The Shape of Water, and the comforts of otherness (Patreon)

I’ve noted before how memes, tropes and patterns can strongly signify, or be used to spot, an in-group, and to some degree how these patterns work to actually reinforce that in-group. These can be patterns of things people do, or say, or consume, but they can also be things that people commonly aspire towards.

In the 50s post-war period, as today, it’s safe to say that the status quo was partly held up by patterns: cars and bril-creem and army service and picket fences and the nuclear family. Memes and tropes, after all, define who “we” are as an in-group, and so conformity was, as it is now, a way of strengthening society. The exclusion from these patterns makes people in society outsiders, and so in The Shape of Water, a film about cultural outsiders, they have to establish their own patterns.

The opening of the film (the second scene) shows us a pattern - Eliza’s daily routine. Her alarm clock goes off, she gets up; she starts running water into the bath; she boils her eggs for lunch; she sets a timer, gets in the bath, has some fun in the bath; she changes the date on the calendar; she prepares herself a sandwich, polishes her shoes, and sets off for work - but before she goes to work she checks in on her neighbour Giles, for whom she was really making the sandwich. Together they watch a tap-dancing man on his TV, and now Eliza sets off for work.

Right away we’ve got several motifs strongly established. For one: water. Water is run in the bath, and water is in the pot boiling the eggs. But hey, if water wasn’t a strong recurring motif in The Shape of Water that would be kind of weird huh, so let’s talk about: time. Time is shown in the alarm clock, the egg timer, the calendar, and the wall clock. The calendar, by the way, has a “daily thought” on the back of every date card, and today’s reads “Daily thought: Time is but a river flowing from our past”. This is the start of how the motifs begin to intersect, and share meaning, but we’ll come back to that.

Another motif we might pick up on, is food. Eliza is boiling eggs, which is a motif reinforced by the egg-shaped egg timer she is timing her eggs with - anyone else starting to feel like it should have been called The Shape of Eggs? - and she also makes a sandwich for Giles next door. This immediately shows us, right from the start of the film, that food is important because food is something we can share, and mostly importantly something we can share with people we love, to show them we love them.

One of the less developed motifs of the film, in my opinion - less prominent, possibly some instances of this one hit the cutting room floor - is shoes. Eliza polishes her shoes in her morning routine, and then she and Giles share a passion for tap dancing. For my money, shoes may be something that just kind of shows up a lot, or it may have been intended as a motif and then cut down, maybe because shoes are a consumer product and establishing common patterns around consumerism doesn’t seem to be what this film is going for, but possibly because they didn’t want to draw any more attention than absolutely necessary to the fishman’s feet.

The fun in the tub is not exactly a motif of the film, although it does contain interesting representation of sexuality and multiple sex scenes, but Eliza’s masturbation does establish something that the film does repeatedly with its motifs, which is that it combines them, to make us reflect on the relationships between them. Eliza’s sexuality is first being demonstrated in the water, which firstly serves as a sort of foreshadowing, but I would say also combines the motifs of love and water. 

One of the striking editing techniques of this film are almost match-cuts, showing something in a place where the audience expects to see something else. For example, early in the film the audience expects to see, because of familiarity with Eliza’s routine, her masturbating in the tub, but the film instead shows us a close up of the eggs in the boiling water. For another example, when Eliza is balanced precariously on a barrel adjusting the CCTV camera, we keep cutting back to her shoes on the barrel, and then instead of cutting back to it we cut to Strickland’s cattle prod being suddenly swiped off the desk. On a small screen, these cuts aren’t necessarily all that noticeable, but in the theatre when the film cut to show the eggs, I remember after a beat people in the audience giggled, realising the trick that had been pulled on them, and when Strickland’s cattle prod is swiped off the desk there were gasps all through the audience, followed by a collective sigh.

These cuts work so well because the film revolves around these repeated motifs. We, as an audience, have been conditioned to expect to see certain things, and not to see others.

As I mentioned before, the calendar also combines motifs, telling us that water and time are as one. Time flows like water in a river, but considering this for a moment we might come to the conclusion that there is somewhere, like the ocean, where the water doesn’t flow, it just swirls around in abundance, and if time doesn’t flow, maybe this place is a place where you can never age. However, if the film is also tying water back to love, then maybe the place where there is an abundance of water, of time, where you never grow old, is a place where there is also love in abundance.

So water and love and time are all similarly nurturing, and of course, food is as well. In fact, the eggs - eggs being a symbol of life as well as an item of food shared repeatedly in this film - are repeatedly shown in the boiling water. Here, I’d say, we can see another conflation of these visual motifs.

This film is one thoroughly packed with meaning.

Eliza, of course is Eliza Esposito - “Doesn’t Esposito mean orphan?” The Orpheum, the cinema she and Giles live above, may be a reference to her being an orphan. Orpheum, from Orpheus, sharing a root meaning “a lack of”, with “orphan”.  Perhaps in a way Eliza and GIles and the immigrant family who run the cinema are living in a figurative orphanage.

The Orpheum may be a nod at the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Giles directly references Tantalus at one point, when lusting after a man who will not reciprocate - Giles being an alcoholic as well as a gay man in 1950s society, therefore himself permanently thirsty in two ways.

Many myths are referenced in The Shape of Water: Samson and Delilah; Tantalus; Orpheus and Eurydice. Outsiders, by definition, don’t get myths, because myths are the stories central to the culture of an in-group, and outsiders as a fractured and alienated bunch, don’t get a common culture. Guillermo Del Toro is making a comparison between myths which unite the normative group as an in-group, and the film, which unites outsiders. He is telling us this is a myth for outsiders.

Guillermo Del Toro’s whole career really subverts horror to make the outsiders the in-group. Watching Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth or Mama there is a very clear fondness for the outsiders. It perfectly captures the unintentional flipside of cosmic, lovecraftian horror because when you're someone marginalised something large and powerful that doesn't even care you exist can be comforting, as opposed to the society that knows you're there and hates you. In this way, The Shape of Water is the culmination of Guillermo Del Toro’s career so far.

The reframing of the thoroughly propagandised post-war era from the underneath as it were, pokes holes completely through the veneer of American exceptionalism.

Zelda, at one point says: “It was two shots did you hear? I heard three.” Set in this era of American history, a debate over the number of shots heard brings to mind pretty powerfully the assassination of JFK, which, in a single moment shattered the smooth veneer of the common public idea of America. Of course, if you were a cultural outsider before that happened, as the film is pointing out, that idea of America had already been shattered, or maybe for you never existed.

The people who believed in that idea of their country weren’t generally the outsiders. They were the people in the cultural in-group:

Oblivious, able-bodied, heterosexual, white people - in particular white men.

Which brings us, to the monster.

When Richard Strickland gets two fingers bitten off by the fishman, he proudly declares he still has his “Thumb trigger and pussy finger”. Richard Strickland’s chauvinism is deliberately framed as repulsive to the audience. He states that he wants a mute woman. His sex talk is not cute or fun but an overshare of something that you really wish he’d maybe question and change.

By contrast Eliza’s sexuality throughout the film is innocent, charming and light. She and the fish man have something pure. He didn’t aggressively pursue her, he didn’t harass her, he didn’t try to impose himself on her, they were just drawn to each other.

Strickland, as the antagonist, has a different set of things that he likes. A set of eeeevil things. Well no, not really.

The things he likes don’t make him evil, his actions show that he is a shitty person, but the things he likes - women, new cars, weapons, cheap candy that he can crush in his mouth - are just a separate set of things that mark him out as separate: as an outsider to the film, despite being an insider to society.

Of course there is the time-honoured ‘paradox of tolerance’: if we are going to all hold hands and be one, shouldn’t we also be one with the people doing the harm?

“I can’t tell [what you’re saying]. To me it’s just the worst fucking noise I ever heard.” 

The film beautifully slips past the ‘paradox of tolerance’ by telling us not to empathise with this man, because one of the main traits that makes him unsympathetic is his lack of empathy.

After Strickland’s creepiness Eliza is framed between two posters. One that says “Loose lips sink ships” a dark bit of irony reminding us that she can’t tell anyone about what happened, and “don’t waste water”, a perfect bit of metaphorical allusion to the repeating motifs. The fishman is the water. He is being wasted, and she can’t let that happen.

“[the lord] looks like a human. Like me. Or even you. A little more like me I’d guess.” The arrogance and assertion that god looks like white men is juxtaposed with the suggestion that the creature might in fact be a god in the same scene. What unites outsiders is that we’re all different, and what unites insiders is that they’re all the same. Therefore there’ll always be way fewer of them. Our struggle is just figuring out that we are one group instead of many splintered factions.

The Shape of Water presents us with a world which seems to be just like our own, but uses those subtle motifs to let us know, without realising, that every outsider in the story is linked together.

Back in their apartments above the Orpheum - the orphanage - Eliza and Giles look out at the world through their respective halves of a huge oval window, shaped almost like an eye, because the outsiders look at society through the same eyes.

There is of course, another way that Shape of Water unites outsiders, and that is by showing us the world through the eyes of a total outsider, the fishman.

“He doesn’t know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am how I am. He’s happy to see me every time, every day.” When he heals her, he makes it so she can breathe underwater rather than making it so she can speak. He doesn’t know how she “is incomplete”. The framing although told as a certain story is actually ambiguous because it is told through the eyes of Giles. He doesn’t have all the information, but he chooses to believe what happened to them anyway, and we choose to believe it as well.

For a long long time horror movies have revolved around what frightens the people who are assumed by society to be “normal”. There has, since the dawn of the genre, been a fear of the mentally ill. There is a popular trend of the psychotic lover, the evil deceitful woman. Big Joel explored in his video about Happy Death Day how slasher films are based on young people getting righteously struck down for their sinful behaviour: “people are boning, we’re weirdly watching them bone, and then they die because they boned”. Lindsay Ellis explored in her video My Monster Boyfriend how the older horror movies that Shape of Water was based on were, as a trend, a coded metaphor for the fear of miscegenation - the pairing of people from different perceived racial groups - most specifically, black men coming to steal white women.

The thing about the group that society treats as normal - the thing about the fears of that group - is that society has to treat other groups of people as abnormal, as strange, as different than human, as less than human. So when you keep showing the fears of the “normal” group on screen, you often keep representing the other in the villain, in the monster, and so end up making it so that the fears represented are essentially the fears belonging to the oppressor, the fear of the oppressed.

What Shape of Water does so well, is that it creates an in-group out of everyone in the film who is oppressed in some way by society - everyone who is a cultural outsider. The disabled protagonist, her gay friend, her black colleague, they all work together to facilitate the love story and save the amphibian man’s life.

Incidentally, the fish man isn’t named in the film. I am happy to call him the fish man, the amphibian man, or the creature, but I won’t call him the monster. There is clearly only one monster in this film, and it is Richard Strickland. He is not just representative of the systems that hurt and oppress the main characters - he works for that system.

There is something comforting and comfortable about this film, that simply says “we are all different, but we are all together, so that’s okay”. We are, in short, all the fish man.

So from now on I hope if we’re going to look for a source of horror, and we’re going to look for a thing to be afraid of  - a huge thing that is intangible but deadly, and larger not only than ourselves but larger than we can even comprehend, maybe those systems of oppression are a pretty good place to start.