Movies and mirrors
Design by Ethan O’Leary
“Mirror mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all.”
We all know this quote far too well. The evil queen is beautiful, ruthless and worst of all: vain. When we turn on a Disney movie it’s easy to tell the difference between the good and evil characters before the story actually starts. The main characters are beautiful in a way that is supposed to be innocent and inherently good. The exceptions might be the Hunchback of Notre Dame or Beauty and the Beast, where part of the plot is overcoming their “visual setbacks”. If you’re ugly you have to deserve to be good. Although this appears to mainly apply to male heroes, as there are no redeeming qualities for ugly women.
The villains on the other hand can be beautiful in a different way: it’s unnatural, it requires makeup or magic to achieve their looks. And in contrast to the heroes, it’s not unlikely that the villain is queer coded. It’s also okay for the villains to be ugly, or even average looking. How awful. Neither is it uncommon for the villain to be older than the hero, as age is the bane of all that is good.
There are many things at play here, of which many are kind of problematic. First of all, we have the queer coding of evil characters on a regular basis, which becomes somewhat hateful considering that, in Disney at least, such characeristics never apply to “good” characters. Once upon a time, the US movie industry was regulated by the Hays Code, a set of guidelines for self-censorship for the US movie industry between 1934 and 1968. It policed all kind of things such as the use of profanities, how to display the flag and also “sexual perversion” which in todays standards might sound a bit arbitrary, but at the time meant anything outside chaste hetero relationships. The thing is, many of the prime examples of queer coded Disney villains are from movies post Hays. On the short wikipedia page on queer coding, they list Ursula, Jafar, Scar, Governor Ratcliffe and Captain Hook. The article says that villains are queer coded because of Hays code, as it bans positive portrayal of homosexuality, yet all of the villains listed above were created post 1968. It seems that the code and maybe even societal expectations are still holding the creators back, even when they can do positive queer representation. On a positive note they seem to be moving in a somewhat positive direction with their last couple of movies, where the heroes' experience can be parallelled to that of members of the LGBTQ+ community, such as Frozen and Encanto.
On the other hand we have the issue of characters' appearances being part of what can only be concluded is a sexist agenda. I won’t even start the rant about body image in itself. All genders are portrayed in a very narrow set of ideals, if they are portrayed at all. Portrayal of women in fiction are not only enforcing weird body standards, but they are also enforcing an ideal of how you should tread lightly with your appearance. The heroine is beautiful. But she is also kind, humble and modest. She is beautiful in the right way. A beautiful female villain is vain, and more often than not, the vanity is what makes them evil. Mother Gothel keeps the beautiful Rapunzel locked up so she can be young and beautiful forever. The Evil Queen rids herself off Snowhite who one upped her in the beauty department. These narratives are saying that we should be beautiful, it is part of being good, but we also can’t care too much about our appearance. “Beauty” can be achieved or improved with things such as make up, skincare, medical procedures and so on. But if we take measures to be beautiful, we are no longer pure or real or natural. And then we are no longer good. And the beauty will not be righteous
Queer-coding in itself shouldn’t be considered bad, nor prompoting traits such as kindness. But the pattern in which it is done is problematic. Only queer-coding villains and then having a long list of requirements for heroes consisting of being cishet, “innocent”, young, beautiful and so on, is what is problematic. If anyone could be a hero or villain regardless of sexuality and appearance it might gradually contribute to less hate towards others but also internally. We grow up and wonder why we feel ashamed that we don’t look a certain way, and why we are shamed for trying to look that way. We wonder why many of us have internalized homophobia or why others have trouble accepting people for things that are none of their business to begin with. We look in the mirror and ask who is the fairest of them all, or even worse, we ask who is worthy of love. And the animated characters in our heads answer through our reflection, that it is not us.