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If we do nothing, neither are we
I read fiction like The Shape of Water (2017) and sometimes I try to write it; I hardly ever see anything like it on a screen. Of all the films I have seen by Guillermo del Toro, which at this point is everything English-language except Blade II (2002), I think it's the most successfully complex. It's a genre-blender of mid-century B-pulp animated by social justice and eroticism, a love letter to the Other in all forms of race, sex, class, nationality, and species; it is sometimes piercingly subtle and sometimes splatteringly over the top and I'm not even sure all of it works for me, but it is the kind of movie I am extraordinarily glad someone is making, because otherwise I wouldn't get to see it—it is entirely itself. It has fish people. Boy, does it have fish people. Lovecraft would have had a heart attack.
In the Camelot days of Kennedy's America, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works as a night cleaner in a classified government facility outside Baltimore. She's thin, dark-haired, not young, her pointed face and her quick, forceful hands as expressive as a silent clown or tragedienne's; she is mute but not deaf, her signed dialogue subtitled as matter-of-factly by the film as its other non-English language. By day she dreams of her apartment underwater, weeds ribboning the wallpapered hallway where fish dart past the telephone, her furniture floating in a lily-green gloom; woken by the nightly razzing of her alarm, she runs herself a bath and gets off in the greenish, luxurious water while the eggs she packs for lunch hard-boil on a timer. Lights and sounds flicker up through her floorboards from the cinema she lives over, Technicolor dreams leaking in like rain. She checks in with her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), an aging commercial artist with a passel of cats and a melancholic crush on the fresh-faced counterman of a local pie franchise; she dozes on the long bus ride. Inside the concrete bunker of the Occam Aerospace Research Center, she scrubs floors, dusts futuristic-looking jet engines, and mops up the bathrooms alongside the long-suffering Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who contends at home with a persistently unappreciative husband and at work with the greatest scientific minds of the nation who somehow can't avoid getting "pee freckles" on the ceiling. Home again at dawn, she catches up with Giles before heading off to bed, even her sleep mask as olive as pondweed. It's a time-clocked, self-contained life, and it is impossible to tell if it makes Elisa happy. And then one night something new arrives at the facility, thrashing and keening inside a thick-glassed cylinder the same industrial blue as the pipes and tanks of the laboratory Elisa is supposed to be sweeping up: the amphibious creature referred to only as the Asset (Doug Jones, credited as "Amphibian Man"), brought in chains from the Amazon in the fringe science hope of gaining an edge on the Soviets in the space race. Already it's an object of contention between the more military-industrial and more scientific factions of the facility, personified by grim-faced, cattle-prod-swinging G-man Strickland (Michael Shannon) and compassionately conflicted Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). And it's not an object at all, as Elisa recognizes the first time she sees it—him—alone in the laboratory, a sleek, scaled, powerfully finned and clawed creature whose eyes blink phosphorescently sideways. "The natives in the Amazon worshipped it like a god," Strickland sneers, but the viewer taking in those graceful, muscular shoulders, the bronze and blue countershading, the stickles and spines and curiously soft-modeled mouth, should only think of course. He's like something out of Elisa's dreams. He sees her. She courts him with hard-boiled eggs and the music of Benny Goodman; he answers with dolphinlike clicks and trills and rapidly assimilated signs. Their romance at this stage is sweet, clever, a little goofy, chaste. One of the glorious pleasures of this movie is discovering how it doesn't stay that way. Of course, we are in a top-secret weird science bunker at the height of the Cold War and we were warned from the start that there was a "monster" in this story: this damp gossamer fantasy is going to have to darken before we're through. You just have to trust that del Toro who loves the strange, the outcast, and the unspeakable will not let his species-crossed lovers go the way of the Production Code.
If you detect from this summary that The Shape of Water is a fix-it riff on Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), del Toro has made no secret of his childhood disappointment that Julie Adams didn't get the Gill-man; I would also be shocked if there weren't some influence from Splash (1984), especially the way the third act of that movie takes a level in government conspiracy because it was the '80's. Give me a voiceless protagonist falling in love across the boundaries of water and air and I have a hard time not thinking of Andersen while we're at it, but one of the nicest things about this movie is how much it doesn't feel like any of its source texts, a frankly sexual fairy tale that twists in and out of spy thriller, heist movie, Hollywood musical, and scathingly pastel caricature of American postwar good life without ever losing itself in pastiche for pastiche's sake or feeling too smug with its references, even when one scene finds Elisa encountering the Asset, blood-slicked, inhuman, and beautiful, at a late show of The Story of Ruth (1960). The script, co-written with Vanessa Taylor, is full of small wildnesses, jarring and refreshing. The Asset touches Elisa with tenderness, wonder, and an illuminating arousal that matches her own, but when left by himself in Giles' apartment he also gets hungry and eats a cat. Zelda, correctly detecting from Elisa's creamy smile that her friend has gone all the way with a man who looked about as endowed as a salamander, quite reasonably demands to know "How?" and receives an amazingly explicit little mime in return. Elisa, we learn, grew up in an orphanage: she was found as an infant in a river, the sides of her throat marked with the parallel slashes popularly assumed to explain her muteness; they have healed in adulthood into delicate red scars that the viewer all but holds their breath to see open, not quite sure if we're in a world where mermaids can walk secretly among us—unknown perhaps even to themselves—or merely one where unwanted children are abused and dumped. It's both, of course, because it's our world or the silver-screen consensus that's as near as makes no never mind, and the film leans surprisingly hard on the violence as well as the grace. I expected the third act to escalate in action, which it thankfully manages without letting slip the entire U.S. Army: it is relatively restrained in scope, if not in the Grand Guignol of Strickland's progressively deranged and diseased quest for validation and revenge. (Michael Shannon is basically playing toxic masculinity, but he's such a good actor that he pulls off even comic-book affectations like Strickland's simultaneous sweet tooth for hard candy and torture. While I'm in this parenthesis, where has Michael Stuhlbarg been all my life? I know, a big answer is A Serious Man (2009) and I have not bothered to see that movie since a friend who did his master's thesis on theodicy and the reception of the Job story was extremely unimpressed, but there's got to be something else. He was not movie-stealing here only because of the strength of the movie around him.) I did not expect the escalation in gore. I suspect I would have been better braced for it if I had seen Pan's Labyrinth (2006), but here we are. I don't feel any need to warn about the sexual content of The Shape of Water unless the sight of Sally Hawkins peeping over a bioluminescent shoulder with water rolling from her hair and one of the great shy, sly smiles of cinema curving her face is going to be a problem, but there are some things done here with bullet holes that maybe you want a heads-up on.
For me, however, the lingering impression of the film is much like the Asset himself, capable of a nasty bite but more often of numinous beauty and vivid physical presence. I love the sea-colors, swamp-colors, river-colors of the production design, an almost subliminal motif of scales and waves repeating naturally in tiles and rain stains and shadows through wet window glass. I love that when Elisa lays her head on the Asset's softly plated chest, she can hear both his heartbeat and a strange crashing hollow like the tide. Right now, there is nothing subtle about the way its human heroes are an assortment of American marginalization—disabled, non-white, queer, and not even American—and its villain a man who is all but "The Man," piloting his tailfinned teal Cadillac with more satisfaction than he screws his Stepford wife and remarking with complacent non-irony that God looks "a little bit more like me, I guess," but I would not call it a bug so much as a very deliberate feature, reminding me of comparable foregroundings in the work of Barbara Hambly and Ruthanna Emrys. There are angles from which it even resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone, which I don't think is a bad thing for a sci-fi parable circa 1962. And it has the courage of both its tropes and its subversions, allowing each of its characters the space to be more than their script requires while pulling all possible resonances from the way Elisa covets a pair of shoes or Zelda smokes a cigarette or Hoffstetler speaks his name. Depressive Giles keeps his TV tuned to black-and-white reruns of Carmen Miranda and Alice Faye, agitatedly changing the channel whenever reality intrudes with potential nuclear annihilation or the struggle for civil rights, but even he will abandon his Tinseltown shell for the many-colored, misfit comradeship of forging a laundry van and, very badly, pretending to be fifty-seven again and straight. The subject header of this post is the set of coldly furious signs Elisa lays down for him when he protests that her imprisoned, endangered love is "not even human." If the film has a rallying cry, that's it. Or just Elisa's face, wordless and alive, as she opens her eyes at last to the world she loves. This sea-spell brought to you by my passionate backers at Patreon.
In the Camelot days of Kennedy's America, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works as a night cleaner in a classified government facility outside Baltimore. She's thin, dark-haired, not young, her pointed face and her quick, forceful hands as expressive as a silent clown or tragedienne's; she is mute but not deaf, her signed dialogue subtitled as matter-of-factly by the film as its other non-English language. By day she dreams of her apartment underwater, weeds ribboning the wallpapered hallway where fish dart past the telephone, her furniture floating in a lily-green gloom; woken by the nightly razzing of her alarm, she runs herself a bath and gets off in the greenish, luxurious water while the eggs she packs for lunch hard-boil on a timer. Lights and sounds flicker up through her floorboards from the cinema she lives over, Technicolor dreams leaking in like rain. She checks in with her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), an aging commercial artist with a passel of cats and a melancholic crush on the fresh-faced counterman of a local pie franchise; she dozes on the long bus ride. Inside the concrete bunker of the Occam Aerospace Research Center, she scrubs floors, dusts futuristic-looking jet engines, and mops up the bathrooms alongside the long-suffering Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who contends at home with a persistently unappreciative husband and at work with the greatest scientific minds of the nation who somehow can't avoid getting "pee freckles" on the ceiling. Home again at dawn, she catches up with Giles before heading off to bed, even her sleep mask as olive as pondweed. It's a time-clocked, self-contained life, and it is impossible to tell if it makes Elisa happy. And then one night something new arrives at the facility, thrashing and keening inside a thick-glassed cylinder the same industrial blue as the pipes and tanks of the laboratory Elisa is supposed to be sweeping up: the amphibious creature referred to only as the Asset (Doug Jones, credited as "Amphibian Man"), brought in chains from the Amazon in the fringe science hope of gaining an edge on the Soviets in the space race. Already it's an object of contention between the more military-industrial and more scientific factions of the facility, personified by grim-faced, cattle-prod-swinging G-man Strickland (Michael Shannon) and compassionately conflicted Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). And it's not an object at all, as Elisa recognizes the first time she sees it—him—alone in the laboratory, a sleek, scaled, powerfully finned and clawed creature whose eyes blink phosphorescently sideways. "The natives in the Amazon worshipped it like a god," Strickland sneers, but the viewer taking in those graceful, muscular shoulders, the bronze and blue countershading, the stickles and spines and curiously soft-modeled mouth, should only think of course. He's like something out of Elisa's dreams. He sees her. She courts him with hard-boiled eggs and the music of Benny Goodman; he answers with dolphinlike clicks and trills and rapidly assimilated signs. Their romance at this stage is sweet, clever, a little goofy, chaste. One of the glorious pleasures of this movie is discovering how it doesn't stay that way. Of course, we are in a top-secret weird science bunker at the height of the Cold War and we were warned from the start that there was a "monster" in this story: this damp gossamer fantasy is going to have to darken before we're through. You just have to trust that del Toro who loves the strange, the outcast, and the unspeakable will not let his species-crossed lovers go the way of the Production Code.
If you detect from this summary that The Shape of Water is a fix-it riff on Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), del Toro has made no secret of his childhood disappointment that Julie Adams didn't get the Gill-man; I would also be shocked if there weren't some influence from Splash (1984), especially the way the third act of that movie takes a level in government conspiracy because it was the '80's. Give me a voiceless protagonist falling in love across the boundaries of water and air and I have a hard time not thinking of Andersen while we're at it, but one of the nicest things about this movie is how much it doesn't feel like any of its source texts, a frankly sexual fairy tale that twists in and out of spy thriller, heist movie, Hollywood musical, and scathingly pastel caricature of American postwar good life without ever losing itself in pastiche for pastiche's sake or feeling too smug with its references, even when one scene finds Elisa encountering the Asset, blood-slicked, inhuman, and beautiful, at a late show of The Story of Ruth (1960). The script, co-written with Vanessa Taylor, is full of small wildnesses, jarring and refreshing. The Asset touches Elisa with tenderness, wonder, and an illuminating arousal that matches her own, but when left by himself in Giles' apartment he also gets hungry and eats a cat. Zelda, correctly detecting from Elisa's creamy smile that her friend has gone all the way with a man who looked about as endowed as a salamander, quite reasonably demands to know "How?" and receives an amazingly explicit little mime in return. Elisa, we learn, grew up in an orphanage: she was found as an infant in a river, the sides of her throat marked with the parallel slashes popularly assumed to explain her muteness; they have healed in adulthood into delicate red scars that the viewer all but holds their breath to see open, not quite sure if we're in a world where mermaids can walk secretly among us—unknown perhaps even to themselves—or merely one where unwanted children are abused and dumped. It's both, of course, because it's our world or the silver-screen consensus that's as near as makes no never mind, and the film leans surprisingly hard on the violence as well as the grace. I expected the third act to escalate in action, which it thankfully manages without letting slip the entire U.S. Army: it is relatively restrained in scope, if not in the Grand Guignol of Strickland's progressively deranged and diseased quest for validation and revenge. (Michael Shannon is basically playing toxic masculinity, but he's such a good actor that he pulls off even comic-book affectations like Strickland's simultaneous sweet tooth for hard candy and torture. While I'm in this parenthesis, where has Michael Stuhlbarg been all my life? I know, a big answer is A Serious Man (2009) and I have not bothered to see that movie since a friend who did his master's thesis on theodicy and the reception of the Job story was extremely unimpressed, but there's got to be something else. He was not movie-stealing here only because of the strength of the movie around him.) I did not expect the escalation in gore. I suspect I would have been better braced for it if I had seen Pan's Labyrinth (2006), but here we are. I don't feel any need to warn about the sexual content of The Shape of Water unless the sight of Sally Hawkins peeping over a bioluminescent shoulder with water rolling from her hair and one of the great shy, sly smiles of cinema curving her face is going to be a problem, but there are some things done here with bullet holes that maybe you want a heads-up on.
For me, however, the lingering impression of the film is much like the Asset himself, capable of a nasty bite but more often of numinous beauty and vivid physical presence. I love the sea-colors, swamp-colors, river-colors of the production design, an almost subliminal motif of scales and waves repeating naturally in tiles and rain stains and shadows through wet window glass. I love that when Elisa lays her head on the Asset's softly plated chest, she can hear both his heartbeat and a strange crashing hollow like the tide. Right now, there is nothing subtle about the way its human heroes are an assortment of American marginalization—disabled, non-white, queer, and not even American—and its villain a man who is all but "The Man," piloting his tailfinned teal Cadillac with more satisfaction than he screws his Stepford wife and remarking with complacent non-irony that God looks "a little bit more like me, I guess," but I would not call it a bug so much as a very deliberate feature, reminding me of comparable foregroundings in the work of Barbara Hambly and Ruthanna Emrys. There are angles from which it even resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone, which I don't think is a bad thing for a sci-fi parable circa 1962. And it has the courage of both its tropes and its subversions, allowing each of its characters the space to be more than their script requires while pulling all possible resonances from the way Elisa covets a pair of shoes or Zelda smokes a cigarette or Hoffstetler speaks his name. Depressive Giles keeps his TV tuned to black-and-white reruns of Carmen Miranda and Alice Faye, agitatedly changing the channel whenever reality intrudes with potential nuclear annihilation or the struggle for civil rights, but even he will abandon his Tinseltown shell for the many-colored, misfit comradeship of forging a laundry van and, very badly, pretending to be fifty-seven again and straight. The subject header of this post is the set of coldly furious signs Elisa lays down for him when he protests that her imprisoned, endangered love is "not even human." If the film has a rallying cry, that's it. Or just Elisa's face, wordless and alive, as she opens her eyes at last to the world she loves. This sea-spell brought to you by my passionate backers at Patreon.
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I missed the trailer completely: I went to see the film with
[edit] It appears I did see the trailer last summer and it had the intended effect. I just remembered absolutely nothing of it by the time the movie itself came around. I guess that's the best-case scenario.