What did everyone think of this?

Brad said, I believe the unspoken implcation of this is that what’s left of the government and modern institutions have become a dystopian tyranny forcing those within their control to surrender their freedoms in return for protection from the elements. This is not overtly stated (one of the wonderful aspects of this film is the amount of information it leaves out, forcing us to fill in the blanks), but the actions of the protagonists make no sense if this is not the case.

This interpretation never occurred to me, but it’s a valid reading. I’m not sure how I feel about it, as I’m not sure the overall film would support this particular angle.

Before I offer an alternate reading, let me see if I understand your interpretation. You’re saying the Bathtub residents resist the government action because they see the government as a dystopian tyranny? I don’t think the government has to be perceived in such nefarious terms for their actions to make sense. I read the residents as wanting to live they way they wanted to—regardless of the consequences—and they didn’t feel like anyone had a right to stop them from living this way. (Or are we basically reading the film in the same way?)

@Ademption

What irritated me the most was that every character seemed to live in garbage, but then late in the movie there were hospitals, rescue stations, fast-food, cars, highways, helicopters, and modern American society (on the other side of a dam, duh, not in the tidal plain) which the film predictably rails against as restricting humans’ creaturely freedom to be animals and live in garbage. So the film begs the question, were the main characters all just feral homeless people living with mental illness in garbage…

I’m unclear about what irritated you? Are you irritated at the film for presenting this in a realistic way—i.e., that people would actually prefer living in squalor? Or are you irritated by the characters choosing to live this way?

Ryan said, Let me clarify that statement a bit: the sense of community felt woefully underdeveloped, surface level and ultimately, I found it to be boring. Fireworks, parades, alcohol, oh my! I felt like they could have been more creative with that aspect, it seemed like a cheap way out. I honestly think the film would have been twice as good if they would have gone more into the surrealistic realm with the actual people, their histories, etc.

I don’t know if I completely agree with these comments, but they resonate with me, too. I feel like the film could have handled these elements a lot better, in more interesting ways.

@Jazz

I think what you allude to is an aspect of their grievances, but not the entirety of them. In order to make the waters levels go down, they have to destroy the levee that flooded their community in the first place (errected by the powers that be on the other side of the levee we assume). Then when some Bathtub residents are actually hospitalized, they respond as if it’s a prison rather than a health care facility. This is not simply a case of rugged individualism. There is a socio-political conflict going on. We are not given the details of this conflict, but are given characters who are acting like A) paranoid terrorists, or B) oppressed resisters. Judging by what we know about the characters, my reading is B. This is all very open to interpretation though, much more than most films.

A general question: should the people have been allowed to live on that island—assuming they weren’t really harming anyone else or being a liability problem for the government? Should they have been allowed to stay even if they were in harm’s way from the storm, or does the government have to remove them, even if it’s against their will?

(I tend to feel like they should be allowed to stay. However, the government shouldn’t have to bear responsibility, nor should they have to endanger their personnel if a rescue is needed—I’m not sure if the government can forgo that responsibility, though.)

@Brad

In order to make the waters levels go down, they have to destroy the levee that flooded their community in the first place (errected by the powers that be on the other side of the levee we assume).

Well, I don’t know the historical backstory of the Bathtub, but I was assuming this was a real place, more or less, and that the government just didn’t flood the place knowing that people lived there. My sense was that the government forces the people to leave when the storm is about to hit. (Are you thinking of this as a kind of sci-fi scenario?)

Then when some Bathtub residents are actually hospitalized, they respond as if it’s a prison rather than a health care facility.

But they were initially forced to go to the shelter/hospital, so I thought they were reacting to that more than an ideological stance against medical care.

There is a socio-political conflict going on. We are not given the details of this conflict, but are given characters who are acting like A) paranoid terrorists, or B) oppressed resisters. Judging by what we know about the characters, my reading is B. This is all very open to interpretation though, much more than most films.

I guess in my experience I don’t find these scenarios so far-fetched. In my hometown, there was the remnants of an old leper colony. When I was a young boy, people with Hansen’s disease still lived there, and remember asking the reason for this—as it was a run down, primitive looking place. My father explained that the place was home to these people, and they preferred living there, even if there were better facilities and care in another place. (I don’t know if I really understood that at the time, as the place looked like a spooky place to live.)

I’ve also seen people live on the beach, in shanty towns. Some of them are on drugs. Some of them have jobs. Some of them have other options, but they choose to live the way they do. So I didn’t find the Bathtub residents as strange, and I didn’t have to imagine a kind of post-Apocalyptic scenario to explain their behavior.

Hey JAZZ,

Sorry I haven’t been around to comment further. It’s hard to comment on a film this tricky after a first viewing, but a lot of it has to do with a general feeling of “there’s something rotten here” while watching it. And I came in really wanting to like it; there hasn’t really been a great US indie film in a long, long time.

I thought this LAREVIEWOFBOOKS article was good, even while kind of gliding over style and aesthetics:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=828

From the LA Review of books= referenced above:

Viewers are asked to interpret a lack of work discipline, schooling, or steady institution building of any kind — the primary building blocks of any civilization — as the height of liberation. “Choice,” even the choice to live in squalor, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. There is no inkling of the economic and social history of the region that had limited these “choices.” We are left with a libertarian sandbox, with a rights-based life philosophy gone rancid.

I understand where the writer is coming from—and in the final analysis, I might agree with this writer—but let me offer a different perspective. Living in Hawai’i, I’m conscious of Native Hawaiians who have decided to go back to “the land” and live off of it. (I’m not sure how many Native Hawaiians are living this way now, but I understood that some that live on the island of Ni’ihau have largely eschewed modern conveniences.) These communities may not have the kind of Western institutions that we think are critical to a modern, civilized society, but I think the key word here is “modern.” If people choose not to live in a modern society, then some of these institutions may not be crucial for a civilized society.

Anyway, growing up in Hawai’i, this is a perspective that is familiar to me, and I think it’s a valid aprpoach to living—if the people choose to forgo modern technology and convenience. But I don’t think indiviudals that choose to live this way are necessarily “lazy” or “uncivilized.”

Still, I’m not sure the film necessarily adovcates “returning to the land,” but I don’t see the Bathtub’s as necessarily hedonistic and irresponsible as the writer suggests. The film could be championing a sense of self-reliance, independence and liberty while also critiquing a paternalistic and overreaching government.

Having said that, I think viewers should carefully consider the models and ideals the film presents—in a rather romantic way, imo. The kind of self-reliance is admirable and inspiring, but do people really want to live in this way? I’m not talking about the squalid conditions, because I suspect the vast majority of people in America, do not—but the ideological ramifications of such an approach. Being self-reliant means that when times get hard, you are on your own. Need medical care? Food, clothing, shelter? Sustain an injury that prevents you from working? Need someone to help watch your children? If your neighbors can’t help you, you’re on your own—and you have to be willing to live with consequences of that. Besides the wealthy—who have the personal resources to provide meet these needs—I suspect very few people would be willing to live with the consequences of such an independent and self-reliant way.

>>My sense was that the government forces the people to leave when the storm is about to hit. (Are you thinking of this as a kind of sci-fi scenario?)<<

While not exactly sci-fi, I did feel the setting was post-apocalyptic. Perhaps a prediction of what will happen in 20-30 years if the effects of global warming come to pass. The government has erected levees, which would flood poorer areas like the Bathtub in order to protect the more well off areas. So the natural disaster has a man-made element to it, which would ferment hostility between those on either side of the levee.

Alright, I finally have the time to take this on one post at a time. I figure it would be better to just write my overall opinion first and then go through and respond to other comments.

I was surprised at this film, it wasn’t what I expected at all and I’m not the only one to mention that. I think this is mostly a unique movie and that’s part of why people are bringing in a variety of other resources into ‘reading it’, plus having a new filmmaker and so on sort of prevents us from drawing on previous movies of his to apply to this one. I’m sure there has to be some interviews with the filmmakers out there and in this case I’d like to read them because even I might be getting something substantially different out of the film than what’s intended, but overall the majority of the critical review and commentary literature I have found here and elsewhere shows a substantial tendency for people to bang their own drums rather than break down the beats of the film itself. I do not think I will be fully capable of avoiding that process myself, acknowledged.

Part of the problem is that I was telling some friends and family about seeing the movie, and they asked me what it was about, and I started to tell them and realized that describing the movie is resulting in different ideas being represented than experiencing it. So for now I respond under the general assumption that this movie is a lot more ephemeral and abstract than people are recognizing and maybe later I’ll just discover that the filmmakers’ intentions were more basic than that. Nevertheless, from the top then:

@Ryan Estabrooks, re: “watching kids run around shooting fireworks doesn’t really do anything one way or another for me. (I mention it because in almost every review, they mention this sequence as an example of the film’s “beauty”)… The world they constructed, titled ‘The Bathtub’, was well-built. From the interiors of the houses/cabins/shacks to the streets, it was all consistent and interesting to see. But it seemed like it tried to coast off this one element for the entire film, as if the world itself is eye-catching enough to entertain you for 90 minutes. Aside from the visual aspect, not much else was that interesting for me”

A lot of your points are hard to respond to because one thing you mention in one paragraph holds the key to something I found brilliant that you toss aside in another. You talk about worldbuilding and that’s only half the visual element that is constructing these characters’, and mostly Hushpuppy’s, worldview. The other half is the cinematography that keeps close to a specific visual design. Small details such as floating dust in light get pulled into clear focus while the larger world is blurry. It’s not just a handheld digital cinema conceit but to me represents the community’s myopic worldview, and ties into the alcohol use and their insistence in staying and all of those things. Too many details and branches to move off to at once. The point is that the world and the cinematography and the characters’ decisions and Hushpuppy’s perspective are all the same: bringing in just enough information for their survival, and cut off and disinterested about the rest. Visually these people live in a world where junk has use and the rest is junk.

“The people shot fireworks, ate crabs and drank beer and liquor.”

To me, dude, this is like saying There Will Be Blood was just people talking.

“Not only was there not a sense of an actual community present, but the reasons as to why the people want to stay didn’t seem to come off as anything other than pride. There were not any colors added to this sentiment, just one plain swatch of dour grey.”

I’m going to get into this when I respond more clearly to Brad S’s comments, but there is substantially more to it than that. For now, pride is part of it but only a single part.

“And so the film just floats along, trying to turn things such as breaking open a crab into drama and hammering home one single point: ya gotta do it yaself!”

The concept of survival underlines quite a bit of how these characters think and the community operates but to focus on this point is to ignore that the characters are (internally consistent to the logic of the film) living in a world of contradictions. You also have to keep in mind our very picture of unreliable narrator in Hushpuppy and how her story and opinions change based on what happens throughout the movie. She is learning and absorbing the world around her and translating it into her own story, that much is clear, but how she translates it is as significant as the fact that she does.

This movie is very similar to Tideland in the idea that childhood’s ‘innocence’ is not the experiential protection from bad things but the lack of adult perspective necessary to understand what they actually signify. In other words, in Tideland Jeliza Rose goes through actions such as helping her father shoot up heroin and we the audience are horrified by the ‘addiction’ that we see when from Jeliza Rose’s perspective, she’s just doing another chore her father needs to go to sleep for a while. We the audience are horrified by the people she lives with out in the cabin in the countryside but what causes her to finally ‘leave’ is not recognition that these people are totally fucked up, but childish selfishness that they don’t give her what she wants.

Tideland itself is a difficult movie for people to understand on that level and those exact same misperceptions seem to be happening here. Because of our cultural conceit that imagination is just play we tend to completely ignore how imagination reappropriates real life and its dark sides too, and that imagination itself can be a function of dysfunction. We go into movies about kids imagining aurochs expecting Bridge to Terabithia, not Tideland. And when we get Tideland, it’s confusing.

Some reviewers have already mentioned ‘the romanticized perspective of the child’ and all that crap. To understand Hushpuppy I feel you need to have familiarity with books such as Song of Solomon which details how history gets told through familiar and child singsongy rhymes, or to remember Ring around the Rosies (a song about the fucking bubonic plague).

So getting back to the movie’s ‘one single point,’ you have to remember what community she lives in and what they may have learned when they were kids, and what she’s learning as a kid, from that myopic perspective I’ve described, in contrast the the world outside, and with the understanding of our perspective being played with, and understanding unreliable narrators, and acknowledging something I’m going to get into later about marginalized communities.

In short, the ‘survival’ argument the community makes in and of itself is a subconscious survival mechanism to not recognize what deep shit they’re in, because frankly even if they recognized it it would not help them and they would never be able to do anything about it. THAT’S the point, at least as I perceived it.

“Even the ending when the beasts approach Hushpuppy was pretty anti-climatic.”

The aurochs are generated by Hushpuppy’s imagination (it doesn’t matter whether they’re ‘real’ or not, just like it doesn’t matter if myths are real or not) and their movements match Hushpuppy’s subtly shifting attitude towards her immediate experiences. I already want to go see this movie again though because it seems like the aurochs are both informed by what happens immediately preceeding and immediately afterward. This movie is not as chronologically causally correlated as it seems, I think. Again, you’d have to go back to your memories of a kid and how experiences are conflated in memory to illustrate how this movie operates.

For now I make the argument that the aurochs and her voice over during those sequences are chapter headings. You don’t expect the climax to happen in the chapter heading but in the content that follows.

@ John Pastuch: “I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about it and seeing a bunch of people talk about it on here, but that one line in the trailer- something like “I look around and see that I’m a tiny little piece in a great big universe”- something like that- made me refuse to ever pay to see this in a theater. I didn’t want to pass it off without seeing it, but honestly your review and others on here pretty much confirm my fears.”

That line comes up three times in three different variations and each time signifies something different about how Hushpuppy is trying to account for things. Interestingly enough the film seems almost entirely lacking in religious conceits but really the ‘religion’ of the Bathtub is that of animalistic survival. They all talk about things like ‘the natural order’ and ‘the natural world’ the way a Christian would talk about ’God’s will’ and ‘He giveth and he taketh away.’

What Hushpuppy means, and you will see if you bother to watch this movie, is informed by the fact that earlier she points out that if one small piece of the universe falls, the whole universe falls. This significantly solipsistic perspective nevertheless goes through a character arc from “MY WORLD IS CRUMBLING!” toward “I’m the only one who fix my own world.”

The advertising use of the movie is most likely to pass this movie off as any sort of inspirational The Help like pap. It’s not. At one point later on I’ll talk about the peculiar form of optimism this movie does have, but it’s a dystopic optimism!

Adrock: “The Help is magical realism?”

Like I responded to earlier, more like magical thinking.

What I was worried about was what Pastuch was worried about which is what someone else also worries about when they mention this movie seeming ‘like something Danny Boyle would make’ (which means Slumdog Millionaire. ) Basically everyone is worried that this movie is poverty porn, as was I, told through whitey’s magical thinking style themes: “Well everyone will get better if they just try! If they just understand each other! If we remember that we’re all little pieces in the big machinery of the universe and we have our place!” Etc.

I don’t think it is and I recognize that I’m going to have a fuck of a time convincing anyone considering contemporary culture’s pathological distrust of filmmakers (and other artists) to make anything meaningful without inserting some personal gain or something. I feel like people who take this movie on its own terms are going to really enjoy it. But again even my own perspective of this movie is informed by things such as Song of Solomon, Tideland, what I know about southern Louisiana culture (and yes, my father used to live there and I would visit and that does not make me an expert sociologist of the area but I do have some first hand perspective of the poverty down there), and so on.

So let’s actually just clarify that Danny Boyle point: No, this movie is unlike anything else Danny Boyle has done. Superficially you could say that it’s mostly handheld dirty cinematography illustrating a poor community like Slumdog Millionaire, but that’s like saying Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Olivier Assayas’ Clean are the same movie because they’re both handheld dirty cinematography illustrating drug addiction. AND, Slumdog Millionaire’s failure is a failure of ‘poverty porn’, which I acknowledge even though I like that movie more than some. It’s poverty shown on a multimillion dollar budget perspective; I don’t know much about the filmmakers of Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it certainly felt like they actually spent enough time in that community to really know it, whereas Slumdog Millionaire is an English movie, not an Indian one. See what I’m saying?

On a poverty porn scale of 1 to 10, 1 being British Kitchen Sink Realism and 10 being Slumdog Millionaire, with Winter’s Bone at an average 5, Beasts is a three.

Part of the automatic contradiction in any movie of this type regardless of how its made is simply that the community it shows does not have the money, support, background, or help to make their own movie. Even having access to cheap cameras doesn’t really help them be educated in how to craft their own narrative or do so ‘experimentally’. It happens occasionally and rarely.

So one thing that is interesting is this recurrent theme throughout the movie of Hushpuppy talking about the scientists of the future unearthing her story. It’s a purposeful irony in two ways: 1) her entire history is being washed away around her. There’s no solid foundation for her community to be preserved, and she knows that; 2) The Tideland point, where her perspective is the one we experience the story through because we’re already walking into the theatre with such opinionated mojo that we have to be reminded about how this type of stuff looks like from the perspective of someone in the middle of it, and so the movie reconstructs a myopic childhood and then has to sit back and let the audience struggle with it.

Everyone who hasn’t seen it should try to go in leaving all of your expectations behind and see if you can keep your critical juju at bay until it’s over. I had to do that myself; at various points I was like, “But that’s stupid because—! Wait a minute, DiB, for one thing, you’re experiences are far removed from these peoples’.”

Most critics I’ve read so far are utterly unable to make that differentiation. Hushpuppy dreams of scientists of the future hearing her story as she tells it to herself, but the scientists of the future will never understand it the way she understands it.

@NRH: “The main problem with the film is a very shaky sense of logic and proportion; there is one big plot development in the middle of the film that is really problematic, momentous in a way that the film really doesn’t know what to do with.”

Pretty much every plot development is momentous, and then goes without a momentous climax (see Estabrook’s ‘anticlimactic’). I think that’s purposeful, not ‘the film really doesn’t know what to do with it.’ In some cases it’s not perfectly done (and if we’re thinking about the same moment here, it’s probably the levee explosion) but it’s necessarily noteworthy that the outside has just as limited access to the inside as the inside has to the out.

Think I’m talking about The Bathtub to the rest of Southern Louisiana?

I’m also talking about Hushpuppy’s relationship to her father (when the father returns, “You wouldn’t understand anything Hushpuppy!”), Hushpuppy’s relationship to her mother (“You can stay here if you’d like”, which is Hushpuppy’s reason for going out, but then Hushpuppy immediately leaves"), their relationship to their community (“Winston! You ain’t leaving me are you man!”, the kids’ relationships to the adults (illustrated mainly by them banding together to leave and return and then how they visually ‘lead’ the end of the movie whereas they are ‘lead’ at the beginning), the adults to each other (the whole aide workers thing easily, but also the teacher to the others and so on), and the audience’s relationship to the subjects (already struggling to describe).

But MOST importantly in considering that limited access is the fact that there is access. Hence:

“The fact that the characters are always drunk is less problematic than the fact that there seems to be no economy; how do they afford to get drunk? Who in the film has a job? How does the teacher get paid? If these kids stay in the magical bathtub community, what future will they have? Will they end up as prostitutes on the floating cat fish restaurant?”

This already exists in the real world right now in America, not only in Southern Louisiana but parts of the Appalachians, off-the-grid communities in the Southwest, etc. It’s also not a function of recent events like the recession but endemic to a variety of factors over a long time. I’m not quite sure that everything in the movie is internally consistent but the basic representation is apt. Myself, I had the, “Well where does her father get the ice to keep the beer and chicken cold in the cooler from, if he doesn’t already have a refrigerator or freezer to keep the beer and chicken cold in?” moment.

But one of the biggest things I think people are missing about communities like these is that they are never entirely and can never entirely living outside of society. There are still transactions there, god knows the form they take (mostly peculiar to each community). We’re also struggling with a purposeful myopic perspective that serves to illustrate why this particular community chooses not to do things like accept aide despite our perspective of their poverty. In a lot of ways they don’t recognize that they aren’t entirely doing it all themselves.

For instance, there’s the scene where they look at the factory and Hushpuppy’s father states, “Look at that, isn’t that ugly? We have the most beautiful land in the whole world.” He doesn’t recognize that the trash he’s built his house of came from that factory. If this world is Eden, it’s an Eden with just as inevitable of a fall, but built into the infrastructure rather than incited by a serpent. Around the same time, Hushpuppy explains, “He says people on the outside are afraid of the water. We live in the water.” Both of these scenes illustrate not that mainstream society is wrong, but that marginalization works both ways. More on this when I get back to Brad S’s comments and that irritatingly awful critics’ claim that this movie takes a libertarian perspective (basically it’s just about the exact opposite).

Another thing that people don’t seem to be keeping in mind about this movie is that the people who are left in the Bathtub were not the only people who lived there before the waters started to rise. The people who did decide to ‘take aide’ and so forth left before this movie started. What we’re left with, as far as the movie’s internal logic is concerned, is something like Chris Marker’s “survival on the two extremes”: OUR first world survivalist impressions as spectators watching a movie, and their third world survivalist impressions as people who’ve never had access to a movie theatre. They’re lives are not informed by the same system as ours, so their ‘logic’ is going to feel inconsistent to ours.

That’s what I mean when I say this movie isn’t a hundred or even decades into the future, but more like six or seven. It portrays people who exist right here and now in the actual United States of America. All you need is the waters to wash away those who still maintain an ‘American’ value system, and what’s left is the Bathtub community with their self-preservationist ideas of ‘No crying!’ and ‘No acting like a pussy!’ and ‘We party more than anyone else in the whooooolllle world!’ and ‘This is paradise!’ even though they’re living in trash reappropriated from the dregs of what was washed away.

“the voice over narration sounds oddly rehearsed, and in tone and syntax is so “off” from the dialogue in the rest of the movie that it bothered me throughout.”

I really didn’t notice that.

“The music was unfortunate; the editing seemed clipped and rushed.”

I LOVED the music, and especially its regional echoes.

@Aoaijea: “the alligator getting shot scene is unintentionally hilarious.”

I lol’ed. Unintentional? The whole flashback scene of Hushpuppy telling the story her father told is pretty humorous. It both illustrates how a child understands the stories of her father, and the father’s own idealist and idyllic perception that is not without its own amount of dark reality. I loved the blood splashing across her underwear, and how it cuts to a reaction shot of the father being aroused. Because that’s what his story is, one of arousal, while her story is one of beauty and magic. Undercutting both is the fact that the woman left them in reality.

@Jirin: “It beats you over the head with the climate change angle and has an unnecessary amount of cheesy child’s-perspective narration. It’s also full of a not of clumsy failed metaphor.”

I disagree. The climate change angle seemed almost nonpolitical, it serves two functions. The first is what I’ve said above about ‘Once the others are washed away.’ In order to bring out what the movie is portraying in a real community, the movie isolates them with a real-world plausible event. The second idea the climate change angle concerns is ‘childs’-perspective narration’ where she has been told about and fears these big ice cap melting things and prehistoric beasts the way a kid fears La Llorona or other preservationist legends in other communities, so when for instance she hears a storm she translates it in her head to the ice cap avalanche and when people around her are in distress she imagines it as the coming approach of the aurochs. She’s only taking the information available to her and letting her imagination run wild. I don’t think the movie is interested in saying anything specific about climate change other than a recognition of how it’ll change the game in marginalized communities, which is totally true.

WHICH, by the way, brings me to the idea of an optimistic dystopia. This movie is certainly dystopic in the sense that a cataclysmic event renders a negative post-event world with people on the edge of survival, but most climate change narratives focus on how much destruction those events will have on the middle class. The fact is that the first to get effected, like any other thing in the world, are going to be the impoverished and poor. I’m still holding off what the movie has to say about marginalization itself, but nevertheless, one of the things that struck me about the movie is the fact that that community constructs for itself a survivalist mentality and starts using information for survival, and ONLY the information they need for survival. The whole animalistic survivalist mentality that underlines a lot of what they are talking about sort of shows that in the end this extends to human civilization as a whole: despite the fact that we’re ‘civilized’ we’re still animals; conversely, once civilization is removed and we’re at the point of post-cataclysm, we’re still in our own way constructing civilization. Basically the movie deconstructs the idea that there’s any real difference between a human kingdom and an animal one. Hence, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” refers to the aurochs AND the community.

I’m waiting for some critic, by the way, to wail about how that title is racist because it says poor black people are beasts. I bet ten to one that’s already happened, I just haven’t seen it yet.

That same idea extends to Hushpuppy’s whole small piece of the universe thing. She goes back and forth as things in her life fall apart and come back together about the state of the ‘universe’ based on the state of her own emotions; it matches the movements of the aurochs and it matches the changes in the characters’ arcs. All of these aspects reflect each other and help bring out the underlying structure of the movie. I don’t think the metaphors were messy at all, unless you’re looking for something as direct as ‘the blood on her crotch signifies childbirth.’ It does, but that moment also signifies Hushpuppy’s father’s fantasies, and also Hushpuppy’s fantasies, and also the viewers’ first contact with the mother, and also our awareness that this family is already broken and bloody.

There are SO MANY interweaving and meshed ideas like this that I’m struggling to contain them all or explain them even in direct methods. Again I’m going to need to watch this movie at least another time to try to bring out more specific examples. I’m sorry this is such a struggle for me to put to words, guys.

House of Leaves: “Loved it. Magical realism, so none of those things bothered me. We’re dealing with the child’s imagination.”
Adrock: “HoL gets it. How can a child’s imagination have plot holes?”

Well and it was my fault for bringing in magical realism. But no, I don’t think it’s accurate to say ‘plot holes’ are forgiven by a child’s imagination. The plot informs her imagination, which gives us access to the plot. Plot holes may be there but ultimately are worth scrutinizing for intent rather than tossing off as lazy storytelling. I can’t say this movie is perfect but I can say that what plotholes and mistakes there are are relatively insignificant to the piece as a whole and not worth bothering too much over.

I liked this movie a lot but once again find myself more trying to defend it on the level of how it’s being criticized, rather than as like a new classic of absolute total brilliance or anything like that.

@ Jack: “I liked it a lot because it was like nothing I had ever seen before.”

I have thus far compared this movie to Tideland, Gummo, and the book Song of Solomon. I’ve also not yet had a chance to but have wanted to compare it to Soylent Green and Brazil but it’s much easier to keep it localized to realism than science fiction tropes.

“saw it with a friend that is from New Orleans and he said there is no such place like The Bathtub in Louisiana, and the whole concept was imaginary.”

There is no geographic location called the Bathtub but this concept is not entirely imaginary.

@Jazz: “right now I’m ambivalent.”

You’re always ambivalent! :)

“The sluggish narrative—if you can call a narrative—wasn’t the only problem. "

Well okay.

This movie isn’t entirely metanarrative, but it contains elements of metanarrative. As a construction it requires sort of undermining our narrative expectations to make a point because if it just stuck to the regular narrative tropes it would be nothing but tepid poverty porn, in my opinion. It’s where the movie really tries to undermine our perspective is where it reveals its own, and I think a lot of people failed to notice that. And when I say a lot of people failed to notice that, I don’t think it was the movie’s failure to communicate, but their failure to recognize this narrative undermining as anything other than ‘anticlimactic’ ‘plotholes’ with ‘messy metaphors’ from ‘a magical realist child’s perspective.’

“My sense was that the film was trying to go for this primitive art feel. It just didn’t seem that interesting in terms of the visuals, and I felt in the hands of a better filmmaker this could be a lot more interesting.”

There is that theme of caveman paintings but I still think the major part of the cinematography is in illustrating myopic perspective. The movie limits what attention is given by the narrator to its various elements. That’s significant.

“Maybe even a raw filmmaker like Melvin van Peebles would have made this a lot more interesting.”

Much too flamboyant for what this movie is trying to do.

“I think the people stay not just for pride, but because they have chosen to live that way and they feel they have a right to do so.”

Okay, so we’re finally getting into this. Here goes.

Right. First step, Estabrooks is correct, there is pride at stake. Second step, Jazz is correct, they have chosen to live that way and feel they have a right to do so (and do have a right to do so). Third step, which I will have the most difficulty explaining of all I think, is that that choice isn’t really as much of a choice as they or we think it is. Their base living situation in the near future is a product of their marginalization today.

“There’s also a sense of self-reliance, self-resilience, independence that seems to be close to the heart of the film. This theme relates to the relationship between Hushpuppy and her dad and the way their relationship unfolds through the course of the film. Basically, the father is trying to raise her to become this fiercely independent, self-reliant person—and the film portrays this in a heroic way—culminating in Hushpuppy taming the wild boar-like creatures.”

Also yes as a starting point, but also there’s the matter of urgency. The father knows he’s dying and has to do what he can to make sure Hushpuppy can live on.

But there’s also the fact that in many ways the father is wrong, and even though he puts off a facade of strength and self-reliance he still has to go to the hospital (early on in the movie), puts her in the bus (later on in the movie), and breaks down crying (at the end of the movie). He’s lying to himself just as much as he’s yelling at her about the reality of his impending death and the need for survival.

“There is something about these themes and the way they’re portrayed that makes me think of the Zeitgeist now. Americans seem to have lost a lot of faith in their institutions. Who can we really depend on, but ourselves?”

Very apt point I hadn’t considered, actually, but yes, there’s a lot of that there. Later on in this thread the article is shared where it’s complained that this movie is libertarian. I don’t think it is at all. But nevertheless libertarian or no, right now Americans are struggling with the knowledge that economically, ecologically, morally, and structurally their livestyles are just not sustainable and that they actually have to work for a living now. It’s a painful time in American history.

An important aspect of this movie though is that ‘America’ is still there and these people live outside of it, divided by a levee wall. As they always have. The structure and economy and even ecology and morals have never, ever applied to them. They were refused it, so they have no option but refuse us.

From the aide workers’ perspectives, they are saving the community from disaster. The fact is you can give disaster relief and aide but you can’t really give them a new ‘home.’ You can’t just sweep them out of their flooded houses and put them in a shelter and say, “There now, you’re safe, here’s food, now you’ll be fine.” They don’t have money. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have education. They have no way of just picking up and finding a new place and participating since they never were invited into society in the first place. In other words, they don’t have the basic beginning assets that a typical American receives at birth to then perform the American construction of a life and try to make ends meet. So when you go into their communities and try to take them away from ‘danger’, you are also taking them away from the only survival tools that they have.

And let’s be fucking honest. We’re not going to just move them in to the millions of foreclosed houses that are empty right now. If we move them into community housing at all we won’t give them enough assets and resources to pick themselves up. And even if we do, they don’t know how to properly use them because they are poor.

So no, they don’t have a choice to stay in that community, they are forced to, and when they are forced to leave, it’s the exact same entrapment. And when they live under that type of desperate situation, of course they come up with, “You have to do it all yourself” “You have to be strong” “No crying” “Don’t be a pussy.”

Now is all of that really ‘featured’ in the movie? Eh, I have to admit I’m bringing in a lot of what I know about marginalized impoverished American communities into it. But I feel like the filmmakers are either very aware of this, or experienced it first hand long enough to be capable of portraying it honestly.

I don’t even really think the performers are ‘acting’…..

“In a way, it also feels like a post-apocalyptic movie, although it’s technically not.”

Right. It’s about as much of a post-apocalyptic movie as Gummo was. And from what I understand, the ‘storm’ that destroyed the town in Gummo was a real storm and that’s what the area actually looks like. I don’t think these buildings were constructed just for Beasts of the Southern Wild, I suspect that they filmed in a few actual locations, though I may be wrong. That’s one of the ironies of the ‘worldbuilding’ idea we’ve been talking about. It is because it’s a movie and a constructed fantasy narrative. It isn’t because it’s the world that actually exists for actual people in the United States.

At any rate even if the buildings proved to be constructed and designed, they were done so realistically.

“I’ve seen homeless camps (let’s call them), and I don’t know if it’s the same people living there over many years, but they’re there doing the kinds of things you describe. (Actually, some of them have jobs, so maybe this is slightly different. But the people that lived in the Bathtub seemed to be living off the land. As for alcohol, I just assumed it was some form of moonshine. As for the gas for the boats, I’m not sure. But I’ve seen homeless people with generators—some with air conditioning!”

Thing about humans is, they have a tendency to live on and survive more than not. The thing about poor people is, they still acquire things. That’s the ‘optimism’ in what I’m saying about ‘optimistic dystopia.’ No wonder these people essentialize their own narrative down to the level of animal survival of the fittest. At this point factories and industry aside that’s all that’s left for them to work with, and is why they discard all other intellectual concerns to the side.

I don’t mean optimism along the lines of ‘this will all turn out alright!’ and ‘Hey what they’re doing is good!’ It just goes to show that even if the icecaps melt and entire geographic areas are washed away, people will carve out boats from the remains of cars and go fishing, find their communities, and tell each other stories.

@Ademption: “I wouldn’t have gone had I not read some reviews and about how it’s “actually a fantasy film,””

It’s not, it’s a realist drama movie told through a girl’s fantasies.

“What irritated me the most was that every character seemed to live in garbage, but then late in the movie there were hospitals, rescue stations, fast-food, cars, highways, helicopters, and modern American society (on the other side of a dam, duh, not in the tidal plain) which the film predictably rails against as restricting humans’ creaturely freedom to be animals and live in garbage.”

We left them in the garbage and that’s all they have. Now they see the aide workers as taking that away from them too.

“So the film begs the question, were the main characters all just feral homeless people living with mental illness in garbage or was the entire film an ill conceived Sundance-bait mishmash that didn’t plan out the elements of its fantasy world at all? Probably both.”

Neither, but I wouldn’t necessarily disagree that it’s Sundance bait (I do disagree that it’s ill conceived). But just because an independent movie manages to gain indie street cred doesn’t mean it exists for only that purpose.

With stuff like this and the Danny Boyle thing and so on, maybe still coming down off of my discussions of Dark Knight Rises and so on, is it worth mentioning that it feels like people these days (not just on this forum) are just chronically distrustful of directors’, critics’, and so on’s intentions? Maybe even pathologically so? This movie’s credit sequence indicated that they made their budget off of a mixture of grants and crowdfunding, they took on many complications such as the weave of the plot, themes, and point of view that were very difficult to balance (and they didn’t pull off perfectly) and made a movie about a community that has only vestiges of its identity in other films (maybe people here know other movies about the Louisiana Cajun poor or related communities in the rest of the United States, but the closest I get is the pan-over of buildings in Down by Law and a few experimental movies I’ve seen that have never and will never get wide release). This movie is pretty damn unique so if it existed merely for Sundance bait they’d probably have taken an easier and more cliched route. And the movie would much more clearly be 8-10 level poverty porn.

@Brad S: “I believe the unspoken implcation of this is that what’s left of the government and modern institutions have become a dystopian tyranny forcing those within their control to surrender their freedoms in return for protection from the elements.”

As I said before, nah, it’s more like the government and aide workers are taking away all they have left and feel forced to do so instead of let them be if that’s their choice once they go and blow up the friggin’ levee. Calling the government in this movie a tyranny is like calling the Bathtub folks in this movie terrorists.

“This is not overtly stated (one of the wonderful aspects of this film is the amount of information it leaves out, forcing us to fill in the blanks),”

Totally agree. The education scene itself shows that the community has access to ‘facts’ both scientific and historical but only the facts they want to acknowledge are the facts they use. The rest don’t concern them. I’m glad you point out the amount of information the movie leaves out, which is also the way the community leaves out information when dealing with the children or sometimes talking to each other, which is also the way the father leaves out information when trying to raise Hushpuppy, which is also how Hushpuppy leaves out information on some of her own motivations for actions that she does in the movie even though she narrates over the movie (in some cases the narration is contradictory to the actions taking place on screen and in all cases the narration isn’t superfluous but changes the nature of the information going on on screen).

" but the actions of the protagonists make no sense if this is not the case."

I mean she talks about scientists from the future telling her story while drawing figures on the inside of a cardboard box inside a room she’s set to burn down in hysteric retaliation of her father refusing to let her in on his story. We could say that it makes no sense that she wants to preserve her story for others while burning down the very medium she’s trying to tell the story on. But that’s the way her world works.

“Then why are these people refusing any assistance, which we see is available to them?”
“Why do people in tornado alley not just move away? Their houses thump have wheels?”

So I already described a lot of this in my response to Jazz, above.

The fact is that communities such as this have been discarded and shoved around by the mainstream institutions their entire lives. So now when disaster strikes and the institutions come in, they see it as another attack on their ever diminishing resources. The people beyond the levee pushed them out there in the first place, and then come by spouting mandatory evacuation and pushing them around again. The teacher gets it — she knows that the mandatory evacuation is causally correlated to the levee being blown up. Basically that is when the Bathtub signals to the institutions that they can’t be left on their own or they’ll blow shit up, which of course the Bathtub folks did because they felt those levees were holding the water in purposefully (which they were, but not to drown the Bathtub, but to keep New Orleans from flooding). In every way, from their perspective, the institutions are against them, and that’s endemic to their culture because we’ve institutionally marginalized them for fucking generations.

This is why riots happen in urban communities during blackouts. This is why gang violence mostly ends up killing its own members than threatening the rest of the city. Social and institutional marginalization is a a recursive endemic procedure that is not fixed by running in after a disaster with food and medicine and expecting everyone to just embrace it. “Don’t eat that food” and “I don’t want to be plugged into a wall” is very telling to what the father perceives but is not the political motivation of the movie.

Why don’t people who live in tornado alley just move?

Because they can’t.

But their houses have wheels lol!

They are physically capable of driving mobile homes, but they have nowhere else to go and would be kicked out of any place they went, because they don’t have the money to afford it. And, tornado alley is their home.

Asking why the Bathtub community resists aide is like asking why drug dealers put themselves in danger and legal trouble for less than minimum wage jobs is like asking why addicts don’t just quit is like asking why people who complain about their jobs don’t just get a new one. It’s more complicated than that, and ever more so the further and further from middle class life you get.

Also keep in mind that the Bathtub community is what remains of what has been there before, not every person who lived there ‘before the storm.’ People are still, within the community, discussing whether or not they should leave. We’re left with the dregs, not the tea itself, to tell our story.

Back to Ryan Estabrooks: “I wish Louis Bunuel could have been able to direct this.”

This is a very American movie. Bunuel could have done some interesting things with the concept but the result would be so different as to be negligably the same concept. In fact it would be too conceptual. I would prefer rendering unto Bunuel what is Bunuel’s and what is this movie’s its own.

END PAGE 1

—PolarisDiB

I feel like Beasts is actually a lot more complicated than a lot of its detractors are willing to admit. Granted, its complexity comes from what the film chooses to leave out, namely the history and politics of the region. You can choose to see this as a bad thing, but I thought it was left out intentionally to make the film more complex. Because we don’t know everything about how The Bathtub came to be and what exactly is on the other side of that levee, the actions of the Bathtub residents are much more difficult to read. We know there must be some contact with the world on the other side, because at one point Hushpuppy’s father disappears and comes back in a hospital gown and ID bracelet, but what are the motivations of those on the other side? Are they purely humanitarian? Is there an element of condescension? The film really allows the viewer to make up their own mind about The Bathtub and the world outside it, so much so that I think people’s interpretation of the film says much more about them than it does the film.

I was flabbergasted when I saw this. It left me blown away that all these people had been saying this was unique. It actually left me a little at ease with all the praise it had been getting, because obviously anything that even tries to dare out into regions that many many things had gone to in the past, like say Labyrinth or the Flinstones, would be seen today as bold, brave, and unique…among other words that mean nothing. Magical realism is very ‘now’ and usually get’s a good deal of praise when done well.

Look at Haruki Murakami. However, where Murakami would kind of go off on his own imaginative tangents, this movie is hooked very deeply into George Washington, Spike Jonze, and I guess Emir Kusturica if anyone wants to believe that the semblance to that director goes any further than the townspeople being drunk constantly. It boggles my mind how much something is original the more it resembles something that was actually original in the past.

@ Brad: “We are not given the details of this conflict, but are given characters who are acting like A) paranoid terrorists, or B) oppressed resisters. Judging by what we know about the characters, my reading is B. This is all very open to interpretation though, much more than most films.”

Ah, see, what I’m saying is, no, C) their ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘choice’ is like their households: made out of the reappropriated junk of our privileged lifestyles. Re: my point above and Jazz’s more first-person perspective about these communities not necessarily living in isolation of our institutions and still being able to acquire things. These people are as American as the America that threw them out. It’s contradictory but that’s culture.

@ Jazz: “A general question: should the people have been allowed to live on that island—assuming they weren’t really harming anyone else or being a liability problem for the government? Should they have been allowed to stay even if they were in harm’s way from the storm, or does the government have to remove them, even if it’s against their will?”

A very complicated question. Keep in mind the lack of choice on their part and their endemic marginalization from our resources. In the end we could leave them alone to squalor like they seem to ‘choose’, but if we turn our backs for two long or something goes wrong, they may come back to blow up our levees. But if we just go in and offer them aide, they’ll see us as trespassing on their right to life.

“I don’t know the historical backstory of the Bathtub, but I was assuming this was a real place, more or less, and that the government just didn’t flood the place knowing that people lived there. My sense was that the government forces the people to leave when the storm is about to hit.”

It’s alluded to in various ways in the first half of the movie that the government started building the levees and instructed the people to leave. Many did, but some did not. We are left with those who chose to stay. The government decides to leave them alone but then the storm hits and floods behind the levees as predicted from both sides (they all knew it was coming). The community, lead in part by Hushpuppy’s father, decides to rail on and keep living but as the teacher predicts the water is choking off the environment and they’re losing all their resources. Rather than seek aide for the reasons I’ve already described, the father decides to ‘fix it himself’ for the reasons I’ve already described and just release the water by bombing the levee, which after all represents to him not the protection of New Orleans – type communities but the government’s abandonment of his life in the first place. It is that action that makes the government aware that they can’t just leave those people alone, so they immediately call for mandatory evacuation. This just pushes further to the people of Bathtub that the government is shoving them around so they stay put, so the government goes in and arrests them. Now they’re getting help and aide but at the loss of their own homes and freedom, from their own perspective for reasons I’ve explained. Hushpuppy’s father doesn’t want to die in a hospital in the first place (early disappearance and his return scenes), but now that he’s lost his home he tries instead to get Hushpuppy on an aide bus so that she at least won’t be around to see him die. This scene proves that he’s not just one-dimensionally liber-fucking-tarian (see below). She refuses herself to go and he breaks down and makes clear that he’s going to die. She fights back and they run off back to Bathtub (acknowledged plot hole but narratively/thematically there’s not much use for the aide hospital anymore and if they went on the bus or something the movie would have turned out much different, so it’s difficult to determine what that would have added or subtracted from the whole. Left with what we have, we have to only work with what the filmmakers actually did). Now that it’s established that he’s going to die and they’ll get no help, she strikes off to find her mother.

I could go on but that clarifies the specific area you’re commenting on. Basically the hospital scene divides the movie into two parts: when the father is in charge, and when Hushpuppy is in charge, narratively speaking. Metanarratively speaking they’re not ever really in control in the first place, as from a realist perspective they’re just totally fucked.

“they were initially forced to go to the shelter/hospital, so I thought they were reacting to that more than an ideological stance against medical care.”

Exactly. The rugged survivalism, the reviewer calling this out for fucking libertarianism, the people calling it out for climate change metaphor, and so on seem to be taking these scenes in isolation of how the movie is operating as a whole.

See below.

“I don’t find these scenarios so far-fetched. In my hometown, there was the remnants of an old leper colony. When I was a young boy, people with Hansen’s disease still lived there, and remember asking the reason for this—as it was a run down, primitive looking place. My father explained that the place was home to these people, and they preferred living there, even if there were better facilities and care in another place. (I don’t know if I really understood that at the time, as the place looked like a spooky place to live.)

I’ve also seen people live on the beach, in shanty towns. Some of them are on drugs. Some of them have jobs. Some of them have other options, but they choose to live the way they do. So I didn’t find the Bathtub residents as strange, and I didn’t have to imagine a kind of post-Apocalyptic scenario to explain their behavior."

A thousand times this.

Which is important ‘cause, you and I have those same sort of first hand experiences of this type of lifestyle (a removed and critical perspective, but nevertheless an experiential one), and you still found the movie lacking whereas I’m sort of defending this movie on the principle of understanding these issues. I didn’t personally find this lacking but your arguments against this movie seem to revolve around the same issues as your questions about The Darjeeling Limited. There’s issues of ‘storytelling’ that are being taken on in order to describe the characters, which make us have to confront the movie on multiple levels of ‘narration’ which are in some places interdigitated and in others divergent.

…

Alright, so that LA Review of Books piece is just… something else. Not only do I disagree with most of it, but a lot of what it’s disagreeing with I also disagree with.

I don’t even know where to start taking it on, but I don’t feel like taking another four hours to break it down. Basically, the long and the short of it is that the author sees the characters and the narrative but not the character and the metanarrative of the story, he or she (can’t find a byline) sets a Marxist dialog going with a familiarity of its history and text that this movie has no relationship to, argues against critics who are also incorrect, and puts a lot of the keys to this movie into the wrong lock.

Now, will people watch this movie and decide to follow hedonistic libertarian lifestyles in junkheaps?

Basically, saying that that’s what this movie represents is like saying Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer represents why serial killing is necessary.

—PolarisDiB

“I feel like Beasts is actually a lot more complicated than a lot of its detractors are willing to admit. Granted, its complexity comes from what the film chooses to leave out, namely the history and politics of the region. You can choose to see this as a bad thing, but I thought it was left out intentionally to make the film more complex. Because we don’t know everything about how The Bathtub came to be and what exactly is on the other side of that levee, the actions of the Bathtub residents are much more difficult to read. We know there must be some contact with the world on the other side, because at one point Hushpuppy’s father disappears and comes back in a hospital gown and ID bracelet, but what are the motivations of those on the other side?”

Exactly my feelings too, only I go ahead and ‘read in’ information based on my knowledge of Louisiana bayou culture and its real-life history. Perhaps even I presume too much about the film based off of that perspective.

I forgot to mention. Hushpuppy opens the movie with a line about how animals speak in their own language inaccessible to us, and most of that language is simple needs like “I need to eat” or “I need to poop” but some of it is more than that. I forget the actual quote. But that’s pretty much first step right off in acknowledging that this movie doesn’t intend for a literalized reading and much of what the characters have to say is unaccessible.

—PolarisDiB

@DiB

Which is important ‘cause, you and I have those same sort of first hand experiences of this type of lifestyle (a removed and critical perspective, but nevertheless an experiential one), and you still found the movie lacking whereas I’m sort of defending this movie on the principle of understanding these issues.

A part of me feels that some viewers are responding because of the film’s shock-value or some interesting portrait of an exotic world. But the film didn’t affect me in either way—and I think that’s because of some of my experiences.

You seem to be reading the film as trying to help viewers see homeless people in a more sympathetic light, but I don’t really see the film that way. Celebrating self-reliance—especially over relying on the government—seem to be a key objective (and I do think there are libertarian overtones, at least).

“You seem to be reading the film as trying to help viewers see homeless people in a more sympathetic light, but I don’t really see the film that way.”

That’s not what I see myself as saying. I see Hushpuppy’s narration as the Katrina equivalent of Ring around the Rosies, which gives us access to a horrific event detailed from a sing-song voice. The horrific event of Ring around the Rosies is the Plague. The horrific event of Beasts of the Southern Wild is endemic poverty of the Louisiana bayou.

“Celebrating self-reliance—especially over relying on the government—seem to be a key objective (and I do think there are libertarian overtones, at least).”

Then here’s a key question: why do they send social workers in instead of policemen? They the filmmakers could have imprisoned the residents to justify the tyrannical point but instead put the residents in the hands of people who were only trying to help (and nothing about their actions in the movie counteracts that fact). The policemen could be easily justified with the levee explosion. But instead the movie focuses on how inaccessible that community makes itself to aide, then justifies that lack of accessibility.

—PolarisDiB

@DiB

That’s not what I see myself as saying. I see Hushpuppy’s narration as the Katrina equivalent of Ring around the Rosies, which gives us access to a horrific event detailed from a sing-song voice. The horrific event of Ring around the Rosies is the Plague. The horrific event of Beasts of the Southern Wild is endemic poverty of the Louisiana bayou.

I see what you’re saying. But the film isn’t just trying to show how awful the conditions are, right? You don’t think the film wants to present self-reliance and independence in a heroic way—while putting the authorities in a bad light?

Then here’s a key question: why do they send social workers in instead of policemen?

Too heavy-handed, perhaps. Also, the film still portrays the actions of the social workers/health care workers in a negative light, right. The escape is seen as a triumph, imo—especially the last shot of the film.

@DiB

A very complicated question. Keep in mind the lack of choice on their part and their endemic marginalization from our resources. In the end we could leave them alone to squalor like they seem to ‘choose’, but if we turn our backs for two long or something goes wrong, they may come back to blow up our levees. But if we just go in and offer them aide, they’ll see us as trespassing on their right to life.

I’m not comfortable with your characterization of the people lacking choice and being deprived of resources. The question of how much responsibility they bear with regard to their situation is a very complex one. Are the poor marginalized and deprived—to the point where their control and choices are severely limited? Yes, I think I would agree with that. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have choices available to them. Moreover, it’s not like they don’t have any access to resources, either. There is definitely a shortage of shelter space and resources (including affordable housing), but I’ve heard that some people often don’t like going to shelters because a) they can’t bring their pets; b) they don’t want to adhere to the rules of the shelter (which, include, not using drugs). Some of the conditions for being in the shelter also include getting training to get employment. My point is that resources are being offered and this provides a choice to improve the situation, so saying they don’t have really have a choice or resources is not entirely correct.

But I also want to make clear that I’m not putting all the responsibility and blame on the homeless individual. When an individual hasn’t gotten the love, guidance from stable family; hasn’t gotten a good education; lived around drugs and violence—it can be hard to make decisions that move them to a better life. It’s easy to judge and difficult to understand if one has grown up in a solid home.

Back to the question. My sense is that governments will bear some responsibility if they know people are living in a public space (e.g., the beach) that doesn’t have proper amenities that can mainatin public safety. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s the sense I get.

DiB-

WOW. I actually started posting before you posted that so I only just got through with it and, I want to thank you for a brilliant defense of a film that is coming under fire for things it really has very little (if anything) to do with, from people who don’t really understand it. I agree with so much of what you had to say, and had to add to it thusly:

“that community constructs for itself a survivalist mentality and starts using information for survival, and ONLY the information they need for survival.”

And conversely, during the scene in the clinic, you could also read a whole host of survivalist information the people on the mainland had constructed for and told themselves about the people in the Bathtub based on how they treated them. I loved that it cut both ways: Everyone is, in one way or another, an Other.

“But the film isn’t just trying to show how awful the conditions are, right? You don’t think the film wants to present self-reliance and independence in a heroic way—while putting the authorities in a bad light?”

‘Optimistic dystopia.’ ‘In the end human beings have the habit of surviving.’ That’s what I think is going on here. We’re worried about things like climate change and know it’ll affect communities, especially the poor, and in a sense this movie shows they’ll try to survive and may have a fighting chance to.

In this case I’m reacting more to tone and circumstance than specifics of the plot.

“Are the poor marginalized and deprived—to the point where their control and choices are severely limited? Yes, I think I would agree with that. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have choices available to them. Moreover, it’s not like they don’t have any access to resources, either. There is definitely a shortage of shelter space and resources (including affordable housing), but I’ve heard that some people often don’t like going to shelters because a) they can’t bring their pets; b) they don’t want to adhere to the rules of the shelter (which, include, not using drugs). Some of the conditions for being in the shelter also include getting training to get employment. My point is that resources are being offered and this provides a choice to improve the situation, so saying they don’t have really have a choice or resources is not entirely correct.”

Nor did I mean that.

We have choices available to us, and we also don’t. We can choose what job we try to take or try to find a way around getting a job, but people in this society don’t really have a choice in terms of not getting a job ever. They have to work some way around it, it’s not just an automatic, “Meh, don’t wanna” thing.

Similarly, these people have resources and choices, but they are limited by their geography, lack of information, marginalization, and myopic perspective.

Just like us really but it’s easier for us to understand ‘the rules’ when its a movie about a middle class person than it is about an abjectly poor one. That’s why the majority of my posting on the matter is about remembering the social constructs from their perspective, something I’m uncomfortable doing because of how distant I am from it despite a few keyhole peeks.

This movie is something of a keyhole peek but it expressedly states before it starts that you may not understand the language. Reviewers and critics went on right ahead taking the dialog at face value, both in agreement and disagreement with what it says. The characters are free to make certain choices but they are not free.

—PolarisDiB

@DiB

Optimistic dystopia.’ ‘In the end human beings have the habit of surviving.’ That’s what I think is going on here. We’re worried about things like climate change and know it’ll affect communities, especially the poor, and in a sense this movie shows they’ll try to survive and may have a fighting chance to.

So you’re saying the film celebrates the resilience of the human spirit? The film’s message is one of hope—no matter the challenges we face, humans will persevere?

If so, I don’t think this takes into account the relationship between Hushpuppy and her father—specifically the central idea in their relationship, namely—raising Hushpuppy to be completely self-reliant and independent. What seems to be child abuse and neglect, turns into a different lifestyle and values that the film portrays in a positive light—and some of the primary values are self-reliance. liberty and independence.

We have choices available to us, and we also don’t. We can choose what job we try to take or try to find a way around getting a job, but people in this society don’t really have a choice in terms of not getting a job ever. They have to work some way around it, it’s not just an automatic, “Meh, don’t wanna” thing.

Similarly, these people have resources and choices, but they are limited by their geography, lack of information, marginalization, and myopic perspective.

You seem to be assuming a little too much here. What do you base this reading on?

Just like us really but it’s easier for us to understand ‘the rules’ when its a movie about a middle class person than it is about an abjectly poor one. That’s why the majority of my posting on the matter is about remembering the social constructs from their perspective, something I’m uncomfortable doing because of how distant I am from it despite a few keyhole peeks.

Let me see if I understand where you’re coming from. I hear you saying that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge these characters because their world is so different from ours? If so, are you suggesting we shouldn’t or can’t really evaluate the film—that we should view it as a taste of an unfamiliar world and not really draw any conclusions beyond that?

“Similarly, these people have resources and choices, but they are limited by their geography, lack of information, marginalization, and myopic perspective.

You seem to be assuming a little too much here. What do you base this reading on?"

Geography —> Louisiana Bayou.

Lack of information —> uneducated/stripped down to survivalist information.

Marginalized —> True story.

Myopic perspective —> Alcohol. The school session and what information it does focus on. The cinematography.

“I hear you saying that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge these characters because their world is so different from ours? If so, are you suggesting we shouldn’t or can’t really evaluate the film—that we should view it as a taste of an unfamiliar world and not really draw any conclusions beyond that?”

There is plenty we can read into the film but i.e. when we’re calling it out for being ‘libertarian’ we’re operating under the presumptuousness of people with social security numbers who register to vote and can tell the difference between libertarians versus, say, Republicans or anarchists or any other political group; the characters, on the other hand, could care less because all of that argumentation is Other to their own experience.

Marginalized survivalist communities struggling under economic and ecological fallout will perservere; that’s the ‘hope’ and the ‘heroism’ and the ‘self-reliance’ and the ‘independence’. It’s actually described well in the LA Review of Books at the very last paragraph where the writer mentions the ‘psychological response to survival’. That underlying hopeful narrative I do not read as a defense of their lifestyle nor a trustworthy experience because we’re dealing with abjectly impoverished people through the eyes of an untrustworthy narrator; I don’t read it as a defense of independence to the point of dismantling the infrastructure of the United States because these are people who live outside of it and were banished from it long ago, I do read it as an illustration of the distrust such marginalization has caused in that community that prohibits us simply offering aide and expecting it to be embraced and accepted; I don’t read either child abuse or personal strength training because its both.

—PolarisDiB

@DiB

This is the part I was asking about:

“…but people in this society don’t really have a choice in terms of not getting a job ever. They have to work some way around it, it’s not just an automatic, “Meh, don’t wanna” thing.”

Actually, I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying above. I assumed you meant that the Bathtub residents don’t have a choice about working or not working—because given their circumstances—they can’t get jobs; they’re not just opting out of work out of laziness or some other reason. If so, I was asking what you based this on.

There is plenty we can read into the film but i.e. when we’re calling it out for being ‘libertarian’ we’re operating under the presumptuousness of people with social security numbers who register to vote and can tell the difference between libertarians versus, say, Republicans or anarchists or any other political group; the characters, on the other hand, could care less because all of that argumentation is Other to their own experience.

Let’s put aside whether the film pushes a libertarian pov for a moment. Are you saying the characters have to be politically aware for this point to be made? I don’t think that’s the case. Couldn’t the filmmakers just use these characters to make that point?

That underlying hopeful narrative I do not read as a defense of their lifestyle nor a trustworthy experience because we’re dealing with abjectly impoverished people through the eyes of an untrustworthy narrator; I don’t read it as a defense of independence to the point of dismantling the infrastructure of the United States because these are people who live outside of it and were banished from it long ago, I do read it as an illustration of the distrust such marginalization has caused in that community that prohibits us simply offering aide and expecting it to be embraced and accepted; I don’t read either child abuse or personal strength training because its both.

I don’t read the film as an apology for the specific lifestyle they choose nor do I see the film as advocating for the dismantling the federal government. On the other hand, the film does seem to have political overtones. When you say, “Marginalized survivalist communities struggling under economic and ecological fallout will perservere; that’s the ‘hope’ and the ‘heroism’ and the ‘self-reliance’ and the ‘independence’,” you’re making the film sound more politically neutral than I think it is…well, I’m not entirely sure, but let’s explore that. Is the film championing and celebrating “marginalized survivalist communities?” Is the film really saying that these specific communities are going to persevere? Or do the people in these communities represent a specific ethos—one of self-reliance, independent and liberty (e.g., the freedom to live the way they want to—not necessarily the specific lifestyle of the Bathtub residents). To me, the film seems to emphasize these values more than the marginalized survivalist community—or something specific like Libertarian policies. My sense is the film is more about these ideas than the specific community. If I understand you correctly, you think the film is more concrete—more about the specific community—or at least marginalized survivalist communities in general.

I also wanted to address the “untrustworthy narrative” point. I realize that Hushpuppy narrates the film, and there are clearly moments (like with the boar-like creatures) when we’re seeing things through her perspective. But does this mean that everything we seen is from her perspective—and therefore we should take what we see with a huge grain of salt? I’m not sure I agree with that. This goes back to our reading of what the film is about. Is the film is mostly about the survivalist community—as seen through the eyes of Hushpuppy. Or is it primarily about specific ideas and values—with the filmmaker using the characters and their “story” to express these ideas?

““…but people in this society don’t really have a choice in terms of not getting a job ever. They have to work some way around it, it’s not just an automatic, “Meh, don’t wanna” thing.”

Actually, I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying above. I assumed you meant that the Bathtub residents don’t have a choice about working or not working—because given their circumstances—they can’t get jobs; they’re not just opting out of work out of laziness or some other reason. If so, I was asking what you based this on."

Oh, that’s a case of imprecise subject referent relationship in my own writing. I was comparing the Bathtub residents’ frame of choices to ‘this society’s’ (as in your and my) frame of choices. In our culture, it’s not like we’re forced to get a job, but when it comes down to the larger structure we pretty much are or else we’ll struggle.

“Are you saying the characters have to be politically aware for this point to be made? I don’t think that’s the case. Couldn’t the filmmakers just use these characters to make that point?”

I would say in this case it would be quite disingenuous for the filmmakers to use that specific subject to make a non-applicable political point. Nevertheless one of the reasons I’m emphasizing the focus on framing where the subjects live and the out-of-movie context of that actual existent community is so that ‘you’ (the reader, not necessarily you Jazzahola) can understand things like their attachment to the garbage they live in as property (because it’s all they have), their distrust of institution (because it’s sooooooo important to remember that this is the same thing that put them into poverty in the first place), and their pride (human nature) as something other than the filmmakers setting up a ‘political sandbox’ (to use some of the terminology from the review) or romanticizing their lives (which is why the untrustworthy narrator of Hushpuppy’s voice-over is so important). Based on the reviews and attention this movie is getting, people seem to be relying on the fact that this movie is fiction to keep it centered on their frame of reference of social constructions in an Aristotlan narrative. But the movie clearly starts out bookending the fiction with a deconstruction of such a narrative and deals with an actually existent community that is not applicable to many of our civic assumptions. I’m arguing that those complications not only need to be kept in mind, but that the filmmakers point out that fact throughout the movie in a variety of ways to keep people from relying on such simplistic readings.

“you’re making the film sound more politically neutral than I think it is”

I don’t think it’s politically neutral but I think it’s politics are more dynamic than simply ‘beating you over the head with the climate change aspect’ as Jirin stated or libertarian as the review stated. Those politics have to be understood in context. Otherwise the climate change aspect undermines the libertarian aspect and vice versa, right?

Basically, I’m being reactionary against people pigeonholing this movie into certain, to me, simplified readings both political and otherwise. The movie celebrates independence and survival and questions institution but it’s not libertarian just the way it features climate change and reveals abject poverty but it isn’t, say, socialist. If politics of this movie are to be confronted it’s gonna have to be with a keener eye than, “Oh they reject aide, this movie must be a statement against the government” or “Oh this movie features melting icecaps, this movie must be a statement about climate change.” There’s more to it than that and I feel it deserves better reviews than its getting (not ‘four star’ better reviews but more closely attentive reviews).

“Is the film really saying that these specific communities are going to persevere?”

I would say so.

“Or do the people in these communities represent a specific ethos—one of self-reliance, independent and liberty (e.g., the freedom to live the way they want to—not necessarily the specific lifestyle of the Bathtub residents).”

A little bit of that too.

But I would also say the movie sez that it’s in our nature to persevere, hence the animalist focus, and that stuff like self-reliance, independence, and liberty are psychological safety guards for us to keep trying.

“To me, the film seems to emphasize these values more than the marginalized survivalist community”

Right, but you have to understand those values in context to the marginalized survivalist community, which by its extant presence in our world undermines the ‘sandbox soapbox’ readings of it and is acknowledge in the rules of the movie itself by the opening lines about whether or not we can understand or listen to something speaking in a language outside of us.

" does this mean that everything we seen is from her perspective—and therefore we should take what we see with a huge grain of salt?"

I already mentioned that, like with the discussion of ‘storytelling’ in The Darjeeling Limited, some moments are cohesive to reality and some moments are divergent and they’re not always easily distinguishable. However, it would be helpful if I knew whether or not you’ve seen Tideland, because I feel like both movies perfectly represent the filter of childhood innocence over very real and very dysfunctional settings.

“Or is it primarily about specific ideas and values—with the filmmaker using the characters and their “story” to express these ideas?”

The audience needs Hushpuppy’s perspective to understand how people feel like they ‘belong’ in this community where otherwise we as people who can afford to go see movies in movie theatres would get the howling fantods about people defending their right to live in trash.

Like some people did.

Hushpuppy gains us ‘access’ to a quite inaccessible community, but unfortunately the cost of that access is that we have to accept things that she has to accept, like friggin’ child abuse, for the justifications that the community has. That’s why the ‘fantasy’ aspects of it are important, because in order to tell us the story of a real community with very different social rules, the rules are easier explained to the audience as a fantasy. Does that make any sense? Now I’m wishing I had Greg X’s ability to describe these onion structures.

I like where this discussion is going, though, now. I’m probably going to go see this movie again next weekend so that I can clarify some of these points further.

—PolarisDiB

@DiB

I was comparing the Bathtub residents’ frame of choices to ‘this society’s’ (as in your and my) frame of choices. In our culture, it’s not like we’re forced to get a job, but when it comes down to the larger structure we pretty much are or else we’ll struggle.

So both the Bathtub residents—like the middle clas—has less choice and control over their lives. Ergo, we shouldn’t view the Bathtub residents’ lifestyle as simply a matter of choice. Is that the point you’re trying to make? I basically agree with that.

Based on the reviews and attention this movie is getting, people seem to be relying on the fact that this movie is fiction to keep it centered on their frame of reference of social constructions in an Aristotlan narrative. But the movie clearly starts out bookending the fiction with a deconstruction of such a narrative and deals with an actually existent community that is not applicable to many of our civic assumptions. I’m arguing that those complications not only need to be kept in mind, but that the filmmakers point out that fact throughout the movie in a variety of ways to keep people from relying on such simplistic readings.

What I hear you saying is that the Bathtub community has strong similarities with real people who live in similar way, and we should understand the characters in a similar way. This will prevent us from simplistic interpretations of the film—interpretations that impose political message that isn’t there. Is that correct?

But this still doesn’t address my question about the political consciousness of the characters. They don’t have to be politically aware or sophisticated for the filmmakers to use the characters to convey a political message—at least I don’t see why not.

I don’t think it’s politically neutral but I think it’s politics are more dynamic than simply ‘beating you over the head with the climate change aspect’ as Jirin stated or libertarian as the review stated. Those politics have to be understood in context.

Right. I don’t really find the blatant libertarian or climate change message very compelling. (I thought the film echoed Katrina, more than preaching about climate change.)

The movie celebrates independence and survival and questions institution but it’s not libertarian just the way it features climate change and reveals abject poverty but it isn’t, say, socialist.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the film is tapping into real discontent with public institutions. Is that libertarian? Not strictly speaking, but there’s some overlap. Actually, I think more of the Tea Party—NOT the actual policies per se, but the spirit behind the people in the Tea Party.

Also, the freedom to choose how one should live—and the government preventing this—is a big part of the film. The idea that one should be able to take care of one’s self. I would say that it libertarian in spirit as well. I see these values being more central than survival instincts or the indomitability of the human spirit. If the film were more about survival, I think the characters would face a life-or-death situation outside of their choosing, but in this film, they make a conscious choice to live in dangerous circumstances. And they reject the help when it comes to them, and that rejection mainly because they want to live a certain way and the government is taking that choice away from them.

But I would also say the movie sez that it’s in our nature to persevere, hence the animalist focus, and that stuff like self-reliance, independence, and liberty are psychological safety guards for us to keep trying.

Where do you see the film making that message? I see the film being about freely choosing to live a certain way—even if most people find this way unappealing and dangerous. The tone of the film places the government as the villains (not in a heavy-handed way, but still). We don’t necessarily see them fighting to survive so much as figthing for their way of life. For example, when Wink and some others go to blow up the levee, do they do this to survive or protect their way of life? I see it as the latter. If we’re just talking about survival, they can just go over to the clinic—but they’re not just trying to survive—they’re trying to preserve their way of life.

I already mentioned that, like with the discussion of ‘storytelling’ in The Darjeeling Limited, some moments are cohesive to reality and some moments are divergent and they’re not always easily distinguishable. However, it would be helpful if I knew whether or not you’ve seen Tideland, because I feel like both movies perfectly represent the filter of childhood innocence over very real and very dysfunctional settings.

I haven’t seen Tideland. But I’ve seen Millions and Leolo. Besides the parts with the aurochs, I don’t think we need to question the veracity of what we see—or least I don’t see the film suggesting that we should take what we see with a huge grain of salt.

That’s why the ‘fantasy’ aspects of it are important, because in order to tell us the story of a real community with very different social rules, the rules are easier explained to the audience as a fantasy. Does that make any sense?

Kind of. I don’t know if I agree. If you’re saying that we can only gain access to this community through the a child’s fantasy-lenses, I don’t agree with that. Let me put it this way: what I see on the screen doen’t conflict with my interactions with people living in similar circumstances.

Btw, I hope we can discuss the cinematography and other visual aspects of the film, as I didn’t really think these parts were so terrific (not as some seem to).

If the film were more about survival, I think the characters would face a life-or-death situation outside of their choosing, but in this film, they make a conscious choice to live in dangerous circumstances. And they reject the help when it comes to them, and that rejection mainly because they want to live a certain way and the government is taking that choice away from them.

I don’t know about want to live in a certain way so much as have known no other way to live. This is what they’ve been forced or shunted into by any number of untrackable factors and at this point it’s not a question of whether they want it or not – for them, it’s a fight between what they have (what’s being threatened) or nothing.

Where do you see the film making that message? I see the film being about freely choosing to live a certain way—even if most people find this way unappealing and dangerous.

As DiB said:
‘In the end human beings have the habit of surviving.’

Even though they live in ruins, even though they’re left in dysfunctional settings and nothing but trash to work with, this is a functioning society that sets itself to continue. The father’s behaviour, seemingly so senseless, is like a self-correct mechanism. He’s crippled by his health, his surroundings, his lack of education, his entire situation, but even so what he passes on to his daughter is a fierce desire for independance, a pride in being self-sufficient, an entirely self-destructive love of freedom, all things that instill in her the (possibly irrational) desire to persevere. When reduced to bestial conditions, people can warp them, glaze them over in such a way that they become their own reason for going on. And that’s the central idea of the film, that even though they live in garbage these people have a sophisticated and subconscious system that makes them feel entirely noble, dignified and content as long as they’re left to their own devices. As the world around them falls apart, they keep finding reasons to continue and methods to impart them to their children.

And in that light, I found that their isolationist self-destruction really did have a certain nobility to it. I love the way the film taps into American ideas of fierce independance and individualism, and especially DiB’s phrasing of it:

All you need is the waters to wash away those who still maintain an ‘American’ value system, and what’s left is the Bathtub community with their self-preservationist ideas of ‘No crying!’ and ‘No acting like a pussy!’ and ‘We party more than anyone else in the whooooolllle world!’ and ‘This is paradise!’ even though they’re living in trash reappropriated from the dregs of what was washed away.

And as far as the optimistic dystopia goes, I couldn’t agree more. The film alludes darkly and unsubtly to climate change and the aurochs tear through the world like the very horsemen of the apocalypse. But even if the entire world were to crumble like this backwater has, people would cling to their trash and survive. The mind is a powerful thing.

Yeah. So, well, that. That’s what I meant, more elegantly than I’m capable of.

—PolarisDiB

@Malkin

I don’t know about want to live in a certain way so much as have known no other way to live. This is what they’ve been forced or shunted into by any number of untrackable factors and at this point it’s not a question of whether they want it or not…

No, I think the question of whether they choose to live this way, or if they’re really (indirectly) forced to live this way is an important question. In my early posts I mentioned some Native Hawaiians who have consciously chosen to “live off the land.” This is different from a homeless shanty town, imo. The former is more a conscious choice to live a certain way—i.e., the people prefer and choose to live that way; the latter is a last resort and the people would probably prefer to live another way if they had the means to do so.

Imo, the tone of the film suggests a situation similar to the Native Hawaiian example. This is a group of people who have forged a life for themselves and they now prefer to live this way. I don’t think the film is nuanced to suggest some ambivalence about this—with Wink, especially. I expect viewers see the living conditions as horrible, but the film presents the residents as if this an unambiguously good thing. (I don’t recall seeing any major problems or signs of depression or discontent.)

And that’s the central idea of the film, that even though they live in garbage these people have a sophisticated and subconscious system that makes them feel entirely noble, dignified and content as long as they’re left to their own devices

I agree the film projects feelings of nobility, but you don’t think this is over-romanticizing the situation? I’d think less of the film if that’s it’s central idea (and you might be correct). Up until now, I saw the film as celebrating and praising both personal liberty and self-reliance. I didn’t think the film was lifting up the community—as some sort of model—so much as celebrating the idea of self-reliance and the freedom to live the way one wants to live—even if people disagree with this way of life.

The film alludes darkly and unsubtly to climate change and the aurochs tear through the world like the very horsemen of the apocalypse. But even if the entire world were to crumble like this backwater has, people would cling to their trash and survive.

I’m just realizing that the ice melting might signify the climate change disaster scenario. See, I read this as a return of the aurochs, who came from a prehistoric time. When the lady talks about them, I believe she mentions that the men were terrified of them. So I thought of them symbolized the ultimate danger or threat. (Maybe I’m forgetting some crucial details.) So when the aurochs break out the ice, they’re awakening from their sleep and come to destroy the community. (Perhaps, they symbolize or dovetail with the government threat to the community.) When Hushpuppy tames and connect with them, I read this as signifying her achieving the final stage of independence and power to be self-sufficient—what her father had been raising her to become.

So I really didn’t see the climate change angle, but maybe there is a climate change angle that I completely missed.

Yeah. So, well, that. That’s what I meant, more elegantly than I’m capable of.

Not at all! I don’t think I even had the language to talk about the film before you dropped optimistic dystopia and myopic perspective.

No, I think the question of whether they choose to live this way, or if they’re really (indirectly) forced to live this way is an important question. In my early posts I mentioned some Native Hawaiians who have consciously chosen to “live off the land.” This is different from a homeless shanty town, imo. The former is more a conscious choice to live a certain way—i.e., the people prefer and choose to live that way; the latter is a last resort and the people would probably prefer to live another way if they had the means to do so.

Imo, the tone of the film suggests a situation similar to the Native Hawaiian example. This is a group of people who have forged a life for themselves and they now prefer to live this way. I don’t think the film is nuanced to suggest some ambivalence about this—with Wink, especially. I expect viewers see the living conditions as horrible, but the film presents the residents as if this an unambiguously good thing. (I don’t recall seeing any major problems or signs of depression or discontent.)

Spot on. These people wouldn’t prefer to live another way but that’s only because they aren’t equipped to see their situation with unbiased eyes – and through the haze of whisky and smoke that surrounds them what they’re “stuck with” is the greatest place in the world. They do indeed find it an unambiguously good thing, and they seem happy because they probably are.

So what’s the “objective” reality of the situation? Are they wrong and need correction? Would they thank the government later for being saved from their ruins by force? Maybe they would but they wouldn’t necessarily be happier. They exist in a utopia of short-sightedness, exactly like children. Like Hushpuppy herself. Maybe that’s why her narration jibes with everything else. In the end, it’s that very ignorance and short-sightedness that not only keeps them going but actually makes them happy.

I agree the film projects feelings of nobility, but you don’t think this is over-romanticizing the situation? I’d think less of the film if that’s it’s central idea (and you might be correct). Up until now, I saw the film as celebrating and praising both personal liberty and self-reliance. I didn’t think the film was lifting up the community—as some sort of model—so much as celebrating the idea of self-reliance and the freedom to live the way one wants to live—even if people disagree with this way of life.

I do have a tendancy to over-romanticize, but the film doesn’t. As far as the film itself goes I don’t think we’re forced to view them in one light or the other; the systems they put up are sophisticated, yeah, and they let them see themselves as noble but that doesn’t mean that they are or that we should see them that way. In fact, that’s precisely the question the film sets up so well.

To put it another way, these are people that romanticize themselves and their world. That might be a very good thing or a very bad thing. Left up to us to decide.

I’m just realizing that the ice melting might signify the climate change disaster scenario. See, I read this as a return of the aurochs, who came from a prehistoric time. When the lady talks about them, I believe she mentions that the men were terrified of them. So I thought of them symbolized the ultimate danger or threat. (Maybe I’m forgetting some crucial details.) So when the aurochs break out the ice, they’re awakening from their sleep and come to destroy the community. (Perhaps, they symbolize or dovetail with the government threat to the community.) When Hushpuppy tames and connect with them, I read this as signifying her achieving the final stage of independence and power to be self-sufficient—what her father had been raising her to become.

So I really didn’t see the climate change angle, but maybe there is a climate change angle that I completely missed.

The melting of ice caps are apocalyptic imagery to me, and the return of primeval foes from the earliest days of human existence a poetic way of tying the end back into the beginning. Their rebirth could even be read as a wry allusion to the Second Coming. All our glances at the carnage they’re wreaking are shot closely, and they fill the screen each time they appear. It would have been easy to let the landscape dwarf them if they wanted to emphasize their approach, their hunt. They just seem to be everywhere at the same time, destroying what remains of the world as they go.

Of course, those close angles and the sense that every problem is the very end of the world (DiB explained very well how Hushpuppy’s “little piece of a big universe” mantra is a child’s solipsism) serve to reinforce the Bathtubbers’ myopia and the utter lack of ambiguity in their world. The world might as well have ended. All they have is what’s in front of them – all the father has is a bottle in one hand, a shotgun in the other, shooting up at the clouds and laughing. It certainly feels like the world’s ended, and it’s a shock when we realize that it hasn’t, that the world outside is still functional.

@Malkin

They exist in a utopia of short-sightedness, exactly like children. Like Hushpuppy herself. Maybe that’s why her narration jibes with everything else. In the end, it’s that very ignorance and short-sightedness that not only keeps them going but actually makes them happy.

So their happiness is an illusion, born out of ignorance? If they were more enlightened (including not being high) they would realize that they’re living in squalor and that they would want to live in another way? I can’t say that with the certainty you seem to have. It seems to assume too much, imo. How can you be sure they haven’t chosen this lifestyle versus being essentially forced into it? And if your reading is correct, then the residents are not really like the Native Hawaiians in my example—they’re more like homeless people. So, at best, we would view their choice to stay and return with ambivalence.

This would take away a lot of the positive feelings of the film—positive feelings that the film seemed to want to evoke. Wouldn’t this mean that the escape from the shelter is really something tragic and pitiful? Are we meant to see the ending—with the swelling music, inspirational lines, etc. ironically? Are we supposed to admire their ability to create illusions that help them survive? That seems hard to swallow, and I don’t get that sense. Nor do I get the sense that the feelings at the end are supposed to be a complex mixture of pity/tragedy with hope/triumphant. I recall the ending being a lot more one-sided—towards the unambiguously triumphant.(Didn’t you and DiB speak about celebrating the surival instincts of the human beings?)

To put it another way, these are people that romanticize themselves and their world. That might be a very good thing or a very bad thing. Left up to us to decide.

That’s not the sense I get. I get the sense that the film sees and portrays them in a romantic light. I didn’t notice indications in the film that would lead viewers to question the more romantic perspective. I’d be interested in any examples you can think of. Btw, I’m not adamant in my position, and I’m open and interested in discussing this point more.

The melting of ice caps are apocalyptic imagery to me, and the return of primeval foes from the earliest days of human existence a poetic way of tying the end back into the beginning.

Right, that was sort of my thinking. (But I’m beginning to feel I’m wrong in ignoring the climate change angle.)

So their happiness is an illusion, born out of ignorance? If they were more enlightened (including not being high) they would realize that they’re living in squalor and that they would want to live in another way? I can’t say that with the certainty you seem to have. It seems to assume too much, imo. How can you be sure they haven’t chosen this lifestyle versus being essentially forced into it? And if your reading is correct, then the residents are not really like the Native Hawaiians in my example—they’re more like homeless people. So, at best, we would view their choice to stay and return with ambivalence.

DiB argues this point much more cogently than I could. I do think there’s a difference between them and your Native Hawaiians – in their case, the pride comes first and then they choose to live off the land.

This would take away a lot of the positive feelings of the film—positive feelings that the film seemed to want to evoke. Wouldn’t this mean that the escape from the shelter is really something tragic and pitiful? Are we meant to see the ending—with the swelling music, inspirational lines, etc. ironically? Are we supposed to admire their ability to create illusions that help them survive? That seems hard to swallow, and I don’t get that sense. Nor do I get the sense that the feelings at the end are supposed to be a complex mixture of pity/tragedy with hope/triumphant. I recall the ending being a lot more one-sided—towards the unambiguously triumphant.(Didn’t you and DiB speak about celebrating the surival instincts of the human beings?)

There are really two elements to the film and how we consider it: first, their reality, which is that they live in squalor; second, their self-perception, which is indeed unambiguously triumphant. Now, when it comes to whether we’re supposed to see this as tragic, pitiful, ironic, inspirational, admirable, whatever else, I think that’s down to the individual and how he or she reconciles the two. It’s an ambiguous film but, like you, I didn’t get that sense as I was watching it, because all we are presented with firsthand is Hushpuppy’s perspective and it makes sense within that framework for it to end triumphantly and unambiguously.

That’s not the sense I get. I get the sense that the film sees and portrays them in a romantic light. I didn’t notice indications in the film that would lead viewers to question the more romantic perspective. I’d be interested in any examples you can think of. Btw, I’m not adamant in my position, and I’m open and interested in discussing this point more.

Hmm. I think any romanticism in the film is undercut pretty quickly – in his first few scenes we barely see the father’s face, I don’t remember ever hearing his name, the way he hollers for Hushpuppy and has her eat with the pigs, has her live in a separate house, vanishes for days and so on – there’s nothing romantic about the borderline child abuse we’re given before we settle into the film’s groove and begin to see it with different eyes.

Likewise, you look at a scene like my favourite, the father shooting off his rifle into the sky during the storm, did you get the impression that we’re supposed to admire him? He came off as pretty crazy and even dangerous at that point.

The romanticism comes in when he looks at the factories and calls them ugly, calls the little patch of swamp they live on the most beautiful place in the world. We see it ourselves – well, is it? It’s the character’s eyes, not the director’s, that make it so.

I’m also interested in pursuing this point, though – I’d like to talk about specific scenes a little.

@Malkin

There are really two elements to the film and how we consider it: first, their reality, which is that they live in squalor; second, their self-perception, which is indeed unambiguously triumphant.

OK, but let me throw something else out there that these two elements may not capture. I’m thinking of our judgment and perception of their living conditions. To most people in middle and upper class America, these people are living in terrible conditions; Wink is an irresponsible parent, etc. Now, I think back to my Native Hawaiian example—people who may forgo modern conveniences, formal education, etc. To those living in a modern Western society, we might judge this lifestyle as uncivilized; we may condemn the parents for being neglectful or abusive. But that may be inappropriately imposing our values on them. For example, if you chose to go back to a pre-modern, maybe even pre-agricultural lifestyle—hunting and knowing how to build a house would be far more important than formal schooling. Now, personally, I prefer living in a modern way, but I don’t necessarily think this was is superior to more “primitive” ways of living. There are some benefits to living that way, as well as the costs. If someone is willing to pay those costs, I don’t think we can condemn this lifestyle.

Now, I’m not sure if the residents of the Bathtub actually fit this description. A part of me feels like they do not. But the film—not just the characters—seems to see the community as something unambiguously good. I do not get the sense that the film is presenting the characters in an open way, allowing viewers to make their own choice.

Let me explain why I feel this, while addressing your specific remarks about the early scenes with Wink. My understanding of the film is that it takes us from a point of suspecting terrible living conditions—including an abusive parent—to a point of seeing the father and community in an entirely different light. I know this is what happened to me, while watching the film, and I feel like this is what the film was trying to do. What appears to be neglect at first could later be seen as Wink’s way of preparing Hushpuppy to be independent and self-sufficient. This is especially true if Wink already realizes that he’s severely ill and might not live much longer.

Wink’s shooting the sky is his way of both comforting and empowering his daughter. It may be misguided and the portrayal is a bit romantic—mainly because the film doesn’t offer any critique to this perspective, imo—but it’s Wink’s way of comforting and raising his daughter. He believes that she has to feel confident and bold in order to survive. OK, in the context of their lifestyle that might be true. Of course life isn’t that simple. A feeling of confidence and boldness can only take you so far. (How about learning some real survival skills?)

By the time we get to the government workers forcibly removing the Bathtub residents, I think the film establishes the idea that the people are exercising their personal liberties and that they value self-sufficiency and independence above all else. So the government’s action is an attack on these things. The escape from the shelter feels like an escape from unjust imprisonment, and the ending seems like victory. I’m not saying this is my interpretation, but I’m also asserting that the film doesn’t really leave much room to interpret the film in another way. It’s stacking the deck towards this reading and not allowing the viewers to make up their own mind. Anyway, that’s how I feel. But I’m not entirely convinced about this. (Perhaps, I’m missing some important details. For example, I’m not accounting for the floating brothel scene much, and I’m not sure how that would fit with my reading.)

“Wink’s shooting the sky is his way of both comforting and empowering his daughter. It may be misguided and the portrayal is a bit romantic—mainly because the film doesn’t offer any critique to this perspective, imo—but it’s Wink’s way of comforting and raising his daughter.”

Nah, I believe it shows sort of the futility of his position. I mean regardless of how ‘romantic’ you argue it, the humor is clearly based on the fact that he’s using a gun to attack the weather. I think that’s largely what is meant when I state that the actions of the characters are clearly not completely defenses of their ways of life, despite the fact that I agree that the motivation behind it is benevolent enough to warrant that at least he’s doing it out of love for his daughter.

—PolarisDiB