Beauty Without a Beast

When I was younger, I spent the whole month of October trying to decide which Disney princess I should be for Halloween. Maybe I was just super indecisive, but I could never narrow my options down to just one costume. One year, thankfully, my mother- fed up with my inability to choose- decided for me. (I was not too happy at the time, but have since almost gotten over it.) She came home with a Belle costume and told me it was perfect because apparently "I looked like her." Turns out it was really fun being Belle for a night; she's a pretty hype princess, and Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite Disney movies.

Recently, a musical was made out of this already popular movie. Obviously one of the main themes of the Beauty and the Beast musical is that true love is felt within, not based on outside characteristics. But I think we can dig a little deeper and analyze this idea further. Not only does love mean more than physical attraction, but the concept of love has no boundaries. Neither race, nor gender, nor mental capacity, nor religious affiliation has the power to stop the feeling of true love. Cliché, I know, but its true, and this idea has been shown in modern society. 

On Facebook last week, I saw a video that supports this concept of true love. In the video, different couples stand behind a huge X-ray machine, so the audience can only see their bones. When the two people step out from the X-ray, the audience realizes that they are not typically-accepted couples. There is a lesbian couple and an interracial couple. A best friendship between a little girl with Down Syndrome and another young girl is also shown. The video is very powerful, as it shows two things: love can happen between any two people and can be as simple as a friendship.

Here is a short version of the video:

Beauty and the Beast portrays the same idea as this video, just in a weird, Disney-esque way. Obviously no real-life human has ever fallen in love with a monster or beast, but when gay marriage first was legalized, many opposers viewed those relationships as something scary and monstrous. Whenever something strays beyond the norm, somebody is obliged to protest it.

Even before gay marriage was such a huge controversy, people viewed other things as freakish. Mentally disabled and mentally insane people were once viewed as bizarre and deranged, with no distinctions between different medical conditions. Psych wards in the 1940's performed lobotomies and treated their patients horribly; each patient was viewed as monstrous and inhumane, much like the beast in Beauty and the Beast. No one originally respected the psych ward patients, but now we have working treatments and sterile, caring hospitals. The friendship between the little girls in this video proves that now, any two people can be normal friends, much like Belle was willing to be friends with the beast.

Underneath its magical and romantic plot, Beauty and the Beast reveals a theme ahead of its time: love has no labels.