Batou667 said:
That's verging on being an almost complete non sequitur. No, the film isn't a tragedy because Gaston (the villain) dies at the end. But that was in response to you asserting that "real men are beasts, not dandies", so I'll repeat the question; according to who?
I've been holding off on replying to this one because.. it's an essay.
Beauty and the Beast is a didactic story. It was written as a didactic story. It's a story that is specifically meant to teach or instruct its audience in some aspect of morals or social convention. The two books on which the Disney film is based were written to teach and reinforce societal conventions about marriage and relationships which made sense in the 18th century, a time when women (at least, women of the social class would be subject to arranged marriages. The point of beauty and the beast is specifically, textually, to teach women that their own desires are immoral and selfish. The moral is that women must learn to overlook the physical or character deficits of their appointed husbands, because a good woman, a virtuous woman, accepts her allotted station with grace and makes the best of what she has.
When Disney rewrote the story, they made some pretty obvious changes, in particular removing a lot of elements which would be kind of weird or offensive to modern audiences. They changed Belle's character to make her more of an assertive modern woman, and added the standard Disney protagonist motivation of vaguely wanting something more out of life. The moral is now superficially less about how women should strive to display perfect unconditional love because otherwise their husbands will die of magic blue balls and is now more generally about the need to look past superficial appearances. But the original core of the story is still there, it's just less an allegory for arranged marriage as it is about an idealised idea of heterosexual romance. In fact, it taps into some very common tropes about heterosexual romance and its presentation in media.
Imagine a story about a beautiful woman who finds herself forcibly placed under the absolute control of a frightening, feral guy whom she is initially repulsed and frightened by, but through small acts of humanity and protection she comes to realise that deep down he's actually a good, decent person. She falls in love with him, and in turn he is magically transformed and becomes the person he always was inside.
It exists, and it's called
The Terminator.
In fact, this is the romantic subplot (or even the main plot) about women being kidnapped, imprisoned or held hostage by violent tough guys whom they end up falling for can be found in literally dozens of films, not to mention countless books and other stories, in which it is portrayed as romantic and indeed relatable. For men, it allows for fetishization of male dominance over women, and the fantasy of getting the girl without actually having to make any effort or improve yourself. For women, it prays on a fantasy of fixing someone who is damaged purely by being the most manic pixie dream girl ever. People like these stories because they serve as a heightened depiction of relationship dynamics which are still seen as good or desirable. In film, men are allowed to be broken, self-loathing and flawed without actually being bad people. They are allowed to be coercive, inflexible, threatening, violent or domineering while still being redeemable, as long as they remain sympathetic. Through the magic of film, these men don't have deep seated emotional and interpersonal problems which they need to work through. They just need to meet the right woman, a woman who is so special and deep and not like other girls that she can see through all their horrible shitty behaviour and realise that deep down they really are a good person, whereupon all their problems will magically disappear and they will turn into a real boy.
So again, beauty and the beast is about an idealized romantic relationship. Now, bearing that in mind, let's move on to your questions.
Firstly, I think it should be obvious that anyone who draws a line between "real men" and other men who aren't real, I guess, is basing that on a set of fairly arbitrary prejudices. That line does not actually exist. It's in no way required to actually explain reality. However, large parts of our culture are still predicated on those arbitrary prejudices, and on the idea that being a man or a woman should come with certain behaviours, expectations and standards which separate "real men", men who measure up to those standards, from the others.
In our culture, and certainly within the quite explicit didactic ideology of beauty and the beast. Beast is "real". That's why it's okay for him to act like kind of a dick, because it's not like he's a bad person, he's just a brooding byronic hero, he keeps it real and plays by his own rules even if people get hurt sometimes, but it's only because he's true to himself. After all, at the end of the day he's doing it for love. Sure, he's not perfect, but what kind of woman
needs a perfect man? Just because she's incredibly beautiful and has absolutely no character flaws and is basically framed as the perfect woman doesn't mean she can reject whoever she wants, right? After all, isn't it better to settle for something that's real, even if it's not perfect? She'll learn that after a few months imprisoned in the castle, I'm sure.
Gaston is not "real", he's superficially hyper-masculine, but in a way that is contrived and self-involved, which makes him, again, a dandy. With a few exceptions, our culture does not generally tell romantic stories about people like Gaston. They don't get to be abusive dickbags and still get away with being redeemable or the hero. Even before Gaston has revealed himself to be the truly sadistic character he at the end of the film, noone is rooting for him to learn to be a better person and for him and Belle to end up together as a romantic couple, and that's because of the way he's characterised. There is something off about him, something which was put there deliberately to signal to the audience that this was someone you were not supposed to relate to or see as redeemable.
And again, it just so happens that the mechanism used to convey that draws on a lot of the assumptions about how people of different genders, sexualities behave, or are "supposed" to behave.
