Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Beauty and the Beast

          I felt privileged to watch Disney's, Beauty and the Beast, tonight. Like many a fairy tale (and it is no different with Beauty and the Beast), if you interpret the message of the story on its surface, without looking deeper, you’ll think that the lyrics of the song should be changed from, “Both a little scared, neither one prepared, Beauty and the Beast,” to, “One of them is blind, the other asinine, Beauty and the Beast.”

          But that’s not fair, because in reality,  like in many fairytales, Beauty and the Beast “works.” It works because it’s much more than a tale about a forward-thinking, educated, and beautiful village maid who falls in love with a once-spoiled and vain prince, twisted by his own callousness and who, through desperation, educates his spirit to earn her love. If it were just this, we all know that no magic could meld these two into a union.

          So, why does it “work,” and what is it about? Simple. The Beast is humanity that is full of selfishness, greed, pain, contradiction, and violence.  Beauty is both our intellect and our spirit of hope, charity, and love, as represented by the selfless sacrifices that Belle, her father, and, eventually, the Beast make that will dissipate and dispel the hate, ignorance, and greed that plagues our world. We just have to resist fear and the sometimes-overwhelming temptation, or we become no better than our enemies.

          Yes, Beauty and the Beast could be titled, instead, Love and the World. And truly, if we hold on to love and let it guide us, even in the worst of times, we will find that with that power and influence, though “[b]itter sweet and strange, [the world will] [f]ind [that it] can change.

          “Learning [where it’s] wrong, Certain as the sun, Rising in the east, Tale as old as time, Song as old as rhyme, Beauty and the Beast.”

Loren M Lambert © March 24, 2017.

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