Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 146

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Popular Culture Review
no one will find fulfillment. Intolerance for some inevitably results in such a
deep moral social crisis that all are doomed—and thus fulfilling heterosexual
relationships are not to be found here as well; consequently, they are painted as
absent, silly, meaningless, and unsatisfying. Where, after all, we must wonder, is
Belle’s mother? Where are the prince’s parents? Where is Mr. Potts (was it a
bad case of spout envy)? The Bimbettes who offer Gaston the possibility of
socially-acceptable love are shallow airheads. Lumiere, when he goes after a
woman, gives a perverted laugh and tackles the task as if it were a sport. And the
village businessman who should be concentrating on his customer’s needs is
seen leering, instead, at her breasts—to which the woman cagily responds:
“Bonjour. How is your wife?!” To say that one kind of love is beastly is to
condemn all love, to slander love itself. It is not, then, that gay relationships will
have failed or that straight relationships will have failed. It is that all
relationships have failed and are doomed to continue to fail in a context of
exclusion for some.
Gaston is on the way toward being the hero, especially when we realize
that his persecution of the Beast is merely symbolic of his self-persecution, that
his death is thus a form of suicide, that his harassing of Belle is, in the end, a by-
product of the society she perpetuates and does nothing to change. But like a
real hero, Gaston has real weaknesses. By painting him literally evil (as a naive
reading of the movie would suggest) but at heart oppressed and longing for love
and acceptance (as our reading has suggested), we get a Gaston that is
conflicted, a fully drawn character who, in the final moment, does not die for his
sins or for our sins but for the possibility that we might wake up, realize what
we have done, shake off our intolerances, and sin no more.
And thus the ending is open. The film itself concludes not with the
traditional declaration of resolved conflict, but with a question—literally two
questions, really.
Mrs. Potts’ son, Chip, has been transformed from the teacup that he
used to be back into a human again, and he watches as the also newly
humanized Beast-prince dances with Belle in an apparent marriage celebration,
a celebration to which the hypocritical townspeople seem to have shown up. The
prince and Belle spin around as the music plays, the beautiful animation
catching each character’s reflection in the polished dance floor, reminding us of
the truth exposed in magic and not-so-magic mirrors all around us if we are only
open to them.
“Are they going to live happily ever after?” Chips first asks. It is not
enough to conclude with a pat declaration of eternal happiness in this Disney
story, for the Beast has chosen to live a life of lies—and so has Belle and so has
the town—pretending to be what he is not in order to gain his social acceptance
and humanity. It is, in fact, the second coming of Gaston. And so, Chip rightly
has to wonder: Is this a happy ending? Will these two really be happy together