Now hell collapses into something worse. She’s at the sink, pretending to wash the dishes, she is rigid with recrimination, somewhere between tears and fury. She wants me out of her sight; she says, “I didn’t know that’s how you feel, I’ve done nothing but love you, I’ve been nothing but good to you, but if that’s how you feel…”

Now I’ve done the worst thing, there’s nothing more terrible than this, I have wounded the woman I love; she will never forgive me, she has turned the sun of her affections away from me forever. I get down on my knees in the kitchen, in the center of the room ringed by the new avocado cabinets, I am reaching out toward her waist, I say, “Please, forgive me, I didn’t mean it, you must forgive me.”

And she rolls her eyes at my performance. Something about this is terrible: she is embarrassed by the pitch of my emotions, so suddenly we’re both self-conscious, aware that we’re playing a scene. I am too dramatic, the depths of my feelings are disserved by my falsity, as if she can see right then clearly, unmistakably, that I’m a little drama queen, that I’m not going to turn out to be who she thought. But I’m not false, am I? How else plead my Proustian love, which is intensified by rejection? Am I too much like her? She hisses, “Get off your knees.”

There’s no father in the movie. Perhaps the father is all these men who have conjured the beast from the distant future, all these ineffectual technicians and scientists. What have they brought into the world, deadly, out of control, silent, stalking at twilight for her own mysterious purposes? What does she want with the past, anyway, what does she want with these men? Nothing, really, they are annoyances, merely in the way of her inscrutable purpose.

And there’s something else, too; always more to the story. It’s not just that the beast is a figure for his mother, with her strange alloy of the glamorous and the malefic, like Maleficent, the horned mother in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, also in black, her gestures also dangerous and entrancing. The Prince fights his way through a wall of thorns, his white flesh pricked and made paler by a few drops of blood, but the ram-horned Mother only laughs and raises her lightning-forked staff to summon her dragon.