Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 148

144
Popular Culture Review
doomed to remain a beast for all time. As the years passed he fell into
despair and lost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a beast?
2Interestingly, the curse is gender specific in the Disney movie (and in the video release
o f the movie), but gender neutral in the soundtrack release. On the soundtrack, the
narrator’s voice-over says that the Beast must love someone and earn “their” love in
return, rather than “her” love. While this soundtrack version is grammatically incorrect, it
also shifts the meaning of the curse somewhat. The difference here is intriguing: one
wonders which came first, the movie voice-track or the soundtrack— and why is there a
difference? I will be using the movie version o f the curse as the definitive rendering as
this essay is a reading of the movie; however, even given the soundtrack change and its
lack of a gender specific pronoun, there is ample evidence, I believe, to support the
position for which I am arguing.
*In the song “Be Our Guest,” Lumiere sings that the staff has been enchanted for ten
years. We are told that the magic rose will lose its final petal on the prince’s twenty-first
birthday. Since that day has now come, we can thus assume that the curse took place
when the prince was eleven years old ( 2 1 - 1 0 = 11).
4It is important to note at this point that such stereotypes will become important to our
analysis o f the film, but the film itself employs the stereotypes with a subtle and, indeed,
masterful touch. This is no cliche-ridden work of art. If it suggests that gay men like
interior design, floristry, and show tunes, it does so with fiill awareness that the
stereotypes are at once both instantly recognizably artistic tropes meant to indicate an
other-than-straight orientation and at the same time the sort o f stereotypical
generalizations that are repressive and are meant to be shaken up and done away with by
this critique. Though Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is a tragedy, it is revolutionary and
empowering if read correctly.
5This long quote is a set of utterances sung by various villagers in the opening song
“Belle.”
6We know that this is so because her favorite book is about a girl becoming a princess.
This book is, in the end, Beauty and the Beast. We will take up this point in more detail
below.
7Belle is showing her true nature here. The shop is clearly a bookstore and not a library,
yet Belle has been borrowing books from the doting, smitten, older owner rather than
buying them. And now the poor man gives Belle her favorite book for free, though she
clearly has no sexual interest in the store owner. (Neither, of course, does she care for any
o f the men staring through the store window at her— an important point in the movie
because it makes it clear that Belle has many potential male suitors [not just Gaston] and
no interest in any o f them.) The gift o f a book by a male suitor in which Belle has no real
interest will become a theme, echoed when the Beast gives Belle the castle library and its
contents. In both cases the books are offered as something o f a prelude; in both cases the
man says [in nearly identical words] “if you like it so much, its yours”; and in both cases,
Belle has no real interest in the suitor but merely wants something from him and isn’t
afraid to use her charms to get it.
8For an example o f such a thoughtful yet, I would argue, misdirected interpretation of
Gaston, see Susan Jeffords, “The Curse o f Masculinity: Disney’s Beauty and the B east”
in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics o f Film, Gender, and Culture, Elizabeth Bell,
Lynda Haas, and Laura sells, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1995), 169-170.