The Bathtub Was No Utopia
by tristero
Here is a very strange review about a very great movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild:
While the film centers on Hushpuppy’s struggle to survive the degradation that surrounds her — primarily through imagination and her incipient art — this “You’ve got to fight for your right to party” ethos is also a central theme. 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 have pretty sensitive antennae to political messages embedded in the arts and entertainment, but I really don’t see this.
The Bathtub clearly was not intended to be any kind of positive utopia. Instead, it’s a complex, harsh, squalid, and – in the eyes of Hushpuppy – somewhat magical place, ecstatic, gorgeous and also frightening. If anything else, the abuse Hushpuppy’s father heaps on her should disabuse anyone that the residents of The Bathtub are meant to be paragons and the place itself somehow is on the highway to The Way Things Really Ought To Be.
Instead, “Beasts” is a story of endurance beyond the endurable – the awful environment, the awful parental abuse – and about the attempt of a child to transmute suffering and loss into beauty, strength, and love. It is Hushpuppy’s story – and oh, what a performance from Quvenzhane Wallis! That story is not about liberation, but rather the tragically futile aspiration to transcend her pain. After all, does anyone, at the end of the movie, doubt that as strong as Hushpuppy is, that she is destined for happiness or a substantially easier life than those around her? (And don’t we wish we were wrong?)
No story is apolitical, of course, but in this case, clearly the director is juggling and subverting Rousseau-ian Noble Savage tropes, not libertarian ones, and clearly he in no way is endorsing the grim lives of The Bathtub, or many of the actions of its people. Of course, there are moments of community and joy and shared doomed causes in the Bathtub – but all of that is part of living just about anywhere, even in wastelands like much of Faulkner’s Mississippi. It may be a puzzle that moments of happiness are possible under such conditions, but they are.
The film is a masterpiece, all the more astonishing given it is Benh Zeitlin’s first film and was made for almost nothing. And like most great works of art, it is specific to its characters and story, virtually sui generis.