Be Our Guest: The Spectacle of Checking Into A French Airbnb
Why is my French Airbnb host showing me how the faucet works?
In Disney’s 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast, the French candlestick, MC and libertine, Lumiere spends three minutes and 44 seconds explaining to Belle each item on the menu for the evening as Belle sits and listens. He introduces the cutlery, the desserts, his own backstory as a servant who is not serving, and famously encourages his guest to try the gray stuff, it’s delicious. The song and corresponding animation are a spectacular moment of much-needed fun, bookended by the more dreary quasi-kidnapping plot and lots of actual darkness. It’s also a great allegory for what it is like to check-in to an Airbnb in France.
(Sidebar, has anyone else noticed that Belle literally gets one tiny taste of food in that scene before they all have to rush away? That has bothered me literally since 1991.)
Checking into anything in France is never a quick process, but that is only a bad thing if you value brevity. For the French, time spent i…
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