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The Beauty and the Beast: Stockholm Syndrome


When I was a little girl, I watched Disney's version of “The Beauty and The Beast”. When you are a child, you see all through a rosy glass, and think about how Belle ends up loving the Beast, therefore he becomes a prince, and all live happily ever after... But when you get older (and actually read the classic fairytale), you start to think that, well, Beauty was not a guest at all! ‘Be Our Guest’, Lumiere? She couldn’t leave! So she was, by all means, literally a prisoner.
Once that registers in your mind, you start to ponder that the Beast is helding Belle captive throughout the whole movie (excluding the tiny part on the end when the Beast lets Belle go to tend to his father), and that our ‘heroine’ falls in love with her captor, even when he harasses her sexually! How twisted is that?!
Apparently, there is something called ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, that poses the basis for this perverted idea of liking your enslaver. This situation is given when a hostage creates a psychological bonding with it’s captor, in a positive way, an irrational feeling and behaviour that provokes a friendly and relaxed relationship with the keeper, but rather a hostile treatment towards people that could get them out of the situation, even to the point that a person with this syndrome could stand up to his/her captor and not go against him/her with the authorities. Psychologists who have studied the syndrome believe that the bond is initially created when a captor threatens a captive’s life, and then chooses not to kill the captive. The captive’s relief for not being dead already is transposed into gratitude toward the captor for giving him or her life.
This concept was developed in 1973, after a bank robbery in Stockholm, when 4 employers of the Sveriges Kreditbank where held captive in a security bolt, and started to sympathize with their captor. But, in this decade, we not only consider the sympathetic captor-captive relationship as the only situation where this syndrome could be given, but also in an abusive relationship, or child abuse. Hell, this is such a common syndrome, they even make songs about it!
Going back to the movie, and with all this knowledge, we can see the film in an even worse light: Gaston, who seemed like the bad guy throughout the movie, was in fact the personalization of the authorities, that were ready to give the enslaver what he deserved for encaptivating Belle! And he is thrown towards a deep hole on the ground from a balcony! We have to admit he was a little obsessed with our girl, yes, but always thinking what could be good for her...
The movie ends up with the happy ending of Belle and the Prince’s wedding, but I very much doubt that would happen in real life... What happened next in their twisted relationship, we’ll never know.

Photograph by @KlausHausmann

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