Stories we Choose to Tell: A Shape of Water Edition
I talk on this blog from time to time about how everything we see in a story was decided upon by writers. When talking about problematic elements in media, I often see these elements defended with arguments which take the characters of the story into account, but not the writers behind them.
The Shape of Water gave us a beautiful example of how it's not enough to say that 'it just made sense with the plot' or 'it would be out of character for this character to have reacted differently,' ignoring the circumstances which led these characters to that moment and those actions.
It comes back to looking at media through a Watsonian versus Doylist lens (Watsonian being from the point of view of the characters and what Doylist lens being from the perspective of the writers/creators).
In The Shape of Water, our antagonist, Richard Strickland, is on a rampage to retrieve "The Asset" but doesn't know where he is. He become unhinged in his pursuit. He is spiraling out of control. He is obsessed with power and his ability to assert it. The movie gives us many examples of this, focusing on how he pleasures greatly in controlling the people around him and how unforgiving he is of any shows of disregard to his authority.
So when he follows Dimitri and discovers that he surely played a part in removing our Amphibian Man from captivity, he glories in his position of power over him, torturing him for the desired information. It's the first thing that truly seems to calm him out of the spiral he's been going down. But then Dimitri reveals that it wasn't a strike team of highly skilled Russians who swept the rug out from under Strickland, it was 'the cleaners.' In the next scene, we see how unhinged this new information makes him. His power wasn't undermined by something just as powerful as him but rather by those he who never should have had the power to do him such harm in the first place.
The writers could have written Strickland making the mental jump to Elisa. She, afterall, was the one who stood before him, a look of defiance on her face after questioning, and signed something he could not understand at him. It would make sense. The writers chose that, for whatever reason—be it his desire not to believe it was his crush or his inability to lay such agency at the feet of a disabled, petite little white girl and/or consequently his likely inclination to see a black woman as more the villain—Zelda would come to his mind first as the likely culprit. He arrives at her home more unhinged than ever.
As I watched this scene in the theater, I got really tense. I didn't want to see another black woman killed on screen. Another black man. For surely he was unhinged enough that he would rain his wrath down upon Zelda's whole family, especially after his story about Delilah and the destruction of all those people during Samson's last act of strength. At this point, I imagined the creators had written themselves into a corner. It seemed wholly inconceivable that this clearly racist, obviously sexist, power hungry, despicable man would be utterly incapable of walking away from a black woman who had known about the "theft" of all of his control without killing her.
If it had happened, people would say 'it's the only thing that made sense' and that this is where the plot was inevitably going to go. But don't forget, he could have just as easily been written to go directly to Elisa's. Elisa could have headed out—as she was determined (though admittedly reluctant) to do—before he arrived. She could have seen him pull up and Giles could have distracted him. There are a dozen different ways that scenario could have been handled. But writers wrote Strickland going to Zelda's.
However, the writers of this movie are not to be trifled with. Zelda's husband, Brewster, interjects through Strickland’s intimidation. Despite Zelda's efforts to protect Elisa and our beloved fishman, he reveals that he'd overheard Zelda's affairs and knew Elisa had 'The Asset’. Brewster, who upon Strickland's entrance, was (understandably) cowed by our unhinged antagonist and did nothing to stop him threatening his wife, speaks over his wife’s wishes and cedes to Strickland's authority and domination. Given the set of prejudices and ways of thinking of our antagonist, this was the perfect—perhaps the only—conceivable way that Strickland was to be gratified into 'bestowing mercy,' as I can't help but imagine he feels in that moment.
With Brewster's obeisance, Strickland's world falls back into place. A man, in deference to him, put his wife 'in her place' and for that pleasing (to Strickland) behavior, so will he ‘reward’ them. He didn't have to. What Zelda and Elisa did was against the law, almost certainly traitorous. He'd already linked them with a Russian spy (Dimitri), and he was willing to shoot Elisa when it came down to it. It would have been evil for him to kill them, but he would not have been punished. Zelda and Brewster were not safe from him until that moment, until Brewster gratified his ego and thus assured him that the world was, in fact, as it should be (according to The Book of Strickland ( •́ ⍨ •̀)) .
And the writers did not have to do it that way. If they hadn't, many would have defended the decision of the killing as having made sense from the Watsonian (Strickland's) point of view. But the writers (Doylist) decided that's not how they wanted their film to play out. Theirs was a story of romance and triumph/hope for those society deemed unworthy (lower class, disabled, black, gay, etc).
As I watched this scene though, I was simply struck at how this is such a clear cut example of how you cannot give a story a pass for something horrible happening just because it 'made sense' for that story/character or the world that story was set in. Creators still choose the world they set their stories in, still write the characters into these scenarios. It is a choice, and whether that choice is good or bad does not remove the responsibility of telling that story from the creators' shoulders.
And likewise, we can enjoy a story for it's consistency of character (Watsonian perspective) and world and the ways the protagonists overcome or engage in those narratives while simultaneously being critical of the choice by the writers (Doylist) to put these characters into these settings and these scenarios where they continue a harmful trend of killing off their black and/or queer characters.
So The Shape of Water gets a hearty standing ovation from me. I'd be more than happy to go back to the theater for another viewing or another movie in this world with these characters.
Thank you Guillermo Del Toro for maintaining my faith in you. ♥♥
