Cocteau's Beauty &the Beast The Poet as Monster Beauty and the Beast is the first of Jean Cocteau's five feature-length films and in some ways the best. It functions so perfectly on the fairy-tale level that for most viewers any exegesis is unnecessary and even undesirable. ‘The visual elements alone make the film unforgettable, and a comparison to other filmed fairy tales makes its superiority manifest. For those with a psychoanalytical perspective the film, like the story on which it is based, “follows an archetypal pattern of a virgin coming to terms with and symbols like the plucked rose and the golden key fall into place only too neatly in this context. What has not been ‘emphasized sufficiently, however, is that Beauty and the Beast can also be seen as another of Cocteau’s filmed treatments of the theme of the death and rebirth of the poet: in the original story the central character is Beauty, but in the film the emphasis is shifted to the Beast, who like the poet must die in one form in ‘order to be reborn in another. During the filming of Beauty and the Beast Cocteau suffered painful boils “in those places where the film compels me to torment an actor with hair and spirit- gum." Even physically, Cocteau identified with his monster, who embodies Cocteau’s favorite theme of the poet cursed with magic powers, and who is not appreciated until those powers have been destroyed. ‘The film begins with the flight of one arrow and ends with the flight of another arrow, ‘The first one is fired by Avenant and lands in the middle of the floor, which la Belle can be seen polishing ‘on her first appearance. ‘The final arrow is fired by a statue of Diana, goddess of chastity, and it lands in Avenant’s heart, killing him and setting off a mutual metamorphosis in which Avenant tums into la Béte and la Béte into Avenant. What change has taken place between these two arrows, of which the first missed wildly and the second went directly to its mark? Shortly after the first arrow was fired, la Belle refused Avenant’s offer of marriage, choosing her father (who was not yet ill) over her suitor. In other words she chose a relationship in which she was 100Cocteau/101 dependent, a child, over one in which she would have to play something’ of an adult role. ‘The ending, invented by Cocteau, in which Avenant and la Béte exchange appearances, is the most controversial part of the film, In effect la Belle is accepting, at the end, the very same man (in appearance) whom she rejected at the beginning. ‘The character of la Béte has been shown to be superior to that of Avenant, but in terms of appearances Beauty has trav- eled a great way to retum to her starting point. It is as if she had been meant to accept Avenant right away, as if the whole plot has been a trick played on her by destiny to force her to grow up. ‘At the beginning of the film Beauty may be indifferent to sex, but she also wants to stay with her father out of affection and respect for him. At the conclusion, however, her motivation is clearly sexual, because her father & weaker ‘than ever and the monster (because she has broken her promise) is more of a threat than he was before, Yet she chooses the monster—and gets her old suitor back, According to Pauline Kael the film’s final transformation is ambiguous: “what we have gained cannot take the place of what we have lost.”3 That ambiguity, needless to say, does not exist in the original story, in which “a great fairy” transports Beauty and her family to the prince’s kingdom where his subjects are ‘overjoyed to see him again and the two wicked sisters are tumed into statues, a punishment which seems rather excessive under the circumstances. The conclusion of the original story thus balances the “wicked fairy” of the curse with the good fairy of all good fairy tales, brings Beauty from poverty to prosperity, and reinforces the moral about how to choose a husband by forcing the thoughtless sisters, already unhappy in marriage, to bear mute witness as statues to Beauty's more fortunate fate. ‘The reader, like Beauty, can only be “agreeably surprised.”4 ‘The very different response of the film’s audience has already been indicated, and the central question about the film’s conclusion is the one ‘formulated by Noél Simsolo: “Isn’t the Beast more beautiful than Beauty?” Greta Garbo's response is the most memorable; she is reported to have seen the film and said at the end, “Give me back my beast."6 ‘The audience's response to the film’s concluding apotheosis tends to be, as Cocteau himself admitted, one of “terrible dis- appointment.” ‘The nature of this disappointment can be best indicated by a comparison to an American film whose plot is notably similar and whose conclusion is equally ambiguous. ‘A close parallel can be found in wHat it is now necessary to call “the first” King Kong, which explicitly refers to the story of Beauty and the Beast in both its introduction and conclusion. It should first be stated that King Kong, often considered in America to be nothing more than a camp classic, is one of the most. pro- found and throught-provoking of all films, with a great deal to say about America, capitalism, the natural as opposed to the civilized, theater and film as opposed to reality, and exploitation in all its102/Cocteau modern forms. Claude Ollier has brilliantly analyzed some of these themes; he calls King Kong ‘“‘one of the most beautiful and most disturbing films ever made.”8 He stresses the way the film company within the film tries to manipulate reality but is instead manipulated by it. Ann is a bad actress who has to be taught how to be seductive and even (in a scene which will prove to be horribly ironic) how to scream; when she inadvertently becomes ‘a participant in an expanding series of tragic events, those lessons are revealed to have been appropriate but inadequate. As for the famous scene in the theater, when the plot of the film is recapitulated, Kong falls in ‘love with Ann again, and the excitement of the audience (in the film) changes to terror, there is nothing in any other film quite like it, Not only does it’ seem to be the ultimate Artaud spectacle, in which the star of the show literally moves from ritualized battle to an attempt to murder the members of the audience, but the effect is transmitted to the audience in the movie theater as well. If Kong can move from the stage into the world outside, perhaps he can also descend from the movie screen. ‘The subsequent scenes, in which Kong wrecks New York City, grinds people into the cement, and rips an elevated train from’ its tracks, are watched in a sort of ambivalent trance. It is impossible not to cheer for the destruction of civilization, and for those insect.like planes to be swatted out of the sky—while simultaneously fearing for one’s own survival. But. King Kong was also a love story, as its publicity stressed at the time, and as the frequent explanations scattered throughout the film make clear. ‘The idea is that even the strongest man can, like Samson, be disarmed and destroyed by beauty. The weak ‘woman is potentially deadly to the strong man who lets her over- power his reason, Kong is a god, worshipped as such, and apparently his yearly “bride” is accepted as a sacrifice and devoured. In the case of Ann, however, Kong sees her as a creature io be treasured and protected, The central irony of the film is that while hordes of human males are trying to protect Ann from Kong, he is only trying to protect her from them. He wants to rescue her from her violent, cringing fellow-creatures, and he thinks that her screams are caused only by them, not by himself. Since she was tied to a stake when he first saw her, he is not entirely in the wrong. In his desire to protect her, however, he lets himself fall into captivity, and on the Empire State Building the care. he takes to protect her is the direct cause of his own death, In short, King Kong is a case history of transformation through love—from ‘a god, Kong descends to the state of a captive in chains, and both literally and symbolically he ultimately breaks those chains through love. Despite his final ascent to the top of ‘a tower, however, the amount of sexual suggestion in the film is remarkably low, Parts of King Kong were suppressed for thirty years, but when they were finally added to copies of the film in the nineteen-sixties, they tumed out to be more grotesque thanCocteau {103 suggestive, There is one splendid shot of Kong squashing a man under his feet like a roach; the ape also rips his prisoner's dress and fondles her with a giant finger, But it remains impossible to imagine Kong and his bride doing anything, so whatever erotic content is present has little concrete significance. Cocteau’s film shows a similar instance of sirength destroyed by beauty (or Beauty), but in a more meaningful way the situation has been reversed. La Béte wants very badly to lose his strength, because only love can redeem him from his curse. It is rather la Belle, as has been noted, who undergoes a great change of attitude’ because of love, and in terms of strength and power, it can only be assumed that she has gained by the change. The process shown in King Kong is a leveling one—love brings Kong down to the level of Ann and of human society, and since he has been leveled it is only in an ultimately futile gesture that he can be raised again, The process shown in La Belle et la Béte is that of indirect progress toward an unlikely union, and when the couple is finally united any remaining problems will be solved by the combination of metamorphosis and apotheosis. ‘At what point do these two fables of beautiful-monstrous love most closely connect? Both involve the possession, loss, and transfer of strength and power, which is intimately connected with love in almost all of Cocteau’s writings. In Orphée, for example, Huryetes is frst portrayed an a hindranes to Orphés, preventing him from fully realizing his poetic talent; yet each in tum saves the other from death, through love. The Princess who represents the death of Orphée also loses her power because of her love for him. In Renaud et Armide, written two years before La Belleet la Béte was filmed, the ring wom by Armide is a source of power similar to la Béte’s key, and because of love she gives that ring away just as Ia Béte gave his key away—and with an even more tragic result. It is easy to demonstrate that in Cocteau’s work love is linked with death—o is almost anything. But in Cocteau’s plays and films love always requires a sacrifice, and that sacrifice is very often that of human life. It is true that both lovers survive in La Belle et la Béte, but they do so at the expense of Avenant, just as the intersecting triangles in Les parents terribles can be resoived into couples only by the death of the one character who is common to both. In Cocteau’s work even the most impossible love becomes possible when enough sacrifices have been made, King Kong, though, shows a love which can never succeed’ because the necessary sacrifice is almost inconceivable. ‘The film is therefore a truly frightening one, because what the audience is made to desire (a union between a young woman and a monster) is what. had previously been almost universally felt to be forbidden, The film also approaches tragedy, because this desire cannot, be satisfied in the world as we know it. The terrifying possibility has been given conerete form only to be purged through pity and fear—and to use those terms is to indicate the dimension missing1104/Cocteau from La Belle et la Béte. In Cocteau’s film the audience is made to sympathize with a desire that it would otherwise have condemned, only to be disappointed by “the scathing irony of ‘the happy’ endin Claude Ollier’s essay on King Kong concludes on the following wistful note: “Another possible happy ending would have resolved the major uncertainty about the monster's appearance, the unrevealed mystery: what would King Kong have looked like if, in the film’s final images, Ann had loved him?”"L0 Cocteau’s film answers that question by showing how la Belle’s love for la Béte transforms him ito a pallid storybook prince and thus changes a film which had, like King Kong, been giving expression to a primeval fear into a film in which magic exists not to recreate the primitive but rather to dissipate it. The point is not that, one sort of film is superior to the other, but that La Belle et la Béte changes its shape to suddenly to make audiences entirely comfortable with its conclusion. The most obvious way to resolve the problem would be to make the film’s symbolism much more mundane than it is usually taken to be. La Belle, one might argue, is not really a great beauty. Her sisters tyrannize over her, her brother has overly exalted ambitions for her, and her father needs an accountant more than a daughter. ‘Under the circumstances la Belle is rightfully worried about her future, and what the film shows are essentially the fears of any ordinary girl. What in essence is the reason why such a girl might wish to avoid marriage? ‘The principal fear she would have is that the one she loved, the one she was forced to love, might turn out to be a monster, ‘Since that fear is to some extent common sense, it is easy to sympathize with her predicament. Not only does she fear that her lover will prove to be a monster, but he is a monster already, standing before her with his. hands dripping with blood. Cocteati, in short, has filmed the fairy tale so that the human truth (the truth that dwells in our daily lives) takes the foreground, ‘The ending, then, is simply a variation on the ending of another great fairy tale, the one told by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: when the marriage is a happy one, it follows that each partner will look beautiful in the other’s eyes. When looked upon with love, even Chaucer's aged hag or Cocteau’s Bete can be the mate of whom someone has always been dreaming, for whom someone has always been searching. One writer goes so far as to claim that “Beauty never loved Beast, at least not qua beast; she only loved whatever of Prince Charming she saw in him,"'11 But if la Belle’s desire has been merely to avoid an unhappy marriage, why should the audience be so unhappy to see her succeed? ‘An interpretation which sees. in the film only a young gitl who does not really love a monster seems to underestimate both Cocteau and his story. A fairy tale, after all, is usually an aceretion of plot surrounding (and masking) a truth that is too difficult to face directly. Cocteau, who put the bedroom scene back in Oedipus, puts the fear of sexual assault back in LaBelbet la Béte. ‘The merchant’s expression when he hears the monster askCocteau /105 for his daughter is emblematic of that fear. ‘The film’s sexual symbolism goes beyond the concluding apotheosis and even beyond the astonishing faces and hands set in the walls as if to watch out for something unspeakable and then reach out to grab the guilty party. (It is only one step, after all, from the hands holding torches in La Belle et la Béte to the hands slithering out, of the plaster in Repuision.) When la Béte repeatedly proposes marriage, he is proposing nothing less than going to bed with a monster, and the scream that la Belle utters on first seeing him has other sources than repugnance at meeting a wealthy landowner. ‘An explanation of the film that considers only la Belle’s conscious fears is far less convincing than one that includes her subconscious fears (and desires) as well, and if la Belle does not love la Béte qua beast it is safe to say that no audience has ever understood the film In one respect, however, even a psycho- analytieal explanation is incomplete. According to Dennis DeNitto, "The stages of Beauty's initiation into womanhood are presented from her point of view. Throughout the film we have seen the men in Beauty’s life generally as she might perceive them, We even sense that these males do not exist except in relation to her, The transfor- mations of Avenant and the Beast are symbolic of Beauty's changing attitudes toward them,12 This interpretation fails to consider all the differences between the original story and the film that resulted from it. ‘The text of the story Cocteau used, by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, is appended by Cocteati to the diary he kept while working on'the film, A comparison between story and film shows that Cocteau, by identifying not with the young girl but with the monster, has used the story to deal not only with Belle’s dilemma as an inexperienced girl but also with his own dilemma as a poct. Why, for example, was la Béte placed under a curse? The explanation in the original story is that “a wicked fairy condemned me to keep this appearance until a beautiful woman agreed to marry me.”13 This punishment is totally arbitrary, and serves to emphasize the importance of the free choice and ability to see beneath appearances, of the beautiful girl who will free the unfortunate prince from his spell. In the film the explanation is ‘mote elaborate: “My parents didn’t believe in fairies, so the fairies punished them through me as a result. I could only be saved by the look of love” (p. 374). The idea that adults have to accept things with the same simple faith that children have, expressed in the introduction to the film, is more complicated than it might at first appear to be. ‘The fascination that Cocteau's ‘own childhood had for him has been amply discussed and has provided a great deal of fuel for various Freudian fires, But it is much easier to explain Cocteau’s fondness for childlike faith by pointing out that such faith implies the absence of criticism. For106/Cocteau Cocteau poetry has to be felt, not analyzed (and therefore Cocteau’s own literary criticism consists almost entirely of metaphor.) So Cocteau had an ideal arm with which to fend off criticism of his own work: one had to accept it with the simple faith of a child, and that was that. ‘The opposite point is perhaps even more valid: Cocteau. was less interested in fending off adverse criticism than in actively courting it, since he saw scandal ‘and rejection as the inevitable response to genuine poetry and thus a vindication of the poet’s identity. One of his favorite anecdotes on this subject goes back to Parad. Later we heard, above, a very funny remark which amounted to the highest possible praise. A man said to his wife: “If Thad known it was s0 crazy, I would have brought the children,” ... This man did not suspect that a childlike response is precisely what the ‘modem audience lacks, and that because of its desire to be treated ‘as grownups, this audience no longer accepts anything but bboredom.! When the poet meets with childlike faith, he is accepted at once; when he meets instead with scorn the audience is at fault for lacking faith—and the poet is confirmed as the heir of Rosseau and Rimbaud. It is one thing to agree that a fairy tale—or a modernist ballet— has to be received in a childlike state of mind, however, and quite another to respond emotionally to the particular punishment— ‘one’s child transformed into a monster!—that supposedly has followed a failure to do so in this case. Cocteau never implies in his writing that he blames his parents for the curse which has ‘been placed on him, and on the contrary he seems to be genuinely grateful to his mother for introducing him to the theater at an early age. Cocteau casts no blame backwards for a curse which, in any case, he counts as his greatest blessing. La Belle’s father may be pathetically trapped, both by his impoverished condition and by his bargain with the Beast, but there is little suggestion that ‘he is responsible for the fate of his daughter Beauty. As her sister Felicie observes, very acutely, “‘That’s what happens when a ninny asks for roses to be brought to her” (p. 104). Children in Cocteau’s work are not punished for the failures of their parents; the infernal machine entraps them all together. (The process by which the work was created is another matter. The original screen- play laid the blame for the Beast’s curse not on “my parents” but on “the king, my father”) (p. 374). Only if the Beast is supposed to stand for the poet, as Cocteau conceived the role of the poet, does it make sense to see him as cursed because of a failure to believe in fairy tales. “Children believe what they are told and doubt it not,” Cocteau tells his audience. “I am asking of you a litile of this naivete now . .."(p. 4), ‘That kind of audience response—naive acceptance~is the only ‘thing that can free either poet or monster from the curse ofCocteau /107 incomprehension. Cocteau changes the Beast’s salvation from the original story's marriage, which is Beauty’s salvation as much as the Beast’s, to “a look of love” because he is thinking of acceptance as a poet, a salvation in which Beauty is, like Eurydice, an instrument but not a participant. ‘The curse in the original story has a second clause as well: “She forbade me to show my wit.15 Not only does the handsome prince have to appear to be a monster in the story, but he has to be a monster without “esprit.” There is something almost comical in Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s description of the Beast’s conversation: “Every evening, the Beast visited her, and spoke with her during the dinner with sufficient good sense, but never with what is called esprit in society.”16 In addition to his good looks, the Beast of the original story must hide his mind ‘a5 well; to put it another way, people are unable to appreciate his mind for what it is, and think’ him stupid because it is part of his curse that he cannot communicate with them. ‘The part of the curse involving wit is eliminated from Cocteau’s film, although it is still apparent, when the Beast stands before Beauty with smoking hands, that what he would like most of all is to speak, to explain it to her, to be loved for his mind (instead of his innate goodness). Cocteau removes this theme because it is essential to his concept of poetry that the poet does indeed show his mind but is nevertheless misunderstood by the dullards around him, Both in what he added to the Beast’s curse and in what he removed, in short, Cocteau shaped the curse into something more closely resembling what he saw as his own. In the original story the two parts of the curse—beauty and wit—determine a constant parallel between them each of Beauty’s two sisters choosesa personification of one of these qualities and each is disappointed: ‘The elder had married a young man as handsome as Love; but he was. 50 in love with his own appearance that he was occupied with only that from morning to evening and he scorned his wife’s beauty. ‘The second had married » man with a reat deal of wit; but he only used it to infuriate the entire world, beginning with his wife,t Belle is quick to draw the moral that “it is neither beauty nor wit in a husband which make a woman happy; it is a good character, virtue, kindness...” And the Beast is grateful to her for being “good enough to let yourself be touched by the goodness of my character.” In Cocteau’s film the moral is not quite so obvious. The sisters remain unmarried, and the two parts of the curse remain indistinguishable. Mme. Leprince de Beaumont's story addresses the question ‘‘what is the basis of a sound marriage?” and moves toward an unambiguous answer: Beauty marries a prince “who lived with her a very long time and in a perfect happiness, because it was based on virtue."18 Cocteau’s film is about the conflict between appearance and reality not because that conflict108/Cocteau relates to marriage but because, due to that conflict, it is impossible for the poet’s contemporaries to see beyond the “scandal and parade” to the genuine merit of the poet’s work. Beauty, therefore, does not see beyond the Beast’s appearance until it'is too late, and the creature she loved is dead. She is not rewarded for perceiving his vertu but punished because she failed to recognize it im time. When one’s sights are set on Orpheus, it seems trivial to be loved for a good character, and for Cocteau the only happy ending possible is immortality. The audience’s reaction to the transformation of Beast into Prince is similar to the public’s reaction to the posthumous glory of the Poet: now we appreciate the monster. For Cocteau the essence of fairy tales is the archetypal last line “and they had many children.” The poet’s only children, in contrast, are the works of art he has created. ‘The ending of Beauty and the Beast contains both of these ideas, although they would seem to be mutually contradictory. Not only is there a union between Beauty (outward beauty) and Beast (inner worth) as in the original story, but superimposed upon that is a union between the poet’s audience and the poet. ‘The fairy tale ending does not really work, not only because Cocteau himself was unable to believe in it, but also because he believed deeply in the very different ending of his other films. In Beauty and the Beast, as in King Kong, it was Beauty that killed the Beast, but. in Cocteau’s film the Beauty in question is not a young woman with whom sexual union is impossible, but rather the beautiful works of art which it is the poet’s task to create, and whose creation, according to Cocteau, requires the poet’s death. Michael Popkin ‘Touro College NoTES 1 Dennis DeNitto, “dean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast,”American Imago, 33 (1978), p, 127. 2 Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (New York: Coward.McCann, 1967), p.90. Subsequent references to the sereen. play are to Jean Cocteair, Beatily and the Beast, ed, Robert M. Hammond (New York: New York University Press, 1970). 3 Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bong Bang (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 236, 4 Jean Cocteau, La Belle et 1a Bete: journal d'un film (Monaco: Baitions dtu Rocher, 1958), p. 265. 5 Noel Simsolo, “La Belle et la Bate,” La revue du cinéma, image et son, Sept-Oct. 1971, p. 27. 6 Kaol, p.236,Cocteau /109 7 dean Cocteau, Du cinématographe (aris: Pierre Balfond, 1973), p. 26 8 Claude Ollier, “Un roi & New York: King Kong,” Cahiers du cinéma, ‘mai juin 1965, p. 72, 9 George Amberg, Introd., Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, by Jean Cocteau (New York: Dover, 1972), p. vl 10 Ollier, p, 72. 11 Charles F, Altman, “Diana the Huntress,” French Review, 50 (1977), 658, 12 DeNitto, p. 154. 13 Journal d'un fim, p. 264, 14 Jean Cocteau, Oeuvres complétes (Geneva: Marguerat, 1946.51), IX p. 324, 15 Journal dun Film, pp. 264.65. 16 Journal d'un film, p, 259. 17 Journal dwn film, p. 261. 18 Journal d’un film, pp. 263-66.