Misunderstanding Feminism: A Tale As Old As Time

 

 

 

 

 

Misunderstanding Feminism: A Tale as Old as Time.

 

 

 

 

Dayna Wilson - 300113188

GSWS 1101 – 001

Contemporary Issues in Gender and Women’s Studies

Dr. Sally Mennill

16 March 2021

1531 words

 

 

 

When Disney officially announced that a live action remake of the 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast was underway, the news was met with cautious optimism. Disney’s assurances that the new film would be appropriately updated with a feminist angle were underlined with the casting of Millennial Feminist Hero Emma Watson, who serves as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador in addition to her acclaimed acting career. Watson was reportedly heavily invested in ensuring that the adaption would sufficiently meet feminist standards, and even sought approval of the final product from feminist icon Gloria Steinem (Vanity Fair 2016). Unfortunately, despite enjoying widespread economic and critical success, the film failed to meet even minimal standards for feminist storytelling, as evidenced by a basic misunderstanding of what modern feminism means, the perpetuation of damaging stereotypes, and a critical lack of intersectionality. While the updated version may have improved upon the original film, it still falls far short of embodying the ideals that modern intersectional feminism embraces.

One of the primary ways that the 2017 version of Beauty and the Beast seeks to re-examine the tale through a feminist lens is by increasing the agency that the lead character, Belle, enjoys. While in the original film, Belle is seen as an inactive character who passively experiences the narrative, up to and including her subjugation, the 2017 update seeks to portray her as orchestrating her own destiny. Rather than wandering around her small French town, reading books, and skillfully avoiding the advances of Gaston, Watson’s Belle is an adept inventor who spends her free time teaching a young village girl to read. By the standards of Second Wave feminism, marked by demands for bodily autonomy and workplace equality, Beauty and the Beast (2017) meets its goal of feminist representation, hence the ready approval of Second Wave icon Steinem. The problem, of course, is that forty years later, Second Wave feminism has been critiqued as “white led, marginalizes the activism and world views of women of color, focuses mainly on the United States, and treats sexism as the ultimate oppression” (Thompson 1). In short, it is no longer, and should no longer dictate the criteria by which we judge our media. Modern feminists of the fledgling Fourth Wave movement have encouraged a more holistic approach to gender equity, with consideration given to a broad array of topics including gender, gender roles, and the intersectional experiences of disabled women, Black, Indigenous, and Women of Colour, and queer women. Making your previously “ditzy” character into an inventor does not a feminist movie make. Had Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, the two men who wrote the 2017 film been honestly concerned with meeting modern feminist ideals, a working knowledge of how said feminism is defined would surely have been beneficial.

            The lack of feminist understanding Chbosky and Spiliotopoulos exhibit is particularly underlined in the gender roles Belle has been assigned within her circumstances. Despite being supposedly empowered through her technical ability, it has been noted that the machine that she opts to create exists to do the laundry, and that “the underlying message baked into this pie is that laundry is women’s work…it would be better to question why she had to wash anything at all, while her father did nothing more useful than mend clocks” (Williams 2017). Indeed, enlightened though she may be, Belle continues to exist as a nurturer: first towards her father then later extending to the Beast as well, as a domestic servant, and as a romantic interest. The added mechanical aptitude her character demonstrates exists as little more than a personality quirk: while Chbosky and Spiliotopoulos tease at Belle seeking fulfillment in the form of a career or wanting “adventure in the great wide somewhere,” in the end her journey begins and ends with her relationship with and value to a man, just as in the first film. If anything, the classic narrative of a female character existing solely as half of a romantic relationship is made somehow sadder when the character is afforded the agency to potentially exist beyond the trappings of romance, then said opportunity is truncated in favour of romance.

A further problematic aspect of the version of feminism portrayed in the 2017 reimagining with respect to gender roles involves LeFou, proudly advertised as Disney’s first openly queer character. While positive LGBTQ2IA representation is direly needed in mainstream and widely accessible media, emphasis must be placed on the positive descriptor in order for the queer community to benefit. As for LeFou, in the first film he was portrayed as a weak, simpering, unattractive foil to Gaston’s hypermasculine character. In the update, all of the same qualities are true plus an overt attraction to Gaston has been added to the mix, an aspect played for laughs by Josh Gad, the straight actor cast as LeFou. Throughout the film, the queer character embodied by Gad is clearly meant to serve exclusively as comic relief. While the original character succeeded in meeting that purpose effectively and without complication, by adding a queer identity to him the audience has shifted from laughing at a straight upper-class white man to laughing at a marginalized person. While the addition of LeFou’s queerness may not, of its own merit, automatically incite punching down, the fact that the stereotypically queer aspects of his characterization are the butt of the intended jokes surely does. The jokes that the viewer is intended to find funny with regards to LeFou are centred exclusively around his attraction to Gaston and his effeminate gender presentation. This character is by no means a celebration of queer people or queer culture, he instead serves to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about what masculinity should look like. When men are criticized for exhibiting traditionally feminine coded traits, that same criticism serves to devalue women and the feminine through the implication that the subject is somehow lesser for displaying said traits.

Unfortunately, this concern over a problematic representation of marginalized demographics must similarly be extended to the decision of Bill Condon, the director of the 2017 film, to cast Black actors in two of the servant roles: those of Madame Garderobe (Audra McDonald) and Plumette (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Condon, a white man, proudly mentioned a commitment to diversity in several interviews given as part of the film’s press tour. In fact, the updated film features exactly one more featured actor of colour than its 1991 predecessor, in which LeFou is portrayed by Latinx actor Jessi Corti. Following a recent trend in films, both Garderobe and Plumette are established as Black women in human form yet spend most of the film in a non-human form. While this is also true of the white characters in the film, and while it is not inherently a problematic plot device in and of itself, the fact that there have been a rash of films in which Black characters are replaced with animals or even inanimate objects has given rise to an uncomfortable trope. The Princess and the Frog (2009), Spies in Disguise (2019), and Soul (2020) all feature Black characters being literally dehumanized and spending the majority of their films in non-human form. All but one are Disney films. Centring Black characters and Black actresses is an undeniably positive thing in white-dominated media, however, as noted by writer Olivia Mazzucato, a woman of colour, “it becomes problematic when minor moments are touted as championing diversity without looking at the way in which people of color function within the narrative” (Mazzucato 2017). As modern feminism should always include the lived experiences and struggles of women of colour in the narrative, it is imperative to consider the subtle systemic racism evident in a piece of media. Feminism without intersectionality is ineffective and inherently flawed.

It’s difficult to consider what an appropriate feminist retelling of Beauty and the Beast would have looked like. The film is at its core a story of female submission, and even had the film’s minimal efforts towards feminism been effective, a major re-imagining of the story would have been necessary to deliver an appropriately feminist offering. As it is, the array of misguided attempts to reconcile a deeply anti-feminist plot with a modern audience are not unlike slapping a new label on an old product. In fact, by claiming that the film has been reworked to include a feminist narrative then failing to deliver on that claim, filmmakers have done a disservice to both the feminist movement and the audience. Children’s movies with feminist heroes and feminist storylines absolutely exist. Even movies within the princess genre can display thoughtful feminist content, as witnessed by Disney’s Frozen (2013) and its sequel Frozen II (2019). Beauty and the Beast (2017), however, does not. Telling children that it is, is disingenuous and harmful to their concept of positive female representation. While the filmmakers behind Beauty and the Beast (2017) surely entered the project with good intentions, their efforts fell far short of anything that could be accurately called feminist. In the future, Disney would likely find it advantageous to choose those with a solid understanding of the values they’re trying to embody to helm their projects. Perhaps they might even consider hiring a woman or two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Beauty and the Beast. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, performances by Paige

O’Hara, Robby Benson, and Richard White, Walt Disney Pictures, 1991.

Beauty and the Beast. Directed by Bill Condon, performances by Emma Watson, Dan Stevens,

and Luke Evans, Walt Disney Pictures, 2017.

Blasberg, Derek. “Emma Watson, Rebel Belle.” Variety Fair, March 2017,

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/02/emma-watson-cover-story. Accessed 15 March 2021.

Mazzucato, Olivia. “Reel Representation: Diversity in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is Less Radical

Than Disney Claims.” Daily Bruin, 17 March 2017, https://dailybruin.com/2017/03/17/reel-representation-diversity-in-beauty-and-the-beast-is-less-radical-than-disney-claims. Accessed 15 March 2021.

The Princess and the Frog. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, performances by Anika

Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, and Keith David, Walt Disney Pictures, 2009.

Soul. Directed Pete Doctor, performances by Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, and Graham Norton, Walt

Disney Pictures, 2020.

Spies in Disguise. Directed by Troy Quane and Nick Bruno, performances by Will Smith, Tom

Holland, and Ben Mendelsohn, 20^th Century Fox, 2019.

Thompson, Becky. “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave

Feminism.” Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 336-360, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178747. Accessed 15 March 2021.

Williams, Zoe. “Beauty and the Beast: Feminist or Fraud?” The Guardian, 19 March 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/19/beauty-and-the-beast-feminist-or-fraud. Accessed 15 March 2021.

Zeitz, J. “Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s- Second Wave Feminism

as a Case Study.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 43, no. 4, Oct 2008, pp. 673-688, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40543229. Accessed 15 March 2021.