Beauty and the Beast · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman in a yellow gown steps into a gold room and starts to turn, and the camera lifts and swings around her and the animal she's dancing with. You knew that shot before you bought the ticket. It was made in 1991, hand-drawn except for a famous computer-assisted ballroom, and Bill Condon restages it here nearly move for move inside a domed hall Sarah Greenwood actually built. Nobody in that theater in March 2017 was finding out what happens. They came to arrive somewhere they had already been.

That is the strangest fact about this film, and it's the best door into it, because Deleuze gives you a way to say precisely what the film does to time.

He opens his cinema books with a very old argument about movement. Before cinema, motion got represented through poses — the discus thrower caught at the top of his arc, the instant chosen because it condenses the whole action into one beautiful stopped form. Deleuze calls these privileged instants: movement understood as passage between eternal poses. Cinema broke that. A camera doesn't choose. It samples, twenty-four times a second, ordinary moment after ordinary moment, none of them more decisive than its neighbor. That's the any-instant-whatever, and Deleuze thinks it's the origin of the medium's power. Film is the art that stopped waiting for the beautiful pose.

Beauty and the Beast runs that history backwards, deliberately. Its unit is not the instant but the tableau, and the craft record says so plainly: Greenwood and costume designer Jacqueline Durran build theatrical, painterly tableaux, dense with props and period ornament, and the camera cranes and circles between them. The blue village dress. The library. "Be Our Guest." The yellow gown. These are stations, and the audience is holding the timetable. Once you watch the film this way its odd mix of thrill and inertia stops being a puzzle. The pleasure is arrival; the deadness is everything in between, where the movie has to invent.

The ballroom itself is something finer: a crystal-image. Deleuze's crystal is a moment when what's actually on screen and something virtual — a memory, a reflection, a dream — become impossible to tell apart and begin trading places. Usually he finds it in mirrors. Here it's a remake. You cannot see this waltz with your eyes alone; the 1991 waltz runs underneath it, and for the length of the number the two images pass the title of "the real one" back and forth. Emma Watson's gown and a cel-painted gown occupy the same square of screen. That isn't an analogy for the crystal. It's the structure itself, an actual image fused to its virtual double with neither able to win.

Which makes the film's additions so revealing. Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos fill in what the animated version left as a hole: how Belle's mother died, why the prince became cruel, the plague in the village's past. Deleuze has a name for that kind of image, and it's the plainest relation to time a movie can have — the recollection-image, a dated flashback standing in for a former present. A hole gets a date and stops being a hole.

Fairy tales live on those holes. A tale survives four hundred years partly because it doesn't explain the mother, and the missing explanation is the room your own life gets to move into. Condon's film converts that room into footage. The footage is well made. It is also the film's central critical wound, and Deleuze lets you name the mechanism rather than just the disappointment: the virtual isn't vagueness, it's a real force doing real work, and a flashback spends it.

So where is this movie genuinely alive? In a face that doesn't exist.

Dan Stevens played the Beast on stilts, in a muscle-suit rig, with a camera strapped to his head, and everything the visual-effects pipeline does downstream is built to protect one thing: his eyes and micro-expressions. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up — a feeling registered on a face and not yet discharged into action. The finer node fits better still. The potisign is the intensive face, the one where small movements accumulate toward a threshold nobody has crossed yet. That is the Beast for most of this film. He can't act on what he feels. He can only be looked at, and burn.

The craft debt runs straight and is worth naming, because this is where film moves forward through particular people solving particular problems. Cocteau, in 1946, kept a human's eyes inside a leonine mask and gave his castle living candelabra. Andy Serkis and Gollum, in 2002, proved an actor could drive a digital face and body. Avatar built the head-mounted rig that maps micro-expression onto a non-human face. Favreau's The Jungle Book, one year earlier, showed photoreal creatures could carry a whole picture. Condon's own contribution is small and decisive: he kept the actor physically on set, at the Beast's height, so Watson had real eyes to act into. That choice is why the romance registers at all.

Then there's the castle, which Greenwood designs as the curse made architecture — Rococo splendor gone Gothic, frozen and overgrown, visibly warming as the romance thaws it. Deleuze would call that an encompasser (synsign): a milieu so charged it summons the action out of the people inside it, marked by them and marking them back — the imprint. Structurally this is the large-form action-image at full strength, the classical machine: a whole situation presses, one act transforms it, the world changes state. But the castle carries a sharper charge too. Crystal-decomposition is Deleuze's term, drawn from Visconti, for an aristocratic and ordered world rotting from within. A prince's cruelty has turned his own court into furniture. The candelabra and the clock still carry traces of their faces, and they are the debris of a class that decayed into its own objects.

What did the film do to film? Commercially, everything: a billion dollars, and the remake pipeline locked in behind it — Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan. Cinderella had proved the template two years earlier; this was the moment the method was turned on a text the audience had memorized. What that cycle industrializes is something Deleuze saw coming in his account of the powers of the false: crystalline description, an image that composes its object and then quietly replaces it. Ask someone who was twelve in 2017 to picture the ballroom and see which one arrives.

The question worth leaving open isn't whether remakes are legitimate. It's what happens to a culture's images when the profitable move is to re-photograph its own memories at higher resolution. Deleuze thought cinema's gift was the ordinary instant, the moment nobody posed for. This film is evidence that audiences will pay a billion dollars for the pose.

Watch it again for what happens between the stations. Watch Stevens's eyes when the Beast isn't talking — that's the newest thing in the movie and the only part with no precedent to hit. And notice where the film gets restless: it's the invented material, the mother, the plague. Those scenes have nowhere to arrive.