warning: this is sufficiently embarrassing to the point where i could do nothing more with my life and this would work as humiliation for the rest of my existence. so enjoy.
okay, so obviously i saw beauty and the beast in 3D last night (but you already knew that). even though i spent the first few minutes of the movie thinking i’m too old for this. i shouldn’t be here, why did i even come? i soon stopped giving a fuck and started paying attention to the movie, because if i payed $15 to see the thing i may as well enjoy it. i tried to see the movie through my five-year-old version of me eyes, but, knowing what i know now, i obviously had a hard time doing that. luckily, children’s movie creators are aware of the fact that no one sends their five year old to the movies alone and therefore add a few jokes the adults will enjoy. i also was very aware of the message those adults might assume the movie was sending to the children watching, and the fact that this single interpretation of the movie could potentially ruin my viewing. but then i thought more about the movie outside the perspective of poor helpless captive belle. i know people are always harping on the problems arising in disney princess movies—that they teach girls to have false expectations of “love” and shows them that as long as they’re pretty they’ll find a prince charming, but looking past those superficial once upon a time qualities of these hans christian andersen rewrites can actually bring out a real-life applicable meaning.
peoples’ opinions of this film are no different, claiming that beauty and the beast is an instruction manual for dealing with an abusive partner (i.e. do nothing and apologize for everything). but i realized last night that girls aren’t the only people watching these movies, and even if they were, they’re not only identifying with one specific character. there’s a lesson to be learned on the flip side of the princess-dream-come-true-fairytale story.
while watching the movie, watching the beast transform back into a human prince, i thought to myself, how the hell is this guy going to be any better than the beast? he’s still an asshole anyway. but then i remembered that he wasn’t the beast from the beginning of the movie, he was the changed beast that loved belle. sure, his animal instincts told him to be aggressive and territorial, holding belle inside the castle against her will in attempts to woo her and make her fall in love with him, thus breaking the spell. turns out, beast, using people isn’t all that easy. you have to make them actually like you, genuinely. that means being nice and meaning it. sincerity. the beast changed his attitude and his behavior, showing belle a side of him she would surely be attracted to.
i feel like the underrated moral to this story is that in order to keep people around, you have to make them feel important, like you care about them. you can’t be externally attractive to someone who sees ugliness on the inside (unless you’re a horribly cruel ryan gosling-type, which in that case, i don’t really care). so basically, what i’m trying to say is don’t be so quick to judge these disney movies and label them as brainwashing for young girls, because there’s a lesson under the surface to be learned. if you want to hate something, you’ll find the bad in it, but if you want to see the good aspects, you’ll find those too.
two sides of the same coin, people.
also, belle is just a good person trying to be nice. no one says she was looking for love. it just happened, k?
