October Blog Post

I’ve never seen a Disney movie in my life before. Despite the fact that my godmother was incredibly close to Walt Disney when she was growing up and used to call him Uncle Walt every time he came to the house, I’ve never seen a Disney movie before. I was fascinated when we watched Mickey Mouse Monopoly, written by Chyn Sun and directed by Miguel Picker, in class. Having never seen these movies before and watching clips now as a nineteen-year-old who’s had a good amount of life experience, I can see that Disney certainly has an agenda and feeds children a misconstrued version of reality at young age. We socialize and feed children these messages early on in their life and hide them behind beautiful princesses and talking animals.

The message that stood out to me the most was when they were discussing Beauty and the Beast. I vividly remember the quote, “She reinterprets his rage and abuse as anger”. I thought it was fitting to pick this quote for my October blog post because October is National Domestic Violence Awareness month. What was most shocking to me was what the little girls in the documentary said when being asked what they would do if their friend was in the same situation as Belle. These young girls excused the Beast’s actions and said they would tell their friend to stay sweet and hope that the Beast would stop his outbursts of rage. They would just be happy that their friend is in love. In my opinion, the message that this movie sends to young girls is that abuse is something that you shake off. It’s not a big deal and it’s something you should excuse because women “need” to have a man in their lives. This quote I picked also opens up a conversation about gender roles in Disney movies. Belle “reinterprets his rage and abuse as anger” because, according to Disney, a woman is nothing unless she is with a man. Because she is supposed to stay with that man she must excuse his actions and stand by him no matter how he treats her.

It’s amazing to me that we let children watch these movies that depict women as weak and always needing a man to rescue them. We started discussing in our LA groups about whether or not we should let children watch Disney movies after watching this documentary. Some people were saying that parents can’t really stop children from watching these movies because they can find other ways to watch them. There was also talk that kids will feel out of the loop when their classmates talk about these movies if they’ve never seen them before. Someone brought up the point that it’s alright to let kids watch these movies but parents need to talk to their children afterwards and explain some of the key messages. I’ve never seen Disney movies because they scared my older sister when she watched them and my parents thought they would have the same affect on me. Growing up always being out of loop when kids talk about Disney movies was never a bad thing in my opinion. After watching this documentary, I see that Disney feeds children false messages of what “true love” is and what men and women’s roles in society are. I personally don’t believe these misconstrued versions of reality are necessarily a good thing to learn at such a young age.

The quote I picked is important to me I’m passionate about ending domestic violence. It makes me sick that a movie like Beauty and the Beast gives the message to children that abuse, whether it be physical or emotional, can be excused or reinterpreted for something that it’s not. There’s no excuse, especially not “love” that makes abuse acceptable.