in Esmeralda was a denial of all the values he had previously lived for, and that, for a brief moment, entirely shattered his world. He chose to deal with this by trying to either possess her, or destroy her, because he was so afraid of the freedom she represented, and how her kindness and beauty flew in the face of everything he had previously thought about the race of people he hated. Does it excuse his behavior or slimy intentions? Absolutely not, but it is an important point in the film, and I don’t really see it as problematic. Plus, we know Frollo is unquestionably the bad guy, so even as a kid when I really didn’t understand all the nuances of the song, I knew that his reasoning for pursuing her like that was twisted and wrong.
In a way, it also shows how ‘patriarchy hurts men too’. We pity him, because we see him ultimately as a product of a culture that has its values in the wrong place, too insulated by his privilege to see how much it is hurting him. But we cannot deny that he is a dangerous force that the heroes have to overcome. Out of all the Disney movies, I’d say this one is probably the only one in which I adore all the main characters. ALL of them, yes, even Frollo, because he does exactly what he is supposed to do-be one scary mutha of a villain.
I agree with Amanda on the count of “Hellfire” showing how messed up Frollo is. Look at the Muslim fundamentalists who blame women for not covering up and encouraging men to leer and holler after uncovered women. In the Muslim texts (I forget whether it was the Quran, Hadith, or Sura) Abu Bakr leers at Muhammad’s wives going to the bathroom in order to force Muhammad to get edicts from God to make them cover up. The wives are made to do this while Abu Bakr isn’t punished.
Also the original novel makes Esmeralda an object of lust so they kind of had to do that in the movie.