The Hunchback of Notre Dame

[schneefink]

I watched Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" yesterday (yay Disney movie nights with friends!) and enjoyed it a lot. I liked Phoebus a lot more than I expected, starting from his fight with Esmeralda in the cathedral, and at the end I was surprised how much I wanted to read the continuing adventures of Esmeralda&Quasimodo&Phoebus.

Frollo was scary, an excellent villain.
- in a position of power
- convinced he's a better person than everyone else – his villain song literally starts with that:
"Beata Maria / you know I am a righteous man / of my virtue I am justly proud. / Beata Maria / You know I'm so much purer than / the common, vulgar, weak, licentious crowd." Great villain song.
- hatred of a specific ethnicity and the desire to destroy them
- delights in power games and sees people only in the sense of how they can be of use to him
- has command of a military force, which mostly goes along with the immoral actions, and when one of them refuses he declares him a traitor
- is convinced none of his mistakes are his fault
- has no problem with casual killing
- preys after a woman
- uses his powers ruthlessly in pursuit of personal goals
- can only be destroyed when the whole town rebels.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The happy ending in the movie is nice, but I couldn't help but worry that the King or another higher authority wouldn't be at all happy with citizens resisting a minister and there's a good chance of repercussions, especially for Esmeralda's people. I don't think Phoebus is likely to get a pardon (maybe, depending on the next minister, but the odds are worse if he keeps associating with Esmeralda), so now he'll be an outcast too, certainly not an easy transition. And if Quasimodo gets implicated in the rebellion/Frollo's death, he might be considered a criminal too, though the priest would probably try to protect him. In any case, plenty of future story potential.

Comments

[dancing_serpent]

Oh, nice! This makes me want to rewatch again. The fist time I watched it was in the cinema, and it impressed me quite a bit. Especially the really really gorgeous music! I agree with everything you say about Frollo, and his villain song still send shivers down my spine.

In any case, plenty of future story potential.
Hm, yes, certainly. Maybe I should go looking for fic...

[schneefink]

The music is the reason we watched it: LB put it on a film music collection for a long car drive, and we both liked the music so much we decided we had to watch the movie again :)

Unfortunately I didn't find the kind of fic I was hoping to find, but maybe I missed something.

[naye]

I've never seen this one, but now you've got me intrigued!

[schneefink]

It doesn't seem to be as popular as some other Disney movies from what I've seen, but I don't know why. It can't be quality. (Maybe because Esmeralda isn't a princess? Or because the setting is less fantastical and a bit darker? Idk.)

[quarter_to_five]

So glad more people like this one! I love it but I'm always amazed it got made.

I mean, er, how do I put this, it's a little dark and also...erotic for a Disney film? Frollo's Catholic lust and repression, Esmerelda has scenes where she's basically stripping, and Quasimodo's frustration and then humiliation at the hands of the crowd where he IS forcefully stripped. (Its the same sequence, isn't it? Esmerelda's beauty/Quasi's ugliness made into items of consumption for the crowd and both sexualized/de-sexualized.) And its not squinty-subtext or a subversive reading or whathaveyou, that's all rather on the surface!

[schneefink]

I don't think Quasimodo's humiliation stands out so much among the Disney movies (at least I didn't think it does, though it is hard to come up with concrete examples right now so maybe), but the two things that surprised me were a) that Frollo's desire for Esmerelda was stated more explicitly than I expected (when Esmerelda said "I know what you want from me" as a kid I wouldn't have understood that, but now all of their interactions are so creepy and uncomfortable), and b) the ugliness of the crowd, especially because the crowd is human and in our world. They turned on Quasimodo so fast at the festival of fools that it's difficult to believe the happy ending that they really do accept him now. There are other Disney movies with a lot of ugly stuff in them too (like Pocahontas), I don't remember enough of them to be able to juge how much Quasimodo stands out, but it's definitely very different from e.g. Frozen or Brave or Moana.

[quarter_to_five]

You know, I don't think I've ever actually seen Pocahontas! I've always been horrified by how brutal and *physical* Quasimodo's humiliation there is - he's tied down and partially - and very publically - stripped and he tries to cover himself but his clothes are too torn, and he limps away even after he's been rescued and can't meet anyone's eye...it's pretty horrifying, and - apparently - really strongly etched into my memory. The scene has always read not just as an assault but also very much a shaming, a violation. The scene seems coded to read, to a certain degree, well, rapily. And then Frollo's song is just...I mean, it isn't really about anything other than a catholic priest singing about sex. A kid might have missed Frollo's comment, but I don't how else anyone can understand the song...And I *think* Esmerelda can basically be assumed to be a prostitute, (Mary Magdalene as she sings to Maria, the Cathedral itself, to carry on the Catholic motif) but at least that's an adult reading...the rest is just right there.

Ok now I really want to go rewatch it!

[schneefink]

Let me know what you think if you rewatch it :) And if you watch Pocahontas. I'm mildly put very skeptical about a love story with that background, but I don't want to check how well (or, more likely, badly) they did it.

Personally I didn't think Esmeralda was a prostitute, but I can see how that would be plausible. (Frollo wasn't a priest btw he was a minister - according to Wikipedia they deliberately changed it to avoid angering the church - but it doesn't change much imo.)

[dhampyresa]

I think I need to rewatch that movie.

[schneefink]

I would love to read your comments :) I knew before watching that it was based on a novel, but not who wrote it or that there are so many different adaptions.

[dhampyresa]

I'm most familiar with the Notre Dame de Paris musical, but it's really close to the book.

[dolorosa_12]

I haven't watched this film recently (I think the only time I ever watched it was in the '90s when it came out in the cinemas), but the parallels you're drawing between Frollo and our current real-world villains made me laugh ruefully.

I'm currently rereading one of my favourite trilogies of books, and the villain there is an unqualified member of a corrupt, wealthy, unaccountable aristocratic ruling dynasty, who once ran the equivalent of this world's Olympic Games, and 'seemed to think running a country was the next logical step'. He's also a racist, a misogynist, a warmonger, sexually violent towards women, narcissistic and paranoid. Oh, and a massive wall across the American continent features heavily in the series' plot.

I can't decide if these kinds of parallels are suddenly more obvious because of the current state of the world, or if human villainy and injustice only takes so many forms, whether fictional or real-world...

[schneefink]

It's probably a mix of everything: the parallels are more obvious now, there are limited variations of villainy, and probably writers also write about what they know so it's even more familiar.
(Speaking of familiarity with villains, I've never seen "House of Cards", but from what I've heard of it, I would be interested in a few years to read about the different impressions it makes before vs. after the Trump presidency, just because the real world comparisons are so different.)

[dolorosa_12]

Yeah, I've not seen House of Cards (US or UK version), but I've heard that its creators have been making veiled allusions to Trump in promotional material for the show that's come out after Trump won the US election.