The Shape of Now

The Shape of Water uses the past to prick the present

I find that the most visceral reactions I experience to films today center on their relevance to the earth-shattering political struggles we are experiencing IRL. I’ll go into more depth on that in my Top Ten for the year of our HOLY SHIT IT WAS JUST ONE year I’m so tired 2017, which I won’t write until it’s 2018 because I don’t write for a website that needs clicks or an editor with a deadline; the glorious freedom of not mattering much. I did not actually expect Guillermo del Toro’s latest film to hit the proverbial nail so squarely on the head with a period piece about a cleaning lady who falls in love with a mysterious creature that is captured and tortured in a government sponsored lab around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Baltimore, but wait, as soon as I finish that description, I realize my expectations were dumb, uninformed garbage and that’s exactly what I should have expected.

There will come a time, soon, where I get a chance to reckon more completely with The Shape of Water as an aesthetic object, an exquisitely beautiful, sensual film, a glorious love story in its own right. Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, and Doug Jones are marvelous in this film. I would love to take a deep dive into how Hawkin’s character, Elisa, operates with an empathy born of constant contact with people who do not speak/use her language. This mode of being allows her to encounter something as strange as the Amphibian Man (I did not make that up) merely assuming that he, like all folk she meets, doesn’t speak her language, but is obviously capable of some language. It’s an extraordinary leap that no one else around her makes, least of all the government agent in charge of security, but it’s a leap that allows us to explore very interesting territory. Elisa already knows that Amphibian Man isn’t just some, er, dumb animal and that gives del Toro an opportunity to explore their relationship in much more depth.

But right now, in this moment, we need to talk about Michael Shannon’s character, Richard Strickland, in many ways Elisa’s polar opposite. And, oh speaking of spoilers and alerts, we can’t really do this without giving away vast chunks of the plot, so if you really really need to see the movie before reading, I suggest that you bail now and come back as you are able to (I mean, it’s a great movie, you should see it, this will live on the Internet forever, it can wait).

Richard Strickland is a good deal more self-aware than your average suburbanite American Dreamer circa the early 1960s; he has to be for his full embrace of evil to be clear. He is an archetypal exemplar of the career military man. Well, he dresses in civilian clothes and calls himself security but he is a direct report to a five star general (clear awareness of military hierarchy is not one of the film’s strengths, but there’s also an Amazon river god in the movie, so that matters . . . not at all). One of del Toro’s great choices is to explore the circumstances of Strickland’s life outside of work as well as the things he does at work. At work, when he isn’t beating his prisoner, he . . . sprays urine all over a public restroom with the abandon of a man who knows he will not have to deal with the consequences. He is condescendingly, um, polite when he deigns to notice the help, in this case Elisa and her best workmate, played by Octavia Spencer, Zelda. It’s a helluva an introduction, a fricking brilliant object lesson in white male privilege in daily microaggression fueled action.

Strickland is clearly a heavy and unquestionably a villain. Hell, the fact that he continuously beats his prisoner is enough to establish that. Outside of work, he is a struggling career man sentenced to live in a city he hates (there is a line about Baltimore that got quite a laugh in the DC theatre I saw it in). Every scene he has with his kids is brilliant, the kind of quietly exterior performance of interiority that makes Shannon so compelling in Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories. Strickland performs the role of father to two kids and husband as if some outside force compels him to do it. He clearly hates being near the children, who adore him and are well behaved. He hates watching TV, he hates the thing the culture tells him make him whole. He is not whole and not so deep down, he knows it.

Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and Strickland is quiet desperation in action. The mass of people are not always able to get to the point of articulating the contradictions that are twisting their guts inside, though. del Toro gives us a brilliant little scene between Strickland and his boss, the aforementioned five star general played by professional angry boss actor Nick Searcy (JUSTIFIED).

So, a brief plot recap: Elisa, played deliciously by Sally Hawkins, has fallen in love with Amphibian Man, and has managed, with help from very unexpected places (see, it’s not all spoilers around here!) to smuggle him out of the facility which is nowhere near as secure as it likes to think it is (I couldn’t help but think about certain other top secret facilities in the vicinity of Baltimore where this is still true). Recovering the creature is Strickland’s responsibility and he begins to interview every employee of the facility in an attempt to track Amphibian Man down. In his overwhelming arrogance as a straight white man, he dismisses the possibility that it could be “the help” and gets a telling off from Elisa in sign language that brought a couple of tears to my eyes, her defiance is so self-assured. Strickland had promised the general that the creature, who was supposed to be killed and vivisected, would be caught soon before and dodges his calls, but now Hoyt is here and that means its bad for Strickland.

In a moment of desperation and reckoning, Strickland, struggling to come to grips with defeat, asks Hoyt a very personal question. If a man does everything right for 13 years and fails once, is he a failure? A good and decent man has certain expectations about how his service will be rewarded. In essence, Strickland lays bare his assumptions about life in an honest and agonized way. Then the general completely destroys them. With absolute clarity he reveals the hollowness of the performance of the American Dream. Because decency is for show, “we export it, we don’t use it.” Men like Strickland and the General are not decent (any glance at the history of the Cold War will reveal plenty of such examples).

I love this scene because our villain is now at a crossroads. The emptiness of the promises he thought he implicitly understood is revealed, everything he ever strived for is taken away from him, past, present, and future. He can contemplate that void and then turn his back on it, admittedly a heroic action that takes great character. Strickland is not our hero. He throws himself into that void, shedding all of the inhibitions and trappings of niceness and protocol that had constrained him before. The third act of The Shape of Water is primarily about Strickland’s destructive fall into inhumanity and the damage that causes when the wounded animal lashes out at the things he’s choosing to blame, which are not the same as the things that are really at fault.

The Shape of Water is very incisive about the insecurities experienced by white privilege and the destructive impulses of their reactionary counter-revolution. In an age when the quiet things gnawing at the heart of the Republican party have become not just the loud things, but the only things, it’s tremendously cathartic to see a movie exploring the anxieties and structural forces that brought people to the point where they could believe such things. In a year when a generation’s assumptions about their place in the world are revealed to be delusions and the promises they were given false, causing them to rise in anger to embrace a candidate who promises, either openly or by his incompetence, to burn it all down and fuck the rest, Guillermo del Toro and his team show us Richard Strickland and how the uneasy fit of the domestic life he’s told he’s supposed to want but actually hates is taken away from him. The Shape of Water, in addition to the other, exquisitely beautiful and profoundly sensual things it is, is precise and trenchant on this subject, a point of exquisite sharpness inserted in a movie about a woman who falls in love with a merman. The Shape of Water is an expert use of sci-fi and love stories to make a much deeper point about a howling emotional void that has vast political consequences; it’s very good and it’s very 2017.