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rinueBeasts of the Southern Wild is now out on DVD and BluRay; I did not have a chance to see it in theaters (because life) but was able to screen it in a quasi-theatrical environment last night. I recommend it. It's a well-realized piece of near-future science fiction; I think some reviewers were blinded to this by a gloss of magic realism, but those fantasy elements are a product of the seven-year-old narrator, who has not yet learned the difference between figurative and literal language and therefore takes statements like "she's so hot she makes water boil" as fact (in ways reminiscent of Tarsem's The Fall). As science fiction, it takes a refreshingly local viewpoint rather than trying to give you a planetary perspective (which Ciro has noted places it in the incredibly small category of post-colonial SF).
If the subject line didn't clue you in, what follows is not going to be a movie review; it's going to be a critical literary analysis that assumes you've seen the film and are aware of trends in SF publishing. (This is the only way to examine SF in film, because most "science fiction" films are to science fiction what sword-and-sandals epics are to Roman history.) It will also compare the film with sometimes unpublished writing by me, Ciro, and Val, because we have a particular philosophical and stylistic orientation that is unusual but is also (obviously, I would think) the way I believe things ought to be written, for reasons that will be explored below. As such, I apologize if it's impenetrable in some places to all but a few people (who conveniently make up the majority of known readers of this blog).
For everybody else, the capsule movie review: Worth seeing. Good visual sense. Nice use of 35mm. Excellent practical effects. Compelling setting. Sympathetic and well-drawn characters with strong performances across the board, especially Dwight Henry's deep, complex, and egoless performance as the father. I have seen acting I could set beside his performance as equal, but I have not seen acting that is better. Humbling.
Although I enjoyed the movie as is, I would have written an entirely different second half. Not necessarily better, but different. I'm taking as the halfway point the blowing of the levee.
What Worked in the Ending as Filmed:
Although the movie is science fiction, it remains solidly a character story, less concerned with the fate of the setting or concept than with the emotions of the narrator. This is unusual but welcome. As Ciro has noted, mainstream SF publishers (a.k.a. pro markets) favor stories that are about the world, rather than in the world, which restricts the literary possibilities available. I'm not talking about the difference between hard SF and soft SF, a distinction I find largely meaningless (or find has taken on new and less useful meanings, where "hard SF" means either "plausible" or "absent humans" and "soft SF" means either "science fantasy and who cares if spaceships or cloning couldn't possibly work that way" or literally any work in which a person at some point feels something, also known as everything except some Larry Niven).
I'm talking about the difference between what is and isn't literature. A lot of modern SF uses literary techniques and a literary voice without being literature. This is not to say devoid of literary value, and the line is less a line than a continuum. For instance, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Terry Gilliam's Brazil explore very similar themes and settings (the latter certainly influenced by the former), with similar pivotal central romances and endings with friend-turned-torturers, but Orwell falls on the literary side and Gilliam on the SF side of about-worlds-versus-in-worlds.
Gilliam's hero's motivation, and Brazil's theme, concerns whether it is possible to escape the system, and concludes with the answer "yes and no; physical escape is impossible, but escape into one's imagination is possible." In other words, Brazil's resolution, although internal and romantic, is a resolution to an external conflict. In contrast, Orwell is asking whether it is possible to love someone if free will is irrelevant (in a pervasive totalitarian environment), and concludes that it is not possible, or at least not possible for this character. Hence, Nineteen Eight-Four's resolution, although motivated by external forces such as state-sanctioned torture, is a resolution to an internal conflict in Winston: do I love this person enough? No, I don't; I betray her and afterward find it a relief to suppress that part of myself.
Although Winston's story arc is informed by the world he occupies - and made more powerful and compelling by its setting - you could tell the same arc in another setting; you could for instance tell a non-SF story about a gay man living in a contemporary or past society in which homosexuality is a capital offense, and give it exactly the same resolution, with a similar emotional impact. It is less easy to transpose Brazil's resolution into another setting. You can have a character go happily mad (in that special kind of literary crazy where delusions aren't maladaptive) as a response to the Absurdity of war, as in King of Hearts, but it will be allegory, again a comment about the world rather than an individual.
Put another way, I can argue (convincingly or not) that I would not react in the way Winston does and would not face the outcome Winston has, without doubting the realism of Winston's actions or outcome; I can feel empathy for him even if I don't identify with him, and can imagine other outcomes for other people in the same society. In Brazil, I do not have the option of imagining that I would behave differently, and although I like the main character, you could drop in an entirely different main character and not change the story much. His downfall doesn't particularly arise from his actions, thoughts, or relationships, but from mostly off-screen activity by De Niro's rogue plumber and people pursuing De Niro; the plot arises less from the ostensible protagonist's identity than from mistaken identity. The story is about the world, not in the world.
I like both Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four very much. I am not trying to hold one above the other when I point out their difference. In fact, although I am pointing to Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of literature and arguing that Brazil fails to make that leap, it would be fair to say that Brazil is one of my favorite movies, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four is not in my top 100 books. I like stories about worlds, often more than I like stories about characters.
However, I find it unfortunate that stories that do what Nineteen Eighty-Four does do not often get published in SF markets. (Also not often in literary markets, but I'm interested in the SF publishing side; literary publishing has its own different problems.) Sure, any modern SF editor believes they would publish Nineteen Eighty-Four if it showed up; we wave it around like a banner, an example of how SF is unfairly ghettoized and bookstore shelving is capricious. However, if you look at what the editors with money and options do - the editors who can take their pick from the top-selling authors, rather than those of us who can offer $10 and a handful of readers - they do not pick stories in which the resolution is, say, a character realizing her marriage is falling apart. It's fine if that's a theme, and it's fine if that's part of the ending, but the resolution needs to link back to the setting; it has to involve the protagonist's thoughts and feelings about the potentials and dangers of virtual reality, and can't simply be that while her husband is using virtual reality she sees an expression on his face that makes her sad.
An example is Ciro's short story "The Sleepers," published in K-Zine issue 4 (I believe only available for Kindle). Although it was eventually picked up by a UK magazine (who seem to have more tolerance for this sort of thing), it met a disinterested or openly hostile response from many American SF editors, who found the ending unsatisfying for being an in-worlds ending instead of an about-worlds ending. Very quick non-spoilery plot summary if you haven't read: Characters in offworld mining colony discover something that shouldn't be on a previously uninhabited asteroid. Main character is so troubled that he runs away. The story is an investigation of whether it was responsible to run away when encountering something unexpected, and not an explanation of what the unexpected thing was doing on the asteroid.
For me, "The Sleepers" was a satisfying and even virtuosic story; it maintained a clear focus from beginning to conclusion, with a well-drawn setting and convincing characterization, and it provided a nuanced exploration of the ways paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries can be perceived as an Existential threat, impossible for a given individual to assimilate. I can use the story as a lens through which to reflect non-simplistically on creationists or global warming denial, and I can also read it as a criticism of the contemporary relationship between science and industry, where there is an incentive not to share knowledge, and where decisions about whether to pursue a result or destroy a potentially unique information source are not necessarily being made by someone who likes or understands science.
Most editors did not agree and thought it was a cop-out to not reveal what the Sleepers were and how they got to the asteroid. Never mind that this was totally irrelevant to the story being told, and would have fallen heavily on the fiction end of science fiction, commenting less on reality or the likely path of technology than, roughly, "wouldn't it be cool to find some Unobtanium."
Beasts of the Southern Wild has a "The Sleepers" sort of third act (although it's not as thematically coherent), in which nothing about The Bathtub and the community's future is resolved, but protagonist Hushpuppy decides what kind of person she is going to be and steps confidently into a kind of maturity. She is still under threat. She is still only dubiously or temporarily in control of her environment. It is still difficult to imagine the circumstances of her adulthood, or that this triumph will be anything but fleeting.
But she has triumphed for the time being, in ways that are concrete (such as giving her father a death and burial they both find meaningful, or proving she is able to leave an environment she finds confining, including The Bathtub [presaged by her first act choice to burn her house down when she no longer wanted to live there]) and in ways that may or may not be temporary or illusory (such as escaping the evacuation to return home; such as finding a woman who Hushpuppy at least believes to be her absentee mother, who is everything Hushpuppy imagined she was, which is all Hushpuppy needed to confirm).
All of that is moving and continues to center on Hushpuppy, protagonist, and what she cares about, and all of it derives from the actions she takes rather than her environment (whether in the sense of The Bathtub's persistent hurricanes, her father's medical condition, or the government/civilization on the other side of the levee). In the ways it works, it reminds me of Val's writing, although I couldn't point to a single specific story.
Also, the Aurochs are adorable and I'm glad that even though Hushpuppy's mom is discovered in a whorehouse, she is a line cook instead of a whore. Dodged a bullet there. (I say this not to demean sex workers, but film is way too full of brave and noble prostitutes, in much the same way female comic book characters seem inevitably to get raped. In film, if you are an adult woman, you are some combination of girlfriend, wife, mother, mother substitute, or prostitute, and if you're strong and independent, odds are in favor of prostitute. Very occasionally a nun, or in Sister Act a semi-prostitute girlfriend disguised as a nun.)
What I Would Have Done Differently:
It's kind of a fake happy ending that wants us to believe it's a real happy ending, isn't it? And although the first half of the film sets up some important criticisms of society inside and outside The Bathtub, as well as whether Hushpuppy's upbringing by Wink is enough to make her a complete and self-determined person, the second half of the film basically ignores those criticisms to tell a less believable and less compelling generic coming-of-age story, and one which basically reinforces a patriarchal structure while championing survivalist lonerdom, which is an odd thing to call a triumph for a little girl who almost never speaks (except in voiceover), and whose peers are similarly silent little girls.
Notably there are no little boys, and there is no implication there later will be little boys, which suggests a future I find extremely dark. Not that I would be terribly happy if I thought there was going to be a lot of childbirth without modern medicine, which is another reason I have trouble thinking "we don't need your stinking institutions, civilization" is a particularly sustainable fantasy for a little girl; childbirth is metabolically taxing when it works correctly and life-threatening when it doesn't, and it is nothing short of a miracle for women that we have set up hospitals to deal with it.
As a matter of fact, something the movie illustrates very well in the first half is that one can very happily live in isolation or live in poverty up until the point something goes wrong, in very much the same way that there is no difference between having health insurance and not having health insurance unless you get sick. The difference between being poor and being rich, as Omar Benhalim has observed, is whether, when your washing machine breaks down and destroys a load of your clothes, it's inconvenient (rich) or you lose your job because you have no clean uniform that morning and your boss would just as soon hire someone else (poor). If you are making no money but have access to your parents' washing machine? Still rich.
A sufficiently bad disaster will kill a poor person and a rich person equally, and subsistence-level poor people may in some respects be more resilient in a sufficiently disruptive but nonfatal disaster (better able to relocate or rebuild, more practiced in survival alternatives, less dependent on now-unavailable support systems). However, in the case of garden variety day-to-day misfortune, resourced people clearly have the edge; and in the case of slightly less disruptive but still bad nonfatal disasters, resourced people are better able to be patient, whether that means being able to stay in a safe place for as long as needed while a house is being rebuilt correctly or whether that means having an alternative source of food than next year's seed corn when the crops don't come up.
In The Bathtub, the advantages and disadvantages of living close to the land are clear. Although individual residents have their own reasons for wanting to live there, and Wink especially seems to view his life there with a degree of fatalism (i.e. this is where I belong and who I am and you don't leave, nor should you want to), we as the audience are able to view the community from an outside perspective, and are being asked in some sense to judge (alongside Hushpuppy) whether the freedoms of this lifestyle outweigh its deprivations, or vice versa.
And in particular, we are asked to consider whether climatological disaster (rising oceans in the face of icecap melt) is sufficiently disruptive to mean that more isolated, versatile, tribalistic, societies like The Bathtub will have the survival advantage, or whether it is only sufficiently disruptive to give technological, social, urban environments the edge. In other words, it is clear that one side or the other, and perhaps both, are death-denying and foolish. It is also obvious that The Bathtub is not as separate an enclave as it superficially appears, because they have to be getting that beer and gas and electricity from somewhere; and when the big hurricane is coming, a lot of the residents of The Bathtub throw in the towel. Even though people like Wink want the city to leave them alone, and want to be able to flood the city when needed to un-flood the bathtub, they also benefit from being able to get goods and services from the city when they want them.
This is a dialectic the movie does not make any moves to resolve. Although the city and The Bathtub come into contact when the levee is blown and The Bathtub subsequently faces mandatory evacuation, Hushpuppy comes to no new understanding of the relationship between the two. Arguably, this is because she doesn't care; she cares about living with her dad. But equally arguably, her behavior while in the evacuation center is not at all character driven; from what we can tell, she is acting according to what her dad tells her to (from "don't eat that food" to "come with me now to escape"), and the writing uses the center as a symbol rather than a fully-realized location staffed by humans.
While in the center, Hushpuppy is never confronted with an evaluation of what she doesn't have, from vaccinations to basic literacy. We don't see social workers talking to the other adults about more permanent housing options (and being rebuffed or not rebuffed). No adult at all, whether shelter resident or worker, makes an attempt to connect with her, even when her father is medically incapacitated. And when The Bathtub residents drive away in their triumphant bus escape, we are to believe she doesn't see anything out the window worth mentioning - nothing that might intrigue her or cause her to re-evaluate the slanted stories she's been told about civilization, and her related impression of her father and his values.
Those values present the second unresolved dialectic. Wink champions traditionally masculine traits, such as physical strength, self-sufficiency, defense of territory, and mastery over one's emotions. These traits are undeniably useful and admirable, and it is clear why he would want to pass them on to Hushpuppy. Nor are they antithetical to his role as a parent and caretaker. He points out (correctly) the advantages to Hushpuppy of having her own territory, into which he will not intrude. When he teaches Hushpuppy to rip a crab apart rather than use a knife, and to fish with her fingers and fists, he provides her with the knowledge that she can survive with literally nothing. When she burns down her house, he doesn't say one thing about the lost value of the house; it was hers, and things are for using, not needing.
Although his parenting methods follow these hyper-masculine values, they are still aimed at the needs of his child; not just his desire to keep her safe, but a recognition of her emotional states. When she is frightened by the storm, he doesn't hug her, but he does run outside to show her he is battling the hurricane. When she is angry and throwing things on the ground, he doesn't apologize, but he doesn't deny her anger; he embraces it and turns it into a pillow fight and moment of connection. Finally, when he is dying, he does everything he can to make sure she remembers him either fighting or smiling proudly at her, not crying.
However, it is clear these masculine values, while estimable, are insufficient. Hushpuppy yearns for the mother she can't really remember. She would like sometimes to be held, to be allowed to be weak. She recognizes the connection that exists between people, and between people and animals and nature, represented by the heartbeat. She feels the lack of traditional feminine values like softness, intimacy, and beauty. She acknowledges that in The Bathtub, children without parents pretty much die. We can see for ourselves, particularly after the hurricane, that the remaining adults of The Bathtub are mostly uncoupled adult men, and the children are semi-abandoned girls who aren't sure of their place. Not only does Hushpuppy hold imagined conversations with her absent mom, but when Wink is sick in act 1, she runs to the most feminine figure we've met to that point, a badass female teacher slash witch doctor with two key lines of dialog:
First key line (paraphrased): The most important thing I can teach you is how to care for things weaker and sweeter than yourself.
Second key line (paraphrased): If they mess with the levee there is no way the city will leave us alone.
And she puts her money where her mouth is in both cases - the former as a teacher and the latter by riding out to try to stop the explosion (an effort undermined by Hushpuppy).
The teacher is the only figure in the story who seems to recognize that you need to integrate both masculine and feminine values to survive as a society, and who seems to correctly understand the interplay between the city and The Bathtub. She is also the person with the scientific knowledge to say the floodwater is saline enough to kill the plants and animals that currently seem to have survived.
She pretty much disappears in the back half of the film, because the writing suddenly decides it's not interested in those themes. I could put it another way by saying the first half of the film suggests that maturity comes from integrating the masculine/feminine and lasting security comes from being able to be self-sufficient but also someone who can ask for and provide help to/from various levels of community. Wink, however strong, can never be strong enough because he has shut off half of the avenues available to him, essentially out of mulishness, and although Hushpuppy could not happily abandon him or their life in The Bathtub, neither can she be happy and fulfilled by only that narrow emotional life.
The second half of the film does an about face and behaves as though only The Bathtub is real (and never mind whether it is the best option for dealing with hurricanes and saltwater floods, and never mind whether it will simply be re-evacuated; poor people are noble and happy and earthy and city people are cogs) and although it's nice to know women exist (in lingerie, as people in a far off dark room where they will quietly sway with you and pet your hair), they don't exist in a way that is relevant to Hushpuppy's life as anything but a possible sometime vacation from active masculine reality.
As such, the second half of the film, although it is a character story, feels less like a story-in-a-world than like a retreat from the world that has been established. The writer did not have an answer to the (ethically complex) question of how society can or should deal with voluntarily separatist groups and/or informed self-endangerment, or the even murkier question of to what degree children are able to make choices for themselves in these situations. I don't have an answer to this either. Which is exactly why I would never have sent the characters to the city. By doing that, the writers backed into a corner, and then panicked. They had to jailbreak the characters with no payoff, and write a third act based not in the world presented but the certain emotional triggers of a dying dad and a reunion with "mom." These were presented skillfully enough to be effective and to feel less than flat, but in some sense, they could have shot a dog and given us the same catharsis.
If I'd written the script, even though I admire a literary ending and often use them, I would probably have kept a science fiction structure and used it to tell a story which was more feminist and more alert to the advantages of civilization. (Big surprise, right?) After the levee explosion, I would probably write a story about the community of The Bathtub coming to terms with the fact that they've attracted the city's attention, perhaps through a series of standoffs/evasions with the evacuators, raising questions about how far Wink (for instance) will go to stay free, how many resources the city is willing to expend to bring them back into the fold, whether the city's concern is more for the people or for the levee, and to what degree this confrontation was inevitable versus instigated by Wink and Hushpuppy's actions.
In the process, Hushpuppy would be able to observe the advantages Bathtub residents have over the citified intruders, but also the humanity of the evacuators and the ways in which they work together. She might then make the decision to stay in The Bathtub (having outlasted the interest of the city folk), or she might stay with her father through his death, but then walk confidently to the city on her own terms, probably in the process teaching one of the "rescuers" some survival trick that helps take care of someone else (integrating the masculine teachings of Wink with the communitarian lessons of her badass teacher).
I probably would not have had Hushpuppy meet her mom, because I wouldn't want something as cliché as her mother being in/from the city, but I also find the whorehouse setting deeply problematic. Which is kind of a shame because I did like the mother as presented. (It's ambiguous in the film whether this is actually her mother, but I'm willing to say it is, or is for all intents and purposes.) I appreciated that she didn't seem to have shame or be a disappointment, and was able to show love to Hushpuppy without in any sense abandoning who she was. Also, blowing off the top of an egg with a spat bottlecap? Amazing.
Although I liked the aurochs showing up and would have integrated that into the ending, I really thought on first viewing that the filmmakers were drawing a symbolic parallel between the four swimming parentless aurochs and the four swimming parentless little girls, but they weren't. The other three little girls just ran away. I'm not entirely sure what role the little girls fulfilled in the script, except as compositional elements. They're not really foils, friends, dependents, or henchmen for Hushpuppy, and were a missed opportunity that could have been used to further develop the feminism/interdependence motif. Along a similar line to the use of the whores, I'm relieved the little girls didn't turn out to be sacrificial figures to raise the stakes, but disappointed they weren't characters so much as "broad paintbrush stroke of inactive, silent, lingerie-wearing femininity."
In summary, good movie, worth seeing, worth owning, with a back half that lets down the promise of the first, but not so egregiously it becomes unenjoyable. (Which puts it in a category with Sunshine and Chronicle.)
In even shorter summary: Writing is hard, and it's nice to see something ambitious even if it doesn't quite fit together.
If the subject line didn't clue you in, what follows is not going to be a movie review; it's going to be a critical literary analysis that assumes you've seen the film and are aware of trends in SF publishing. (This is the only way to examine SF in film, because most "science fiction" films are to science fiction what sword-and-sandals epics are to Roman history.) It will also compare the film with sometimes unpublished writing by me, Ciro, and Val, because we have a particular philosophical and stylistic orientation that is unusual but is also (obviously, I would think) the way I believe things ought to be written, for reasons that will be explored below. As such, I apologize if it's impenetrable in some places to all but a few people (who conveniently make up the majority of known readers of this blog).
For everybody else, the capsule movie review: Worth seeing. Good visual sense. Nice use of 35mm. Excellent practical effects. Compelling setting. Sympathetic and well-drawn characters with strong performances across the board, especially Dwight Henry's deep, complex, and egoless performance as the father. I have seen acting I could set beside his performance as equal, but I have not seen acting that is better. Humbling.
Although I enjoyed the movie as is, I would have written an entirely different second half. Not necessarily better, but different. I'm taking as the halfway point the blowing of the levee.
What Worked in the Ending as Filmed:
Although the movie is science fiction, it remains solidly a character story, less concerned with the fate of the setting or concept than with the emotions of the narrator. This is unusual but welcome. As Ciro has noted, mainstream SF publishers (a.k.a. pro markets) favor stories that are about the world, rather than in the world, which restricts the literary possibilities available. I'm not talking about the difference between hard SF and soft SF, a distinction I find largely meaningless (or find has taken on new and less useful meanings, where "hard SF" means either "plausible" or "absent humans" and "soft SF" means either "science fantasy and who cares if spaceships or cloning couldn't possibly work that way" or literally any work in which a person at some point feels something, also known as everything except some Larry Niven).
I'm talking about the difference between what is and isn't literature. A lot of modern SF uses literary techniques and a literary voice without being literature. This is not to say devoid of literary value, and the line is less a line than a continuum. For instance, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Terry Gilliam's Brazil explore very similar themes and settings (the latter certainly influenced by the former), with similar pivotal central romances and endings with friend-turned-torturers, but Orwell falls on the literary side and Gilliam on the SF side of about-worlds-versus-in-worlds.
Gilliam's hero's motivation, and Brazil's theme, concerns whether it is possible to escape the system, and concludes with the answer "yes and no; physical escape is impossible, but escape into one's imagination is possible." In other words, Brazil's resolution, although internal and romantic, is a resolution to an external conflict. In contrast, Orwell is asking whether it is possible to love someone if free will is irrelevant (in a pervasive totalitarian environment), and concludes that it is not possible, or at least not possible for this character. Hence, Nineteen Eight-Four's resolution, although motivated by external forces such as state-sanctioned torture, is a resolution to an internal conflict in Winston: do I love this person enough? No, I don't; I betray her and afterward find it a relief to suppress that part of myself.
Although Winston's story arc is informed by the world he occupies - and made more powerful and compelling by its setting - you could tell the same arc in another setting; you could for instance tell a non-SF story about a gay man living in a contemporary or past society in which homosexuality is a capital offense, and give it exactly the same resolution, with a similar emotional impact. It is less easy to transpose Brazil's resolution into another setting. You can have a character go happily mad (in that special kind of literary crazy where delusions aren't maladaptive) as a response to the Absurdity of war, as in King of Hearts, but it will be allegory, again a comment about the world rather than an individual.
Put another way, I can argue (convincingly or not) that I would not react in the way Winston does and would not face the outcome Winston has, without doubting the realism of Winston's actions or outcome; I can feel empathy for him even if I don't identify with him, and can imagine other outcomes for other people in the same society. In Brazil, I do not have the option of imagining that I would behave differently, and although I like the main character, you could drop in an entirely different main character and not change the story much. His downfall doesn't particularly arise from his actions, thoughts, or relationships, but from mostly off-screen activity by De Niro's rogue plumber and people pursuing De Niro; the plot arises less from the ostensible protagonist's identity than from mistaken identity. The story is about the world, not in the world.
I like both Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four very much. I am not trying to hold one above the other when I point out their difference. In fact, although I am pointing to Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of literature and arguing that Brazil fails to make that leap, it would be fair to say that Brazil is one of my favorite movies, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four is not in my top 100 books. I like stories about worlds, often more than I like stories about characters.
However, I find it unfortunate that stories that do what Nineteen Eighty-Four does do not often get published in SF markets. (Also not often in literary markets, but I'm interested in the SF publishing side; literary publishing has its own different problems.) Sure, any modern SF editor believes they would publish Nineteen Eighty-Four if it showed up; we wave it around like a banner, an example of how SF is unfairly ghettoized and bookstore shelving is capricious. However, if you look at what the editors with money and options do - the editors who can take their pick from the top-selling authors, rather than those of us who can offer $10 and a handful of readers - they do not pick stories in which the resolution is, say, a character realizing her marriage is falling apart. It's fine if that's a theme, and it's fine if that's part of the ending, but the resolution needs to link back to the setting; it has to involve the protagonist's thoughts and feelings about the potentials and dangers of virtual reality, and can't simply be that while her husband is using virtual reality she sees an expression on his face that makes her sad.
An example is Ciro's short story "The Sleepers," published in K-Zine issue 4 (I believe only available for Kindle). Although it was eventually picked up by a UK magazine (who seem to have more tolerance for this sort of thing), it met a disinterested or openly hostile response from many American SF editors, who found the ending unsatisfying for being an in-worlds ending instead of an about-worlds ending. Very quick non-spoilery plot summary if you haven't read: Characters in offworld mining colony discover something that shouldn't be on a previously uninhabited asteroid. Main character is so troubled that he runs away. The story is an investigation of whether it was responsible to run away when encountering something unexpected, and not an explanation of what the unexpected thing was doing on the asteroid.
For me, "The Sleepers" was a satisfying and even virtuosic story; it maintained a clear focus from beginning to conclusion, with a well-drawn setting and convincing characterization, and it provided a nuanced exploration of the ways paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries can be perceived as an Existential threat, impossible for a given individual to assimilate. I can use the story as a lens through which to reflect non-simplistically on creationists or global warming denial, and I can also read it as a criticism of the contemporary relationship between science and industry, where there is an incentive not to share knowledge, and where decisions about whether to pursue a result or destroy a potentially unique information source are not necessarily being made by someone who likes or understands science.
Most editors did not agree and thought it was a cop-out to not reveal what the Sleepers were and how they got to the asteroid. Never mind that this was totally irrelevant to the story being told, and would have fallen heavily on the fiction end of science fiction, commenting less on reality or the likely path of technology than, roughly, "wouldn't it be cool to find some Unobtanium."
Beasts of the Southern Wild has a "The Sleepers" sort of third act (although it's not as thematically coherent), in which nothing about The Bathtub and the community's future is resolved, but protagonist Hushpuppy decides what kind of person she is going to be and steps confidently into a kind of maturity. She is still under threat. She is still only dubiously or temporarily in control of her environment. It is still difficult to imagine the circumstances of her adulthood, or that this triumph will be anything but fleeting.
But she has triumphed for the time being, in ways that are concrete (such as giving her father a death and burial they both find meaningful, or proving she is able to leave an environment she finds confining, including The Bathtub [presaged by her first act choice to burn her house down when she no longer wanted to live there]) and in ways that may or may not be temporary or illusory (such as escaping the evacuation to return home; such as finding a woman who Hushpuppy at least believes to be her absentee mother, who is everything Hushpuppy imagined she was, which is all Hushpuppy needed to confirm).
All of that is moving and continues to center on Hushpuppy, protagonist, and what she cares about, and all of it derives from the actions she takes rather than her environment (whether in the sense of The Bathtub's persistent hurricanes, her father's medical condition, or the government/civilization on the other side of the levee). In the ways it works, it reminds me of Val's writing, although I couldn't point to a single specific story.
Also, the Aurochs are adorable and I'm glad that even though Hushpuppy's mom is discovered in a whorehouse, she is a line cook instead of a whore. Dodged a bullet there. (I say this not to demean sex workers, but film is way too full of brave and noble prostitutes, in much the same way female comic book characters seem inevitably to get raped. In film, if you are an adult woman, you are some combination of girlfriend, wife, mother, mother substitute, or prostitute, and if you're strong and independent, odds are in favor of prostitute. Very occasionally a nun, or in Sister Act a semi-prostitute girlfriend disguised as a nun.)
What I Would Have Done Differently:
It's kind of a fake happy ending that wants us to believe it's a real happy ending, isn't it? And although the first half of the film sets up some important criticisms of society inside and outside The Bathtub, as well as whether Hushpuppy's upbringing by Wink is enough to make her a complete and self-determined person, the second half of the film basically ignores those criticisms to tell a less believable and less compelling generic coming-of-age story, and one which basically reinforces a patriarchal structure while championing survivalist lonerdom, which is an odd thing to call a triumph for a little girl who almost never speaks (except in voiceover), and whose peers are similarly silent little girls.
Notably there are no little boys, and there is no implication there later will be little boys, which suggests a future I find extremely dark. Not that I would be terribly happy if I thought there was going to be a lot of childbirth without modern medicine, which is another reason I have trouble thinking "we don't need your stinking institutions, civilization" is a particularly sustainable fantasy for a little girl; childbirth is metabolically taxing when it works correctly and life-threatening when it doesn't, and it is nothing short of a miracle for women that we have set up hospitals to deal with it.
As a matter of fact, something the movie illustrates very well in the first half is that one can very happily live in isolation or live in poverty up until the point something goes wrong, in very much the same way that there is no difference between having health insurance and not having health insurance unless you get sick. The difference between being poor and being rich, as Omar Benhalim has observed, is whether, when your washing machine breaks down and destroys a load of your clothes, it's inconvenient (rich) or you lose your job because you have no clean uniform that morning and your boss would just as soon hire someone else (poor). If you are making no money but have access to your parents' washing machine? Still rich.
A sufficiently bad disaster will kill a poor person and a rich person equally, and subsistence-level poor people may in some respects be more resilient in a sufficiently disruptive but nonfatal disaster (better able to relocate or rebuild, more practiced in survival alternatives, less dependent on now-unavailable support systems). However, in the case of garden variety day-to-day misfortune, resourced people clearly have the edge; and in the case of slightly less disruptive but still bad nonfatal disasters, resourced people are better able to be patient, whether that means being able to stay in a safe place for as long as needed while a house is being rebuilt correctly or whether that means having an alternative source of food than next year's seed corn when the crops don't come up.
In The Bathtub, the advantages and disadvantages of living close to the land are clear. Although individual residents have their own reasons for wanting to live there, and Wink especially seems to view his life there with a degree of fatalism (i.e. this is where I belong and who I am and you don't leave, nor should you want to), we as the audience are able to view the community from an outside perspective, and are being asked in some sense to judge (alongside Hushpuppy) whether the freedoms of this lifestyle outweigh its deprivations, or vice versa.
And in particular, we are asked to consider whether climatological disaster (rising oceans in the face of icecap melt) is sufficiently disruptive to mean that more isolated, versatile, tribalistic, societies like The Bathtub will have the survival advantage, or whether it is only sufficiently disruptive to give technological, social, urban environments the edge. In other words, it is clear that one side or the other, and perhaps both, are death-denying and foolish. It is also obvious that The Bathtub is not as separate an enclave as it superficially appears, because they have to be getting that beer and gas and electricity from somewhere; and when the big hurricane is coming, a lot of the residents of The Bathtub throw in the towel. Even though people like Wink want the city to leave them alone, and want to be able to flood the city when needed to un-flood the bathtub, they also benefit from being able to get goods and services from the city when they want them.
This is a dialectic the movie does not make any moves to resolve. Although the city and The Bathtub come into contact when the levee is blown and The Bathtub subsequently faces mandatory evacuation, Hushpuppy comes to no new understanding of the relationship between the two. Arguably, this is because she doesn't care; she cares about living with her dad. But equally arguably, her behavior while in the evacuation center is not at all character driven; from what we can tell, she is acting according to what her dad tells her to (from "don't eat that food" to "come with me now to escape"), and the writing uses the center as a symbol rather than a fully-realized location staffed by humans.
While in the center, Hushpuppy is never confronted with an evaluation of what she doesn't have, from vaccinations to basic literacy. We don't see social workers talking to the other adults about more permanent housing options (and being rebuffed or not rebuffed). No adult at all, whether shelter resident or worker, makes an attempt to connect with her, even when her father is medically incapacitated. And when The Bathtub residents drive away in their triumphant bus escape, we are to believe she doesn't see anything out the window worth mentioning - nothing that might intrigue her or cause her to re-evaluate the slanted stories she's been told about civilization, and her related impression of her father and his values.
Those values present the second unresolved dialectic. Wink champions traditionally masculine traits, such as physical strength, self-sufficiency, defense of territory, and mastery over one's emotions. These traits are undeniably useful and admirable, and it is clear why he would want to pass them on to Hushpuppy. Nor are they antithetical to his role as a parent and caretaker. He points out (correctly) the advantages to Hushpuppy of having her own territory, into which he will not intrude. When he teaches Hushpuppy to rip a crab apart rather than use a knife, and to fish with her fingers and fists, he provides her with the knowledge that she can survive with literally nothing. When she burns down her house, he doesn't say one thing about the lost value of the house; it was hers, and things are for using, not needing.
Although his parenting methods follow these hyper-masculine values, they are still aimed at the needs of his child; not just his desire to keep her safe, but a recognition of her emotional states. When she is frightened by the storm, he doesn't hug her, but he does run outside to show her he is battling the hurricane. When she is angry and throwing things on the ground, he doesn't apologize, but he doesn't deny her anger; he embraces it and turns it into a pillow fight and moment of connection. Finally, when he is dying, he does everything he can to make sure she remembers him either fighting or smiling proudly at her, not crying.
However, it is clear these masculine values, while estimable, are insufficient. Hushpuppy yearns for the mother she can't really remember. She would like sometimes to be held, to be allowed to be weak. She recognizes the connection that exists between people, and between people and animals and nature, represented by the heartbeat. She feels the lack of traditional feminine values like softness, intimacy, and beauty. She acknowledges that in The Bathtub, children without parents pretty much die. We can see for ourselves, particularly after the hurricane, that the remaining adults of The Bathtub are mostly uncoupled adult men, and the children are semi-abandoned girls who aren't sure of their place. Not only does Hushpuppy hold imagined conversations with her absent mom, but when Wink is sick in act 1, she runs to the most feminine figure we've met to that point, a badass female teacher slash witch doctor with two key lines of dialog:
First key line (paraphrased): The most important thing I can teach you is how to care for things weaker and sweeter than yourself.
Second key line (paraphrased): If they mess with the levee there is no way the city will leave us alone.
And she puts her money where her mouth is in both cases - the former as a teacher and the latter by riding out to try to stop the explosion (an effort undermined by Hushpuppy).
The teacher is the only figure in the story who seems to recognize that you need to integrate both masculine and feminine values to survive as a society, and who seems to correctly understand the interplay between the city and The Bathtub. She is also the person with the scientific knowledge to say the floodwater is saline enough to kill the plants and animals that currently seem to have survived.
She pretty much disappears in the back half of the film, because the writing suddenly decides it's not interested in those themes. I could put it another way by saying the first half of the film suggests that maturity comes from integrating the masculine/feminine and lasting security comes from being able to be self-sufficient but also someone who can ask for and provide help to/from various levels of community. Wink, however strong, can never be strong enough because he has shut off half of the avenues available to him, essentially out of mulishness, and although Hushpuppy could not happily abandon him or their life in The Bathtub, neither can she be happy and fulfilled by only that narrow emotional life.
The second half of the film does an about face and behaves as though only The Bathtub is real (and never mind whether it is the best option for dealing with hurricanes and saltwater floods, and never mind whether it will simply be re-evacuated; poor people are noble and happy and earthy and city people are cogs) and although it's nice to know women exist (in lingerie, as people in a far off dark room where they will quietly sway with you and pet your hair), they don't exist in a way that is relevant to Hushpuppy's life as anything but a possible sometime vacation from active masculine reality.
As such, the second half of the film, although it is a character story, feels less like a story-in-a-world than like a retreat from the world that has been established. The writer did not have an answer to the (ethically complex) question of how society can or should deal with voluntarily separatist groups and/or informed self-endangerment, or the even murkier question of to what degree children are able to make choices for themselves in these situations. I don't have an answer to this either. Which is exactly why I would never have sent the characters to the city. By doing that, the writers backed into a corner, and then panicked. They had to jailbreak the characters with no payoff, and write a third act based not in the world presented but the certain emotional triggers of a dying dad and a reunion with "mom." These were presented skillfully enough to be effective and to feel less than flat, but in some sense, they could have shot a dog and given us the same catharsis.
If I'd written the script, even though I admire a literary ending and often use them, I would probably have kept a science fiction structure and used it to tell a story which was more feminist and more alert to the advantages of civilization. (Big surprise, right?) After the levee explosion, I would probably write a story about the community of The Bathtub coming to terms with the fact that they've attracted the city's attention, perhaps through a series of standoffs/evasions with the evacuators, raising questions about how far Wink (for instance) will go to stay free, how many resources the city is willing to expend to bring them back into the fold, whether the city's concern is more for the people or for the levee, and to what degree this confrontation was inevitable versus instigated by Wink and Hushpuppy's actions.
In the process, Hushpuppy would be able to observe the advantages Bathtub residents have over the citified intruders, but also the humanity of the evacuators and the ways in which they work together. She might then make the decision to stay in The Bathtub (having outlasted the interest of the city folk), or she might stay with her father through his death, but then walk confidently to the city on her own terms, probably in the process teaching one of the "rescuers" some survival trick that helps take care of someone else (integrating the masculine teachings of Wink with the communitarian lessons of her badass teacher).
I probably would not have had Hushpuppy meet her mom, because I wouldn't want something as cliché as her mother being in/from the city, but I also find the whorehouse setting deeply problematic. Which is kind of a shame because I did like the mother as presented. (It's ambiguous in the film whether this is actually her mother, but I'm willing to say it is, or is for all intents and purposes.) I appreciated that she didn't seem to have shame or be a disappointment, and was able to show love to Hushpuppy without in any sense abandoning who she was. Also, blowing off the top of an egg with a spat bottlecap? Amazing.
Although I liked the aurochs showing up and would have integrated that into the ending, I really thought on first viewing that the filmmakers were drawing a symbolic parallel between the four swimming parentless aurochs and the four swimming parentless little girls, but they weren't. The other three little girls just ran away. I'm not entirely sure what role the little girls fulfilled in the script, except as compositional elements. They're not really foils, friends, dependents, or henchmen for Hushpuppy, and were a missed opportunity that could have been used to further develop the feminism/interdependence motif. Along a similar line to the use of the whores, I'm relieved the little girls didn't turn out to be sacrificial figures to raise the stakes, but disappointed they weren't characters so much as "broad paintbrush stroke of inactive, silent, lingerie-wearing femininity."
In summary, good movie, worth seeing, worth owning, with a back half that lets down the promise of the first, but not so egregiously it becomes unenjoyable. (Which puts it in a category with Sunshine and Chronicle.)
In even shorter summary: Writing is hard, and it's nice to see something ambitious even if it doesn't quite fit together.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-21 12:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-21 01:11 am (UTC)I think you would like this a lot. It's problematic in places, but it's a huge relief to see onscreen science fiction that isn't spaceships or zombies or totalitarian governments. Not that I dislike spaceships and zombies and cryptofacism, but SF is so much larger than that.
To your larger point, I am similarly annoyed by films and stories in which everything is a dream, unless we know that from the outset and it's a plot point, used consistently. Terribly irritating as a twist or a get-out-of-jail-free card.
But I am even more annoyed at the willingness of some audience members to insist that certain works are "secretly all a dream" or "they were dead the whole time" despite the author/filmmaker never suggesting anything of the sort. The former is usually out of laziness (as when readers make this textually unsupported claim about Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills), and the latter seems to be out of a desire to have broken a secret insider code (as when a handful of viewers insist that the character Donnie in The Big Lebwoski is Walter's hallucination of a dead soldier, invisible to all other characters . . . even though the other characters speak to him and look at him, and this is not the sort of game the Cohens have ever played in their films).
Occam's razor (and me speaking as a filmmaker): filmmakers don't try to hide the most interesting part of their film from you. They just don't. It's hard enough to make a story coherent as it is.