Shape of Water

Discussion in 'Whatever' started by Biff, Dec 28, 2017.

  1. Biff

    Biff S7 Royalty

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    Finally saw de Toro's Shape of Water. Not really horror or sci fi, but it does have a 'creature', so it deserves a sb post. More of an adult fairy tale with a few cringe worthy moments (good cringe, not schmaltzy cringe). Del Toro is back in form for this one.
     
  2. toothaction

    toothaction Team Tsubu Staff Member

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    Treated myself to a screening on Christmas day. A wholly wonderful film, fully committed to its premise.
     
  3. bryce_r

    bryce_r Die-Cast

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    loved it but you do have to have the suspension of disbelief. Otherwise you can't get into it.
     
  4. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    Finally saw this. Loved the effects and sets, but how the hell did this win best picture?

    And how does this film simultaneously advocate for animal rights, and then have the protagonist sleep with a creature that doesn't seem to have human intelligence and can't consent? I can't be the only one who sees it this way.
     
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  5. Biff

    Biff S7 Royalty

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    Hmmm.....I think you are.:)
     
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  6. Waterbear

    Waterbear Line of Credit

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    I certainly didn't walk away from the film thinking it was about animal rights and fish rape.

    The creature was basically a Yacuruna. In mythology they are like the opposite of water nymphs. They seduce women near the amazon river and take them to their giant underwater cities and turn them into fish people. Del Toro just took that legend and made the creature nice instead of scary.

    I certainly thought the fish man was more intelligent than the majority of humans in the film and not just an animal that couldn't consent.
     
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  7. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    I can see the argument for a near-human level of intelligence (and I would disagree with that argument), but what demonstrated that it could be _more_ intelligent than humans?
     
  8. Ghost Attack

    Ghost Attack Toy Prince

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    10000000%
     
  9. Waterbear

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    He wasn't going around enslaving and torturing people or trying to rape co-workers and he convinced a woman to risk her life to save him and to have sex with him and he healed her and turned her into a fish lady. Seems pretty smart to me.
     
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  10. jl

    jl Line of Credit

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    Wait until they are 1,000 of them and start taking over the worold like the Dolphins in the KOTORIMARK topic :D
     
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  11. ultrakaiju

    ultrakaiju Die-Cast Staff Member

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    It's almost like you've never followed the Academy before. :razz:

    The Oscars are right up there with the Nobel Peace Prize for awards which somehow people assign value to, but are actually [by virtue of historical awarding] totally empty and lacking any depth, logic, or measurable reference. It's an exercise in social status, as opposed to any sort of quantitative (or even qualitative) merit.
     
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  12. ---NT---

    ---NT--- Prototype

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    And occasionally those "values" collide with actual talent. See: Parasite.
     
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  13. ultrakaiju

    ultrakaiju Die-Cast Staff Member

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    Fully agreed. With both categories, they are not mutually exclusive; just as they are also not a defining trait.
     
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  14. ---NT---

    ---NT--- Prototype

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    I mostly just wanted to imply that BJH is AWESOME and GDT is NOT AWESOME! ;)
     
  15. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    So you're saying he Yacuroofied her? That doesn't sound any better!
     
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  16. Waterbear

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    Maybe it doesn't sound better but it sure sounds smart!
     
  17. toothaction

    toothaction Team Tsubu Staff Member

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    A little perplexed at the level of dismissal I'm seeing about this film here. Did we see different movies? Did some of you have a look on a tube television, during the day, in a crowded, busy house and with your trigger finger on the pause button? Can't say I put much stock in the Academy either, but occasionally they stumble on a decision that I agree with. There were an uncharacteristically large number of worthy candidates for the top prize in 2018, Shape among them, but the real surprise is that it didn't go to something like Dunkirk (WAR!) or The Post (BIOPIC! PERIOD PIECE! HANKS! STREEEEEP!!!), y'know? Gave some more thought as to why I felt as I did when leaving the theater on Christmas day that year, but I'll spare you any more blather from me and just ask that you spend a couple of minutes with this essay I dug up tonight. Good ol' FILM CRIT HULK gave Del Toro's film way more thought than I did, and arrived on excellent ways of articulating what I merely felt as an observer.

    Also, listen to Taimur! Kid knows what he's talking about!
     
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  18. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    I admit that I have been a little silly about the consent thing (like calling this Honey, I Fucked The Gillman), but that aspect really does feel wrong to me. If this was a movie about a guy that got infatuated with Koko the sign language gorilla, stole her from the research facility, kept her in his greenhouse and did the horizontal mambo with her, I think there'd be more than a little moral outrage over it. My question about how this ended up winning Best Picture doesn't have much to do with this, though. I just don't think The Shape of Water is a very good movie.

    I don't respond well to movies that are as intensely overt with their themes as this one is, even if those themes align with my own worldview. I agree, Guillermo, yes, humans are prone to "othering" which results in the oppression of those who are born with a different skin color from the group in power, or whose sexual preference differs from the mainstream, or people with disabilities. Yes, mistreating animals is bad. Yes, intimidation through physical violence is bad. Yes, the America of the 1950s was considered a golden age by some, but the worst of human nature resulted in a tremendous amount of suffering.

    But the black-and-white presentation of the above results in bland characters and a story with no nuance. Everything is all clearly spelled out for you. Everyone in this movie is entirely good or entirely evil. This movie is rated R for "sexual content, graphic nudity, violence and language," and it feels about as complex as Disney's Little Mermaid.

    It's even more puzzling when compared to the other movies it was up against that year. Of the ones I saw, here's how I'd rank them, most deserving of the award to least deserving: Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, Darkest Hour, The Post, Dunkirk, The Shape of Water. And to me there is a big gap between Get Out and all the rest. Get Out was thought-provoking, innovative, scary, and most importantly, directly relevant to the times.

    Del Toro blew it with this movie, but the Academy voters blew it with the vote.

    (Also, did people also forget that Amphibian Man just bit that cat's head off?)

    Ah, dammit. Lindsay Ellis just had to point out that bit in her video at 13:47, now I like it even less!

     
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  19. nico000

    nico000 Toy Prince

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    Really liked that movie, probably my favorite from Guillermo. Get out was fine but for the ending, still have to watch Lady Bird and The Post...
    And I would make for a very poor movie critic!
     
  20. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    toothaction, I read the Film Crit Hulk essay and I don't see the the same things he did, or rather, I did not feel the same things he did. Thanks for sharing it, though.
     
  21. Waterbear

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    You seem to be having trouble seeing the movie as it was intended, a fairy tale. Like most of Del Toro's other movies it is quite obviously totally a fairy tale. You compare it to the little mermaid as though that is somehow a bad thing but it has more in common with that cartoon than all of the other movies you think deserved the oscar instead. Are you just upset that a live-action fairy tale beat all those other movies?

    The Devil's Backbone is my favorite Del Toro film with Pan's being a close second and those are both fairy tales with live actors as well. Did the human/animal love in Beauty and The Beast offend you as well? How about in The Little Mermaid when a fish woman fell for a human man? Or in all of Greek Mythology where Gods turn into animals and fuck woman?

    Are you forgetting that is a very short amount of time the creature you believe had no intelligence was learning sign language? Or that his fishy god-like body armor opened itself up to expose his completely hidden genitals when she took off her clothes? Looked like consent to me. Or how he kissed her a few times in the movie? Saying there was no intelligence or consent is just factually wrong. If you want to hate the movie that is perfectly fine but not for that particular reason which just doesn't make any sense at all.

    And thank you for the very interesting and fun conversation! It is rare to actually get a full on discussion going here regardless of the topic. I have enjoyed it.
     
  22. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    I am happy to respond to every question you posed but let me regroup and declare my beliefs about it up front.
    1. This movie's moral framework, conveyed through the theme, aligns with my own (with the exception of the following point), but this is not a requirement for me to enjoy a movie.
    2. The movie portrays a creature that has intelligence, but it does not demonstrate a level of intelligence and awareness beyond that of any real-life animal that humans have interacted with. When the protagonist has sex with the animal, an injustice is being committed against it, and the movie exhibits an obvious moral blind spot here.
    3. This movie has a simple story and characters. Complexity is not a requirement for me to enjoy a movie. In this case, though, I believe this simplicity dulls the theme, and makes for a disappointing movie.
    4. I do believe a level of complexity in your theme, story, and characters is required for something to be worthy of competing for Best Picture.
    See point 4 above. I think it's fine that the movie is a fairy tale but I don't think fairy tales can rise to the level of Best Picture. If it was a novel, I wouldn't expect it to be a Pulitzer contender, either. I am less upset than bewildered.
    I have no comment on the Greek mythology, I don't know it well enough.

    My criticism here has nothing to do with the fact that two species are interacting. I love Star Trek, which has all sorts of aliens having sex and even procreating, but in all of these cases these beings are sentient, meaning the participants are able to perceive and feel things on an equal level and they can communicate these complexities to one another.

    Going back to your examples, in the case of Beauty and the Beast, if I remember the Disney version correctly, Beast was a human man who was cursed and put into a monstrous body. He is still a man inside. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel was a mer-person who exhibited all of the psychological complexity of a human woman and came from a society that mirrored a human one. For all intents and purposes, once she gained legs, she was the equivalent of a human woman. The gap between Beast and Belle, or Ariel and Prince Dude, is extremely small to the point of being non-existent.

    Unlike Beast, the creature in The Shape of Water has no backstory indicating that it used to be human. We are told that it was worshiped as a god by indigenous people, but unlike Ariel, there is no mention that it had its own civilization, or language, or culture. Mr. Spock would advise us that unless we discover evidence to the contrary, we have to assume that it is a non-sentient animal species.
    I did not forget, and I was not saying in my previous posts that the creature had no intelligence, I said that it did not demonstrate a human level of intelligence. In real life there are examples of primates in captivity that have been taught sign language, and birds that can communicate using actual spoken human languages, but in all of these cases, the animals do not have a level of intelligence that matches or exceeds that of a human.
    I think you are making a big leap here. At some point in your life I'm sure you've had the experience of a dog showing you his "red rocket" and humping your leg. This does not mean that the dog has a level of intelligence on par with your own, nor is the dog capable of consenting for you to have sex with it. Higher up on the scale of animal intelligence, male dolphins will sometimes expose their penises to divers and try to mate with them. Again, mere expression of a desire to mate does not convey intelligence and it does not give a human a right to reciprocate.

    Going back to my earlier example of Koko, the famous sign language gorilla, let's say that she learned enough sign language to ask to have sex with her keeper, and they spent days going back and forth about the implications of that. It goes back to the sentience issue. She does not operate on the same level of awareness as her human keeper, and based on what we know about the limits of gorilla intelligence, she never will. She is not capable of consenting in the same way that an adult human can, and a moral wrong will be committed if he has sex with her.

    Yes, the creature interacts with Elisa without killing her. Yes, it appears to experience pleasure when it hears music. Yes, it learns some words in sign language. Yes, it has a mating response to its human keeper. Yes, at the end of the film when Elisa is shot, it shows sadness and anger. But none of these things are outside of the realm of what animals are capable of, and none of this can justify having sex with it.

    Given the ending of the movie, you might be able to make the case that maybe Elisa and the creature are actually the same species, that what they were doing was just what nature intended. Maybe their species just works that way, the less intelligent males live in the water, and the nearly-identical-to-human females live on dry land until they encounter a male and mate, after which their gills are activated and they live in the water. But at the midway point in the movie where they actually do it, you don't know any of this to even speculate.
    Hopefully it makes more sense to you now.
    Agreed, thank you!
     
  23. Waterbear

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    "I think it's fine that the movie is a fairy tale but I don't think fairy tales can rise to the level of Best Picture."

    That says everything right there. You don't hold fairy tales in high regard while apparently most people(including the academy)have more respect for them than you do. You simply didn't like the movie and wanted half a dozen other movies to win best picture instead. That's great but the fish rape excuse is nonsense. You are deciding the creature isn't sentient enough for sex because you don't like the movie.

    This four year old Reddit thread that happens to be the very first google result looking up shape of water fish rape mentions most of the same things you just did about koko the gorilla and dog humping and star trek etc etc. So I'm not going to respond to all those same exact things but you can go read the responses in that thread if you haven't already.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi..._elisa_rapes_the_amphibious_man_in_the_shape/

    Like I said days ago though there is a very distinct history behind the creature(amazonian Gods that live in underwater crystal cities and lure women to the water so they can fall in love and turn them into fish people)that has been expressly acknowledged by the director himself so tying yourself in knots to disbelieve every act of intelligence the creature shows in the movie AND simply ignoring the mythology behind the inspiration of the creature is just silly.

    You can just dislike the movie without trying to come up with a reason that everyone else should dislike it too.




    No fish gods were harmed in the making of this film.
     
  24. Roger

    Roger Die-Cast

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    Waterbear, you asked me questions about what I was saying and I gave answers. I'm not trying to convince anyone that they should dislike something they like.

    I hadn't seen that Reddit thread but I think it's telling that there are other folks out there who were thinking along similar lines as what I said above.

    All of that stuff about crystal cities and luring women is interesting but none of it is in the movie. The movie should speak for itself.
     
  25. ---NT---

    ---NT--- Prototype

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    Not Roger, obviously, but I did want to chime in on this point since I feel similarly to how Roger feels about this movie.

    I think we all acknowledge that it's a fairy tale (hence the Disney/mermaid comment). To your question about being upset that a fairy tale beat other movies, I would say replace "live-action fairy tale" with "Disney" or even "live-action Disney". Basically, emphatically, YES - no Disney movie (except Tron) should even be considered for Best Picture. Water was just a more visually-interesting, Disney-esque bland story. GDT gets by on his name, more than the quality of his movies.

    Ugh, sorry, I am an unabashed GDT hater so please ignore me. (I do agree about Devil's Backbone though - only good movie of his, IMO.)
     
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