Delta blues: Beasts of The Southern Wild

POWER FROM CHAOS: Beasts of the Southern Wild
 

Director Benh Zeitlin’s first feature film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, is seen through the eyes of a six-year-old named Hushpuppy (played by five-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis) living with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a ravaged southern Delta community called “the Bathtub,” reminiscent of a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and based on the culture of the Mississippi.

The residents of the Bathtub dwell in battered wooden huts, separated from the rest of civilization. It’s a harsh existence of living off the land and adopting a survivalist mentality to prepare for the delicate balance of a climate swinging inevitably out of whack. The ice caps are melting, the waters are rising, mythical aurochs emerge with their tusks raised, and we are told that when everything falls to pieces, there isn’t going to be time to “sit around crying like a bunch of pussies.” You have to keep trying, we are shown, no matter how heavy the sense of dread.

The film is filtered through Hushpuppy’s eyes as a kind of heightened reality – while not quite magical realism, her childlike perspective transforms the fear and instability she experiences in her decaying, water-logged home and the terrible destructive force of the natural elements and cruelty of nature into something transcendent and magical, informed by a poetic logic and language of mythic intensity that Hushpuppy and the film use to make sense of and draw power from chaos.

Dark wild child

Hushpuppy grows up and thrives surrounded by death, and images of the lushness of nature offset by decay abound. We watch Hushpuppy dip her hands in basins full of squirming insects, encounter dead animals with bellies full of maggots, hold small animals up to her ear (if they spoke, she thinks, they would say they need to poo!) and go fishing with her dad by dipping their hands in the water off the edges of boats. When they catch something, Wink instructs Hushpuppy to punch the fish out with her bare hands. We’re told by another adult that we’re all animals and that everything is made of meat, that we’re all meat and meant to eat meat.

Part of the power of Beasts lies in Wallis’ immense talent as an actress, which is even more incredible considering her age. She is able to project a wild resiliency and power throughout the film, but her eyes also sometimes seem to contain a quiet, defeated sadness, the kind of brokenness one would expect from a young child who’s lost her mother, and who may also be about to lose her father and her home.

Later in the movie, when the residents of the Bathtub are asked to leave by the government, which attemps to shuttle them into refugee centers and hospitals, they resist, struggling to stay in their home and fight, despite the hardships they face and ravages of the elements.

Poverty and its portrayals

Zeitlin, as a white New Yorker, has faced some criticism for being unqualified to make a movie about poverty, and even perhaps fetishizing it. It’s a difficult balance for any filmmaker to achieve, in an era where tragedy is often either pornographically exaggerated and packaged for an audience weaned on Oprah, or aestheticized and sold back to the middle-upper-class as something cool and edgy.

While Beasts is perhaps limited in its vision of poverty, seen through the narrow and disjointed lens of its six-year-old protagonist, it also offers a refreshing counterpoint to typical Hollywood narratives, where poor people and black people are in need of rescuing by those more privileged. While the residents of the Bathtub may be flawed, “white trash,” borderline mad, or alcoholics using booze as a crutch to cope, they are still always portrayed with dignity and shown to be in charge of their own destinies.

In a way, I think Zeitlin’s film could serve as a critique of the docility of middle class North American life, of our arrogance in presuming that our way of life is correct and the ways we value our own comfort at the expense of a fragile, damaged ecosystem. While the residents of the Bathtub seem to lead a frightening, dangerous, and uncertain existence, it’s contrasted with a glimpse of the grotesqueness of our own way of life. The sick, the elderly, the homeless and the disenfranchised are all shuttled away and hidden in dreary refugee centres (“like fish tanks without water”), or hooked up artificially in hospital beds, cast aside by an ordered society that has no place for them, that is fundamentally disconnected from death.

While Beasts of The Southern Wild draws from folklore and a heightened mythic sensibility, it does so without cheapening the horrors of life or romanticizing them. Hushpuppy’s mother was so beautiful she could make pots of water boil just by walking past them. It is these moments that form Hushpuppy’s landscape and become her talismans, allowing her to feel her way past sadness and fear, instead staring curious and unblinking into the eye of the auroch. ■

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD IS IN THEATRES.