Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon set the stage for future monster films, inspiring somewhat of a remake 63 years later, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. At the age of six, Toro was inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon and found it to be very romantic and assumed that the two would end up together but was shocked to find this was not the case, he was determined to fix it. In this way, The Shape of Water is very similar to Arnold’s 1954 monster horror film but with a significantly alternate relationship ending.
The Shape of Water, set in Cold War-era Baltimore, is full of characters who are different and lonely. Eliza, besides being an orphan, is mute — she can hear, but she communicates through sign language with Giles and Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her co-worker at the research facility where they clean labs. Life seems to have passed right by Giles, a commercial artist whose skills are being phased out by a photo-mad advertising economy, and he’s nursing a hopeless crush on the handsome owner of the pie shop nearby. Zelda, already viewed with disdain by the lab’s white employees because she’s black, is married to a man she loves but who seems to see her as an inconvenience. Zelda and Eliza’s boss is security supervisor Strickland (Michael Shannon), an imposing and prejudiced man who carries around a cattle prod and is desperate to please his superiors, which he hides behind a blowhard demeanor.
Strickland has traveled from the Amazon to the lab with a creature he calls “the Asset” (Doug Jones), an imposing water-dwelling creature that has gills like a fish but can stand like a man and has two breathing systems, though the above-water anatomy shuts down after too long without water.
The creature’s multiple breathing systems are being studied in the lab for their military applications by Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is also a Soviet spy. Hoffstetler sees the Asset as a marvel. Strickland, a bigot, just calls it an “abomination.”
But Eliza has always been the outsider, and she is curious about the Asset. Over the course of many furtive visits to the lab by Eliza, they develop a connection. And when the lab’s and the military’s plans for the Asset become clear, she knows she can’t just sit by and watch. She has to take action.
The Shape of Water is a fairy tale for adults, and there’s a good reason it’s for adults. Young children aren’t born with prejudice; they have to learn it, and they learn from watching their elders treating those who are different like they are less-than. What The Shape of Water has to teach, however subtly, is much needed in a prejudiced world. It paints borders rooted deep in the American soul — between countries, races, abilities, and desires — with compassion and gentleness.
The film takes its name from Plato’s idea that in its purest form, water takes the shape of an icosahedron, a 20-sided polyhedron, evoking the idea that beauty, and humanity, has many faces. Like most fairy tales — which often involve glorious and beautiful beings who take on disguises to teach craven people a lesson — The Shape of Water is devoted to reminding us that everyone is beautiful, and that it’s those we cravenly consider maimed and strange and frightening who will inherit the earth.
Del Toro always renders his films’ social critiques in fantastical and imaginative images, and The Shape of Water is among his best, with a creature that’s both fully reptilian and strangely human, a black-and-white dream dance sequence, and underwater imagery that verges on the balletic. The colour palette leans heavily on greens, ranging from muddy to emerald — I suspect partly because green is the colour of the sea and partly because it’s the combination of two primary colours, yellow and blue. (In a terrific visual joke, Strickland buys a Cadillac that is teal, the “colour of the future,” and gets angry when people call it green.)
And those images and colours are brought to life with a perfect cast. As a seething, disintegrating force of pure ego, Shannon is the definition of scenery-chewing. Jenkins gives one of the most empathy-stirring performances I’ve seen in a long time. And you could be forgiven for forgetting that Hawkins barely utters a word throughout the whole film: Her eyes and face and gestures do the work of thousands of lines of dialogue.
Fairy tales have happy endings; in The Shape of Water, it’s a bit more bittersweet, a fantasy that strikes a note of hope, and suggests that real love means crossing the divides we erect between us and those different from us. “Where you go, I will go,” Ruth tells Naomi. It is a difficult and beautiful dream — and del Toro makes it feel like just a bit less of a fantasy.
In the opening scenes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon we are introduced to the stunning heroine Kay, steering a boat to pick her partner up. This foregrounds her as an atypical heroine of the time, a blend of independence, beauty, naivety and innocence. While she looks like the other 1950’s heroines, she doesn’t act like them; she is clearly and educated woman, who has no difficulty holding a convocation with older men of status. This suggests that she has come from a fairly wealthy upbringing, where independence was prized; which is developed as a theme though the way she presents herself in her speech, dress, confidence, and ability to communicate articulately. Her direct eye contact and active contribution to the convocation lie in direct contrast to her coquettish and charming behaviour. Standing shoulder to shoulder and patting the other characters arms throughout the film, she softens her directness and forms emotional connections.
The sexism of Black Lagoon is especially egregious–and I think it was so by 1950s standards as well as ours. The film’s treatment of the character of Kay Lawrence has a great deal to answer for, but ironically, there are some signs that director Jack Arnold and screenwriters Harry Essex and Arthur Ross were actually trying to be pretty progressive and broad-minded for the times. Kay is a career woman, a scientific researcher in the same field as Mark and David. In fact, some dialogue establishes that Kay’s contribution to Mark’s marine biology institute has been crucial and that the whole success of the institute is built on it. Portraying a woman scientist as a full colleague was, admittedly, unusual and progressive for 1954, a time when the presence of women in what we now call STEM careers was extremely slender. The script also positions Mark and David as opposites, with Mark being more knee-jerk and rigid, and his attitude toward Kay is part of the contrast between them.
But for all of this, in the final analysis Kay is little more than the typical “damsel in distress” whose main function in the story is to scream whenever the Gill-Man shows up. The male characters treat her with paternalistic condescension, with the usual 1950s SF/horror trope that this activity or that one is “too dangerous” for her (because she’s a woman). Furthermore, the Gill-Man monster seems bizarrely obsessed with her–swiping webbed claws in her direction (several times), groaning and lurching toward her whenever possible, and even carrying her away to its hideout at the film’s end. Although the monster kills and mauls several men over the course of the film, the obvious implication is that it has special interest in Kay, suggesting an unusual danger from which the other members of the expedition must protect her. It’s unclear in the film’s climax what the Gill-Man intends to do with her after her abduction. We’re obviously meant to think of rape, thus morally justifying the creature’s destruction at the end. The Kay character is essentially no different than Fay Wray in the hands of King Kong: the gentle white lily flower whose virtue the men must protect from an ugly and potentially radicalised monster.
If The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s sexism is terrible enough, its environmental sensibilities are even worse–and here again, I suspect ironically that the film was trying to be somewhat progressive. When they finally realise they are dealing with an amphibious creature, Mark insists on capturing the creature, alive or dead, while David is content with bringing back photographs and samples. Mark ultimately pays the ultimate price for his aggressiveness, being mauled to death by the Gill-Man underwater. I presume this is to “punish” the aggressive approach in the eyes of the audience, vaunting David as the more reasonable man. But ultimately this isn’t where the film winds up. After the creature kills Mark and abducts Kay, the remaining members of the expedition unrelentingly hunt it down and destroy it. Not a single word is mentioned in the entire film as to whether the creature is intelligent, is part of a community, or even whether there might be others of its kind in the Black Lagoon or elsewhere. The Rita expeditions are resolutely certain in their judgments: the monster is a primordial leftover from millions of years ago, exists alone in a moral and ecological vacuum, can’t be reasoned with and has no appetite other than for destruction. They’re so certain of these judgments that they aren’t even discussed, even to reject any counter-possibilities. They simply construct what they think the creature is and then act on it.