Belle is a Stuck-Up Snob

In "honor" of the impending release of the live action version of Beauty and the Beast, I'll address an issue that has bothered me since the first time I watched the animated version in 1992. Belle is a stuck-up snob. Watch this.



Belle patiently and graciously tolerates her neighbors' boring doltishness with little more than a sigh, a roll of the eyes and a shake of her head, but in case we didn't catch her contempt for them, she makes sure to refer to them as "provincial".

pro·vin·cial: prəˈvin(t)SH(ə)l/adjective
1. of or concerning a province of a country or empire.
"provincial elections"
synonyms: nonmetropolitan, small-town, nonurban, outlying, rural, country, rustic, backwoods, backwater;
2. of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.
"scenes of violence were reported in provincial towns"
synonyms: regional, state, territorial, district

In case we still didn't catch the film makers' contempt for rural, blue collar people, they beat us over the head with it during the song, "Kill the Beast".

We don't like what we don't understand
In fact it scares us
And this monster is mysterious at least
Bring your guns, bring your knives
Save our children and our wives
So save our village and our lives!
Let's kill the beast! 

Got that? Rural, blue collar people (particularly married fathers with children and wives) are narrow minded, prejudiced, bigoted, paranoid, easily manipulated and prone to violence. Why, some might even call them "deplorable".

Sound familiar?

It should.

It's exactly the prejudiced, bigoted opinion that America's coastal and big-city elites hold of their rural, blue collar countrymen in flyover country.

That's not to say that the film makers deliberately set out to indoctrinate children with an animated blockbuster, nor is that out of the realm of possibility. It's likely that the film makers simply projected their own prejudices onto the screen. They probably see themselves as Belle surrounded by American Idiots. After all, writers often write themselves (or facets of themselves) into their stories' heroes.

If you doubt me, check out Meryl Streep's Golden Globes speech, in which she manages to aggrandize herself and her and her fellow, rich, powerful Hollywood elites, while simultaneously making them all out to be victims. That's quite a feat to pull off. Or, check out David Harbour's (of Stranger Things) even crazier speech at the SAG Awards. Theirs is the standard thought pattern of Hollywood elites, and that group includes the people who made Beauty and the Beast.

Back to Belle: her contempt for her neighbors is ironic, considering that their lives would go on just fine without her, but hers is impossible without them. Her neighbors include bakers, butchers, tailors, farmers, fishmongers..... BOOOOOOORIIIIIIING! Right? But if they all disappeared, what would she eat? What would she wear?

By contrast, the movie never shows Belle contributing anything of value to her town. Sure, she's beautiful and smart, but she does nothing of value with those gifts. And they are gifts. Both beauty and intelligence are mostly hereditary. She could teach children, for example, but she doesn't even do that.

Even her father, though eccentric, invents useful machines, and yet the story presents him as a lovable, intelligent buffoon.

This is the same kind of contempt of which I wrote earlier.

... what's wrong with men who work in skilled trades?  After all, they make Ms [Susan] Patton's life, with luxuries and comforts King Solomon could not have imagined, possible.  They extract the fuels and generate the electricity she uses to make a living.  They keep that electricity flowing and swoop in to the rescue when that flow is interrupted.  They build the roads on which every single product Ms Patton owns and uses reached its intended destination, and drove those products to her.  Surely, the fancy restaurants Ms Patton frequents cook with natural gas.  Where does she think that natural gas originated?  How did it reach her favorite restaurant?  She probably doesn't think about those questions, because the men who make it happen do their job so well she doesn't have to think about it.

Note that Susan Patton is yet another coastal elite, a Princeton graduate who lives in NYC and writes for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc.

It's also the kind of contempt for people who work with their hands that Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame regularly combats.

So, why does it matter that a fictional Disney princess reflects the contempt with which her creators hold blue collar Americans in flyover country? Because...

“Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles.” ~ Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture 

This snobbery towards people (the vast majority of them men) who choose to work with their hands and their brains needs to stop, and as long as Americans swim from childhood in an ocean of slanderous contempt towards hard working, decent people in flyover country, it won't stop.