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Monthly Archives: February 2018

The Shape of Water: turning the ethics of My Fair Lady inside out

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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Myths and fairytales are dangerous. It’s a lesson we’ve learned from Freud, Bettelheim, Levi-Strauss, and (as I have done most recently) Roland Barthes. Myths are dangerous because they scoop up social threats and ambiguities and throw them at us like a snowball. It is dangerous to treat with danger. Perhaps, like a snowball, the myth will break apart and dissolve the threat; perhaps it is the means by which danger is reconciled to the ongoing life of society. Barthes asserts something like this in Camera Lucida (# 11), and though he is speaking of photographs, we know from Grimm, from novels, from Hollywood, from music, really from every cultural endeavor, that myths labor against any perceived irruption or intrusion into social status quo. But it also is true that the status quo is stable (a “state” or status) only by means of lived concepts that are always also unstable (the capacious ambiguity of that quo, “in which”). This means that the nearly infinite content of myth always functions concretely and finitely—but also never completely—to reconcile a specific threat back to social stability, an intruding difference back to assimilated sameness, an unfamiliar, unheimlich outside back to the warm, homey inside. The labor of reconciliation proceeds through representation and therefore repeats the threat it strives to mute. But all of this is old hat, yes?*

  Indeed, the very title of del Toro’s film suggests this trivial lesson about myths and social concepts since water, of course, has no shape but takes on the shape of its container. Critics frequently cite the film’s final poem—a paraphrase of Rumi, it is thought—to suggest the pervasive presence of love, or of the divine, and the poem does suggest both of these. And it also suggests the pervasiveness of meaning.

We are literally awash in meaning but we require channels to receive and communicate it to each other.

One of those channels is narrative form. Even though Giles’s (Richard Jenkins) opening narration does not begin with “Once upon a time,” the cadence and content of his words signal immediately that this is something like a fairytale. We settle into our seats expecting a story about how huge, age-old categories, cultural promises, and social ideologies come to bear down on the lives and pains and deaths of very small, single, trivial, creatures. At the end of the film, Giles’s narration doesn’t hesitate to satisfy his audience’s culturally shaped expectation for “They lived happily ever after,” but then through that poem, he parlays it into a deeper comment about meaning’s fundamental relationality.

That this film teaches us about the omnipresence of meaning and the necessity of viable forms or channels to translate and interpret that meaning could not be made more bluntly, more obviously, than by making its star a mute. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) can hear but not speak and this singular fact radically defamiliarizes communication for us, that of both those who talk in the film and, profoundly, Elisa herself. The normal state of things—the status quo—is our human world of speaking and speaking-back (in both senses), but what Elisa’s quiet presence and non-trivial interventions in conversation index is the stark rarity of listening. To quote a song from My Fair Lady, most of the world around Elisa is just blathering “words, words words.” (“I hear words all day through, first from him now from you…”)

Elisa, I submit, is an inside-out Eliza Doolittle. Instead of a social misfit (lower-class)  who is appropriated by a linguistics professor (on a bet with a male friend) to learn the Queen’s English in order for her to catch the eye of masculine Imperial power, Elisa is a social misfit (a mute) who attunes her friends and us to the unhierarchized joys of the world’s profusion of dialects. There is American Sign Language, of course, but also the dialects of neighborly care, of friendship with co-workers, of Hollywood musicals and Bible epics, of painting, of recorded music, of dance, of eggs and pie and other culinary arts, of touch, and (if I can stretch your patience, but I really do want to call this a dialect) of self-care, the self-constitutive syntax of daily routine.

Dialect just means a form of speaking. Dialects are subsets of a language, a term too loaded for me to define here, but in this film, it clearly has something to do with American English in 1950s Baltimore. The film offers other dialects, then: General Hoyt’s (Richard Searcy) dialect of American military power, Richard Strickland’s (Michael Shannon) appropriation of Norman Vincent Peale’s dialect of the power of positive thinking, Dmitri (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Mihalkov’s (Nigel Bennett) Cold War antics (complete with poetic passwords, flashlights, and untranslatable words like “butter cake”), and another use of the bible, this time channeled through a Foucaultian technology of language that establishes the White male norms of Cold War America, particulary aimed at the only prominent Black character, Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Strickland’s casual insertion of White male normativity into the imago dei story, for instance, is not socially, practically distant from his sexual attraction to Elisa in her very status as a mutant, a monstrosity (as he sees her) that might “squawk” for him during sexual intercourse (another kind of communication in the film).

By the time we get to that scene between Strickland and Elisa, the distastefulness of his harassment lies not only in the boringly predictable story of white male entitlement but also in the ugly smallness of his understanding of humanity. Humanism, that liberal periapt of the 1950s, shimmers with universality but behind its curtained facade it chewed up and spewed out anyone who didn’t assimilate to white, male, European values and comportment. The dialects of Strickland, the General, and the Russian bosses are status quo but not relational. Each puffs up the male ego, each claims the right to dominate, each shouts down, makes demands, and humiliates.

The only time Elisa “yells” is when she is desperate for Giles to hear her. She stomps her feet, hits him, pounds the wall. LOOK at me, she says. SAY what I’m saying. Touch my words with your tongue, touch my fingers with your eyes, touch my heart with your heart. Hear me.

Sally Hawkins in the film THE SHAPE OF WATER. Photo by Kerry Hayes. © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

Elisa shows us species being that includes and bursts through Humanism’s limitations. Indeed, expanding the concept of “living being”, of “valued life”, is at the heart of the message of this film and of the reconciling work of its myth. Consider this: we know from Giles’s opening narrative that Elisa is a princess. He tells us. And yet most of us still translated the lines on her neck into the scars of violent wounding, and not gills, into a traumatic past and not the identity and belongingness of an incomprehensible difference. The God-like creature is not assimilated into Baltimore society but instead rescues Elisa for a life of a divine connection.

The reconciling work failed. Or is it cast out of the screen to us?

  • I want to acknowledge Ken Derry’s helpful review of this film, “The Shape of Water,” in The Journal of Religion and Film, 21:2 (Oct 2017). Derry notes his ambivalence toward the film because of its clichéd tropes.

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Mike Ott’s Lake Los Angeles (the Antelope Valley trilogy)

04 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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 This weekend I had the chance to watch Mike Ott’s trilogy about life in small-town desert towns north and east of L.A. The three films are Little Rock (2010), Pear blossom Hwy (2012), and the best of the lot, Lake Los Angeles (2014). Though all three films use the same actors, only the first two center on teenagers Atsuko and Cory (played by Ott’s co-writer, Atsuko Okatsuka, and actor Cory Lawler, respectively). As a study of teenage wasteland with the lost-hope twist foisted onto Small Town, U.S.A. by neoliberalism’s morbid indifference, Little Rock, and Pear Blossom Hwy are fine films. Intentionally annoying, they track closely these young people who are going nowhere and have nowhere to go.

Lake Los Angeles is different. Starring a character who was present but backgrounded in the first two films, the Cuban laborer, Francisco (Roberto Sanchez) and a youngster new to the trilogy, Cecelia (Johanna Trujillo), this film nails the texture and tonality of a poverty and precarity wrought by the cruel and greedy economic scaffolding of our country. The expansive long shots of the merciless desert; the hazy, smoky, foggy shots that close around Franciscolike a shroud; the silent night-time scenes in abandoned homes where Cecilia finds unstable shelter–these do not simply express an inner despair but also underscore and exemplify structural isolation. They instantiate Francisco’s inability to be the man he was in Havanna and Cecilia’s inability to be the little girl she was with her Mommy in Mexico. Their shared lack of English, money, and a green card renders them each, differently, invisible and illegible to American society.

This is an invisibility and illegibility that doesn’t even make it to the level of micro-aggression. Francisco seems to fold into his cigarette and the haze around him. Cecilia befriends a dog she named Panchito and whispers stories of her life to an old Sailor Man inside a snow-globe.

Francisco will work at anything. We see him cleaning out houses scheduled for demolition, shoveling horse manure, and doing yard work for a wealthy suburbanite. He also assists Adria (Eloy Méndez) shelter undocumented Mexicans until he can gather enough money from their U.S. contacts.   Each time Francisco and Adria meet, Francisco anxiously tells him it’s too many people, or they’ve stayed too long, or he doesn’t have enough food to feed them. He seems unwilling to do this work but does it for the money he sends back to Cuba for his wife and two sons. Cecilia stands out to him because she arrives with no other family. She is supposed to meet her father–or that is the story Adria tells Francisco.

Francisco calls her kitten and worries over her. We viewers do too.

The film is the story of their lives and families, mostly as they are lived in loss and disjunction, in heartbreak and barely missed violence. Ott succeeds in conveying the grain of “this part that has no part,” as Rancière would say, because the camerawork is patient, the tonal palette is somber and just varying enough, and because the soundtrack is not overdone.

One moment remains with me. Francisco asks his suburban boss if he can go inside the house to use the bathroom. Sure, you know the way, the white man replies. But instead of the bathroom, we see Francisco pace slowly around the living room, looking at the paintings and photographs and art objects. He sidles up to the piano and plays a few notes with one hand, pressing just three or four keys. “I’m still in here,” he says softly to himself before his boss calls to him to come back to work. “Estoy aqui, boss,” he calls.

I’m still in here; I’m here. The split is rendered perfectly, and so subtley you might miss it. But it’s that moment, in the bright light and green lawn of suburban America, that I best understood the darkness, haze, and emptiness of the rest of the film.

 

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