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A couple of days ago, apropos the newest version of The Phantom of the Opera, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making claims. Quasimodo, the Mummy (I'm talking about the original Karloff version here, haven't seen the remake), Erik the Phantom - they'd never cheat. They have no messy relations dropping by at inconvenient hours. They move heaven and earth and kill for their beauty. But the utmost they ever demand from the Esmeraldas and Christines and Helens of the world is a kiss. A fully consumed relationship is presented by the narrative as impossible. (Except in the actual French Beauty and the Beast , which was written by a woman, not a man.) (Which is the difference to the Dracula/Blue Beard model of the Gothic Romance, in which the heroine actually does get violated in one way or the other, or if she falls for her Blue Beard voluntarily, quickly learns that she should not have.) I was reminded of this when rereading the SFX Christmas issue cover story, which is about Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Because of course King Kong is the beauty & beast principle taken to the extreme.
Kong is the ultimate hero of the Beauty & Beast principle, something even the creators of the original '30s movie were aware of when teasing Fay Wray that she was going to get "the tallest, darkest leading man of Hollywood". Quoth Peter Jackson about his version, which is going to be played by Andy Serkis in front of a blue screen and gorrilla'd by Weta Digital:
Kong has never felt a single bit of empathy for a living creature in his long life. Our King Kong is very battered, he's very ancient, he's the last of his particular race on the island. He did have a mother and father, but they're now dead and there are no more after him. He's the final survivor and he's a very old gorilla.
"Jackson will place more emphasis on the psychological aspects of the relationship between Darrow and Kong, who initially attempts to kill the actress before discovering the harbours feelings for her", adds the magazine. Yep, that would be our Beast, alright. He of the dark and bloody past, transformed by love. Given he's not just a different species but a different size altogether, there can be no physical aspect, so no matter whether Beauty is going to scorn him or requite at least some of his feelings, the relationship will stay in the chaste medieval pattern of knight and lady. And he will die for her. That's another quintessential part of the story, again with the notable exception of the French original. Kong dies. Quasimodo dies, though after Esmeralda. The Phantom dies (in most versions; Gaston Leroux and Susan Kay, in Phantom of the Opera and Phantom respectively, let him die a few days/weeks after the showdown/kiss/redemption, whereas most film versions let him die in a more gory fashion immediately after the showdown, and Webber leaves his fate open to debate in the musical) . You have to look for characters who only bear an echo of the beauty & beast pattern in order to find survivors.
(Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre comes to mind, though he gets blinded, and he's more formed after the somewhat different Byronic pattern anyway. Heathcliff decidedly does not die, until the end of the novel when he wants to, long, long after his own beauty has gone, but then Heathcliff is among other things almost Emily Bronte's way of savagely attacking the genre. See his sarcastic ridicule of Isabella for believing him to be a Beast transformable by love.)
(Oh, and there are also Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs; in that case, the Beast-ness lies not in an ugly exterior but in a monstrous interior. Of course, when Harris instead of just toying with the scenario adopted it completely in Hannibal, people, by and large, were appalled… because in addition to Beast actually getting Beauty, Beauty had to become a Beast as well, and not in a comely Shrek way.)
Of couse, the great appeal of the Beauty & Beast scenario lies in other factors as well. Sympathy for the outsider, the outcast, which the beast always is, and the belief in the border-crossing, transformative power of love. Beasts in all their incarnations make the handsome young lovers who come attached to the beauties look pale in comparison. In the original Mummy, you've got to pity David Manners who was stuck with playing that kind of role in a lot of Universal films at the time, because one scene of Karloff's Imhotep and Helen Chandler staring at each other with minimum dialogue has so much more power than his endless protestations of love to her. (And if Manners was pale against Karloff in The Mummy and against Lugosi in Dracula, you can imagine how he fared stuck with the two of them at the same time in The Black Cat. Makes me think of Bruce Boxleitner's rueful comment on the Babylon 5 DVDs, regarding how a scene with Peter Jurasik or Andreas Katsulas was tough because they were so very good that they inevitably, even if the scene wasn't about them, got the lion's share of attention, but if you had to play a scene with both of them at the same time, you might as well be the wallpaper.) There hasn't been a version the Phantom story in which Raoul didn't get the hostility of the majority of the audience. And hey, Hugo actually did write Phoebus as despicable.
King Kong is somewhat different in that Beauty hooking up with Kong really isn't in the cards. Now matter whether it's the original's Anne Darrow or Dawn as played by Jessica Lange in the 70s' remake, their handsome love interests aren't perceived as rivals for the poor beast in the same way and hence don't get audience resentment. Incidentally, it probably says something about changing times that said love interest was a sailor in the 30s film, an enviromentalist in the 70s version, and will be a playwright (played by Adrien Brody) in Jackson's film. Audience hostility instead traditionally goes to Carl Denham, the entrepeneur who wants to exploit Kong and hence has the bright idea to bring him back to New York, and also has some unsavoury designs on Anne Darrow. Still, I'm willing to bet even the not-resented love interests won't get sighed over the way the big ape will be. It's in the nature of the story. The beast may always lose on screen, but he never loses the audience.
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not. Stephen Sondheim's musical Passion actually is a pretty straight forward telling of the Beauty & Beast story with the beast being female. Fosca is intelligent but ugly, intense and highly manipulative. Giorgio is the handsome beauty who has an equally good looking love interest, Clara. Now I love Passion, but as far as I know, it wasn't very successful. I do recall reviews declaring themselves freaked out by Fosca the stalker, and the fact that Giorgio ultimately gives in and for one night, after which she, in true beast fashion, dies, requites her passion. What was Sondheim saying here, they demanded, that enough stalking by an ugly intense person would eventually pay off in love? Well, you can surely read it that way - though the way the musical meditates on the nature of passion, and the two views expressed by Giorgio early and late in the story, one that love is selfless and thinks of the other first, and the other, later view, that love is not convenient but selfish and all-consuming, is more complex than that - but what I wonder is why the critics were so freaked out as if the story was something new on stage. (Or novel. Or screen.) It wasn't. Just the gender was unusual.
Still, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that an ugly/deformed/somehow otherwise outcast woman falling for a beautiful young man is perceived as creepy and pathetic, whereas an ugly/deformed/otherwise outcast man falling for a beautiful young woman is perceived as romantic. In the screen adaption of Stephen King's Misery, psychotic Annie Wilkes gets a rare moment of not-King-authored humanity when Paul, and the audience, realize that she has fallen in love with him. (She's not in the novel; btw, generally I much prefer the novel which is a great treatise on the process of writing itself.) And is aware of the futility of it, because "people like you do not fall in love with people like me". Not in popular culture, anyway. If Jackson had made Kong into a female gorilla, going after Adrien Brody instead, you can bet the fans would be screaming for his head now before anyone has ever seen any scene, and the critics would be sharpening their knives.
Trying to think of other rare examples of female beasts, I'm wondering whether Ayesha counts (aka She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, thought up by Henry R. Haggard). We certainly have a handsome male beauty here with a pretty female love interest which makes Ayesha jealous, but Ayesha herself is beautiful beyond compare. Her beast-ness lies in her immortality and amorality. So no, she doesn't count. If anyone can think of female Quasimodos and male Esmeraldas, pray tell.
ide_cyan quoted a rather interesting essay on the beauty and the beast myth. The gist of which - or at least of the excerpt - was that one of the beast's chief attractions lay in the fact that he's such a devoted, faithful lover, yet without the disadvantage of actually making claims. Quasimodo, the Mummy (I'm talking about the original Karloff version here, haven't seen the remake), Erik the Phantom - they'd never cheat. They have no messy relations dropping by at inconvenient hours. They move heaven and earth and kill for their beauty. But the utmost they ever demand from the Esmeraldas and Christines and Helens of the world is a kiss. A fully consumed relationship is presented by the narrative as impossible. (Except in the actual French Beauty and the Beast , which was written by a woman, not a man.) (Which is the difference to the Dracula/Blue Beard model of the Gothic Romance, in which the heroine actually does get violated in one way or the other, or if she falls for her Blue Beard voluntarily, quickly learns that she should not have.) I was reminded of this when rereading the SFX Christmas issue cover story, which is about Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. Because of course King Kong is the beauty & beast principle taken to the extreme. Kong is the ultimate hero of the Beauty & Beast principle, something even the creators of the original '30s movie were aware of when teasing Fay Wray that she was going to get "the tallest, darkest leading man of Hollywood". Quoth Peter Jackson about his version, which is going to be played by Andy Serkis in front of a blue screen and gorrilla'd by Weta Digital:
Kong has never felt a single bit of empathy for a living creature in his long life. Our King Kong is very battered, he's very ancient, he's the last of his particular race on the island. He did have a mother and father, but they're now dead and there are no more after him. He's the final survivor and he's a very old gorilla.
"Jackson will place more emphasis on the psychological aspects of the relationship between Darrow and Kong, who initially attempts to kill the actress before discovering the harbours feelings for her", adds the magazine. Yep, that would be our Beast, alright. He of the dark and bloody past, transformed by love. Given he's not just a different species but a different size altogether, there can be no physical aspect, so no matter whether Beauty is going to scorn him or requite at least some of his feelings, the relationship will stay in the chaste medieval pattern of knight and lady. And he will die for her. That's another quintessential part of the story, again with the notable exception of the French original. Kong dies. Quasimodo dies, though after Esmeralda. The Phantom dies (in most versions; Gaston Leroux and Susan Kay, in Phantom of the Opera and Phantom respectively, let him die a few days/weeks after the showdown/kiss/redemption, whereas most film versions let him die in a more gory fashion immediately after the showdown, and Webber leaves his fate open to debate in the musical) . You have to look for characters who only bear an echo of the beauty & beast pattern in order to find survivors.
(Mr. Rochester of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre comes to mind, though he gets blinded, and he's more formed after the somewhat different Byronic pattern anyway. Heathcliff decidedly does not die, until the end of the novel when he wants to, long, long after his own beauty has gone, but then Heathcliff is among other things almost Emily Bronte's way of savagely attacking the genre. See his sarcastic ridicule of Isabella for believing him to be a Beast transformable by love.)
(Oh, and there are also Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs; in that case, the Beast-ness lies not in an ugly exterior but in a monstrous interior. Of course, when Harris instead of just toying with the scenario adopted it completely in Hannibal, people, by and large, were appalled… because in addition to Beast actually getting Beauty, Beauty had to become a Beast as well, and not in a comely Shrek way.)
Of couse, the great appeal of the Beauty & Beast scenario lies in other factors as well. Sympathy for the outsider, the outcast, which the beast always is, and the belief in the border-crossing, transformative power of love. Beasts in all their incarnations make the handsome young lovers who come attached to the beauties look pale in comparison. In the original Mummy, you've got to pity David Manners who was stuck with playing that kind of role in a lot of Universal films at the time, because one scene of Karloff's Imhotep and Helen Chandler staring at each other with minimum dialogue has so much more power than his endless protestations of love to her. (And if Manners was pale against Karloff in The Mummy and against Lugosi in Dracula, you can imagine how he fared stuck with the two of them at the same time in The Black Cat. Makes me think of Bruce Boxleitner's rueful comment on the Babylon 5 DVDs, regarding how a scene with Peter Jurasik or Andreas Katsulas was tough because they were so very good that they inevitably, even if the scene wasn't about them, got the lion's share of attention, but if you had to play a scene with both of them at the same time, you might as well be the wallpaper.) There hasn't been a version the Phantom story in which Raoul didn't get the hostility of the majority of the audience. And hey, Hugo actually did write Phoebus as despicable.
King Kong is somewhat different in that Beauty hooking up with Kong really isn't in the cards. Now matter whether it's the original's Anne Darrow or Dawn as played by Jessica Lange in the 70s' remake, their handsome love interests aren't perceived as rivals for the poor beast in the same way and hence don't get audience resentment. Incidentally, it probably says something about changing times that said love interest was a sailor in the 30s film, an enviromentalist in the 70s version, and will be a playwright (played by Adrien Brody) in Jackson's film. Audience hostility instead traditionally goes to Carl Denham, the entrepeneur who wants to exploit Kong and hence has the bright idea to bring him back to New York, and also has some unsavoury designs on Anne Darrow. Still, I'm willing to bet even the not-resented love interests won't get sighed over the way the big ape will be. It's in the nature of the story. The beast may always lose on screen, but he never loses the audience.
Which makes me wonder whether the story also works with reversed gender, or doesn't, and if not, why not. Stephen Sondheim's musical Passion actually is a pretty straight forward telling of the Beauty & Beast story with the beast being female. Fosca is intelligent but ugly, intense and highly manipulative. Giorgio is the handsome beauty who has an equally good looking love interest, Clara. Now I love Passion, but as far as I know, it wasn't very successful. I do recall reviews declaring themselves freaked out by Fosca the stalker, and the fact that Giorgio ultimately gives in and for one night, after which she, in true beast fashion, dies, requites her passion. What was Sondheim saying here, they demanded, that enough stalking by an ugly intense person would eventually pay off in love? Well, you can surely read it that way - though the way the musical meditates on the nature of passion, and the two views expressed by Giorgio early and late in the story, one that love is selfless and thinks of the other first, and the other, later view, that love is not convenient but selfish and all-consuming, is more complex than that - but what I wonder is why the critics were so freaked out as if the story was something new on stage. (Or novel. Or screen.) It wasn't. Just the gender was unusual.
Still, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that an ugly/deformed/somehow otherwise outcast woman falling for a beautiful young man is perceived as creepy and pathetic, whereas an ugly/deformed/otherwise outcast man falling for a beautiful young woman is perceived as romantic. In the screen adaption of Stephen King's Misery, psychotic Annie Wilkes gets a rare moment of not-King-authored humanity when Paul, and the audience, realize that she has fallen in love with him. (She's not in the novel; btw, generally I much prefer the novel which is a great treatise on the process of writing itself.) And is aware of the futility of it, because "people like you do not fall in love with people like me". Not in popular culture, anyway. If Jackson had made Kong into a female gorilla, going after Adrien Brody instead, you can bet the fans would be screaming for his head now before anyone has ever seen any scene, and the critics would be sharpening their knives.
Trying to think of other rare examples of female beasts, I'm wondering whether Ayesha counts (aka She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, thought up by Henry R. Haggard). We certainly have a handsome male beauty here with a pretty female love interest which makes Ayesha jealous, but Ayesha herself is beautiful beyond compare. Her beast-ness lies in her immortality and amorality. So no, she doesn't count. If anyone can think of female Quasimodos and male Esmeraldas, pray tell.
