Hunchback of Notre Dame – reheard
Rummaging through my enormous Disney collection, I decided to listen to the soundtrack for Hunchback of Notre Dame again. Perhaps it’s the grown-up talking in me now, but I started to wince at the amount of dark themes in this story, and it’s darker than any Disney film. The dark themes aren’t surprising, since it’s a Victor Hugo book during the Romantic movement, but I definitely appreciate more after listening to the songs again, instead of just humming along with the music.
The story starts off with a death and possible infanticide.
Quasimodo may or may not be suffering from hallucinations.
We are led to believe Esmeralda may fall for the main character of the film, but she doesn’t.
Frollo can’t keep his erection to himself and screams into a fireplace.
Quasimodo can’t keep his erection to himself and… rings a bell.
People die in this film.
We have a song that contains the lyrics “but the dead don’t talk/so you won’t be around to reveal what you’ve found”.
Esmeralda, Phoebus and Quasimodo nearly die.
Frollo dies screaming in a blaze of glory.
I found it harder to listen to “Heaven’s Light/Hellfire” this time around, because there were two polar opposites talking about the same stimulus – Esmeralda – and the idea that a woman can prove to be both demon and angel to two different men is very disconcerting. I don’t want to don my feminist hat, since the book made Esmeralda much more passive and Disney’s version, in comparison, makes Esmeralda look like a radical revolutionary (“JUSTICE!”). It’s poignant how Esmeralda can entreat the Virgin Mary for saving her people, and Frollo prays to the same Mary in killing off Esmeralda (and the city of Paris). Hunchback works on extremes – life and death, demon and angel, heaven and hell – and these extremes make all the themes more significant, especially since they work around very mortal (yet conversely) spiritual issues.
Latin lyrics all around singing about the day of reckoning, lust, asking for mercy from the Lamb of God… the music is dark, and I believe even Stephen Schwartz also said that Hunchback contained some of the darkest words he’d ever written. Confutatis.org was founded from the Hunchback soundtrack (“Sanctuary!”) and I suppose it finally deserves a mention here, 4 years after this website was conceived.
I suppose the happy ending had to be there. Pocahontas did a good job of having a very bittersweet ending – the movie ends with “I can’t leave you,” but Pocahontas and John Smith still don’t end up together, but Hunchback had such dark themes it was necessary to have something good come out of it. The hot guy ends up with the hot chick, the bad guy dies, and the ugliest man in Paris is still single but THAT WILL BE RATIFIED IN THE SEQUEL.
I remember the reasons why I loved Hunchback of Notre Dame – it was different from the usual princess stories. It contained religious elements, even addressing religious hypocrisy, sexual desire, social injustice, racism, and I don’t think any other Disney animated film details the fear of death as much as this one (the Beast died peacefully, and Frollo goes down terrified). Watching this as a child, I never picked these themes up, so I would personally say that no, Hunchback did not make me an atheist. What I did remember was the music, the happy ending with the message that ugliness wasn’t a bad thing, and Clopin didn’t look so bad (I could throw tomatoes at him in the CD game). In that sense, I think Disney has done its job successfully, and even more so when I can actually look back on this film and gain a whole new intellectual perspective.
