See, to princess critics, Beauty and the Beast is about bestiality. Yup, you read that right. But that’s what happens when you take things too literally. “Beauty and the Beast is about a bookish fish-out-of-water named Belle who shacks up with a hulking animal resembling an upright water buffalo with dreadlocks,” proclaims Thelma Adams in The Observer. “He’s a beast! La la la. She’s a girl! La la la. She could be his guest—as an entrée! Anything that happens between these two that isn’t verbal jousting is bestiality.” But this implies that Belle falls in love with the Beast because he’s a beast. As in, she looks at him and she’s like, “Finally! A talking animal! I’m so into animals, but I couldn’t find one I could discuss literature with. This is perfect!” That’s ridiculous. The whole point of this movie is that she sees the man within the beast. She looks beyond his ugliness and sees his inner beauty. Jeez.

  But there is a point to the Beast’s beastliness. And it is wrapped up with sexuality. There’s a reason the enchantress turned the prince into a beast instead of, say, a frog, or an object like his servants. He’s a beast because beasts are aggressive, strong, stubborn, powerful, and selfish — a beast holds within himself all the basest urges of men. The Beast has been transformed into what the prince was to begin with — a man, without a woman’s touch. Or, to put it another way, a man without a woman worth channeling those urges towards protecting, loving, and supporting. So, it’s true that one of those urges is sexual. There’s a sort of raw sexuality that emanates from the Beast, but it isn’t his beastliness that is sexual. His sexual urges are represented by his beastly form.

  I mean, think about it. Gaston also emanates sexuality. That’s kind of all he is. “Every last inch of me’s covered in hair!” he sings, ripping his shirt open. (You know who else is covered in hair? The Beast!) Gaston brawls, he spits, he shoots, he’s square-jawed and deep-voiced, and he’s got “biceps to spare.” All this signals his masculine sexual energy. But the prince, when he’s revealed as a prince, is more than that, in a way that Gaston is not. “The half-buried truth about Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is that, in the end, the prince is a letdown,” writes Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. And there’s some truth to that. Nine-year-old me certainly found him kind of weird-looking, when I first saw him as a prince, without really being able to say why. But it isn’t because we want him to go back to being a beast. It’s because there’s something appealing to women about the raw sexuality of men. But in real life, a man can’t be just his sexual urges — the way Gaston is — he’s got to be more than that. So, when the Beast turns back into a man, we know that that sexual energy is still there within him, but it’s been tempered by the love he feels for Belle such that he won’t hurt her the way Gaston would.

  So, the Beast’s beastliness is a symbol for the way in which, as a man, he had allowed his base urges to take him over. And Belle’s first clue that, perhaps, the Beast is more than what he seems is when, later in the movie, he uses those same urges to protect her, not hurt her. But, to the princess critics, this means that Belle’s relationship with the Beast is not just bestial, it’s also a product of Stockholm Syndrome — the psychological term for when a hostage falls in love with her captor. Yup, that’s right, the princess critics are psychologists now.

  “Belle gets pretty familiar with the Beast's moods and what will set him off, which may seem like she's getting to know him as a friend, but is really just an innate survival instinct telling her to tread lightly around his monstrous ass so he doesn't rip her in half in a fit of spectacular rage,” write Simone Bower and Megan B. on Cracked. But, according to a real psychologist, Frank Ochberg, victims of Stockholm Syndrome “can’t talk. They can’t eat. They can’t move. They can’t use a toilet without permission,” and they go through “a period of feeling that they are going to die.” For all the Beast’s yelling and stomping around, he never threatens Belle’s life in any way. With Beauty and the Beast, more than, perhaps, any other Disney princess movie, the princess critics are grasping at straws.

  So, what does happen? The Beast wants very much for Belle to like him — his life depends on it — but he has no idea where to start. “She’s so beautiful and I’m . . . well, look at me!” the Beast rages. He can’t imagine anyone being able to see past his ugly exterior. He couldn’t see past the enchantress’ ugliness when she was dressed as a crone, why should Belle see through his ugliness now? “You must help her to see past all that,” his servants tell him. “I don’t know how,” the Beast responds. This is the Beast’s problem: he doesn’t know how to control his urges, he’s never tried — never had a reason to try. But his servants try to counsel him. And, in doing so, they lay out the qualities of a real man — not a man ruled by his urges — a man in control of them, and able to use them to care for and protect the woman he loves. He must be a gentleman. “Give her a debonair smile.” “Impress her with your rapier wit.” “But don’t frighten the girl.” “Be gentle” “Shower her with compliments.” “But be sincere.” “And above all: you must control your temper.” So now we’ve got a clear alternative to Gaston’s version of masculinity. A man versus a gentleman.

  So the Beast, trying to act like a gentleman, asks Belle to join him for dinner. But Belle refuses (not the behavior of a frightened captive). She wants nothing to do with him. So the Beast, to save his own life, must woo her. And he does his best, regulating the tone of his voice, and even saying “please.” But Belle continues to refuse, and the Beast — still a creature of his basest impulses — ends up yelling at her and storming out. “She’ll never see me as anything but a monster,” he moans in despair. To him, Belle is reacting to his external form. But, really, its his internal self she finds beastly. So, on the one hand, the Beast doesn’t seem like a particularly nice guy. On the other hand, he was trying to be polite — which, it’s clear, is contrary to his nature. Yes, he’s doing all this out of a selfish desire to save himself. But it’s a start.

  Then Belle tries to escape. Out of curiosity, Belle enters the forbidden West Wing — the Beast’s lair — and finds the enchanted rose. Mesmerized, she removes the protective glass cover and reaches out to touch the glowing flower. But, just before she touches it, the Beast swoops in and grabs the glass cover. “Do you know what you could have done?!” he screams at her. It’s frightening, yes, but the Beast has a point. When the last petal of the enchanted rose falls, the Beast’s curse becomes permanent. What if Belle had knocked off another petal? Or all the petals? The Beast is, understandably, concerned. But his gruff demeanor and inability to control his feelings, frighten Belle and convince her to break her promise. She runs from the castle, leaps onto her horse, and rides off into the forest. The Beast immediately sees that he’s let his temper run away with him again and is ashamed. He’s starting to see that there’s another way to be.

  The forest is full of wolves. Now, we have no way of knowing for sure what the Beast’s motives are in following Belle into the forest. Presumably, one of them is the fact that Belle is his only chance of becoming human again and she’s getting away — his selfishness again. But we can also assume that he knows the forest around his castle is full of bloodthirsty wolves and he doesn’t want Belle to be eaten alive. Whatever his motives, the Beast follows her and finds her losing a battle with the pack of wolves. And it is in this moment that the Beast uses his brute force and animal aggression in service of protecting someone else for the first time. The Beast’s own life is in danger. But he leaps at the wolves — biting, tearing, scratching — and frightens them off. But not before being injured himself. So injured that he can’t get up — would die, if no one helped him.

  And so we come to a pivotal moment in the narrative. Belle sees the Beast, lying helpless in the snow, and is initially prepared to leave him there. He’s a beast, he imprisoned her, she’s free to go. But she chooses to stay. She knows that he saved her life — without him the wolves would surely have killed her — and she know she owes him his life in return. So she brings him back to the castle and tends his wounds. It’s worth noting here that, from this point on, Belle is basically there of her own free will. The wolves were gone, she could have run. Or she could have brought the Beast back to the castle and then run. But she stays, and takes care of him. Yes, technically she is still his prisoner, because those are the terms of his deal. But it’s important that she has made a choice here. She isn’t a helpless damsel in distress, imprisoned by a ruthless monster, doing whatever she can to survive. She has chosen to stay — she’s willing to give him a second chance.

  The moment that changes Belle and the Beast from enemies to friends happens as she tends to his wounds. He wants to act like a beast, licking at the gashes on his arms. She wants to act like a human, pouring hot water into a bowl and soaking a cloth to clean his wound. And as they struggle over whose method will win — beast or human — they begin to argue. She presses the cloth to the Beasts arm and he roars in pain, making the household objects cower. “That hurts!” he yells at her. But Belle isn’t cowering. “If you’d hold still it wouldn’t hurt as much!” Belle yells back. “If you hadn’t run away, this wouldn’t have happened,” the Beast counters. “If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away!” she shoots back. “Well you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing!” “Well you should learn to control your temper!”

  And there it is: learn to control your temper. Belle is the first person in the Beast’s entire life who has given as good as she got. Belle is not cowering in fear, she’s the same Belle she was in the village — a girl who knows exactly who she is. She knows the Beast was in the wrong, and she holds him to it. And, as they bicker back and forth, the one thing the Beast has no answer for is this: learn to control your temper. It’s not, you see, that the Beast must change completely into someone else. It’s only that he has to learn to control his urges. When he was fighting the wolves, the Beast’s temper was an asset. In dealing with Belle, it’s a hindrance. Belle is telling him he can exert control over his urges and best them. “This might sting a little,” she tells him as she applies the damp cloth. And the Beast who, a moment earlier, might have yelled out in pain, simply closes his eyes, grunts, and bears it. He can reign himself in. He can get himself in check.

  In this moment, suddenly, he is learning how to be a man. “Thank you,” Belle says, “for saving my life.” The Beast’s startled expression says it all. He is being treated, for the first time, like a man. And being treated like one, he acts like one. “You’re welcome,” he tells her, his voice quiet and calm.

  “I’ve never felt this way about anyone,” the Beast — who is suddenly wearing clothes and walking on two legs instead of four — says as he watches Belle walk in the snow. In recognizing him as a man instead of a beast, Belle has awakened the Beast’s humanity. Suddenly he is capable of love — of tenderness. And the object of his love is the woman who saw him for what he was inside. And Belle, for her part, is coming to realize that “there’s something in him that I simply didn’t see.” Belle, who is able to see inside the hearts of the people she meets, is surprised to find the Beast is different than she originally thought. But he’s different because she inspired him to be different. And she reaches out to him, actively teaching him now how to be a man. She shows him how to be gentle — feeding the birds without frightening them. She shows him how to be civilized — sipping his soup instead of devouring it with his face in the bowl. She reads to him. She teaches him to dance. She’s civilizing him. Giving him a reason to be a man instead of a beast.

  And the Beast, who is eagerly learning all these lessons, feels that he wants to do something for Belle. This “selfish” beast, who couldn’t understand why Belle would want to take her father’s place, suddenly wants to do something for someone else. And what does he choose to do for her? He gives her a library. Belle, who’s been seeking acceptance all her life, who was seen as odd in her village because of her love of reading, is given a library. It’s the perfect gift and it shows that Belle has found what she was looking for: someone who accepts her for who she is. The Beast’s desire to give her a library, — and his delight in her joyful reaction to receiving it — show that the Beast, more than anyone else in Belle’s life, sees her for who she truly is. “It’s yours,” the Beast tells her. Not, you can come here whenever you want, or, you can read any of these books. It’s yours. He has given something away to someone he loves. By being truly herself, Belle has inspired the Beast to find his true self. And, in becoming his true self, he is becoming someone who can give Belle what she needs: acceptance as a thinking person, not simply a domestic object.

  To the princess critics, though, all of this means that Beauty in the Beast sends the message that a woman can change a man. Meet a jerk, love him enough, and he’ll become a prince. That’s what the princess critics think this movie is about. It promotes “the idea that the right woman can ‘tame’ a beastly, abusive, troubled man and turn him into a prince,” says Peggy Orenstein in Huffington Post. “The love story in this one is one of the most disturbing ones in the princess lineup and rather regressive,” writes Mari Rogers of the Feminist Disney Tumblr. But that’s not it. It’s too simplistic — as usual. The idea is actually this: if a man is truly a good man (like we know the Beast is, because he is a prince and because he was chosen for this curse) but he’s allowed himself to be ruled by his urges, a woman’s love can cause him to channel those urges and use them in service of the woman he loves. Had Belle tried to civilize Gaston, it wouldn’t have worked. His beautiful exterior concealed a warped and evil soul. Belle doesn’t try to teach the Beast anything until she sees — after he rescues her — that glimmer of humanity and goodness inside him.

  So then we come to the Beast’s most important moment in the movie. After a night of dinner and dancing, in which it seems clear that Belle and the Beast are falling in love, the Beast asks Belle, “Are you happy here with me?” Are you happy here . . . with me. The Beast wants to know if he has made Belle as happy as she has made him. Her happiness matters to him. And Belle says “yes.” She is happy. She wouldn’t say she was if she wasn’t, we know that about her. She’s found acceptance in the unlikeliest of places, but she’s found it and she’s happy.

  But there is one more thing she needs for her happiness to be complete: to see her father, to know if he’s okay. And the Beast immediately grants her wish with his magic mirror. But Maurice, determined to find Belle and rescue her, is lost in the woods, sick and alone. The animation in this sequence is brilliant. Somehow, the Disney artists suddenly make the Beast look like a man. He’s still the Beast, nothing has changed, but his facial expression and something about his eyes render him human. “I release you. You’re no longer my prisoner,” he tells her. He believes he has sealed his doom. She won’t come back. She can’t possibly love him enough to stay if she doesn’t have to. But he does it anyway. He condemns himself to eternal life as a beast. And he does it for love. “I had to,” he says afterwards. “I love her.” His transformation is complete.

  Upon rescuing her father and returning home, Belle finds that Gaston has put into motion a diabolical plot. He is going to lock Maurice up in an insane asylum if Belle doesn’t agree to marry him. One man is willing to give Belle up out of love for her, another is wiling to commit a crime in order to force her to be his. Which one is the real man? “He’s not the monster, Gaston, you are!” Belle tells him, after showing the townspeople that the Beast is real. It has become abundantly clear who is the monster and who is the man. But the monster looks like a man and the man looks like a monster. Both Gaston and the Beast have acted on their feelings for Belle, and each have become more themselves. Gaston has become a true villain, willing to risk innocent lives to claim his prize. The Beast has become a true hero, willing to give up his own happiness in order to ensure the happiness of the woman he loves. The contrast couldn’t be clearer. True love, the movie tells us, is a meeting of hearts and minds — a union in which both people accept one another as the individuals they are and are willing to make sacrifices for the happiness of the other. It’s not just implied through symbolism this time. We’ve seen it develop and grow, and play itself out within the plot of the movie. The moment of true love, writ large.

  Now that Gaston knows about the Beast — and about Belle’s feelings for him — he’s got to kill him. He locks Belle and Maurice in a cellar and leads a mob of angry villagers to the Beast’s castle. Gaston is a hunter looking for a trophy — a trophy that is just as much Belle herself, as it is the Beast’s head. Initially the Beast is content to die. He thinks he’ll never see Belle again and knows his life is essentially over. While the household objects mobilize to defend the castle, the Beast remains locked in his tower, resigned to his fate. But Belle is able to break out of the cellar and follows hot on Gaston’s heels, intent on saving the Beast from the murderous mob. When the Beast sees Belle riding into danger, he rallies.

  Both Gaston and the Beast are fighting for Belle. But Gaston wants to possess her and the Beast wants to keep her safe. “Did you honestly think she’d want you, when she had someone like me?” Gaston taunts the Beast. But he’s got it wrong. The Beast doesn’t think Belle wants him. He just loves her and wants to protect her. Still, even though he could have killed Gaston, he shows compassion. His internal transformation is complete. He is a gentleman. He doesn’t kill Gaston, but tells him to leave and never come back. And Gaston, who a moment earlier had been sobbing and pleading for his life, leaps up and stabs the Beast in the back. He’s decidedly not a gentleman.

 

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