Holy everything, the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast really is about Stockholm syndrome - just not in the way people who say that tend to think it is.
A while ago I transcribed these tweets and book quotes about the origin of the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’.
Basically, several people got taken hostage, and the psychiatrist who was supposed to help the police deescalate the situation did a terrible job.
After the hostages were free, one of the women publicly called him out on doing such a terrible job, and said she’d felt more in danger of being shot by the police than by the kidnapper.
The psychiatrist, who had refused to speak to this woman when she requested it during the hostage situation and did not meet her afterwards, immediately declared that she must only think he’d done a terrible job because she was secretly attracted to the kidnapper.
Likewise, when Belle publicly says Gaston is more cruel to her than the Beast was, he immediately announces this must be a delusion caused by something wrong with her.
[image description: two captioned screenshots from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, and a screenshot of a book quote from See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill.
First movie screenshot is Belle recoiling, holding the Enchanted Mirror, captioned, “He’s no monster, Gaston. You are!”
Second movie screenshot is Gaston yanking the mirror away from Belle, declaring, “She’s as crazy as the old man.”
Third screenshot reads: “In 2008, a review of the literature on Stockholm syndrome found that most diagnoses were made by the media, not psychologists or psychiatrists; that it was poorly researched, and that the scant academic research on it could not even agree on what the syndrome was, let alone how to diagnose it. Allan Wade, who has consulted closely with Enmark, says Stockholm syndrome is ‘a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence’ by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.”
Some of the text in the third screenshot is highlighted. There are also two footnote links, but the footnotes themselves are not shown.
In fairness to the townspeople for going along with this, from their perspective, Belle calling Gaston a monster seemed like it came out of nowhere. They aren’t privy to why she rejected his marriage proposal before her disappearance, and it was not widely known that Gaston was having Maurice sent to the asylum to blackmail Belle into marrying him.
(I mean, the end of the song 'Gaston’ implies that some of the folks in the pub could infer what he was up to, but only Gaston, Lefou, and the asylum keeper were officially in on the plan.)
The whole exchange, “I might be able to clear up this little misunderstanding, if.” “If what?” “If you marry me,” was in an undertone, and nobody else looked to be close enough to overhear.
Anyway: This scene is Gaston leveraging his position of respectability in the town to be believed over the woman who disagrees with him, making himself the only one whose side of the argument people are even listening to, and then redirecting everyone’s focus to “kill the Beast!”, just like the psychiatrist who invented Stockholm syndrome leaned on his degree to get people to believe he was right to dismiss accusations that he did something wrong, and refocused their attention on his ‘diagnosis’.
