Disney Princesses – Bitch Flicks

How Feminist Is ‘Beauty and the Beast’?

Belle saves the Beast – not just physically by breaking the spell, but emotionally and psychologically by changing his behavior and smoothing his sharp edges. … Both of them begin as loners and societal misfits, but they end as the perfect fit in each other’s lives. However, this nice, mushy message comes at a cost: Belle’s agency as a character. …When we are introduced to Belle she has no more growing left to do in this film other than learn to be less judgmental and find a suitable husband.

This guest post written by Hannah Collins is an edited version that originally appeared at Fanny Pack. It is cross-posted with permission.

Based on the classic French fairy tale and the 1946 French film, Le Belle at la Bete, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) is one of the most critically acclaimed and universally loved in the Princess catalogue. The story revolves around the titular ‘Beast’ – a vain and selfish Prince who is transformed into a monstrous animal by an enchantress as punishment for his flaws – and Belle (the ‘Beauty’), a kind and intelligent girl whom he imprisons in the hope that she might help break the spell put on him. Despite his poor anger-management skills (and inability to use cutlery) Belle slowly begins to tame the Beast’s temperament and work her way into his heart. But, before she can return his feelings and make him human again, an angry mob from her village led by the villainous Gaston – desperate for Belle’s hand in marriage – threaten to destroy everything.

As usual, I’ll be using six key questions to filter the film’s feminist/anti-feminist messages through and ultimately give it a ‘Positive,’ ‘Neutral,’ or ‘Negative’ stamp on it at the end. So without further ado, let’s see how Disney’s sixth official Princess movie holds up.

Belle
Mrs. Potts
The old beggar woman/enchantress
The feather duster maid (called ‘Babette’)
The Wardrobe (called ‘Madame de la Grand Bouche’, which translates to ‘Madame Big Mouth’. Nice.)
The Triplets (called the ‘Bimbettes’… Hmm.)

Total: 8 principle female characters (with speaking parts) compared to 11 principle male characters (with speaking parts).

In a word, no. And this is a good break with tradition, as nearly every Princess movie so far from Snow White, to Cinderella, to Sleeping Beauty, to The Little Mermaid have had female villains motivated solely by vacuous jealousy.

Although the Prince/Beast is the perceived villain to begin with in Beauty and the Beast, the real villain is Belle’s relentless pursuer, Gaston – clearly the more beastly of the two, personality-wise.

Apart from Mrs. Potts, who acts as a surrogate matriarchal figure to just about everyone, Belle disappointingly has very little interactions with any other female character. All of her close allies – her father, the Beast, Cogsworth, and Lumiere – are male, through a combination of circumstance and choice.

This serves subliminally to reinforce Belle’s ‘otherness’ as she seems unable and/or unwilling to maintain relationships with others of her gender. Unfortunately, this is also reflected across the rest of the film’s female characters, with the tightest bonds of friendship being between men: Gaston and LeFou; and Lumiere and Cogsworth.

For the final two-thirds of the film the answer to this is Belle, with her father, Maurice, keeping things barreling along through the first act. Yet, even when Belle does become the driving force of the plot, she doesn’t actually attract the majority of the viewer’s emotional investment. That’s because most of this investment is funneled into the Beast’s quest to regain his humanity instead.

At the start of the film, Belle flitters around a field belting out a song about “wanting so much more than this provincial life,” yet her unfalteringly charismatic character doesn’t develop one bit throughout the story. Geographically-speaking, she also only ends up living what can’t be more than a few miles away from the home she dreamed of travelling far away from. Meanwhile, the Beast’s character enjoys a dramatically shifting arc that also bears the weight of the entire story’s moral as an added bonus. In this respect, Belle – the eponymous princess of this supposed Princess-oriented movie – is effectively side-lined in her own film.

If toxic masculinity took cartoon form, it would look like Gaston. While Belle is a flawed but emphatically feminist heroine, Gaston is a perfect send-up of laddish, brutish, and gross chauvinism. His interactions with her are all deliberately sexist, offensive, vile, and stupid – i.e. the perfect counter-balance to Belle’s pragmatism, wit, and intelligence. Gaston’s attraction to Belle is based firstly on her obvious good looks, and secondly because her constant rejection of him turns his failing courtship of her into a game, and as a proud hunter who “uses antlers in all of his decorating,” you know that Gaston basically just sees her as little more than another deer to chase, shoot, sling over his back, and carry home to become another trophy over his fireplace.

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During his solo song (sung in that flawless baritone), we’re given a handy checklist of things to have and achieve before any self-respecting ‘man’s man’ can be counted as worthy:

Body hair. A lot of it.
Spitting. Be good at it.
Hunting. Do it often.
Using animals as decoration. Everywhere.
Eating 4 dozen raw eggs to become the “size of a barge.”
Drinking. All the time.
Chess (although because being smart is basically useless, the only way to win is by slapping the board away from your oppenent.)
Stomping around in boots. No, really – go out and buy some, now.

With his square jaw, bulging muscles, and operatically-deep voice, Gaston is kind of like a Disney prince gone wrong. And Belle, with all her well-developed intellect, seems to be the only person to call this out. Even her father says that he “seems handsome” and suggests Belle should give him a chance in the romance department. The rest of the town – especially his loyal lackey, LeFou, and the horny triplets – treat Gaston like the village hero, never questioning his judgment, and happy to attend an impromptu wedding for he and Belle (before she’s even agreed to it) or sing an ode to his chest hair in the tavern, or later on be led blindly on a witch hunt to kill the Beast he showed them in a “magic mirror.”

The Beast on the other hand, with his anger problems, selfishness, and emotional unavailability is someone who starts off in a similar place to Gaston – albeit minus the gushing self-confidence. He doesn’t even call Belle by her name to begin with, just “the girl.” The difference between he and Gaston is that rather than forcing himself upon her, the Beast allows himself to be changed for the better by Belle, thus turning himself into a man worthy of her love. As Gaston becomes more and more incensed and frenzied to the point of trying to blackmail Belle into marrying him, the Beast learns to control his anger and becomes more docile and open to the needs of others until he earns rather than wins her affections.

The ultimate proof of his transformation comes when he allows Belle to leave the castle to attend to her sick father at the expense of him being able to break the spell. (Although, seeing how close the town and castle seem to be, there’s no reason he should have assumed Belle couldn’t have popped back to the castle later on…)

Most of Belle’s characteristics fit the usual wish list for Disney Princesses we’ve encountered so far: beauty, charm, kindness, a good set of pipes, and a touch of wistful longing for “something more” than the life they’re trapped in. But Belle has another trick up her puffy dress sleeves: intellectualism. Like our previous heroine, Ariel, Belle is curious about the world around her. The difference here is that Belle has been able to satiate her curiosity with books, turning her into an imaginative, ambitious, sharp-witted, and worldly heroine.

As I mentioned previously, the downside to all this glowing perfection is that Belle seems to have done all her character development off-screen, but she also has another severe weakness: Her heightened intelligence has given her one hell of a superiority complex.

At the start she sings about her “little town, full of little people” and is bored by the routine of everyone else’s lives. She laments that no one reads and imagines more like she does. Similarly, the rest of the town look down on her for being intellectual and “weird.”

During this opening number we see a woman struggling with a comical amount of children – literally juggling babies in her arms – while desperately trying to buy some eggs. Meanwhile, Belle sails past on the back of a cart, smiling and singing about the joy of reading – unburdened by the troubles of being a working-class mother. This is the best insight we get into Belle’s P.O.V: All sweetness and pleasantries on the outside, but internally judging the other women around her who have slavishly “given up” on any hope of independence or self-empowerment.

Belle’s quest for self-betterment is both her greatest strength and weakness. She is presented to young girls watching the film as a woman ahead of her time – a model early feminist, before the term was even invented, who dreams of living life beyond her designated place in society. Yet, by doing so, she can’t help but dole out pity to the other women around her who were not able to choose to live their lives in the way that she has so luckily been able to. In some ways, Belle is the epitome of some of the feminist movement’s problems: white, elitist, and judgmental. And also kind of a hypocrite – after all, let’s not forget that the only two books we see Belle actually engaged with are romance stories – one (pictured below) she reads a passage from referencing “Prince Charming” and the other is Romeo and Juliet. Maybe her desires aren’t quite as wildly different from everyone else’s as she might wish.

Yes, I know. How can one of Disney’s foremost feminist heroines be merely a ‘Neutral’ in terms of gender representation? Hear me out.

The core philosophy of Beauty and the Beast is to love what’s inside of someone rather than just what’s on the outside. This makes it the first time a Disney Princess film has broken the nonsensical ‘love at first sight’ BS that has been at the heart of every previous story – and this is where most of its plus points come from. Belle saves the Beast – not just physically by breaking the spell, but emotionally and psychologically by changing his behavior and smoothing his sharp edges. He begins as a self-loathing, literal monster, and ends up as a well-rounded man who literally and figuratively reclaims his humanity thanks to Belle. Belle, meanwhile, is rewarded with the one thing she (secretly) always longed for: someone who truly understands her. Both of them begin as loners and societal misfits, but they end as the perfect fit in each other’s lives.

However, this nice, mushy message comes at a cost: Belle’s agency as a character. As I’ve established, when we are introduced to Belle she has no more growing left to do in this film other than learn to be less judgmental and find a suitable husband. In fact, I was left feeling a little cheated by the end. The opening, uplifting number makes us anticipate the journey of a modern woman ready to go globe-trotting… only to lead down the same well-trodden path of her finding the nearest castle and Prince to hook up with and stay put in his library for the rest of her life.

In the end, Belle is actually demoted to the usual passive ‘Prince’ role – a one-note hero who swoops in to save the day in the nick of time, leaving the Beast fulfilling the lead, active ‘Princess’ role. This, ultimately, is why what should have been a ‘Positive’ film for gender representation, has sadly balanced out into a ‘Neutral’ one instead.

Hannah Collins is a London-born writer and illustrator fascinated by the intersection between pop/visual culture and feminism. On the blogging scene, Hannah has attracted over 1 million readers to her blog on gender representation in pop culture. By day, she is currently a freelance illustrator for children’s books and comics, and by night (and any other available hour) she contributes to the Cosmic Anvil and Fanny Pack blogs, as well as her own.

‘Cinderella’ Or Why Do Mostly Straight, Mostly White Guys Make All The Big Studio Movies?

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this ‘Cinderella,’ but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

As I sat waiting for an evening preview screening of Disney’s latest Cinderella to begin (and because I didn’t have my phone to distract me–everyone had had theirs confiscated in an asinine and outdated measure to prevent piracy), I couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of the audience were a somewhat diverse group of women and queers–except for the guys talking loudly behind me. They were so straight, one of them said Last Tango In Paris was the ideal date movie. Since at least one of these guys talked about having a son I marveled that either man had ever succeeded in getting a woman to have sex with him, even once–and wondered what these two were doing at Cinderella. Then I remembered they were seated in the “press” row: they were film critics.

Film criticism suffers a lot because white, clueless, straight guys like the ones seated behind me make up the majority. These critics all tend to like films about straight, white, male protagonists like themselves (with the occasional, historically inaccurate, white male gay stand-in to show how “open-minded” they are), one of the many reasons this year’s Oscar nominees were nearly all white people (and the Latino who won big awards did so for making a film about a white, straight guy).

But the movies themselves suffer when only straight guys are allowed to make them: not only are Cinderella’s filmmakers, director Kenneth Branagh (Thor and at the beginning of his career movies with Emma Thompson like Dead Again) and writer Chris Weitz (who with his brother, Paul, made American Pie–Weitz is part Latino, but the vast majority of characters in his films are white guys) men, their previous films have been singularly bereft of queer flair–memorable costumes and hairstyles and a sense of how women talk when they’re alone together–that make up the Cinderella story.

Chris Weitz, as a director, took over the Twilight franchise right after the original film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, proved to be a box office bonanza. Since then no women have directed the big YA adaptations, even those centered on women and girl protagonists. Similarly, Sam Taylor-Johnson the woman director of the successful (in both the financial and critical sense) recent Fifty Shades of Grey film (with a built-in audience that is mostly women) seems to be poised to be unceremoniously dumped from the franchise–which I’m sure the producers will be quick to tell us has nothing to do with her being a woman, though, odds are, she’ll be replaced by a man. Even when women directors succeed with big studio films they’re treated like failures.

In feminist documentaries like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, we see that women in the 1960s at newspapers and magazines were unfairly pigeon-holed into writing for the “women’s section,” but women directors now, 50 years later, don’t even get to helm the few “women and girls’ stories” big studios choose to tell.

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this Cinderella, but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

The film chooses the most familiar parts of the stories (Cinderella is a folktale that has many different iterations including some very old ones from Asia) but also tacks on a syrupy-sweet beginning in which “Ella” (played as a child by Eloise Webb and as an adult by Downton Abby’s Lily James) spends an idyllic childhood with her father (Ben Chaplin) and mother (Agent Carter‘s Hayley Atwell, unrecognizable in a blonde wig and eyebrows) before her mother dies from that disease women in films often get that keeps them looking good on their deathbeds. She tells her daughter who, like her, is so virtuous she has no discernible personality, “Have courage and be kind,” a case of the bland leading the bland.

We’re introduced to Ella’s CGI mouse friends (much more creepy than the animated ones in the 1950 Disney Cinderella—as she kept scooping them up I couldn’t help wondering if she washed her hands afterward) with whom she can communicate, as she also does with a farmhouse menagerie of animals running across the yard. The film has a seemingly willful ignorance of why those animals are there; when we see scraps on Cinderella’s plate they’re just vegetables, even though the goose, in the 19th century English setting the nameless, timeless kingdom the film takes place in resembles, would most likely be Christmas dinner.

Ella’s father remarries, bringing into the house the evil stepmother, here called Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett, in a succession of 1940s-inspired gowns, hairstyles and hats that, like her sojourns on the red carpet, show what a great clothes horse she is) and the two stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) who, the film is careful to point out are “ugly” on the inside. With their overcurled hair and pursed lips, wearing busy print dresses, the two aren’t terrible to look at, exactly, just tacky.

When the father dies (some versions of the tale have him survive and take part in Cinderella’s degradation) the stepmother banishes Cinderella to sleep in the attic and to become the household’s only servant. Because she sleeps by the dying embers of the fire to keep warm the stepsisters christen her “Cinder-ella.”

Trying to escape the drudgery of home, Cinderella rides her horse into the forest and meets the Prince (Richard Madden, Game of Thrones’ Robb Stark) who is on a hunt. Cinderella, not knowing who he is, talks him out of killing the stag (another instance of creepy CGI) she has just warned to run away. When they part The Prince says, “I hope to see you again, Miss.” Back at the palace the King (Derek Jacobi) pressures the Prince to take a wife and The Prince asks that the palace hold a ball, open not just to gentry but all the young women in the kingdom, so that he might meet the nameless “country girl” again.

CinderellaHBCarter — Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother

We see Cinderella working on her dress, one of her mother’s that she has altered, and inevitably her stepmother and sisters tell her she is not welcome to attend the ball with them, “It would be an insult to take you to the palace dressed in these old rags.” When they leave Cinderella’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) appears first disguised as a beggar woman, then after Cinderella gives her a crust of bread and milk revealing her true identity. Her wand exudes the same sparkles as that of the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” godmother of the 1950 Disney version, but that effect seems more like laziness (it’s very familiar from other films) than an homage.

The transformation of the pumpkin, mice, lizards, and goose (actually a gander) into respectively, the golden coach, horses, coachmen and driver–and then back again–is the most magical in the film. Less successful is the transformation of the fairy godmother and Cinderella, whose hair and gowns end up looking more like the garish stepsisters’ than they would in a Cinderella directed by Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, Jane Campion or Gina Prince-Bythewood (the dresses also don’t equal the storybook descriptions of spun gold and silver). It’s like Branagh made a conscious decision to not pay too much attention to “girly” detail like gowns and hair. Also barely adequate, perhaps for similar reasons, is the styling of the Prince. Plenty of women and queer men enjoyed looking at Richard Madden in Game of Thrones (and some of us remember him fondly as the gay EMT in the UK version of Sirens), but here he’s dressed in gaudy jackets, clean-shaven, with his curly hair dyed dark and shellacked into a long pompadour, so that he looks like Zac Efron without the self-tanner. And even though we don’t know where the kingdom is, he’s made to drop his Scottish accent for an English one, that, even to my American ears, sounds shaky.

CinderellaCoach — Cinderella in the golden coach

In spite of her ballgown, James is radiant and doesn’t get stuck in gooeyness of her character, but she has the same odd affect she did in Downton (where she appeared just as I was giving up on the series): even when her character is supposed to be upset she always seems on the verge of breaking into one of her big, bright smiles. Most disappointing is Blanchett, whose stepmother is never given a real reason for her cruelty (besides money, which the movie pays scant attention to, and her own perfunctory rationale that she still grieves for her first husband, which we see no evidence of) so Blanchett has nothing to play except in one brief scene, when she blackmails the Grand Duke (Stellan Skarsgård). Blanchett is talented enough that not only has she convincingly played Bob Dylan, but she made him sexier and more appealing than he’s ever been himself, so Branagh and Weitz really dropped the ball here. The stepmother could have been a great villain, like Ben Kingley’s Snatcher in The Boxtrolls. Instead, she just looks great, like a blonde, chic Joan Crawford in her prime.

An interesting difference between this version of Cinderella and most of the other earlier versions is that it has a little diversity in it. Some of the princesses who arrive at the ball aren’t white. The Prince’s footman (Nonso Anozie) as well as a few of the townspeople are Black. But this tiny, tiny step in the right direction made me wish someone had been bold enough to make the decision to cast a Black actress as Cinderella. Then we would have the reason for the stepsisters’ and stepmother’s irrational and instant hatred of her, no matter how kind she is to them, and also the King and Duke’s reluctance to let The Prince marry her, since, in too many places, those same attitudes survive today. I would have loved to have seen what Lupita Nyong’o (who, like Blanchett, has shown on award show red carpets that she can wear the shit out of great gowns) could have done with the role, but as it has since its beginning, Walt Disney still barely believes in white, brunette princesses, let alone Black ones. I doubt I was the only person in the theater wondering how many more white, blonde storybook heroines I could take.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender