Cocteau Riffs

Tuesday at DMAC and [still] thinking about Cocteau, queerness, and multimodality. Finding out that sometimes my thinking is better expressed in [or I know better what I'm actually thinking in] my short little crappy videos.

In Love of the Beast, for instance, how everything seems to turn away from meaning, from knowability, from being known. But you must love the beast. Isn't queerness kinda like that? Queer is [or at least used to be] the realm of the unknowable.

I've been sifting such thoughts through Cocteau's La belle et la bête. [Clips from La belle et la bête are readily available on YouTube, such as the following clip of Belle entering the Beast’s castle for the first time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQtmFglneko]

We can read B&B in a number of ways, in a number of sexual ways. A little bit of Freudian imagination might figure the Beast as the id who needs the social taming of the Beauty to restore ego balance. Along these lines, the rampant materialism of the boyfriend and other family members itself is disciplined as potentially destructive id energy. Pushing further, the story seems to valorize a particularly heterosexual solution to unwieldy desire. The beast must be loved by the beauty, having left her father (to whom she seemed overly attached) to usher both of them into mature intimacy and sexuality. And indeed, they both “ascend” from the natural world at the end of the film, overcoming their potentially baser desires and connections.

Such readings are not necessarily wrong, but I believe such a glossing of the filmic text misses a key dimension of the film. Specifically, Belle, the Beauty, must come to love the Beast, even as she does not know him. She cannot know him. But the bête can only be free if she loves him without knowing him.

As such, the film offers what I would call a queer fantasy. Despite the seeming heterosexuality (Belle is a woman and the Beast seems male), B&B shows us how someone must come to love a completely alien being—what is being is this? what kind of beast is he?—in order to make a space for ascendant liberation. Love precedes knowledge. In fact, love must exist in the absence of knowledge for it to be liberatory.

The beast is a queer figure in the sense that he is not only not normal, but abnormal, monstrous, frightening, and ultimately unknowable.