Disney's Gaston Died the Worst

I grew up on Disney films. They were entertainment, but they were also the most important didactic medium of my formative years. The characters and events inspire children’s imaginations while providing moral centers. I wish I had half of Simba’s bravery, Aladdin’s inner nobility, Mulan’s honor, or Pongo’s sense of family. These characters are moral icons that got mass-produced by the Disney machine, but somewhere, behind the capitalism, lies truth of human character and spirit.

And for every hero, there is a villain, an antagonist to block our hero’s path. Often times, these villains test our heroes and push them to their limits. Pretty much all antagonists in literature or movies or Disney Movies have a goal. Maleficent wanted revenge for being snubbed to the most important birthday party in all the land. Clayton wanted fortune in exchange for gorillas. And Jafar, lovable twisted Jafar, wanted the all-elusive power.

On a brief tangent: Jafar’s three wishes were: be a sultan, be an all-powerful sorcerer, be a genie. Maybe he should have wished for a bigger brain.

These villains are sometimes more memorable than the hero’s themselves. Hades and Hercules? Please! I’d take the Underworld god with a fireball for a head over a pretty boy any day. But in the end, these villains always die. Well, to clarify, these villains always come to an endpoint. For example, lovable Jafar does not “die,” but spends his life in limbo while Aladdin lives on into the infinity of “happily ever after.”

Some men break their necks. Some dragons are struck by Excalibur-type swords. Some squids are impaled by ships. But no villain’s death is worse than Gaston’s in Beauty and the Beast.

Gaston is the mythopoetic representation of Narcissus. Throughout the movie, Gaston surrounds himself with mirrors or other objects that can reflect is own beauty. As Ovid says of Narcissus, “He looks in wonder / Charmed by himself…Everything attracts him / that makes him so attractive. Foolish boy, / He wants himself, the loved becomes the lover.”


And what a beauty Gaston is! He is physically fit. He has a nice cleft in his chin. I believe his physical beauty is not a point of contention; it is a given. We, the audience must assume he is physically beautiful in order to begin to challenge his moral center.




Needless to say, Gaston is arrogant and conceited. As the villain of the picture, he needs a goal, and what a goal he has: Belle. Gaston might be more sympathetic as character if he actually cared for Belle, but Gaston only views Belle as a supplement to his own grandeur. Gaston cares nothing for Belle, as made obvious when he mocks her books and passion for reading. He makes it very clear that Belle is his goal; in fact, he loves her so much, he points a gun at her in the opening scene.


Gaston tries a number of things to win his “love.” Most directly, he purposes to Belle in her own home. On the assumption that he will receive a “yes” he stages a public spectacle outside the house. To Gaston’s dismay, Belle forces Gaston out of the house with Judo-like finesse and Gaston falls into mud, humiliated in front of his followers. The mud of opaque, not-transparent, and the opposite of the pristine reflective surfaces in which Gaston typically views himself.


After a number of other feats, of which I won’t go into here, Gaston loses his footing. After a respectable attempt, as a villain, to blackmail Belle into marriage, Belle shows Gaston the magic mirror from the Beast’s castle. Belle yells, “SHOW ME THE BEAST!” and the raging Beast is shown to the entire mob. In this scene, the Beast’s physical ugliness in the mirror is a symbolic anti-Narcissus reflection of Gaston’s inner hideousness. Gaston’s face is horrified. This is one time we see Gaston truly broken.


This face, seen below, is the turning point for Gaston’s downfall.



The previous two examples show that Belle is Gaston’s undoing. Like the perfect hero, Belle holds the key to destroying the villain. Both examples show that Belle is able to manipulate the Narcissus myth and show Gaston the aberrations in his own reflection: the mud is opaque, and the mirror reflects not the outside world, but the internal world. One could argue this scene, the magic mirror and the mob scene, is the true death of Gaston. After this scene, Gaston loses sight of his goals and gives full control to his emotions.

In an illogical outburst, Gaston locks Belle in her own house and sets off into the night to kill the Beast. The awkward and somewhat ridiculous part of this act is that Gaston’s goal as the villain was supposed to be courting and marrying Belle. How would imprisoning her get him closer to his goal? He should have stuck with the blackmail plot, but he didn’t. He decided locking Belle in the cellar was a better idea.

I could give Gaston some leeway saying that killing the Beast would take his main romantic competition away from Belle, thus putting Gaston back in the front running to win Belle’s affections, but this is a stretch. There is no evidence that Gaston wants the Beast dead for that reason. While fighting the Beast, Gaston does shout over a thunderclap: “BELLE IS MINE!” but I don’t believe his words. He has passion, to be sure, but does he have affection? If he truly wanted Belle, he would have tried to manipulate her into marriage rather than running off into the woods.

Now, attempting to kill the Beast, Gaston seems more desperate to prove his own self-worth to himself: Narcissus trying to court his reflection. Gaston is no longer a villain trying to impede Belle’s progress; Gaston is simply a broken villain, lost with out a purpose in the movie. At this point in the film, Gaston is only fueled only by his rage—an admirable quality for a villain—but Gaston’s life is about to get even worse.


After shooting the Beast full of arrows and stabbing him, the Beast is about to die. Belle escaped to warn the Beast, but she is too late. As the Beast dies in her arms, Belle whispers, heart-breakingly, “I love you.” Of course, the spell is broken. The weird shooting stars fall, and the Beast turns back into a beautiful man, arguably more beautiful than Gaston himself. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Gaston fell to his death off a cliff while all this is going on.

When Narcissus died, Echo and the others “found nothing” when they searched for his body. “Only a flower with a yellow center / Surrounded with white petals” grew on the bank where Narcissus drowned. Like Narcissus, Gaston fell into oblivion, and a yellow and white flower grew at the site of his death.





The parallels between the Narcissus myth and Gaston the villain help clarify the overarching character development for Gaston as a man, but also as a villain. Narcissus was a fooled to love his reflection. Here, Disney took this idea further by giving their version of Narcissus power and the ability to change other people. Ovid’s Narcissus dies not really affecting anyone else in the myth, but here, in the Disney film, Gaston’s self-infatuation can potentially lead to death and despair, but as a G-rated mythopoetic reconstruction, the Disney Narcissus also dies without really accomplishing any personal goals. In theory, Gaston’s Narcissistic solipsistic self-indulgence is quite frightening; I wonder what might have transpired in a gritty, R-rated version.



Gaston’s physical death is not what makes his ultimate demise so painful. Gaston’s goal was to marry Belle. Of all the Disney villains, Gaston was not even close to this goal. Belle always hated Gaston. He made no forward progress at all, and, in the end, his “killing” the Beast acted as the catalyst for Belle to confess her love and create a more beautiful man than Gaston.


One might argue that Belle already loved the Beast before his stabbing and arrowing, but then why did the spell break only when Belle vocally said the words? The truth is that Belle needed to have to Beast "die" in order for her to discover her feelings fully. Her love was subconscious, and the brink of death forced her affections to the surface, thus breaking the spell. Had Gaston been slightly more patient, had Gaston went to the pub instead of into a rage, the last petal of the magic rose would have fallen, and the Beast would have stayed a hairy brown mass for the rest of his life. Gaston simply had poor timing.

Gaston not only failed in his own goal as the villain, but he played a large role, if not an integral role, in the eventual happiness of his enemies. Gaston failed in all aspects of his life, and, to top it off, he’s in hell.