The most interesting interpretations of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, those from Silpa Kovvali for the Atlantic and Kelly Candaele for the LA Review of Books, focus for the most part of the political aspects of the film. Candaele argues that the film has a potentially dangerous political message – that it touts “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.” Kovvali, on the other hand, says that “an open-minded viewer should leave the film with a greater understanding of the way that complicated political histories can make people distrustful of institutions widely perceived as universal goods,” and that the film is “actually a nuanced look at how peoples’ worldviews are tied to where they came from.” While there is clearly something to be said on both sides here, and the film certainly wants us to compare the bonds of community among those in the Bathtub with the impersonal state on the other side of the levy, my interpretation, in some sense parallel to these, focuses on the themes of nature, authenticity and death. I see this film as probing the question of what it means to be human, and the nature of modern civilization.
We can start with the title and the first few scenes of the film. The movie is about beasts who live in a southern wilderness. The wilderness part is clear. The residents of the Bathtub live in an area separated from the city by a concrete wall. But who are the beasts? The first few scenes of the movie show Hushpuppy and others living very closely to the animals, and, we are prompted to think, much closer to the animals than those in the city who get their food from grocery stores. The residents of the Bathtub may be the beasts of the film’s title, but the other obvious possibility is that the beasts are the Oryxes who are freed from a glacier and run thunderously closer to the bathtub throughout the movie.
I take these Oryxes to represent nature in all its harshness and inevitability. The people of the Bathtub aren’t just living away from the city, they’re living much closer to nature, and that means they’re living much closer not only to the animals, but to the danger nature poses. They live under the shadow of the inevitable storm that will destroy what they’ve built. Most importantly, they live much closer to death, not only to the death of the animals they eat, and whose entrails are on full display, but to their own deaths.
The question we are asked to think about, as Candaele and Kovvali have, is what to make of this situation: what is the point of struggling to remain in this dangerous and, for us city slickers, gross, world. The movie is directed, I believe, primarily at urban sophisticates who are supposed to feel a bit queasy at the prospect of using their bare hands to bash the heads of catfish in and rip crabs apart. But we are supposed to see that in our sterile environment, with out carefully parted hair and packaged fish, we have lost something essential to a fully authentic human life. Living closer to nature is more dangerous, but more real and more meaningful.
It is the loss of this authentic way of life Hushpuppy’s father rages against. He fights to live and die apart from the intervention of modern science and society. This is why he flies into a rage when Hushpuppy tries to use a knife to cut the crab in half rather than her hands, and everyone in the bar encourages her to use her hands by chanting “beast it” over and over again. The butter knife here is an unacceptable concession to the world on the other side of the wall.
When modern civilization does invade the bathtub, after the levy is blown up by an explosive alligator, it takes the form of an alien abduction. A strange craft appears in the air, followed by sparklingly clean figures who force the Bathtub people into a harshly lit and soulless shelter. On the other side, we can’t help being reminded of certain documentaries of anthropologists intruding the lives of remote tribes in New Guinea when the city dwellers confront Hushpuppy’s club wielding father. The only desire Hushpuppy and her fellows have is to get back to their home, no matter what the cost.
Perhaps the most interesting thing the film asks us to do, though, is think about the ways in which the people in the Bathtub are more like the town dwellers than the beasts: what makes them truly human. In her narrative Hushpuppy is trying to understand the nature of the universe. She sees that there is some kind of cycle, and at one point, is haunted by the feeling that it is possible to irreversibly break this cycle. It isn’t the intrusion of the city people, though, that causes this potentially universe-destroying break. The most important strand of Beasts of the Southern Wild is Hushpuppy’s struggle to understand her father’s impending death. She knows that everything’s father dies, but not her father. She knows that for the people who died in the storm, the end of the world has already happened, but she can’t imagine that her world will continue without her father.
Her father teaches her to be strong, and that there should be no tears when someone dies. That’s the way of the bathtub, and perhaps the way of nature. But in the end neither she nor her father can stop from crying. In the end, Hushpuppy stops the Oryxes in their tracks. And in a million years, the scientists will know everything that happened here, and that a girl named Hushpuppy once lived with her father in the Bathtub. She’s recorded it all with her drawing, and through this art and the art of the scientists, who live in towns, she will have some sort of immortality, and so overcome the inevitability of nature. At the end of Beasts of the Southern Wild, we’re left with the quintessentially human paradox. Hushpuppy realizes that the cycle of the universe, the cycle of life and death, cannot be broken by anything, but through her drawing, through her art, she hopes to escape this cycle.
The earliest examples of art we have are cave paintings of animals, and part of the fascination we have with these paintings is the feeling that they were a way for their creators to leave something of themselves behind. We first see Oryxes in the film as a tattoo on the leg of the teacher, and this tattoo is a depiction of those cave paintings. Beasts of the Southern Wild is about living with nature, and the struggle against it.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.