I blame this post, and my unstable mental condition, on my sister Gina.
I was a young impressionable lad when my dearest older sibling first showed me her creepy drawings. She had a pad of paper where she kept personal sketches of her favorite monsters. It contained Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla and the scariest one of all, the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” The Creature was a dangerous half-man, half-reptile that lived in the murky green waters of the deadly Amazon River in Brazil.
I asked her how she came up with such a hideous idea for a monster? She said she saw it on Saturday afternoon television fright show. She described for me how the monster would sneak out of the water and grab you if you were not careful. In the original movie, three people were killed and the beautiful starlet was almost dragged away never to be seen from again. But luckily, she was rescued by the dashing hero. So with wide eyes and her hand curved into a grabbing claw, my sister explained in spine-tingling detail how all the Creature wanted was to bite your neck!
I was terrified, my sister’s description did the trick. From that day forward I was always apprehensive to get too close to the water’s edge of any river, lake or dark body of water – – you never know when or where the “Creature” might be lurking? It was a monster after all, and a monster was always something to fear precisely because a monster was a monster. Horror used to make sense when I was a boy.
But it is not that way anymore. The Creature that once struck fear in the heart of men and women everywhere has now become the hero. Instead of a monster to protect yourself against, the Creature has turned into a marginalized object to now pity, love and to protect. One of the top pictures that has been nominated to receive a number of the prestigious Oscars at the Academy Awards this year is a film entitled “The Shape of Water.” It is brave new telling of the story of the Creature – – no longer is it meant to be a horror story, it has turned into a tragic romance. Rave reviews are pouring in about it from the army of movie critics nationwide. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 92% rating:
“It is a movie about outsiders and the very human need to connect.”
“The film’s huge heart and good intentions are always on display.”
“On paper it sounds indigestible, but on screen it is pure magic.”
Why does it sound indigestible? Because the plot is ludicrous. It has the half-man, half-reptile Creature falling in love with a mute woman who is hiding him in her bathtub next door to a gay man as they run from the evil Christian. That is why it sounds so strange. The Creature is not a killer, he is now a star-crossed lover! Life isn’t as easy to understand as it was when I was a boy, it seems that now I am an adult everything has been turned upside down. Life is now about celebrating differences, exalting strangeness, and experimenting with forbidden love even if a person looks like a clammy alligator. It is as if there is more beauty and purity in the strange and bizarre love affair than oh, you know, a common, boring, ordinary one involving a man and a woman for life. How restrictive and repressive!
Listen to what one very reasonable reviewer writes about it in the National Review, “But what, exactly, does a mute Mexican immigrant janitoress, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins, wasting the genius she displayed in Maudie), have to do with the black struggle against Jim Crow? How does her romance with an amphibious monster, captured for government experimentation during the Cold War, express the thwarted desires of U.S. citizens whose ancestors were oppressed? Why is her protective co-worker a sassy and stoic black woman (Octavia Spencer) with a Stepin Fetchit husband? Why is her best friend a gay artist (Richard Jenkins) who is scared of expressing his own sexuality? Why does her nemesis, a security official at the science lab (Michael Shannon), stand in for white supremacist bigotry?”
You see, the producer of the film, Guillermo Del Toro, took a good ole fashioned scary Saturday afternoon fright story and turned it into another politically correct sappy love story and social commentary telling us how we must think – – remember, you must never forget about the marginalized and forgotten! In fact, the weird and the strange is to be celebrated, extreme diversity has become the new normal.
I find it interesting what Rex Reed says about this movie, “Here I am again, out on a limb with a saw in my hand. I’ve been here before, but never have I disagreed with quite so many colleagues (including a few I actually respect) about the same movie. But as the year draws to a close, I remain aghast at the way critics have not only embraced but slobbered over The Shape of Water.”
He continues, “The Amphibian Man is understandably menacing to anyone who comes near it, but Eliza, who empathizes with the misery of hatred and persecution, offers compassion and tenderness in the form of hard-boiled eggs. Romance blossoms. She is happy to be with him because he is non-judgmental…The whole movie is off the wall, but when Eliza strips naked and crawls into the bathtub to surrender her virginity to the creature, it really loses its hinges. ‘Never trust a man,’ says fellow toilet scrubber Octavia Spencer after she sees the Amphibian Man’s metallic fish costume, ‘even if he looks flat down there.’”
It is interesting to me how Rex Reed says he feels like he is out on a limb. Why? Because he dares to criticize a story that has a politically motivated message. He dares to go against the consensus. He dares to point out and say that the idea of a woman engaging in a sexual relationship with an animal man is ‘off the wall.’ You can’t judge a person’s sexual proclivities these days! Next time you see your friend swimming with a fish, you better not judge!
I remember when a good scary creature was just that, a good scary creature. Now he is the one who is misunderstood, marginalized and woefully mistreated. And guess whose fault it is? I blame my sister Gina!
