User blog:Jester of chaos/Revisiting Dr. Facilier (The Princess and the Frog)


 * Original:

Dr. Facilier - or the Shadow Man as he was more commonly referred to - was the main antagonist of Disney's The Princess and the Frog. While there's no need for an introduction, one aspect behind him that needs to be mentioned is his willingness to sacrifice the "wayward souls" of New Orleans to pay off his debt owed to his "friends."

For starters, there's the argument on whether or not Facilier's plight is seen as sympathetic. I mean, him being threatened with eternal damnation in Voodoo Hell if he ever failed to pay his friends back would be understandable...except it was his own fault for getting greedy with his friends and accumulating so much debt that he realistically couldn't hope to pay back. Since the film takes place during the Roaring Twenties, Facilier also comments about how he was most likely ostracized because of his race, if his comments about big cats such as Big Daddy La Bouff is any indicator. But...is this really meant to be sympathetic? Facilier's motivation doesn't stem from his anger at being a lower class citizen due to race, but it is really more because he is greedy and self-serving. And because he promised his friends the souls of the inhabitants in New Orleans, that would also include the souls of all those in the lowly, racially oppressed sections of the city that Facilier hailed from. As for his death, while it is terrifying, it is also played as more karmic than deliberately tragic. With people like Lawrence, while he does promise him some of the money he'd get when he was running the town, he of course would keep the larger portion for himself. Him tempting Tiana with the falsehoods of her getting her dream restaurant is him screwing over ANOTHER downtrodden, lower-class citizen so that he could get his amulet back. Really, the moment where it could be argued that you are supposed to stop feeling sorry for Facilier is when he steps on Ray.

As for the heinous standard, yeah, his plan of taking over New Orleans is the generic "Take over X" villain scheme, and at most his actions are kill the hero, a bog standard in terms of evil. However, what compounds these moments is the fact that he was completely willing to sacrifice AN ENTIRE CITY to eternal damnation just so he pay his debts off, thus saving his sorry ass. This plan would've led to the deaths of god knows how many innocents, and he had every intention on keeping that promise to his friends as long as he benefited from it.

Overall, those are my thoughts on Dr. Facilier. I feel that he does start off as a generic bad guy, but when you compound that with his willingness to condemn an entire city to be razed by his Friends on the Other Side, I feel that it is one of those instances - much like Steele - where the colossal gravity of the action pushes him firmly over the baseline.