The Amphibian Man | Monstrosity in Shape of Water
It hopefully comes as no surprise to anyone who has been around even a little bit of time that I’m quite a fan of monsters. In fact, I’ve quite literally written books on the subject. As a researcher in cultural storytelling, I find monsters to be a beautiful source of study. They tell us so much about the societies who spin their tales over dark campfire nights - they tell us what the society fears as much as what they hold dear, and how they deal with the troublesome reality of difference. When we look at popular culture, the monsters are also there, lingering at the corners, ready to reveal their secrets to us if we just dare to look.
Today, I want to talk about a very special kind of monster, one which has been treated strangely in pop culture since it’s movie’s release. The Shape of Water was initially released in 2017, and despite the Oscars and the beauty in the film, it became known as the movie where a woman wants to bone a fish. And that’s not inherently not true for the movie, but I think it oversimplifies some incredibly complicated and beautiful notes to the film.
So today, in honor of October, let’s talk about a monster: a beautiful and appealing monster that has a special place in the hearts of all those Othered. Today, we’re analysing the Amphibian Man from the Shape of Water.
So, let’s start with the movie itself, because I think the context the Amphibian Man finds himself in is important. And, quick note, I will be calling this monster the Amphibian Man, rather than any other terminology simply because that’s how he’s denoted often by people working on the film. In the script he doesn’t really have a name, and although he shares characteristics with some very real monsters, which we’ll talk about soon, I think it important to understand these as two monsters which are inspiring of one another, rather than as the same.
Anyway, the film Shape of Water is a fantasy romance movie, where our main character Elisa, a mute cleaner, falls in love with our strange monstrous the Amphibian Man. Set in the heart of the Cold War, in Maryland in the United States, the film has a strange darkness to it that the beauty of the Amphibian Man and his love story quite literally lights up. While the film is often described using the designation of “fantasy romance”, I think it more important to think of it as a monster movie romance, because monster movies have a very specific structure and flow to them which is different to a traditional fantasy. As we dig into the Amphibian Man, it’s important to keep this context in mind - the combining of the genres of monster movie and romance - because this context is key to really truly understanding our monster.
Our main character, who we experience the monster through, is Elisa Esposito. Elisa is a mute. She cannot speak, but can hear. In order to communicate she uses sign language. Elisa is said to have been found by a river as a baby, her throat slashed on each side in a way which had removed the vocal chords. She finds a natural and felt connection with the Amphibian Man when she first runs into him. She finds an ability to see in each other, to hear each other without ever having to speak the same language. Both are capable of hearing without words having to be said in order to comprehend.
The Amphibian Man is a beautiful figure, with bright biolumenesce. He’s described in the film as capable of alternating between two separate breathing mechanisms. He has two sets of lungs, primary and secondary lungs, which are separated by a thick joined cartilegdge. Despite this, though, he seems to use water as his primary source of breathing, and seems to have a need for salt water specifically. Strickland notes he captured him from the river, which still, actually tracks.
This is because there’s a lot of similarity between the Amphibian Man and an mythic Amazonian monster called a Yacuruna. It has been noted that Guillermo del Toro was inspired by the Creature from the Black Lagoon for his monster, but I also think there are so many similarities we can draw between the Amphibian Man and the Yacuruna that I think there was definitely at least some sense of connection there, too.
Yacuruna as a story and creature are primarily found from the people around the Amazon. It’s said that Yacuruna are particularly found at the mouths of rivers. They are described as fishmen, who sit at the mouth of a river and possess strangely human-like qualities. In the stories, they transform into attractive men in order to lure women into the river, never to be seen again. In some cases, the people nearby see the creatures as a god, but for others, they simply give gifts as a way to appease them.
Strickland points to a lot of similarities to this story. He finds the Amphibian Man in a river, but the creature has a need for salt in the water - like, maybe, the mouth of a river? Strickland also says “The natives in the Amazon worshipped him as a God.” He’s also humanoid enough to follow through a similar perspective as the described Yacuruna, and, in the end, does take a woman down into the depths with him - never to be seen again.
Despite the similarities, del Toro has made some deliberate changes to the narrative when it comes to our dear Amphibian Man. The most obvious is that the connection the monster has with woman gets transformed from one of darkness and violence, to one of compassion, love and understanding.
This alteration is a primary proponent of the movie. Del Toro worked actively to transform typical considerations of the monster into one with a different understanding. This is a core component of the movie, and is successfully done by giving us all the traditional elements of a monster movie overlayed with a romance.
The movie follows the typical structure of a romance movie, starting with the current place of our female protagonist - because most romances also have the protagonist as a female. We then have the meet cute, where our two love interests meet. Our meet cute is in a government facility while one of the characters is in chains, but the idea still stands. A romance movie typially has added complications which somehow conspire to keep our two love interests from truly getting together. Soemtimes, they successfully do, and then something new comes in to create more tension and pull them apart again for some time.
And, conviently, this stage of the movie also ties really neatly together with a hunting monster movie. There are a few types of monster movie, but most have the same idea of growing tension, death, destruction, and desperation until about halfway through, when the main character(s) then decide to hunt the monster. Or maybe to escape? Or, sometimes, to escape and then hunt. But either way, right as our romantic couple get together - escaped from the facility to finally spend their days together - the antagonist, the monster hunter in his monster hunter movie, has began their hunt.
This is why Strickland, I think, works so well as an antagonist. He’s the classic rough around the edges monster hunter. The guy someone else would come to and say, “he’s trouble, but by God he’s the best we have.” He’s not full, by the rules G-man, but he’s got the heart of the mission still in mind. In a different move - hell, even in the same movie told from a different perspective, where we don’t have the romance story running over the top - Strickland would be our protagonist. He would be the hero.
And now may be a good time to talk about the role of the monster, at least for our purposes here. Monsters, at their heart, are always the strange Other. They’re the things that don’t fit into the neat little categorical boxes we’ve drawn up for ourselves. A vampire is both alive and dead - two categories which typically don’t have an intersection. They can also represent that which falls between categoires, things that don’t fit into one or the other, like the separations between man and fish, for example. I’ve talked a lot about this is many many many other places, so you can go check those out if you’re interested.
The important thing is this: the monster is the outsider, the thing that doesn’t fit, the piece of the puzzle we’d rather not think about or which distort our perspectives of what’s possible. It represents the Other - it’s why monsters have always been a pop culture stand in for commentary on other social Others. Because our strange horrid creatures of our imagination are a reflection of how a wider society feels - and these social others are often treated just as monstrous as these creatures from our social imagination.
So, when del Toro adds a romantic plot line for our monster movie, he does something really interesting to the traditional monster movie: he humanises it. He flips our perspective on it. He makes us see the monster as a being, with wants and needs and a history. He makes us see it with compassion and empathy. He humanises the Other, and by doing so flips our understanding of monstrosity.
In fact, compassion, empathy and understanding are the underlying messages of del Toro’s the Shape of Water. He demosntrates our ability to understand others without actually needing to speak. Communication is often perceived as the greatest barrier to understanding others, and yet del Toro gives us a love story between two people who never speak a word.
The setting of this being during the Cold War is an important focus for this setting. It’s not just to set a greensh gray filter to the movie, to contrast to the bright luminescent joy of connection between the two lovers. It’s also not a reasonable explanation for government experimentation on the Amphibian Man - that could be justified by shady government tactics at any point in history, really. No, the Cold War is an important point because it’s a time period, particularly in American history, that is marked by an increase of xenophobia. There is great fear of the Other, on top of heightened tensions between races with the growing Civil Rights movement. We get a glimpse of this when Giles, Elisa’s neighbour, is at a cafe when a black couple gets sent away due to the person running the bar not wanting them there. The landscape around them is scared of the foreigner, scared of the dark neighbour, scared of anything that strayed from the cherry pastels of a white sixty’s housewife world.
And it’s a lot of these marginalised others who are our main characters throughout the movie. Elisa’s muteness makes it difficult for her to navigate a world where others are less interested in learning to communicate with someone different. Giles, her neighbour, is a gay man. Zelda, her colleague, a Black woman. This a rag-tag group of strange marginalised Others who gather together to save the life of a strange creature who has fallen in love with one of them, and whose treatment at the hands of the government feels so oddly familiar to them.
It’s no accident the people the Amphibian man most connect with are those who are most ostracised from the larger society. They are overlooked and forgotten. We see this in Strickland, who refuses to even think of the fact these cleaners - one a mute and one Black - could outsmart him and outmanoeuvre him. Instead of them being the side characters, or even the mischievious antagonists hidden from sight until the climax, they are our heroes, the ones we root for. And because we are seeing the world from their perspective, we also see the human side of our monster. The social monsters show us the beauty in the other monsters.
The Amphibian Man is, by far, not a pacifist monster. He’s not helpless or calming. He’s a frightening thing that can hurt and hurt bad. We see him attack Strickland, leaving him without a finger and heavily injured. He attacks Giles’s cat, and when Giles sees him eating his cat, the Amphibian Man attacks Giles. Despite the physical attack on him, Giles still consoles him. He still has compassion and empathy, understanding why the monster reacted the way he did. The Amphibian Man realises this, and uses his power to heal Giles as a way of thanking him for his care. Therefore, even when the creature is shown as the violent monster, it’s still accompanied by soft understanding and a realisation that when he attacks, it’s out of fear or confusion.
Ultimately, what we understand from the monster in Shape of Water is the power of communication. And I don’t mean the type of communication we’re used to - not words and discussions. Its not about human speech or language sharing - instead, its about communicating empathy, communicating understanding. Elisa and the Amphibian Man fall in love without ever sharing words, without ever fighting to get words heard by the other. They, instead, share themselves through their actions of compassion, understanding, and selfless actions of love. This is what brings them together. This is what brings them all together. Zelda acts on the love for her friend. Giles acts on the love of others who are oppressed. It isn’t words that connect people, but compassion and love.
What is beautiful about the Amphibian Man is that he is a monster, by most reasonings and definitions. But he is not the most monstrous of the movie. The combination of genres is what makes the Amphibian Man so wonderfully beautiful. The romance genre layered on top of the monster movie has one important change to our monster: it humanises him. It makes us empathise him.
Through him, through the romance, through their love, we come to understand, love and embrace the Other. This is what the Amphibian Man comes to show us: to embrace, to share, and ultimately to love.