Favorite Characters: Dido Belle Lindsay (Belle)

I watched this movie again and was again bowled over by how much I adore this incredible character.  Dido is a young woman forged in a nearly impossible crucible, trying to determine who she is and what she’s worth in a world where she’s met with constant caveats on her value.

As a child, Dido’s life is set on a new course when she meets her father, a white aristocrat who sired her out of wedlock but who loves her and the resemblance he sees in her of her mother.  Although the great aunt and uncle who raise her in her father’s absence come to love her as one of the family, their love for her is never as uncomplicated as her father’s, who instantly acknowledges her, makes her his heir, and insists that she be given every opportunity afforded to the daughter of any aristocrat.  Her great aunt and uncle’s love, meanwhile, is filtered through an ever-increasing number of rules that govern Dido’s place in the world.  She’s still a child when they placidly decide that she’ll never marry, since anyone for whom her mother’s blood wouldn’t be a dealbreaker would be too lowly to be worthy of her father’s.

These are the types of catch-22’s that surround Dido.  Whenever there are dinner guests, she finds herself too objectionable to eat with the family but too elevated to eat with the servants, and so she slips through these cracks of in-between space where no one exists except her, caught between the two halves of her world – neither of which, it seems, can ever fully have her.  For many young ladies her age, having their portrait painted is a prospect of great delight and anticipation, but the mere thought of it devastates Dido, having spent her youth walking the halls adorned with family portraits in which Black bodies are painted only in the background, looking up at their white masters with servile admiration.  She can’t bear the idea, and yet she can’t begin to articulate to her great uncle why she’s so “ungraciously” opposed to his gift of having her sit for a portrait with her white cousin.

With all these often contradictory, always dehumanizing rules pulling at her, making her feel as though her mother’s blood is a shame she is forced to carry – “her [mother’s] apparent crime to be born negro, and [Dido’s] to be the evidence” – Dido retreats into pride.  This is what I think interests me the most about her character.  In the face of being made to feel less-than, she holds fiercely, haughtily to her father’s name and her rightful position.  When she first meets Mr. Davinier, she chastises him for not showing her the due deference that he, as a vicar’s son, ought to.  As she herself justifies it, she puts others in their place in order to state what hers is meant to be.  While she doesn’t initially make very heated protestations against following her great aunt and uncle’s rules, she’s not shy about making it known just why she feels they’re so absurd and unjust.

Dido is young, she’s confused, and her own unfair treatment means she doesn’t always give others the consideration they deserve.  But she’s also perceptive and bold, and she’s always learning.  I love seeing her awakening as she collects scraps of news on the controversy over the slave ship the Zong – her initial disbelief, her righteous anger that her great uncle has kept this knowledge from her, her growing political attentiveness, and the outpouring of compassion she feels for the drowned slaves that in turn gives her the bravery she needs to love every part of herself.

Some Rumpelstiltskin/Belle Thoughts (Once Upon a Time)

This isn’t a Relationship Spotlight post, because it’s not one I love – not even in a fascinating, dysfunctional way like Tony and Sid on Skins.  Still, I’ve been thinking about these two since Once Upon a Time’s fall finale and wanted to write about them.  Belle/Rumpel spoilers ahead.

When I saw Belle’s season 1 intro, I was intrigued that the show’s version of her story placed Rumpel as the Beast.  He doesn’t look like the Disney Beast, of course – less animal, more imp – but more importantly, he acts different.  Where the movie’s Beast is mostly selfish and quick-tempered, Rumpel really is a monster when he meets Belle.  He’s killed people, psychologically tortured others, preyed on and manipulated countless desperate souls, and is feared by most of the realm.  In caring for Rumpel, Belle has to do far more than look past his monstrous looks; she has to see the glimmer of a good man he might have been once and could possibly be again.

This is a darker story, more about saving Rumpel’s soul than restoring his non-cursed humanity, but it becomes frustrating because Rumpel so rarely indicates that he wants saving.  Ultimately, he’s only ever on his own side, and on the occasions he aids the heroes, it’s either because their goals align with his or he’s “playing good” to placate Belle.  The genuinely heroic and/or altruistic things he does over the course of the series are negligible, so it makes Belle – who’s supposed to be really smart – seem like a dupe.  It’s painful to see her lecture rightfully-suspicious Storybrooke folk about Rumpel’s “good heart” when he’s being anything from amorally shifty to blatantly villainous behind her back.  Not only does it severely weaken her character, but it has an abuser/abused ring to it when she forgives him no matter how times she discovers (to her utter shock) that he’s been lying to her and doing horrible things on the sly.

The whole things is further complicated by the fact that Rumpel doesn’t want his curse to be broken by True Love’s Kiss.  The recurring theme of Belle and Rumpel’s story is that he wants her, maybe even needs her, and loves her after a fashion, but loves his power more.  In season 1, he explicitly rejects Belle’s offer of True Love for fear of breaking his curse and losing his Dark One powers.  Ever since, though their pattern is for him to beg her to stay when she catches him out and for her to take him back, it’s clear that he’ll always choose his power over her.  In addition to being one sick puppy (albeit a massively compelling, entertaining one,) he’s a total magic addict, ruled by his need to be the most powerful, and she can’t compete with that.

Despite the creepy, unhealthy slant to the relationship, especially this season (he maintains an insidious lie and uses magic on her to keep her in the dark, and she tries to control him against his will by wielding the Dark One’s dagger – please tell me no one sees Twu Wuv in that!), I like that Rumpel’s villainy and twisted power issues don’t negate his feelings for Belle.  She’s one of his few vulnerabilities, and to the extent that he’s ever conflicted about his actions, it’s due to her view of him.  For her sake, I don’t want them together, but for his, I felt for him during their big falling-out in the fall finale.  While he deserves every bit of it and I’m so glad Belle’s (finally!) wise to his deceit, I get why he’s so wrecked when she casts him out.  It gets back to complicated and dark, and that’s what I get behind when it comes to these two.  Being a villain doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her, and loving her doesn’t make him less of a villain – there’s a self-awareness to that portrayal that the pairing needs.  Don’t give me twisted and call it romantic, but make it equal parts intense, dark, messed-up, and bittersweet, and I’m there.

Belle (2014, PG)

 

I’m in the Cities for Pride, and I thought why not make it Pride and a show (or two?)  Saints be praised, the movies I missed are still in a few nearby theaters.  Let’s kick things off with Belle.

 

This lovely film is based on the true story of Dido Belle Lindsay, the illegitimate biracial daughter of an aristocratic British naval captain in the 18^th century.  After the death of her mother, Dido’s father officially acknowledges the young girl, giving her his last name and bringing her to be raised by his aunt and uncle while he is at sea.  She grows up alongside her white cousin Elizabeth, who is also illegitimate but unacknowledged by her own father. 

 

As you might imagine, the historical context gives Dido a vast and complex social system to navigate, especially when her father is killed at sea and leaves her his fortune.  Her great aunt and uncle love her dearly, and Elizabeth is like a sister to her, but from the start, she’s given a laundry list of rules that she alone must follow:  guidelines that dictate when she is and isn’t allowed to show her face.  She also lives in an England that is growing increasingly divided on the issue of slavery, a debate that her great uncle strives to keep her from hearing.

 

Dido is played excellently by the gorgeous Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was Martha’s sister Tish on Doctor Who.  She’s intelligent and curious, sensitive and passionate, proud and willful.  She carries herself with a haughtiness that she wraps protectively about her, a coping mechanism against her situation.  She knows, for example, that the “mere” son of a vicar would be invited to her great uncle’s dinner table before she, a lady of the house, would be granted the same honor.  So, she pulls rank with others before they can do so with her and clings to the conventions with which she’s been raised, even though they stifle her at every turn.

 

So many fascinating layers are at play here.  Watching young Dido (no more than 6 or 7) play with Elizabeth, her great aunt and uncle decide that she will never marry; any man who would “overlook” her skin color and deign to marry her wouldn’t be of sufficient class for her father’s bloodline.  Meanwhile, Elizabeth, who, unlike Dido, has no inheritance to provide for her, is unable to find anyone to marry a beautiful and lively – but penniless – girl.  Additionally, Dido has no guide to contextualize her own blackness.  She only has her family’s contradictory “some animals are more equal than others” rules to go by, as well as the family portraits that show black slaves in subservient, diminished positions beside her white ancestors.  She doesn’t even know how her curly hair needs to be combed; it isn’t until her family arrives in London for the season that a black maid teaches her the proper way (shades of Suzanne on Orange is the New Black.) 

 

Joining Gugu Mbatha-Raw are Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson as her great aunt and uncle.  Miranda Richardson and fellow Who alum Penelope Wilton (Harriet Jones!) are also in the film, and Matthew Goode, who I loved in A Single Man, makes a brief appearance as her father.  Plus, there’s Tom Felton, a.k.a. Draco Malfoy, who seems to be making a career out of playing slimy, bigoted little creeps – lucky him.

 

Warnings

 

Thematic elements, some language (including racist remarks,) and a little smoking/drinking.