The Shape of Water

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

After seeing this film (winner of the 2017 Best Picture Oscar) in the theater, I walked out with two couples. The women liked its romantic story. The men said they didn’t get it. They asked me what I thought. I told them I enjoyed the movie and said it had a little of Beauty and the Beast, a bit of Splash, and there was an element of Moby Dick. I’ll get into these points, as well as others.

The opening voice-over by the character Giles (Richard Jenkins, great as usual) lets us know the story he is telling is a sort of fairy tale, but as it turns out, it is an adult one, and talks about a love that is almost destroyed by a monster. Fairy tales are fantasy works, as is this film, and the director and writer, Guillermo del Toro (Oscar winner for Best Direction), reminds us of the power of imagination through the visual arts. Giles is an illustrator, so he creates images, reminding us of what movies do. The fact that the main character, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) lives above a movie theater and in which she later finds the missing Creature, also stresses the moviemaking experience. After Elisa fills her bathroom and turns it into a romantic aquarium for herself and the Creature (Doug Jones), the water spills into the theater below, and it’s as if our world outside the movie house and the story we are watching flow together, pointing to how stories told through imagination permeate our lives. The later dance sequence that Elisa creates in her dream looks like a Hollywood musical (except for the addition of the dancing Amphibian Man) and reminds us of the magic of the movies.

The story takes place in Baltimore in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as we hear President John F. Kennedy addressing the nation about that incident. The United States in this time period is paranoid concerning the threat of a foreign enemy, and the movie underscores how something as alien as the Creature can be perceived as dangerous. A large capsule filled with water and which contains the Amphibian Man arrives at the Occam Aerospace Research Center. The scientists there want to conduct experiments on the sea Creature. The movie is awash in aquatic imagery. Water is relevant since the Creature lives in it. Rain can fill the city’s canal, thus becoming a liberating force that eventually allows the creature to escape. It also can symbolize tears, as we feel sorrow for how badly others treat the Creature, Elisa, Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), and Giles. Elisa masturbates in her bath each day, so water is associated with sexuality. Elisa and Zelda work as cleaning women at the research center. They wash away the filth and blood left by those working at the facility, men who soil the world with their cruel experiments on the Creature. The scientists miss the urinals and pee on the floors, as Zelda says, and despite their academic abilities, are ignorant of the fallout of what they do. So, the water used by the cleaning women is used as a purifier. Elisa was abandoned, found near a river, showing her very being is connected to water. Perhaps that is why she has an affinity with the Creature and secretly feeds him eggs (a life-giving symbol) and comforts him with music and communicates with sign language, instead of treating him like a monster. Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), the security man, only washes his hands before urinating (crudely doing so in front of Elisa and Zelda, showing no signs of decency towards what he considers lowly, defective workers) saying that cleaning both before and after would be a weakness of character. His statement shows him to be at odds with the purpose of water, which is also shown by how he abuses the Creature, and when he drinks only to take his pain pills. Strickland “fishhooks” the Russian scientist toward the end of the film, grabbing him by the wound in the man’s mouth, treating him like a caught fish, in a particularly sadistic act, displaying his evil nature. The dream sequence which involves Elisa and the Creature is suggestive of a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film entitled Follow the Fleet, the reference merging the imagination of the movies with the magical symbolism of water in the movie. At the end of the film, when Giles recites a poem, the words say that the lover can’t describe the shape of his lover, since her worth is boundless. The “shape of water” fits in with this romantic notion, as it is a sort of contradiction, since water has no shape, is mutable, and can be boundless, like love. The conclusion of the film shows that for Elisa, water is almost a symbol of her life-force, and her eventual salvation.

Strickland is the true “monster” mentioned in the prologue. His last name tells us that he follows and enforces the rules of society, and in his case, he does so with cruelty. The film is inspired by the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon, only the monster here is to be admired and the human is the evil creature. Strickland’s rigidity was forged in the military where General Hoyt (Nick Searcy) tutored him in identifying an enemy and being merciless with it. He shocks the creature with a high voltage cattle prod, a sort of phallic symbol, symbolizing his twisted idea of what masculinity should be. When he has sex with his wife, he covers her mouth, silencing her, not wanting to hear any voice but his own. This scene fits in with why he makes sexual advances toward Elisa, she being mute. When he talks to the two cleaning women, he says he liked the conversation, but he did all the talking. He is not on the receiving end of any communication that may alter his narrow-minded ways. He is also sort of an Ahab character, who was driven by anger and not open to really understanding Moby Dick’s nature. The White Whale chewed off Ahab’s leg, setting off a quest to quench Ahab’s vengeance. Likewise, Strickland has some appendages, a few fingers, bitten off by the Creature he torments, which enrages Strickland. He says he hates the color green, and the Creature is greenish. But, he is persuaded to buy a teal Cadillac. It has fins in the back as part of its design and becomes symbolic of how Strickland is showing his desire for power over the water-based entity he has captured. However, his car is damaged when Giles drives the van which contains the freed Creature into the Cadillac, pointing to Strickland’s inability to hold onto his prize catch. Strickland is driven by his revulsion for anything that does not fit in with his understanding of the world order, with its standards based on superficiality, like the appearance of the Creature, or the color of an African American’s skin. When he talks about how the Creature is not made in God’s image, but that the deity appears more like Strickland than Zelda, he reveals his bigotry.

The story is set at a time when there was a great deal of intolerance toward those who are different (some may say similar to today). The movie has a great deal to do with bigotry and rejection of the outsider who does not adhere to the standards of an artificial norm. Eliza can’t speak, Giles is gay, and Zelda is an African American woman. (Zelda complains about how her husband doesn’t speak much, seeing this characteristic as a flaw, but when he does talk, he betrays her, Elisa and the Creature, showing that Elisa’s silence can be golden). The film subverts conventional thinking. The scientist, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), is a Russian spy, and we would expect him to be the bad guy by following his superior’s orders to kill the Creature to thwart the American scientists. Instead, he follows his conscience and turns into a hero, helping Elisa save the creature while sacrificing himself in the process.

Giles, because he is an outsider, is Elisa’s best friend. He wants to get his job as an illustrator back, but we get the feeling that he was let go because of his sexual orientation. He wants to be romantic with the seemingly accepting Pie Guy (Morgan Kelley) at the restaurant where he continues to buy pies so he can see the man. When Giles touches the man’s hand, the Pie Guy pulls back in revulsion, and tells Giles it’s a “family” eatery, as if Giles is not fit to be around so-called “normal” people. He also refuses to serve an African American couple, showing the damage he inflicts on others who he rejects for being different from himself. Giles scolds him for his prejudicial action, and it is after this scene that his indignation concerning intolerance gives Giles the courage to help Elisa.

The Creature is a magical figure. Just like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, despite his initially scary appearance, we discover that he is capable of love and caring, and Elisa turns out to be his Beauty. (Yes, he does attack Giles’s cat, and since I am a cat lover, that was tough to get over. The scene is sort of a flashback to the alien on the TV show Alf, who ate cats. But, the Creature here probably does so out of fear after the animal hisses and growls at him. He does make nice with the other cats after he realizes they will not harm him). After Elisa frees the Creature, who is becoming sick, she nurses him back to health in her bathtub, and follows Hoffstetler’s instructions on how to care for him. The two consummate their love for each other in the watery scene mentioned above. The Creature has healing and lethal abilities. He represents the rewarding of those who are accepting of diversity and who do not swim in the mainstream of society (pun intended here), and the punishing of those who practice hate. At the end, he kills the sadistic and murderous Strickland after the man repeatedly tortured him and shot Elisa. He heals the accidental wound that he inflicts on Giles and touches his head and grows hair, the man’s baldness being an element that undermined his self-confidence. He not only is capable of resurrection (like Christ), after Strickland shoots him, but brings Elisa back to life, transforming her neck scars (possibly inflicted in an early abusive episode? Or, was she an undeveloped sea creature already?) into gills (as opposed to what he did to Strickland’s throat, inflicting a deadly neck injury). His kiss makes Elisa a sea creature, too, and reminds us of Daryl Hannah’s mermaid kiss that transforms Tom Hanks’s character in the movie Splash. The Creature allows Elisa to live in another world where she can be free from the society that marginalizes her because she can’t speak. She can now live in the seemingly limitless vastness of the sea, free to express her individuality, and love and be loved.

The next film is No Country for Old Men.