My, What A Guy, That Gaston!

In a longer post I'm working on, about the revelation that LeFou is struggling with his sexuality, I make a comment about how this adaptation (more specifically, I think, how director Bill Condon) is letting the actors mold their characters and bring a certain depth to them that's lacking in the 1991 animated version (as well as in the original fairy tale -- which is, after all, to be expected, as fairy tales are allegorical stories so character depth and development isn't a thing).

I love the 1991 animated version -- specifically, I love the music -- but I've always been fairly open about it doesn't hold up too well under my adult-lens (not even my Disney scholar lens!). I mean, I've got questions:
Where is Belle's mom? Do the townspeople know about the Beast and the castle -- or, at least, the prince and the castle (a royal family seems a hard thing to NOT know about)? Where does Chip come from?! 

And, perhaps most relevant to this post -- why does everyone LOVE Gaston? I mean, the entire town basically does everything he says and hero-worships him. I get that in most Disney movies, he'd be the hero/love-interest. I get that, for the most part, he doesn't even really do anything evil. (FOR THE MOST PART. Yes, throwing an innocent man into an insane asylum just to blackmail his daughter into marrying you is pretty despicable. But really, the guy just wants to go kill an evil monster that did, admittedly, imprison two innocent people.) I get that he's supposed to be the pinnacle of hyper-masculinity: strong, athletic, good-looking, a pioneer in the field of interior decorating, single-handedly keeping egg-sellers in business...but.

But the guy's kinda of a jerk -- even to LeFou, his best friend. So why does everyone adore him?

Luckily, Entertainment Weekly recently interviewed Luke Evans, publishing an article titled, "Luke Evan's Backstory for Gaston is a Beauty" (pun intended, I'm assuming). AND you can read it online.
In a nutshell,

"Evans paints Gaston as a broken man devolving into monstrosity, transforming in counterpoint to the actual titular Beast’s evolution towards civility; more than this, the actor’s take on the burly villain comes loaded with a heavy history and more gravitas than one might expect of the one-dimensional (albeit six-abbed) antagonist."

The parallel in the two, male, main characters' journeys has always been apparent to people who look at the film with a critical eye -- the question has always been, "Who's the real beast?" But.
(More excerpts from the interview and my thoughts below the cut because, hi. I'm wordy and have lots of opinions.)




But we learn a lot of details about the character from Evans's interview -- details that make me even more excited to see the film this weekend:

• Pay attention to costuming and the attendant symbolism (and you thought high school English wouldn't be useful): "...but I felt like he had to be in red, and not just any red. A certain color red. An almost blood red. [...] But essentially, the red became connected to the darkness of his character, which I quite liked. When he starts to become the monster Gaston, that’s when he’s seen in the deep red leather jacket."
• EW points out that Emma Watson requested (because of course she did) that Belle be the inventor and have greater agency -- and Evans had similar thoughts for Gaston: "I saw massive potential to create backstory and layer him up with intention and objectives. The fact of the story is that Gaston is a war hero and an army captain, and the only reason he’s got this celebrity status in Villeneuve is because when he was about 16, he protected the town from a pack of Portuguese marauders in 1740."
  This. Is. Huge.
  First of all, I love that we have name for the "little town full of little people": Villeneuve (which, if I remember my high school French correctly, literally means "new city").
  Second, and perhaps more importantly, Evans' reveal gives the story a specific time and place -- France, ~1760. (Evans reveals that LeFou was with him at war and keeps his exploits from "20 to 30 years ago alive." Which makes Gaston older than I would have thought but...*shrug*). And Disney fairy tales usually happen once upon a time in a faraway land -- the only exception is The Princess and the Frog which is very clearly 1920s New Orleans.
  But a 16 year old war hero? That *clearly* explains the town's hero worship and adoration. 
• Okay, and here's the kicker -- Evans brought the element of PTSD to the character, which I am absolutely fascinated by:
  "But if you’re 16 and doing that, you might be suffering from a little PTSD. So we played it dark. When I first met [director Bill Condon] he asked me to play him darker. There was a lot of anguish inside him, bubbling away. And he wasn’t happy that Belle had rejected him. Instead of being this petulant pouting child needing to be fluffed up by his fans in the tavern, there was a much darker side to him."And, of particular importance to my class this semester, Evans has a few thoughts on Gaston-as-Disney-Villain:
  "Also, the best villains are not villains from the beginning. They turn into villains. He probably does suffer from PTSD, which he manages to keep under wraps because he has people like the villagers and LeFou and the girls who puff him up and make him feel sexy and wanted. But below that is a broken human being. He’s jaded, and the second he realizes that he’s not going to get what he wants, this military creature comes out of him. [...] I think that’s why he was always such a great villain. I see him as the biggest villainous threat in any of the Disney films. He has no special powers. He’s not Jafar, or Ursula, or Maleficent. He’s a human being! He’s an arrogant, narcissistic, bigoted, chauvinistic, self-absorbed man who, once he’s told no, is driven by jealousy and revenge to fuel the fear of quite an idiotic group of villagers to go kill something they’ve never seen before. I mean, it resonates massively to what’s happening in the political climate throughout the world now."

I wish we could have seen this story -- the transformation of Gaston-the-boy into Gaston-the-war-hero into Gaston-the-villain. The connection to PTSD is a little tenuous -- I don't at all think that Evans is implying that everyone with PTSD turns into a villainous beast of a man -- but I do like the depth it brings to the character. I'd like to think that 16 year-old Gaston was probably a little bigoted, a little chavinistic, and that the trauma of the battle, combined with the adoration of the villagers...all of that created the monster. And Evans is absolutely right: Gaston is a human being. He doesn't have magic or special powers. His villainy is a very real, relatable villainy -- it could happen to any one. We probably know a real-life Gaston.