The Shape of Water

So what is the shape of water anyway? 

  Water is a malleable element that assumes the shape of its container. It is a life-force, an  inner quality that can’t be read from its surface. It has no exclusive shape but is a sustaining presence.

The same can be said for humanity. Humanity is an essential quality that can be found in any number of forms. Here it propels the mute Eliza, the lost gay artist Giles and reluctant help Delilah, and it is embodied in the mysterious amphibian monster. But that natural humanity has been trapped by the US army which intends either his live dissection or his murder to serve the government’s political interests and paranoia. 

That merman seems godlike in his healing powers. That’s because he is a creature of nature, not the species man so long removed from it. He restores Giles’ hair, disappears his wound, cures his own bullet-holes — and ultimately brings eternal life via love to Eliza. 

As an orphan Eliza Esposito is cut off from any earthly roots, but she has an instinctual connection to the source of life, water. Hence her immediate attraction to and sympathy for the merman. She persuades Giles to help save him because of their common humanity, theirs and the merman’s.  

Her job reduces her to cleaning the masters’ piss, blood and excrement. But her humanity has profounder roots than anyone else here. In the opening scene she is asleep and so freed into her natural state — floating in an ocean that fills her room, all the furniture bobbing about, until she eases back down to her fish-shaped sofa and awakens into her lesser world, mundane reality. While her egg-timer ticks off her breakfast, she masturbates in her tub, exulting in her freedom, fullness and immersion.  

The film does have a fish out of water, but it’s not the merman. It’s the pie-clerk, a bigot from Ottawa who fakes the chain’s “Southern Hospitality.” The positive variation on this is the Russian spy who has been educated in America and is now to be reluctantly “extracted” back to Russia — and death.

The film also has a monster but it’s not the merman. It’s the obscene director Strickland. As he grinds his candies and scarfs painkillers he pretends to civilized order, discipline, virtue, righteous citizenship, potency, but he’s the film’s biggest loser. He tortures the merman monstrously, sexually threatens Eliza, demeans her and her partner Zelda, and so provokes the audience’s proper revulsion that we cheer when his new Cadillac gets crunched.  

Like water and humanity, manhood cannot be characterized by its outer appearance or shape. Zelda has bigger balls than husband Brewster. Despite his failure as an illustrator, the gay and lonely Giles proves manlier than Strickland when he helps free the merman. He drives the rescue laundry van, then knocks down Strickland to enable the escape. 

So, too, the merman’s flat groin unfurls a sexual potency that fulfills Eliza and brings them eternal love. This while macho Strickland loses his fingers, which even after reattachment turn black and putrid. He may have saved his “pussy finger” but he’s ultimately emasculated.

Guillermo del Toro pointedly sets the film in late 1950s America. That’s the America that the current Republican government aims to restore. Hence the pie-clerk’s racism and homophobia, and Strickland’s racism, sexism, classism and smug materialism. Strickland is sure “The Lord’s image” is his, not black Zelda’s and certainly not the merman’s. Indeed, he loses the trail when he snaps “What am I doing, interviewing the shit cleaners?” Strickland is so alienated from nature that his Caddy is pointedly “teal, not green.” This sterile military-industrial complex admits no green beyond the Stricklands’ gelatine dessert, the sickly key lime pies, and Giles’s ad drawing that loses out to a photograph. 

As the five-star General Hoyt admonishes him, “Decency is what we export. We don’t use it ourselves.”  Their attack on the merman evokes Trump’s evisceration of the EPA, his revival of the murderous coal industry and then plotting to pillage the national parks and to mine the entire seacoast with oil drilling. To Strickland the mysterious captive natural power is only “the asset” — as negative a positive as one could assign a living creature.  

Though the Russians are as murderous as the American’s, the Russian scientist spy Hofstetler sustains the human value: “I don't want an intricate, beautiful thing destroyed!” We don’t have to be restricted to our government’s inhumanity. 

Though the film is framed with shots of Eliza floating in a watery world, first during her dream, then liberated with her merman, the film has another frame, Giles’s narration. He tells the story. As he admits its mystery and his incomprehension it represents his blossoming into a fuller self as well as Eliza’s. 
     Initially he’s an ex-alcoholic failure struggling to get work drawing ad designs. That’s a very ‘50s profession, sustaining a false dream-life for American consumerism as false as the fantasies screened in the Orpheum under Giles’ and Eliza’s flats. “Make them happier,” he’s advised on his cartoon family. Encountering the merman liberates him too. Giles starts drawing emotional representations of the strange creature and his connection to our humanity. Giles switches his hand and his imagination from selling a false image of happiness to probing our wilder possibilities.