Deep Thoughts about Disney's Beauty & the Beast

Send us a text

Tale as old as time? It’s old, alright. True as it can be? Hmm, about that...

Beauty and the Beast is an old and not-so-necessary model for romantic love. 

Hiding in the remarkable Howard Ashman score is a not-like-other-girls feminism and a reified classism that isolates poor Belle and gives her no choice but to fall for her captor. Emily and Tracie grapple with the conditioning from this movie (and so many other sources) that invites us to find meaning and satisfaction in providing kindness and accommodation to beasts in order to transform them into husbands. 

We dig into the ways in which the Disney version of the story, with it’s animated inanimate objects, provides a deeper and more intransigent rendering of the class differences assumed by the story, and find some comfort when imagining the beast as an allegory for self-hatred. 

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thoughts by visiting us on Patreon. 

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.