The romance of Beauty and the Beast is both ancient and timeless. Countless retellings attest to its enduring power. Because the central elements are easily recognizable and quite malleable, it can carry myriad meanings and allow for nuanced commentary on love. As such, it provides a lens for examining contemporary views on the transformative power of love.
Before turning to individual expressions, it is useful to first examine the core story and its themes. So, then: the story consists of a beauty (usually female), who must sacrifice herself (often in marriage) to a loathsome beast (usually male). In most cases, the beauty comes to love the beast, and the beast becomes either human or less loathsome as a result of love. The earliest versions may have provided instruction for girls on how to conduct themselves in courtship and marriage. They encode fear of sexual intimacy and resolution in the form of either enjoyment or acceptance of marital obligations. The power of truth, trust and redemptive love are resonant themes, and many scholars interpret the story as one of maturation and integration of the dark parts of the Self.
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The music video for Meatloaf’s I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) (1993) takes the tale on mostly straight. The visual narrative begins with a text prologue that puts the viewer securely in Meatloaf-as-the-Beast’s point of view, by divulging that he has been following his Beauty through the years and the universe. That journey is paralleled immediately by the police chasing the Beast on a motorcycle. From there, it juxtaposes the story of Beast and Beauty’s romance with the continuing manhunt and ends with Beauty joining a transformed Meatloaf on his motorcycle and riding off into the sunset.
The song itself is also predominantly in Meatloaf-as-the-Beast’s point of view. He, like legendary Orpheus, will ‘run right into Hell and back’ for love. Like beastly Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, he’s crazy and lonely (‘Maybe I’m lonely, that’s all I’m qualified to be’) and no one can save him but Beauty. Beauty enters late in the song, finally moved by his protests to learn about him, specifically his ability to transport her physically and sexually. After he assures her of his competence and willingness, she challenges him again, singing that he will forget how he feels and cheat on her. He promises that he will not and finally earns her.
As a whole, the video examines the neuroses of a man in love and the obstacles he must overcome to win his lover’s heart. The police chase, as well as Beast spying on Beauty’s forest bath, invite the viewer speculate on the line between love and obsession. Even so, Beauty’s love transforms Meatloaf from monster to man, affirming love’s redemption; the police in the rearview provide a deterrent to reversing that journey. Considering industry abusers like Chris Brown, the video’s awareness of the potential for violence seems prescient.
By contrast, Annie Leibovitz’s Beauty and the Beast for Vogue (2005) is peaceful in its stillness. In the photographic essay, Drew Barrymore’s Beauty appears transcendent and ethereal next to her earthy lion-Beast. Each two-page spread places a haute-couture Beauty in a potentially familiar tableau. On each, there is a line from a version of Beauty and the Beast and a caption that alludes to the source of the tableau.
For example, in ‘A Haunting Melody’, Beauty, surrounded by masked musicians, leans against a piano and stares into the distance. Read with the text–‘Sometimes Beauty heard music and voices floating through the lonely castle, but she never saw a single soul”the photo illuminates Beauty’s loneliness and Beast’s blindness to her appeal. Each photograph draws out different elements of the story. It ends happily with Beauty reclining against the Beast. The cover for that issue of Vogue reprises the final page in clear reference to common depictions of the Major Arcana Tarot card, Strength, which refers to self-mastery over the inner beast.
In choosing Barrymore, more often known for her talent and independence than her physical beauty, Leibovitz signals for the viewer that this will not be a traditional redemption tale, but one of female agency and personal transformation. Barrymore’s sight lines underscore that reading: the spread opens with her making eye contact with the reader, signaling her agency in choosing to go to the Beast; the cover, which is the actual close of the story, shows both Beauty and Beast making eye contact with the reader, indicating her renewed agency in love.
Interestingly, Leibovitz’s Beast does not transform. While this can be interpreted Beauty learning to see with her heart, better reading might be that Beast, through his strangeness and his gifts has given Beauty ‘the understanding she longed for’ (Swan 364). Further, Beauty has matured into ‘an acceptance of her thinking self as well as more sensitive powers of perception and intuition’ (Swan 365). She accepts Beast as he is, and, in so doing, accepts the animal part of herself as well. As such, this Beauty and the Beast comments on the love of self as much as romantic love, which seems a stirringly appropriate (and redeeming) message for an industry so often taken to task for holding women to impossible ideals.
Once Upon a Time, especially the episode ‘Skin Deep,’ twists Beauty and the Beast to encode cowardice, obsession, and failed redemption while still holding out hope for true love with mutual agency. The show tells the stories of fairy tale characters who have been cursed into our world by Snow White’s Evil Queen. ‘Skin Deep’ gives the backstory of Mr. Gold, already known to be Rumplestiltskin, revealing him also to be the Beast of Beauty and the Beast. In the present, Mr. Gold has been burgled by Moe French, owner of Game of Thorns flower shop, because Mr. Gold took away his truck for non-payment of a debt’just in time for Valentine’s Day. In the past, Belle (Beauty) decides to go with Rumplestiltskin to save her kingdom from ogres. While serving as his maid, she falls in love, but when her kiss begins to transform him (through the power of True Love), he rejects her, and later hears she committed suicide. The viewer, however, learns she did not, and in the present is imprisoned in a mental ward.
‘Skin Deep’ first turns on Belle’s heroism. An odd duck of a girl, who longs for the adventures she has read in books, overrules her father to give herself to Rumpelstiltskin. Yet she soon gives up that agency, savior complex leading her to fall for the Beast with a tragic past; she is left vulnerable to his rejection and the Evil Queen’s manipulation. Cowardly Rumpelstiltskin, meanwhile, instead of completing his transformation, chooses his magic and rejects both Belle and change. And in Storybrooke, he becomes so obsessed with the past (symbolized by the chipped cup) he battles with Belle’s father, even in her absence and her father’s amnesia. The Beast affirms his beastliness and Belle’s transition from subject to object is complete.
This Valentine’s Day episode comments on this perversion of redemptive love with several other storylines. Snow White and Prince Charming’s modern equivalents are caught up in an adulterous affair, but a card-giving mishap forces Snow to realize they have no future unless he leaves his wife. Red Riding Hood/the Wolf engages in predatory sexual behavior, substituting lust for love. Sheriff Emma Swan (Snow and Charming’s daughter, though no one knows it) with only the love of her son, struggles to learn to trust enough to love. Finally, Cinderella is an overworked, unwed teenaged mother whose boyfriend works for Moe French. Her patience, beauty and fidelity leads to a last-act proposal that reaffirms the traditional theme of redemptive love. Each Beauty in her own story dramatizes a different way of dealing with ‘the Beast.’ In that way, traditionalist-Disney embraces a more feminist ethos on one level, while still being didactic and demonstrative of the true redemptive power of love.
Each of the three iterations of Beauty and the Beast offers a different take on the theme. I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That), while concerned about the lines between love and obsession, worship and abuse, concludes that love can transform a monster into a man but warns that once an abuser, always the potential for abuse. Beauty and the Beast concerns itself with Beauty’s transformation, the journey to self-acceptance, but allows for a partnership of equals who respect each other as they are. ‘Skin Deep’ resists a single interpretation, instead providing a critical filter through which to explore relationships, and yet, Once Upon a Time, the frame narrative, consistently reaffirms the redemptive power of love. Of the three, only Annie Leibovitz’s photographic essay effectively deli its meversssage within its own frame. ‘Skin Deep’ is as confusing as Meatloaf is confused.
Beauty and the Beast resists a single, trite interpretation by its very nature. The choice of point of view allows the exploration of Beast’s journey, Beauty’s journey or community visions/multiple journeys. The choice of transforming or not transforming the Beast provides the opportunity to comment on vulnerability, openness, self-acceptance, courage and cowardice. Even the role of the community can change the message’the police provide a deterrent to obsessive, abusive behavior, the absence of a community recommends a focus on the self rather than on the other, or at least learning to love yourself first, individuals in a community provide warning about the deformations of love. As a motif and theme, Beauty and the Beast endures precisely because of its susceptibility to contextualization, but in the end, it always, at some level, asserts the power of love.
- Leibovitz, Annie. Beauty and the Beast. 2005. Photographs. Vogue. April 2005. ‘Morning Beauty | Drew Barrymore by Annie Leibowitz.’ Fashion Gone Rogue. Web. 24 January 2011.
- I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That). Dir. Michael Bay. Perf. Meatloaf. 1993. Music Video.
- ‘Skin Deep.’ Once Upon a Time. Writ. Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz and Jane Espenson. Dir. Milan Cheylov. ABC 2012. Television.
- Swan, Susan Z. ‘Gothic Drama in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Subverting Traditional Romance by Transcending the Animal-Human Paradox.’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (1999): 350-369. Academia.edu. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.
