Get Out, The Shape of Water, and the Narrative of Conflict
In the wake of last Sunday’s 90th Academy Awards Ceremony, perhaps the most prominent narrative online has been that of The Shape of Water beating the “more deserving” Get Out for Best Picture. As our own Eddie Losoya pointed out on Twitter, it’s a strangely zero-sum discussion; one that both propagates an unfortunate trend in Western Society to pit people of color against one another, and serves not to celebrate both films, but to denigrate a deserving winner. The Narrativity crew has been admittedly more divided on The Shape of Water’s strengths than we have on those of Get Out, but there’s no question that both films present challenging ideas to their respective audiences, and are in most cases deserving of the praise they’ve received. Which is why it’s so surprising to see the backlash against The Shape of Water begin less than 24 hours after it took home the Oscar. While the Oscars tend towards being divisive at best, and pointless at worst, it’s interesting to see the narrative shift so suddenly to indicate a specific conflict between two equally deserving films. It might have something to do with The Shape of Water’s misconceived perception as a “safer” film than Get Out, a film that proudly wears its difficult subject matter on its sleeve. As much as the conversation about which film is “more deserving” of Best Picture accolades is a reductive one, it might be worth examining the films in context with one another, to determine what makes each film great, and try to consider why the Academy’s voting block might vote for one over the other.
For those who haven’t seen it (first of all, what is wrong with you?), Get Out, a horror/comedy from writer-director Jordan Peele, was one of the breakout hits of 2017, not least of which because of its frank interrogation of racial politics and its in-your-face depiction of “benign” racism. Part of why Get Out is such an effective film is because it forces its white viewers to engage with the idea that our best intentions are often still problematic, and that performative “anti-racism” is essentially just a different flavor of racism. Take patriarch Dean Armitage’s (Bradley Whitford) oft-quoted comment to his daughter’s new boyfriend, Chris Washington, early in the film for example: “If I could, I would have voted for Obama for a third term.” An already uncomfortable moment (meeting your girlfriend’s parents) is ratcheted up to unbearably cringe-inducing through the casual microagression of Armitage using his hypothetical support of a black president to show Chris that he is “one of the good ones.” Fifteen minutes into the film and a potential white audience is already being confronted with notions of their own prejudices, however well-intentioned, and being asked to examine that prejudice through the eyes of Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris, an outsider to the Armitage estate in every sense of the word.
As the film progresses, we see the way such seemingly well-intentioned prejudice can be used to mask a more sinister agenda, as the Armitage family uses their wealth and privilege to literally steal black bodies for use as vehicles by their wealthy white neighbors. Prior to the secret auction in which Chris is sold to the highest bidder (a ghoulish visual metaphor made all the more effective by Peele’s audacious refusal of subtlety), we’re given a glimpse into the lives of the Armitage’s wealthy clients, whose fawning attempts to ingratiate themselves to Chris do little more than infantilize and not-so-subtly diminish black culture, even as the characters’ carefully chosen words say only outwardly positive things. These incidents are not isolated, and while Get Out is designed to be allegorical, its themes of oppression bolstered by benign prejudice are still deeply resonant and positioned front and centre using real-world issues. It is a difficult and often uncomfortable film for white audiences to watch, and all the better for being so. Get Out openly asks difficult questions and then smartly refuses to provide easy answers, because, frankly, there aren’t any. As the film takes great pains to point out, racism is not as black and white an issue as many (white) people believe, and even those of us who regard ourselves as “the good ones” are complicit in, and benefit from, a system explicitly designed to marginalize people of color. The eventual reduction of Chris’s worth to his body alone (the character who wins the auction explicitly states that, as his eyesight is deteriorating, he values Chris’s photographer’s eyes) simultaneously reflects an idolization of black physical prowess while devaluing the actual contributions made by people of color to both cultural and societal pursuits. Get Out’s message is as devastating as it is effective, and the film’s refusal to background its themes is just one aspect of what makes it such a captivating and frightening experience.
Conversely, Cold War-era fairy tale The Shape of Water is somewhat more coy with its thematic presentation, couched as it is in director Guillermo del Toro’s use of the fantastic in constructing his own allegories. The wealth of themes presented by The Shape of Water are no less challenging for their subtlety, however, and range from explorations of marginalization, female and non-binary sexuality, and toxic masculinity to questions of nationalism and human identity. Del Toro’s use of fantastical allegory to explore those themes is a well-worn trope in fantasy and science fiction work, in which an alien, or otherwise fantastical race, is used to represent real-world marginalized people, and one in which del Toro excels at using. While the trope itself is not uncommon in science fiction and fantasy writing, del Toro’s decision to position his allegorical creature alongside realistic characters from actual marginalized backgrounds allows him to sidestep the most common criticism of the trope: namely its erasure of marginalized groups for the sake of preserving a story’s palatability to a potentially hostile audience, who might otherwise balk at a perceived “unnecessary diversification” of a fantastical universe. (For examples of this kind of toxic hostility in sci-fi and fantasy communities, we need look no further than the often vitriolic response to the recent Star Wars movies which had the audacity to, of all things, cast women and people of color in the leading roles.) Del Toro, for his part, surrounds the Amphibian Man, around which the film revolves, with a cast of otherwise marginalized individuals: Sally Hawkins’s leading role as Elisa, the mute cleaning woman who sees in the Amphibian Man a fellow outsider, struggling to be understood; Octavia Spencer’s outspoken black coworker, Zelda, who supports Elisa’s budding relationship; and Richard Jenkins’s struggling gay artist, Giles, who finds a common ground with Elisa’s outsider romance in the otherwise homophobic and racist America of 1962.
Establishing a period setting in the early 1960s of Cold War-era America allows del Toro to confront the issues raised in the film from a somewhat comfortable distance, while still expressing how little has truly changed in the last fifty years. (It also allows for some truly captivating production design, both in the Art Deco asymmetry of Elisa’s apartment, and the Cold War Brutalism of the laboratory in which she works, but that’s neither here, nor there.) Its interrogation of the fear of the unfamiliar is as relevant as ever in 2017 (and now 2018), where homophobia and racism are still important topics of discussion, but the fantastical allegory at the center of the movie is perhaps the reason The Shape of Water has resonated as strongly as it has with both critical and commercial audiences. Although the Amphibian Man is an outsider (perhaps representing, as Eddie suggests, del Toro’s own feelings of Hollywood outsiderness), both in the laboratory, and later in Elisa’s home, he does not appear to represent any specific ethnic or sexual identity (though his treatment at the hands of the government clearly reflects the virulent homophobia and racism of the film’s time period). This lack of overt specificity, in concert with the Amphibian Man’s purely physical performance (played by Doug Jones in a characteristically wonderful creature portrayal) allows any audience member to transpose themselves into the role of the Amphibian Man. It’s an effective choice, purely because it speaks to a simple truth: everyone, at some point or another, has felt like an outsider, or like they don’t belong. Even the most toxically masculine individual, provided fair representation here through Michael Shannon’s intense performance as a torturous government agent (and in real life by certain other governmental bodies), has at some point felt a desire to belong. It is in this way that The Shape of Water uses audience inclusion to impress upon its viewers the message at its core: we are all outsiders in some way. And, the film seems to ask, if we are able to see something of ourselves in the tortured and fantastical Amphibian Man, is it really such a stretch to see the same in the less fantastical characters around him?
Though both Get Out and The Shape of Water present their respective messages clearly and effectively, the difference ultimately lies in how they present those messages. While both films are, to a degree, allegorical and deal with difficult themes, the post-Oscars groundswell of support for Get Out and subsequent denigration of The Shape of Water online (see how many sarcastic Twitter geniuses have tweeted about it as the “fish sex movie”), is disappointing, if not entirely unexpected. Get Out is a groundbreaking effort, the first debut film from a black writer-director to gross over 100 million dollars at the box office, the first Original Screenplay win for a black screenwriter, and certainly one of the most unapologetic depictions of racial tension in film since Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. And while The Shape of Water is no less effective a film, and no less worthy of accolade, it feels, in many respects like the film Guillermo del Toro has been building toward throughout his career. Then there’s the not entirely unfounded belief that The Shape of Water represents the Academy making a characteristically “safe” choice (see Joshua Covell’s excellent examination of Academy voting habits for more detail).
It’s no secret that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences loves a movie that loves Hollywood, and certainly The Shape of Water wears its love of old-school Hollywood on its sleeve, with various scenes set in a ’60s-era movie house and a fantasy sequence straight out of a classic Hollywood musical. Certainly that love must have influenced a few voters, but to dismiss The Shape of Water outright as the safe choice along the lines of Argo or The Artist, entirely based on its stylistic flourishes ignores the strength of the film’s narrative and thematic arcs, as well as its insistence on using said flourishes to simultaneously subvert the traditional Old Hollywood tropes. In any of the classic creature features from which del Toro proudly draws influence, for example, Michael Shannon’s government agent would end up as the protagonist, his toxic masculine traits a virtue, as he heroically rescues the damsel from the villainous (if possibly sympathetic) clutches of the monstrous Amphibian Man. Instead, the female protagonist (still an unfortunate rarity, even in 2018), Elisa, is imbued with the agency to both embark on a completely radical romantic adventure, and in the process rescue the object of her affection, a dramatic reversal of the typical romantic narrative roles. The Shape of Water’s great achievement then comes not just from del Toro’s ability to craft a sympathetic romance around a traditional movie monster, but to be able to map onto that romance a narrative of such creative and impressive inclusivity, and to do so while simultaneously celebrating and subverting a system ultimately designed to restrict said creativity.
The Shape of Water, for better or worse, represents the kind of incremental progress that the Academy also loves to reward, and though it’s not wrong to prefer Get Out’s louder thematic statements, the fact that two films as subversive and interesting as Get Out or The Shape of Water can even be nominated for Best Picture shows that, incremental or not, progress is being made. To frame the discussion of The Shape of Water and Get Out entirely around this emerging narrative of conflict between the two does both films a disservice and forces two exceptional works into unnecessary conflict with one another, when both should rightly be celebrated as the achievements they are. One, a confrontational allegory about the problem with performative allyship in an inherently racist system, and the other, a fantastical allegory about finding acceptance among outsiders, and neither one a turgidly reverent historical biopic. Both Get Out and The Shape of Water are fantastic films, and successfully capture the feeling of the moment in which they were made. I personally love both of them, and I’m glad that the Academy chose to recognize such daring work this year, regardless of which film ultimately won.
Even if The Shape of Water really only won to make up for Pacific Rim getting snubbed in 2013. Please do NOT @ me about this.
This article originally ran February 2019, on Narrativity.com.
