just. look at the number of oscar noms this has:
Best picture
Best actress
Best supporting actress
Best supporting actor
Best director
Best original screenplay
Best cinematography
Best costume design
Best editing
Best score
Best production design
Best sound editing
Best sound mixing
yes, thats THIRTEEN NOMS, one less than the record current held by Titanic, La La Land and All About Eve. Essentially, The Shape of Water is in the same category as classics like Forrest Gump and Gone With The Wind. Isn't that exciting!! in this analysis, we try our hand at breaking down why TSOW is amazing :)
THE SHAPE OF WATER (2018)
Director & Writer: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon
Summary: At a top secret research facility in the 1960s, a lonely janitor forms a unique relationship with an amphibious creature that is being held in captivity.
The Shape of Water is what you get when you look life right in the eye, you acknowledge all the blood and the lost limbs and the broken hearts, and you smile and go on loving anyway. It was just… such an earnest film, earnest in the way it coaxes you to love its characters, and eases you into its world, and earnest in the way it presents love and loss, earnest in the way fairytales are.
If you've watched it, you probably felt a little uncomfortable. Us conservative Asians probably don’t watch many nude scenes or sex scenes in theatres :’) If you felt uncomfortable, we encourage you to think about why. I guess when you think about it on the surface level it’s kinda weird to watch a woman fall in love with an amphibious creature (we’ll show you why you’re wrong though), but tbh we’ve all grown up with stories like Beauty and the Beast, only that here, the Beast doesn’t have to magically deux ex machina himself into a handsome prince, but remains who he is, and forces us to recognise his beauty.
As you all probably know by now, del Toro films = long rants, so this analysis will be in three parts! 1. Using a feminist lens; and 2. White America, the Other and the Future.
Using a Feminist Lens
Okay, feminism. We want to highlight how significant and current The Shape of Water is, in terms of its social narrative. It’s not just about a woman being able to defy the control of a man anymore. We’ve moved past the age of fighting for women’s basic rights, things like the right to vote, etc — today is the age of intersectionality, because those who are oppressed the most are those who are not only women but also disabled, also latina, also black. More than ever, though, women are being oppressed because of their sexuality, denied any sexual desire or choice in bed, and objectified as cockwarmer, fuckholes, fleshlights just with more flesh.
More specifically though, let’s talk about the theme of love and female sexuality.
del Toro consistently shows us how love and sexuality intersect to form a bond stronger than any obstacle. He does this through motifs.
1. Water (obviously). When del Toro says The Shape of Water, what he actually means is the shape of love. At the beginning, we see Elisa masturbating in a bathtub full of water, and later she has sex with the creature in that bathroom. So there’s that sexual connotation — more than that though, Elisa was found as a baby in a river, and there’s this one beautiful transition from her tracing the raindrops on the window, back to the lab where she works. And at the end, Giles (her closeted gay friend) narrates that love is something all around, filling the world, as Elisa and the creature embrace deep underwater, finally free. Water isn’t just about Elisa’s sexuality — it’s home, and safety, and kindness. To drive that home, our antagonist, Strickland, interacts with water as well. He purposely spills water to summon Elisa, and proposition her while she kneels to clean it up. She rejects him, because it was forced, unnatural, and he’s using her status against her instead of accepting it. Furthermore, he takes painkillers more and more towards the end, but increasingly starts dry-swallowing them — he’s consciously rejecting something that would be natural to take, and becoming increasingly cruel.
2. Eggs! This one’s fairly simple — Elisa masturbates while hardboiling eggs, keeping the egg-shaped timer in the bathroom with her. She offers eggs to the creature, and they’re what establishes their initial relationship. So there’s the twin meanings of sexuality and love, even without us acknowledging that eggs are the product of reproduction :)
—> so what does this all actually mean? When Strickland clamps a hand around his wife’s mouth during sex and demands she be silent, when he looks at Elisa on her knees and tells her “I like that you’re mute. It gets me going”, what does it mean? When Elisa signs that the creature is the only one who sees her as she is, without caring about what she lacks, what does that mean?
All of that means just this: The sexuality of a woman is powerful, but it also isn’t something to be taken advantage of. del Toro tells us that it’s something that can only given freely, just like love. And when we talk about women, we should treasure both their love and their sexuality.
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Part 2! White America, the Other and the Future
Antagonist = White America
We think that Strickland, the antagonist, represents White America during the Cold War, because his actions and values mirror that of the white majority in the society that del Toro is showing us.
Strickland is the White American ideal — he is a patriot that works for the military, has a slim, blonde wife with bobbed hair who does the housework and cooks, has a daughter and a son, and a house with a white picket-fence. And if we didn’t already know that this was the American dream at the time, del Toro reminds us through the odd advertisement or TV show, little snippets of smiling white American families. On the flip side though, Strickland is also racist and misogynistic, which is a reflection of the white society of the time. Del Toro even goes so far as to show us a short clip of race riots on Giles’ TV, and a short scene of a black couple getting kicked out of a diner.
More than that, del Toro shows us how White America during the Cold War was a society that had no respect for anyone’s free will but their own. Strickland makes advances on Elisa without her consent, and fetishises her disability because it makes him feel powerful when she can’t say “no”. The American military, here, steals the creature out of the Amazon in South America in order to use him in the Space Race against the Soviets. Later, Strickland tells Elisa and Zelda that the indigenous tribes had worshipped the creature as a god, and then asks, “We’re created in the Lord’s image. You don’t think that’s what the Lord looks like, do you?” The creature had his own free will, just like how Elisa has hers, and how the indigenous peoples of South America have their own right to religion. None of it was Strickland’s or the military’s to take.
Strickland therefore represents an America that ruins those who do not fit in its ideal, that looks fine on the outside but is rotting away inside. del Toro gives us a visual reminder of this in Strickland’s rotting fingers. He knows they’re rotting, but chooses to ignore in favour of revenge, letting his moral decay persist until he goes mad with it.
Protagonists = The Other
Now, let’s talk about our protags. These are people who don’t fit in the white american ideal, but still triumph in the end. Elisa, a mute Latina woman, springs the creature out of the research facility and sets him free. She escapes interrogation simply because Strickland was expecting a Russian attack, and underestimated those he called “the fucking help, the shit-cleaners, the piss-wipers”. Zelda, Elisa’s black friend, is able to stand up to her husband at the end of the film, and Giles, a closeted gay man, overcomes his insecurities and becomes stronger and braver and more confident.
But The Shape of Water is not just about discriminatory white America losing, and our heroes of the minority winning — it’s about communication and understanding. Elisa’s muteness is more than just a disability — it’s an allegory for the chasm that exists between the white majority and every minority. That’s because even if they try to speak out, their words are not heard, and even if they are, their message is not understood; they might as well be as silent as Elisa. Only her friends — Giles and Zelda — can understand what she signs, because they are the same in that all 3 face oppression from the social majority. Even when Elisa gets angry, gets up in Strickland’s face and signs F-U-C-K-Y-O-U over and over again, Strickland doesn’t understand. “What did she say? What is she saying?” He demands. When Zelda’s husband sells out Elisa near the end, Zelda turns on him, shouts, “You wouldn’t understand! You couldn’t understand. Not if you tried your whole life.”
What del Toro is saying is that the majority will not understand the oppression of the minorities, even when it’s staring them in the face. Even after Trayvon Martin, after Charlottesville, after the Orlando nightclub shooting where 49 people died, after Trump and Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, they do not understand. Maybe, if they listen, and learn the language that only the oppressed speak, maybe they will get it. If they don’t try though, del Toro offers us a consequence: Strickland with his throat slashes, dying as he screams for help, but unable to make a sound.
The Future
Something else that is interesting to think about is del Toro’s reference to “the future”. This occurs twice: 1 with Giles’ painting, and then with Strickland’s car.
1: Giles is a painter, and he makes an advertisement for a jell-o company depicting a smiling white family clustered around a plate of jell-o. Across the top is a line: The future is here! Aside from the irony of watching a gay man paint an idyllic picture of heteronormativity, it’s interesting to see the painting be rejected by the company in favour of the more modern photograph.
2: Strickland buys a Cadillac. The salesman says “4 our of 5 successful men in America drive a Cadillac… This here is the future, and … you’re a man of the future. You belong in this car.” That Cadillac is later destroyed when Elisa and her friends spring the creature out of his cage and escape the facility.
What do these two examples mean? If Strickland represents white America of the Cold War era, then we can see his desire for the capitalist idea of happiness (ie materialism), which pervaded the society around him. And yet, the two symbols of the future — the car, representing materialism, and the painting, representing white-only happiness — are destroyed or rejected. What’s left, by the end of the film, is the diversity of the social minority, and a fairytale-like idea of love and happiness.
So del Toro’s concluding remark is basically this: We need to acknowledge all of the violence and the cruelty and enforced silence of the minorities, because these are the problems that plague our society now. We need to pay attention to the voice of the oppressed, and do our best to understand and help, because this is the fight for equality happening right now. But neither of these things are the future. When we think of the future we must go back, back to our fairytales and our innocent ideas of love and understanding. The future isn’t here — it’s in our belief in happily-ever-afters for all, no matter your gender, your race, your disability or your sexuality.
**listen to the podcast version on our instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thebacklight_ !! :)
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