Beauty and the Beast (1991)

photo of the cover for the 2010 blu-ray release of Disney’s 1991 Beauty and the Beast, showing Belle dancing with Beast with Mrs. Potts, Chip, Cogsworth, a French featherduster, and Lumiere in the foreground looking pleased, and the rose in glass sitting beside them

What does she want?

“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere!” Belle sings it to us directly. She gets her adventure, but while the castle is certainly more than the provincial life she feared, being confined there is not a great wide open space. When she leaves the castle to go to her father, she has a second adventure, but again this isn’t a great wide somewhere. She can’t have both of the things she asks for, apparently.

Also notice how she complains that nothing changes in the quiet town where every day is like the one before and then ends up in a castle where everything has been the same day after day for years. In this case, however, she herself brings the change she wants and makes everything different.

What does he want?

It isn’t said directly, but apparently more than being human again the Beast wants to lash out and punish others for his unhappiness. He might want to be human, but he has no hope that it can happen and assumes it never will, so being angry at the world is all there is, along with being angry at himself for causing this mess. My own speculation is that while he doubtless started out blaming everything and everyone but himself, over the years he’s come to admit to himself that his own behavior led the enchantress to cast the spell, and he’s owned up to his own role in his misfortune. But that’s not what will break the spell, so he’s still always ready to spread his misery to anyone in striking range.

How can she be so casual about a sheep chewing the corner off a page in her book? What is wrong with you, Belle? How can you love books and not care what happens to the pages? In my mind she swipes the book away and frowns sternly just before the sheep can take a bite.

I’m uncomfortable every time I see a movie with wolf scenes like this film has. Philippe the horse might have something to fear, but basically wolves don’t attack human beings without a reason like rabies or the human is violently threatening the pack. I’ve heard that European wolves may have been less hesitant to attack people than U.S. wolves are, but scenes like this are essentially Medieval anti-wolf propaganda.

Things I never noticed before:

• For all the talk of how much Gaston is admired and adored, at the start of the story everybody pretty much ignores his pleading for them to get out of his way. He’s not more important than their own business (or gossip).

• The Beast is in body a beast. He’s gigantic, has fangs, has massive paws with ravaging claws. But by all appearances he doesn’t physically harm Maurice in the slightest. He has the power to inflict a nightmarish mauling, but instead places the man in a cell uninjured.

• “I have been burned by you before!”

• The castle staff have been living under this spell for ten years and most days there is nothing to do but lie around idle. I’ve watched Beauty and the Beast several times, and heard “Be Our Guest” even more, but I had not really listened to these lines. Now I finally hear how miserable their lives must be in this near-vacant castle with only the Beast to feed, and the rest of the day (every day) reduced to sheer emptiness.

• Although we the audience have seen the prologue, Belle has not. For all she knows, the Beast has been a beast his entire life. She’s left to figure out for herself that he was once human.

• When Belle sneaks into the west wing of the castle, she’s being spectacularly rude. The enchanted staff have just gone out of their way to break rules for her, and she repays them by slipping off into the one part of the castle she knows she’s not allowed into and where Cogsworth and Lumiere have just begged her not to go. Worse, when she gets into the Beast’s torn-up room and sees the flower in a glass case, she goes right over and takes the case away! It’s the one precious item in a devastated room that gets careful treatment (along with the hand mirror beside it), but she doesn’t respect the painfully obvious intention to keep this flower safe. Her curiosity has led her past common decency and good sense.

• In the song “Something There,” the Beast entertains (though quickly dismisses) the idea that Belle might now care for him. It could be that he is finally coming to see something in himself he hasn’t seen before (or saw only, as a human, in an entitled, privileged, false way): that he is someone worth loving.

• At the end of the movie, Mrs. Potts assures Chip the couple will live happily ever after, but she isn’t saying this to the audience, or not to all of the audience. She’s saying this to her son, because of course this is how you answer a small child; yet the rest of us don’t have to imagine things are as simple as that in a relationship.

• The closing credits have a couple of voice credits for characters labeled “Bimbette.” No. No. No. Ugh.


For a sideways look at the 2017 live-action remake, see here.

Reflections: Dances With Wolves (1990)

photo of the front of the 2018 Shout Factory collector's edition steelbook blu-ray for the film Dances With Wolves, showing Kevin Costner as John Dunbar riding Cisco the horse on open prairie while Two Socks the wolf bounds by behind them on the right
the Shout Factory steelbook release

I saw Dances With Wolves in the theater near the end of 1990 (I was in my teens) and it profoundly affected my life in ways I won’t try to describe here. I saw it at least twice during its original release; the running time of 3+ hours was not an obstacle. It remains one of my top five favorite films, but I rarely watch it because it hurts. The idea of sitting down and viewing it starts to seem too heavy for comfort—but I have also found that I only need to hear the music on a blu-ray menu screen and I wonder why I ever waited.

(It should be said that for a long time part of my reason for not watching was the simple fact of not having access to the right version: only the extended cut was readily available, and I was not enthusiastic about seeing it.)

The film still strikes deeply. I wasn’t just a foolish teenager to be moved by it when it came out.

Among many other things, the movie demonstrates that people see the world in different ways and have different value systems, and you won’t understand others or judge them fairly unless you begin to see from the place where they are. What makes the land yours? Do you have to build permanent houses on it and put up a fence? If you don’t, do you still expect strangers to know it’s yours?

Different scenes along the way intentionally demonstrate that children are witnesses to awful violence, whether these children are white or Indigenous. They are not spared.

Near the close of the story, the film very carefully shows us there are terrible people in the army and also decent people in the army. We are made to despise some and be sympathetic to others. Then we are carefully shown that both are killed. For how would the Lakota know the difference? And how much would it matter, in the face of rescuing the friend they do know?

Viewed at a distance, Dances With Wolves might seem like an instance of the White Savior trope. But while Dunbar’s transformation through learning Lakota language and culture does parallel what happens in many white-savior stories, it’s an unavoidable fact that he does not save them. (To the contrary, they literally save him.)

In the middle of the film he does bring in rifles that allow the Lakota to fight off a Pawnee attack, but this is not the main story, and the Pawnee are never the true threat. This is one battle in a long, long inter-tribal conflict, and it makes a huge difference on one particular day, but soon enough the Pawnee will acquire rifles and the sides will again be more evenly matched. We see Pawnee working for the U.S. Army, so there’s already a hint of where weapons will come from. Dunbar delivering rifles only gives this group of Lakota advance access to a technology that we know, historically, radically altered the Plains cultures.

The true threat in the film is white encroachment—not merely the army and their forts, or white hunters and trappers, but more than anything white settlements. And before the final credits of the movie begin, there’s a paragraph of text on the screen informing us that thirteen years later everything was over and the last of the Lakota surrendered. The film deliberately tells us that Dunbar/Dances With Wolves does not save them.

Dances With Wolves threads between hopelessness and resilience; it’s not a happy ending but doesn’t suggest despair either. Logically I know he doesn’t change the minds of the white people in power, if he even makes it to them—history says no one changed things that way—and yet still I’m left with something positive, not quite hope and not the poignance of fighting for the lost cause. It’s doing what you can.

Perhaps it’s what Kicking Bird says: he is following the path of being a good human being. Whether his effort succeeds or not, whether he could’ve been safe disappearing among the Lakota or not, he knows it is right to try to persuade people, and wrong to endanger the People by his presence.

He is right the army will hunt him, though maybe he overestimates how important he is to them, how long they will hunt if they don’t find him soon. He is also right, I think, that if he stayed awareness of his presence would eventually filter out to the whites. Someone from another band or nation, trading or visiting or even attacking, would notice the white man among this group and mention it to someone else, who would mention it to someone else, and at some point an officer would be told, “I hear there’s a white man living with the Lakota who hunt over in __________.” Things don’t stay secret forever.

Ultimately it isn’t an issue of futility, and success or failure is not the question. Leaving won’t solve everything, and may solve nothing, but it is the truer choice of the options available.

Although it is not fair to Stands With a Fist, to make her begin a new life yet again.

The Extended Cut

Memory tells me the extended four-hour version of Dances With Wolves was first sent into the world as a TV broadcast a handful of years after the movie was in theaters, airing over two or three nights. Since they could take up more time, they restored scenes that had been edited out to make the film shorter for theaters.

I finally watched the extended cut a couple of weeks ago. I still prefer the original-release version; to me that is unquestionably the authentic film. But if I were making my own edit of Dances With Wolves I would incorporate bits and pieces from the longer version—for instance, some of the added material about the developing relationship between Dunbar and Stands With a Fist. We don’t need every one of these scenes, but some filling out of the romance is nice.

On the other hand, some things are just unnecessary. The fuller sequence about the unstable commander at Fort Hays actually dilutes the shock of his actions. And while there is some value in showing an encounter between Dunbar and the “good officer” who has a role later, it’s not enough to make up for slowing the movie down. (However, the shot of a child peeking in the bloody window is a kind of counterweight to the later shot of a Lakota child peeking under a tent flap watching a Pawnee warrior die.)

I don’t think there’s any reason at all to add in the scenes about the soldiers abandoning the fort before Dunbar’s arrival. He never finds out where they went or why they left, so why should we, when we can make general guesses?

I have mixed feelings about the scene where Dunbar discovers the Lakota have killed the white bison hunters. Without it the film can create an idealized impression by pinning all “negative” behavior to the Pawnee and showing only “positive” deeds by the Lakota. Instead of pretending “the ones we like never attacked white people” we need to wrestle with why Native Americans would attack white people, which is more complex than being bloodthirsty or hyper-territorial. So this sequence makes the film more balanced, and yet some of the images around the firelight dance, quick as they are, are too gruesome. But would it be honest to trim those frames out just to make myself more comfortable?

One thing I’m still missing, in either version, is somehow Smiles a Lot communicating “I found this at the place we fought the soldiers” when he hands over the diary at the end, so Dunbar isn’t left to wonder if this kid had the diary the whole time and he never needed to go back to the fort in the first place. I know poor Smiles a Lot is too emotional to speak, but this issue shouldn’t be left to doubt.