"Making a Frankenstein's Bride Out of a Boy": Beauty, Gender, and Neoliberal Fairy Tales in Beastly (2011)

In the 2011 teen fantasy romance Beastly, the ancient Beauty and the Beast tale is exhumed and re-stitched into a millennial morality play. The film, a limp retelling of a narrative that once balanced horror and desire, instead becomes a site of cultural regression dressed as progress. But unlike its predecessors, Beastly performs a strange inversion: it is not just the man who becomes the beast, but the boy who is made the bride — a sacrificial object to female vengeance and liberal-feminist sentimentality. Under the guise of romance and redemption, Beastly dramatizes what might be termed the Frankensteinization of male beauty: the cultural dismantling of male narcissism under the punitive gaze of “woke” morality, teen witchery, and moralizing femininity. This article reads Beastly as a case study in gendered visual politics and neoliberal affect, filtered through the lens of visual culture studies, cultural Marxism, and psychoanalytic critique.