It is Friday and the movie starts at noon. I’m able to park
close to the cinema door since my car is one of maybe five in the cavernous
parking lot. Do I have the wrong
time? Is the theater closed?
No. The door is not locked and I ride the escalator upstairs
to keep the ticket seller, concessionaire, and ticket-taker company. For there are only four of us in that vast
popcorn-scented multi-plex lobby emblazoned with floor to ceiling “Coming
Soon!” posters. This is the second time
in my life that I’ve gone to a movie alone; who knew that I would be so truly
by myself? A little weird, but freeing
as well.
I go to the bathroom; give the nice man my ticket; walk down
the long hall, and enter the theater. It
is empty. So, where to sit? On the aisle, of course, for easy bathroom
access. In the middle row? Hm. A little too close to the screen, so I
move back two rows. Perfect. Two women
enter and, with a laugh, I bid them “Welcome to my theater!” I unzip my
pocketbook and pull out the water bottle and granola bar I’d smuggled in. I feel a little daring about that small
felony. Look at me, so bold today!
Smuggling contraband and alone
at the movies!
I love Disney, cartoons, and musicals, and Dave does
not. I wanted to see “Beauty and the
Beast” and Dave certainly did not. I love previews, and Dave does not…and the
fantasy selections blaring and darting in bright light – geared to the “Beauty
and the Beast” audience – delight me.
Dave would have been sneering or snoozing over “Wonder Woman,” a sequel
to “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and “Coco,” an animated film about a small boy’s
journey to the land of the dead. Now
that I’ve braved solo movie attendance, I plan to see them all.
The ponderous velvet curtains pull further to the side as
the lights go down. “When You Wish Upon a Star” swells through the room just as
it did at the opening of "The Wonderful World of Disney” when I was a kid. Onscreen, colored stars arc over the soaring
towers of Cinderella’s castle and cascade in a shimmering shower of sparkles. I
grin in the dark. Yippee!
Oddly, I am weepy several times during the movie, and not
just when the brutish Gaston kills our – by now, beloved – Beast. What are the triggers? I’m not sure.
Nostalgia? The appeal of enchantment as a solution to seemingly
unsolvable problems? A yearning for
happy endings? In “Beauty and the Beast,”
arrogance and bullying inflict pain, harsh judgments reveal the flaws of the
judges, exteriors belie interiors, and mob mind and mob violence are shown for
the horrors they are. The themes in
“Beauty and the Beast” are not cartoonish: they challenge us now.
Later, when I return home, Dave has to listen to me re-tell
the tale because I am so uplifted, so excited, so HAPPY after seeing this
movie. He says, “So, it has a plot like
every other fairytale about the restorative power of women.” Whoa.
I am whipped from a defensive response at the start of his comment to
astonishment at new insight in his closing. “Say that again?”
“It’s a story about the restorative power of women.”
While a friend recently told me she’d read an article debating
“Belle: Feminist or Brain-Washed
Captive,” with my new Trump World heightened feminist sensibility, I love
Dave’s expansion of the traditional take on the movie’s message. For, despite
the appeal of powers beyond those human, enchantment was not the path to the
movie’s happy ending. Ultimately, Beauty and the Beast is about loving despite
differences. In the film as in life, kindness
and love are the saving grace.
