News - A beautiful beast

How is it that what is at first sight ugly often becomes more interesting, even lovable, than the conventionally beautiful?

During the last three weeks I have been examining the subject of the beautiful as a lost necessity of psychological life. I have intentionally avoided defining the beautiful, because that invites immediate debate about formal aesthetics, decoration, criticism and so forth.

When James Hillman speaks of the beautiful, he always makes reference to the etymological roots of the word “aesthetic.” It refers to a Greek word meaning a “breathing in” of the world - the gasp we experience before certain sights. In this way, beauty is related more to what inspires awe than to what is prettily scenic.

Mythology and fairy tales are full of the confusions of the beautiful and the ugly. These confusions are sometimes expressed through “animal bridegroom” stories in which a (usually ugly) beast attempts to seduce a beauty. Most of these have been sanitized over the centuries as myth has been reduced to bedtime storytelling. For example, the original “Little Red Riding Hood” is a very adult story about a wolf’s effort to seduce an underage girl into his bed by appealing to her childish wish to cuddle with her grandmother. Between childhood and adulthood, not fully sexual, she doesn’t recognize him as a wolf until he asks her to urinate in the bed.

Although you certainly won’t see that in the Disney version, movies have probably kept mythology alive in our time.

Frank Miller, Ph.D., is the author of four books on film, including Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin & Violence on Screen. Miller, a participant in the June 16-18 symposium and workshop on “Beauty: The Soul’s Obsession” (404-929-9030), is an adjunct faculty member in the Communications Department at Georgia State University. We recently chatted.

__CB: I viewed Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast for this workshop. I think you remarked that you find the ending, when the beast transforms into the prince, unsatisfying. I am thinking of Garbo’s comment when she saw the film: “Give me back my beautiful beast.”

FM:It’s a complete letdown! The prince is no longer the beautifully divine beast. They fly off into the heavens and it’s all very dramatic and pretty, but it’s a very big disappointment. We’ve spent the entire film, like Beauty herself, becoming enthralled with the Beast and then he’s killed.

What in the world did Cocteau have in mind?

As a surrealist, of course, he was influenced by Freud and I’m guessing he psychoanalyzed the story. Remember that Beauty, before meeting the Beast, has been pursued by a kind of sexual predator whom she rejected. For her, according to the psychoanalytical interpretation, engaging in sex is to engage with a monster. But when she kisses the dying beast, it signifies her readiness for a sexual relationship. That’s why the prince has the features of the earlier sexual predator. He’s been transformed in Beauty’s imagination from a threatening predator to a romanticized love object.

Well, to me this is an example of the way psychology, and the romantic movement out of which it arose, proposes socially acceptable solutions that lack resonance. Cocteau drew his inspiration from a 1756 rendition of the tale in a magazine for “young misses.” But the actual original was very different in an important respect: the Beast was not a sympathetic character before his transformation, yet Beauty was drawn to him. One of the transformations in our own consciousness that occurred with the advent of romanticism was that childhood and nature became states of innocence. We feel that what is beastly, grotesque, must have a sublimated quality of innocence, of goodness, to explain our attraction.

I think I see what you mean. The truth may be that you just can’t have the beautiful without the grotesque - that, scarily, the grotesque may be appealing on its own terms.

Right. In Cocteau’s telling of the story, the beast is on his way to becoming a god. The ending is about transcendence of the ugly, the beastly, and yet, like Garbo, we are left with nostalgia for the sublimely grotesque.

Of course, mythology is full of the opposite story too - Jupiter transformed himself into an animal in order to have sex with beautiful women. So there is an acknowledgement, historically, of the seductive quality of the beast. The god himself is the beast, as is Dr. Frankenstein, not the monster.

This fairy tale is actually a retelling of the old myth of Cupid and Psyche. Even in that myth, what is originally represented as a winged serpent turns out to be the beautiful god of love. I know there is something archetypal in the idea that beauty and goodness are one. But it’s also true that Venus, the goddess of love, torments Psyche out of jealousy of her beauty. So the myth has real complexity.

Which I think is present in much of Cocteau’s film but is abandoned in the end. It is certainly completely abandoned in the recent awful Disney version of the story.

Isn’t it interesting that the more psychologically sophisticated we supposedly become, the less we seem to value life for its mystery and complexity? What does the transformed Beast say? He became that awful beast because his parents lost their belief in magic. A good parent makes you a magical charming prince - not a divine beast! Nonsense!

Cliff Bostock, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology in private practice. Contact him at 404-525-4774 or at his website, www.soulworks.net.??

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