Have you ever felt truly alone? Like nobody sees or understands you? Awkward, unwanted? Like, perhaps, a fish out of water? Elisa Esposito has. The protagonist of The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro's magnum opus, has been mute all her life. Found alone as a baby by the waterfront, she grew up into a lonely woman of about forty, living above a Baltimore movie theater, whose only friends are marginalized people like her: Giles, her neighbor, an older gay man and starving artist, and Zelda, her fellow cleaning lady at a government lab, who has the difficult position of being black in the early 1960s. One day, Elisa meets the lab's newest resident: a mysterious, humanoid fish-man, held captive and frequently tortured by Strickland, a sadistic Army colonel with a starkly fascist streak. Nobody but Elisa seems to see the creature for what it — he — really is: a thinking, sensitive creature, capable of language, empathy and reason. And in turn, the creature sees Elisa for who she is: not for what she's missing, not for the scars on her neck, but as a whole person.
I've seen most of Guillermo del Toro's movies, from Mimic to The Shape of Water (skipping over Blade II — I'll get to it, I promise) and while I reserve the right to change my mind later, I think The Shape of Water is del Toro's masterpiece. There's always been a storybook quality to his films, going back to at least Hellboy if not The Devil's Backbone; Shape is no different. You can see the DNA of Universal's Creature from the Black Lagoon franchise; Strickland even explains that he'd pulled the creature out of a South American river somewhere. The romantic link between the creature (played by Doug Jones, not his first time playing a fishman either!) and Elisa seems to call back to the classic 50s films, in which the "Gill-men" frequently menace (or at least are obviously attracted to) the female leads of those films. But for all his faults, del Toro is cleverer than to merely regurgitate 1950s monster movies; in Shape, he has crafted a story about finding belonging amidst a world run by cruel men.
The cinematography is classic del Toro; no expense is spared in recreating 1960s Baltimore, or perhaps more accurately a moving museum of 1960s Baltimore. Through use of color and filter, the film has a feeling of unreality or perhaps surreality. Green is the word of the day in this film: green clothes, green soap, green cars, green pie, green water, green fishmen. We get a little bit of orange to contrast; one scene has Strickland returning home from working overnight to a blocky, modernist house on a sunny early autumn morning, orange sun with orange leaves, orange kitchen bathed in orange light, orange clothes on his very white wife — like if a certain version of the American Dream were a creamsicle.
I have always struggled with the depiction of disability in film. Most of the time I find it problematic at best. Disabled characters are usually depicted for the following reasons: as torture pets whose suffering is intended to make able-bodied audiences feel good about themselves; as token representations to meet a cynical marketing metric (thereby making able-bodied audiences feel good about themselves); and finally, as someone whose disability is a flaw to be cured (thereby making able-bodied audiences feel good about themselves.) You can make the argument that Elisa as a character falls somewhere into one of these categories, but I think that's not just cynical, but arguably missing the point of the film.
So yes, granted, not everyone in the disability community was happy with The Shape of Water, particularly with Sally Hawkins, a non-disabled person, in the role as the mute Elisa. While her ASL sign language (apparently period-accurate, though I wouldn't really know and I've been signing ASL since the 90s) is very readable and clear (pretty good for someone who had to learn it in a hurry), her character is nevertheless reliant on others to be her voice, Giles or Zelda sounding out the words as Elisa signs to them. There's a symbolism there, especially since the creature, whose actual voice is only capable of sounds like "hiss!" and "gronk!" is the only one who communicates back to her with sign language; everyone else uses their voice to speak to her, or for her. As mentioned earlier, at one point Elisa explains to Giles that the creature is the only one, the only person (human or otherwise) that she's met her entire life, who doesn't see her as "incomplete." Some disabled commentators found this deeply offensive, and I can't understand why; leaving aside the obvious issue of a non-disabled actress playing a disabled character (and I suspect the unconventionally-attractive Sally Hawkins was picked specifically for her appearance, which raises its own questions) what Elisa expresses to Giles really spoke to me. I've struggled with my identity, my sense of self, since I was a kid; I've often felt that disability is something imposed on us externally, rather than something that we are. Or to put it another way, we're only "disabled" in a society that wasn't built for us. No matter how much we try to define for ourselves our identities, who we are is ultimately going to be shaped by how other people see us.
Or take Giles. Giles is gay, and rather obvious about it at that for a man in his fifties or perhaps early sixties. He never outright says it, and it's never outright said to his face, but it's clear that his queerness is why he lost his job at an advertising firm and his former boss, who's happy to string him along as a contractor for less pay and no job security, is unwilling to actually let him have his job back. Ultimately, he gets nothing for himself, except the satisfaction of helping Elisa (who is probably the closest thing to a daughter he's likely to get) with her cockamamie scheme of smuggling her fishy boyfriend out of the lab before the scientists vivisect him. The question of course arises: what about Giles? What does he get? Doesn't he deserve to have a happily-ever-after ending too? You could argue that it's not really his story, but I think that's bullshit, because the story is about people who have been othered by society. (Mercifully, Giles lives to tell the tale at the end of the film; ultimately, it seems that his role is serving as narrator for Elisa, who has no voice of her own except in a single scene, which some people took as her having been miraculously "cured." In this scene, towards the end of the film, she imagines a whole song and dance number. But she isn't cured, she just wishes for something she can never have; if you say you've never wished for such a thing, I'll call you a liar.)
Then there's Zelda. While the film isn't explicitly about race, race plays a factor: a man Giles is attracted to turns out to not only be homophobic, but profoundly racist, and then he's never seen again. Zelda, for her part, is almost archetypal, a sassy middle-aged black woman who isn't afraid to work blue with her commentary. After ten years of working with Elisa she understands ASL perfectly fine, but is more than happy to do most of the talking as they wipe down bathrooms or clean bloodstained labs. Self-assured and probably the most competent person in the film, she is nonetheless a black woman in the early 1960s, who faces discriminations great and small all day only to go home to an ungrateful, sexist lump of a man who clearly doesn't love her anymore and the feeling is mutual. After an initial reluctance, she helps Elisa with her plan to free the creature, and ultimately is the one to call Elisa to warn her that Strickland is headed her way (after her husband just casually spills the beans.)
But neither of them really get any closure. Nor does Strickland, arguably. Strickland is The Man personified: tall, imposing, angry, controlling, and a profound believer in the idea that the world and everyone in it belongs to him. He covers his wife's mouth while they fuck; he later suggests to Elisa that her muteness turns him on. He's casually racist to Zelda and seems to get off on torturing the creature, which he terms "the Asset." Unquestionably the film's boogeyman, a perfectly mundane reflection of the monstrous Pale Man of Pan's Labyrinth, Strickland isn't just a thoroughly loathsome human being, he's the big swinging dick of the film, a monument to white power in the politically charged world of 1962. (Incidentally, while the dates don't quite line up, the Cuban Missile Crisis is happening in the background, probably the single biggest dick-measuring contest in the history of the world with the potential to kill us all.) It's interesting how Giles, despite also being a white man, has little real power of his own. He, like Zelda, and like Elisa, is considered the Other. Even Brewster, Zelda's reprehensible husband, has very little power as a black person, but tries to assert his power as a man over Zelda. (He fails, because, just like Strickland, he's a coward.)
I guess I don't really know where I'm going with this. Ultimately I disagree with a lot of the broader takes from disability advocates about this film; to me, this isn't a film about being othered, it's a film about finding belonging in the margins. The film's final scene, where Elisa is revealed to have been at least half fish-person all along (those scars are in fact her gills) doubles down on the central thesis of the film, that even someone who has been Othered can find a place they can call home. Elisa's two best friends are also othered in different ways; she nonetheless argues with them because they can't fully understand where she's coming from any more than she can fully understand what they face every day. There's an argument here for intersectionality, wherein people of different marginalized groups can nevertheless come together and find commonality in a world that doesn't seem to want us.
If only it were that simple. But it feels like we're all in our own little fishbowls sometimes, able to see the world outside, but distorted, out of shape, and out of reach.
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