Love and woman's captivity on the screen: A comparative analysis of Christophe Gans' La Belle et La Bête and Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling

The films, La Belle et La Bête and Don't Worry Darling, depict a utopian world for men. For women, however, what these two films demonstrate is a dystopia. Women are condemned to men, and they are constantly chased by them simlpy because of their gender. In this thesis, I intend to examine the situations that women are forced to face in the so-called dystopian society and contend that men's fixation on women is the main source of women's oppression, which, undoubtedly, leads to women's misery and isolation. The need to create dystopias in these two films is predicated upon the hidden messages ingrained in fairy tales since they are presented as the main reason for female captivity in this thesis. As the narratives in relation to women who are traditionally supposed to exist only to be acted on by men, as literary and sexual objects, are created and authored by male dominated society, men attempt at constructing an understanding of love with the aim of enslaving and controlling women thereby reducing them to the status of victims. As such, the aim of this thesis is to unveil how the origin of fairy tales rests on myths and how fairy tales as male-authored compositions lead to problems on the part of women when they are passed on to future generations. For centuries, fairy tales that have come to represent the tools for the social and cultural constructions of female sexuality, play a pivotal role in women's loss of autonomy and end up as dystopian fiction.