Something I've been seeing a lot of are comments about how The Shape of Water was inexplicably predictable. Specifically, these comments refer to the scars on Elisa's neck becoming gills at the end. It's not a hard call to make or guess, and a lot of people are bewildered at this choice in the narrative, as though this predictability is a narrative flaw of the movie. And of course, to each their own. I can't blame anyone for disliking that.
Nonetheless, I'm of the mind that Guillermo Del Toro never intended for it to be a big surprise or a twist of any sort. I don't think Del Toro & Company mind that their audience will guess this right away.
The Shape of Water is aware that it's a story being told and embraced the medium. We open the movie with Giles narrating over an exploration of Elisa's water filled apartment. It is a whimsical and artistic opening. He is telling us about Elisa, the central figure of the movie and the person in question with the obvious marks. We don't get to see the gills in this opening sequence, but we see her unconscious and floating above her couch. This is bookended by the movie ending on Giles narrating on top of Elisa once again in water, floating and unconscious.
At the end, we're not suppose to question that her scars are gills, we're supposed to wonder if this is real or not. Giles tells us himself that he likes to believe that she got to have a happy ending. Are we seeing the ending he has chosen to believe? Or is this really how Del Toro's story ends?
So does that mean we should think the ending is a false one? That Amphibian Man got to be free but Elisa succumbed to her wounds and this is why Giles never saw her again? The scars were just that after all. It was clearly too obvious that this is truly how the movie is intended to end.
But this isn't just a story. Del Toro & Company punctures this whimsical romance with some harsh realism. This isn't like our traditional gruesome fairytales, where things go from dark to grim. It's just... life. Elisa lives a simple, unfulfilling life. She has good friends and isn't necessarily unhappy, but it's not enough. She isn't the sexless, passive woman of many of those stories. She's real and complex and multidimensional.
We have Strickland being the epitome of 1960's toxic masculinity, chalk full of sexism, racism, and ableism. The people around him can see he is gross but they pretend everything is okay because they feel helpless or that the error is actually in themselves.
Amphibian Man is ethereal, godlike, and fantastical, but he's also scared, brutal, and lonely. He's vulnerable and yet loving.
All these things and more, throughout the movie, point to a harsh realism, and I think this is an intentional contrast. These elements are intended to be side by side. I seem to recall Del Toro saying that he wanted to make this movie as a sort of ode to cinema and the stories they tell. I find it then, most likely that this story within a story is intentional on his part. He doesn't want us to watch the movie once, go 'oh that was a good twist' and set it aside again. He wants us to to be particpants. With this story format, we get to ponder it, engage with it, and make it our own.
Personally, I choose to believe that Elisa got her happy ending. Given everything I've said above and more I can't articulate, I think Gile's story is happening side by side the actual story, and they twine together at times, and diverge at others. Does Giles know that Elisa masturbated in her tub while she cooked him eggs every morning? Are we supposed to think that he supposes that's so? Did he suspect that Elisa sat on the bus, painting her finger against the window pane of a bus, and making water follow the motions of her fingertip? It's not unreasonable, but also not necessary. And again, it's up for each and every one of us to decide.
At the end of the day though, I don't think the question was ever meant to be 'why did you make this so obvious,' but rather, 'do you really think that's how it ends' and what does it reveal to you about the way you interpret that. What does it say about the things you enjoy, the messages you think the movie is trying to convey, what you'll accept as reality vs stories, your own preconceptions, and a whole host of other questions.
So if you love this movie but are annoyed at this element, let me suggest analyzing instead what you think of the ending. Was it real? Is the movie really a beautiful love story if it's not real? Does it makes sense that we begin and end the story with Giles's narration and the twist isn't that Elisa might not have made it? How important is it that a movie surprises us?
And it's all of these questions and so much more that keeps this movie in my head, bouncing around, looking to pull all these words from me.
The Shape of Water Headcanon: Delilah isn’t Zelda’s Middle Name.
Strickland asks Zelda what the “D” in her name stands for, and Zelda takes a long moment before answering. I think it’s meant to be read as her processing how much this man feels entitled to her to ask a personal question so casually, but something about how she does it made my brain go, “did she just make that up?”
And I love everything about what it would mean if she had. In the moment, she doesn’t want to tell him and actually kind of wants to spite him, so she picks something she doesn’t think he’ll expect: a biblical name. Delilah is the first one that pops into her mind as she doesn’t have much time if she’s going to lie to come up with something.
In the book, Strickland proceeds to refer to Zelda as Delilah from this point on, and clearly he grasps onto it in the movie as the thing about Zelda he believes tells him the most about her. It fits a narrative he finds appropriate for a black woman. Stricklands has a lot of delusions it seems to me, so I love the idea that the thing he bases all of his knowledge (assumptions) upon in regards to Zelda is a spur-of-the-moment lie. So, it’s what I choose to believe now.
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. ♥♥
@lioness–hart moving this convo over so OP of the last post doesn’t have to keep getting notified about it haha!
I’m glad to know I have a couple Fury Roadies who have seen this and enjoyed the shit out of it. I could still more than happily do without the cat scene, but I’m really curious how the FR fandom will take it. The violence didn’t feel as necessary for as graphic as it got in TSoW as it did in Fury Road. Despite the genre of Fury Road, the violence had impact without feeling at all gratuitous. I definitely felt like it got that way in TSoW. But it’s Del Toro and that’s part of his thing, so I won’t say it’s a fault, and yet it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not really mine. I was in it for the love story and would have adored a tale that could show the weight of violence in an unfair world without somehow… making me able to visualize the violence of the movie more clearly than the physical acts of love (bar the visual of Elisa looking over Amphian’s (my Amphibian Man shortcut/name) shoulder in the bathroom.
But I can’t help but imagine everyone is going to love Elisa and her impact on every single thing that happens. She has so much agency. It’s so beautiful!
Ugh I just can’t wait! Why are release dates mean???
I didn't want to reblog your response to my foreshadowing comment because it has spoilers that aren't kept under the cut, but I did want to say that I agree with your insight on how the magical, fairy-tale like storytelling of TSoW lends itself to speculation as to what's going on while also leaving people happy with where it ends.
Ah! Sorry! Got caught up and was only thinking of my own followers. I’ve been tagging religiously and stated several times on my blog the tags to blacklist. It wasn’t fair that I didn’t consider how you dealt with spoilers when you made it clear how you do just that. My only defense is that I’m on mobile and couldn’t think of how to do that without not responding or using comments. I selfishly tend to dislike comments for its limiting of characters ¬.¬
But thanks for finding a way to respond anyway! I’ve been enjoying getting to talk about this very full and delicious movie. Thanks for indulging me ^‿^ The movie did manage a spectacular balancing act with that.
