The Hypocrisy of Beauty and the Beast: Judge A Book By Its Covers

Hollywood wants its stories to have their morals and eat them, too

Hollywood loves its little messages, the morals in its stories, the lesson’s we’re supposed to walk out of the theater having learned. There are a few perennial classics: love conquers all, family is what matters (as opposed to professional success), good always triumphs in the end.

Disney films - being generally made for children, especially the animated classics - lean even harder into having morals. Cinderella teaches that kindness is rewarded, Mulan that being true to yourself is powerful, and Frozen that emotions are better expressed than repressed.

There is, however, one message that Disney films tend to trumpet above all others, however: It’s what’s on the inside that matters.

And in this, they are absolute hypocrites.

Beauty and the Beast

The big lesson of Beauty and the Beast is that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. On the surface, Gaston is handsome and manly; the Beast is ugly and savage - and yet it turns out that the Beast is actually nice and Gaston is a monster.

Except, well…

Throughout the movie, everyone’s insides more or less exactly match their outsides. More to the point, their outsides change to match their insides throughout the film. Let’s take a look at Gaston at the beginning, when he’s being nice to Bell (or at least not actively monstrous):

At the very least, he’s clearly meant to be handsome: tall and dark with a square jawline and pearly white teeth.

Now Gaston at the end of the film (when he’s behaving poorly):

Now he’s frightful to look at, with madness in his eyes and a snarl on his lips.

The Beast, on the other hand, makes the opposite transition, from fanged and furry monster:

To suave, but still a beast:

To eventual handsome prince:

In other words, in the film, the way people behave is matched perfectly by their outward appearance.

Which is another way of saying that it’s absolutely fine to judge a book by its cover.

But wasn’t the Prince cursed to begin with because he refused to help an ugly old woman, because she was ugly? Wasn’t he shallow, and so the curse teaches him what it’s like to be ugly?

Well sure, except that from where I’m standing it kind of looks like the witch was more or less involved in entrapment, purposefully trying to bait out exactly the reaction she got.

The witch:

Did not have to look like that. She has magic powers. She could’ve shown up looking like this:

And chose not to. So was she really behaving well, when she appeared ugly?

Hollywood Hypocrisy

There’s also something to be said for Hollywood - the place so closely linked with the handsome and beautiful that the name has come to be synonymous with good looks - being the one to tell us that looks don’t matter.

It’s as if Bill Gates or Elon Musk were telling stories about how money isn’t everything and it’s really family that matters. Would you believe them? At the very least, it’s easy to say that money doesn’t matter when you’ve got absurd amounts of it, just like it’s easy to say that a person’s looks don’t matter when you’re already beautiful.

Most Damningly

At the end of Beauty and the Beast, the curse is broken and the Beast transforms back into a handsome prince.

And yet…wasn’t the whole point that his appearance didn’t (or shouldn’t) matter? If his appearance doesn’t matter, why is his reward to return to a gorgeous appearance?

The movie attempts to drive home the message that ‘it’s what on the inside that matters’, but at the end Bell gets a handsome prince to spend her Happily Ever After with, not a well-dressed Beast. And the Prince, who is supposedly the one who learns his lesson, is rewarded with the very thing he has just spent the whole movie learning not to value.

It would be like spending a whole movie teaching a character that there’s more to life than money, that family and relationships matter more than the sum of one’s bank accounts…and having the reward for character growth be a winning lottery ticket.

Real Life

In real life, what’s on the outside absolutely matters, and people can and should judge people based on how they look.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

In real life, a person’s appearance can give you all sorts of information about them. Do they take care of themselves? Are they hygienic? Do they care about the way they present themselves to others? Do they hold themselves with a confident posture or slump their shoulders, trying to disappear into the background?

None of these things mean a person deserves to be treated poorly or lowers their intrinsic value as a human being, but it is information about them. A person’s style or aesthetic can tell you about what group they belong to or are trying to fit in with; their ethnicity can give you a hint or two about their cultural background and experiences.

The lesson ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ isn’t a bad one, per se; it’s just that, when you first see a book…what else do you have to judge it by? Furthermore, a book’s cover isn’t random, it was designed by someone. It might have reviews or a plot summary on it, or a brief profile of the author and list of other books they’ve written.

The better lesson, and what we sometimes mean when we say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, is ‘don’t finalize your judgement of a book by its cover.’ A judgement should be a synthesis of a great deal of information, and while it’s fine and necessary to make preliminary judgments based on the information one has at the time, it’s important to understand that that judgement is preliminary and temporary and open to new evidence.

It all comes down to whether or not you’re willing to update you beliefs based on new evidence - a key life skill that Disney movies don’t do a good job of teaching.