The Invisible Counterpoint

I think there are two key moments in the movie when Emma Watson offers us the pleasure in seeing what the latest, most self-empowered female Disney character, is capable of. Early in the film she is assisting her father, whose trade is as a clockmaker, and presents him, twice, with exactly the part he next requires... but ahead of him realizing that this is the exact piece he is searching for. She, at this point, is leading him... and could presumably just as well be doing what he is doing, if such was her foremost interest. Basically this is a doctor-nurse situation where the routine, "nurse -- scalpel!," is played out to invert the patriarchal paradigm and presume genuine authority to the "nurse," but without the labour strife or mean gotcha: here, the father couldn't care less is his daughter was one hundred years ahead of him in ability and he, mostly put in the position of assisting her. He knows she's got him beat in many, many ways, and is just d...

The problem for a feminist, revisionist "Beauty and the Beast" is that no one character more causes us to shake our established preferences... to work toward a different finish than we were comfortably expecting, than the arrogant patriarch villain, Gaston. Belle reads as many books as she can get her hands on, but she represents the stage of moral perfection we liberals are all ostensibly at these days, so she's not about to throw any surprises our way, any new-fangled ideas on how to behave she got from reading some of her books: she'll only confirm what we know about ourselves. She'll school any number of characters on how properly to behave, implicitly school them to rise to her level, but (of course) she'll also embrace others' cultural preferences and eat and drink as they themselves would -- get dirty with them, in a sense, to help not only not shame but also bring equivalency to their relationship: "it's not only for you to learn to b...