In Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild a nine-year-old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), struggles to survive in an apocalyptic Delta flood-zone, while her only parent, her father Wink (Dwight Henry), comes and goes and finally dies, and the thawing arctic ice unleashes a rampaging herd of prehistoric giant boars, called aurochs.
As her name suggests, Hushpuppy is what she has been constantly told to do, hush up. She's a spontaneous animal energy, on the domestic end of the spectrum opposite to the aurochs. Her father's name points to his intermittent sobriety, vision, understanding, connection to his responsibilities.
As her name suggests, Hushpuppy is what she has been constantly told to do, hush up. She's a spontaneous animal energy, on the domestic end of the spectrum opposite to the aurochs. Her father's name points to his intermittent sobriety, vision, understanding, connection to his responsibilities.
The film is a vision of the beginning and the end of life. The denizens of “The Bathtub” have only brief security against the floods, imperiled by the levees built to protect the mainland. "Bathtub" connotes cleanliness, the purity of the pre-civilized, and the assumption of contained, controlled water -- which the residents find they don't really have.
As this represents the beginning of life, the wild community is an informal society, sharing what little they have, until the more advanced -- our -- society tears them away, offering Wink medicine and putting Hushpuppy into an incongruous blue dress. The Bathtub adults are always asking what the stray Hushpuppy needs. In their unstructured world, “The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world.” On the other hand, all animal life here is “meat,” without distinction between human and beast. As Hushpuppy observes in the outside world's hospital, “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall.” In the flood, “For the animals that didn't have a dad to put them in a boat, the end of the world already happened.” Though the Bathtub denizens disdain of the niceties of civilization, their own hopeless ignorance, squalor, and self-destruction preclude our sentimentalizing The Noble Savage.
As the film is told from the nine-year-old girl's perspective, the world is full of mystery and magic -- and naivety. She is struggling to make sense of the universe, so her statements have more sweep than reality: “I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right.... The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the entire universe will get busted.” She understands her father’s death before she accepts it: “Everybody loses the thing that made them. It's even how it's supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run.” When Hushpuppy sends the dead Wink off on the floating pyre he wanted, she recasts the imagery that earlier she flung in a fit of anger: “I hope you die and after you die I'll go to your grave and eat birthday cake all by myself.” That's when she sets the fire that destroys her house. Ultimately the unreliable father believes he has prepared his daughter to survive on her own. That would make his death her rebirth. But he is simply reiterating his delusion when -- after the floods have destroyed all their sustaining flora and fauna -- he declares "I'm in control." Similarly, he tried to stop the heavy rains by drunkenly firing his rifle at the sky.
As this represents the beginning of life, the wild community is an informal society, sharing what little they have, until the more advanced -- our -- society tears them away, offering Wink medicine and putting Hushpuppy into an incongruous blue dress. The Bathtub adults are always asking what the stray Hushpuppy needs. In their unstructured world, “The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world.” On the other hand, all animal life here is “meat,” without distinction between human and beast. As Hushpuppy observes in the outside world's hospital, “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall.” In the flood, “For the animals that didn't have a dad to put them in a boat, the end of the world already happened.” Though the Bathtub denizens disdain of the niceties of civilization, their own hopeless ignorance, squalor, and self-destruction preclude our sentimentalizing The Noble Savage.
As the film is told from the nine-year-old girl's perspective, the world is full of mystery and magic -- and naivety. She is struggling to make sense of the universe, so her statements have more sweep than reality: “I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right.... The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the entire universe will get busted.” She understands her father’s death before she accepts it: “Everybody loses the thing that made them. It's even how it's supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen, they don't run.” When Hushpuppy sends the dead Wink off on the floating pyre he wanted, she recasts the imagery that earlier she flung in a fit of anger: “I hope you die and after you die I'll go to your grave and eat birthday cake all by myself.” That's when she sets the fire that destroys her house. Ultimately the unreliable father believes he has prepared his daughter to survive on her own. That would make his death her rebirth. But he is simply reiterating his delusion when -- after the floods have destroyed all their sustaining flora and fauna -- he declares "I'm in control." Similarly, he tried to stop the heavy rains by drunkenly firing his rifle at the sky.
Hushpuppy's voice-over begins with her -- bathetic -- sense of portentous pulse: “All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting, and talking to each other the ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying: I'm hungry, or I gotta poop.” As she listens to a bird’s heartbeat, she adds “But sometimes they be talkin' in codes.” Like the other meat, humans. Wink says her mother left them because when she first saw Hushpuppy the mother’s heart beat so strongly she thought she’d explode. When he describes her mother as so hot she would set pots of water boiling by walking past them, he inadvertently prompts Hushpuppy to set her destructive oven blaze. Poetry comes natural to this elemental people.
We're encouraged to believe Hushpuppy may recover her mother when a Charon figure rows her across a Styx to a brothel where all the children are embraced and fed by the prostitutes, who themselves crave a maternal order. This sentiment is undercut by the score, where Fats Waller sings "If this isn't love, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along."
Auguring the end, a fire destroys the home Hushpuppy’s mother left her. Rains flood the entire community, forcing evacuation. But Hushpuppy has learned her father’s resolve:”They think we're all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere.” The aurochs -- an emblem of wild brutish male power -- run riot until Hushpuppy faces them down. “Strong animals know when your hearts are weak” -- and hers isn’t. In this fantasy Hushpuppy grows from frisky kid to force of nature. The young female perspective draws on the archetype of woman as source of creation. The teacher makes woman also the source of culture.
We're encouraged to believe Hushpuppy may recover her mother when a Charon figure rows her across a Styx to a brothel where all the children are embraced and fed by the prostitutes, who themselves crave a maternal order. This sentiment is undercut by the score, where Fats Waller sings "If this isn't love, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along."
Auguring the end, a fire destroys the home Hushpuppy’s mother left her. Rains flood the entire community, forcing evacuation. But Hushpuppy has learned her father’s resolve:”They think we're all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere.” The aurochs -- an emblem of wild brutish male power -- run riot until Hushpuppy faces them down. “Strong animals know when your hearts are weak” -- and hers isn’t. In this fantasy Hushpuppy grows from frisky kid to force of nature. The young female perspective draws on the archetype of woman as source of creation. The teacher makes woman also the source of culture.
As she hides in a cardboard box from the rampaging fire and her angry father, Hushpuppy draws a caveman image of herself on the wall, her intimation of immortality: “When daddy kill me I won't be forgotten. I'm recording my story for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.” But in the film’s last shot, the survivor Hushpuppy walks in the distance with her friends as the waters cover the path in front of her. Like a swampy island in a flood the child disappears into the adult, innocence into experience.
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