The Shape of Genre
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro's 2017 dark monster romance, has been on my list to watch for many years. And I finally did. And I want to talk about it.
I know it's a bit late on to be talking about Shape of Water - nearly eight years after its release - but I think sometimes hindsight can help to enlighten new thoughts and new perspectives. When I had it on my list, I knew it was a monster movie that became the butt of a lot of jokes about a woman wanting to have sex with a fish. I thought it was an exaggeration, but seeing how quickly it came together, how much this woman really did fall in love, made me a little surprised, and understand a bit about how it all came to be a small joke.
But I think Shape of Water reveals something really interesting about genre, and how the tropes of a genre can be used, manipulated and put on display to make really strong and fascinating points.
Romance vs Monster Movie
Shape of Water is a mixture of genres. It’s a romance - first and foremost. We watch as two people fall in love across their differences, and how they fight against the odds to be together. Typically, romance stories follow a three-act structure following a particular structure to the narrative. Often, the plots are focused more on character development and the growth of the relationship. Commonly, the structure starts with a meet-cute, there are challenges as the relationship grows, a midpoint crisis, and then the resolution comes when the couple overcomes their obstacles and achieve a happy ending. Obviously, there can be differences and alterations on the pattern, but this is the typical structure.
The Shape of Water fits this structure. The focus on character has us following Elisa, a mute cleaner working in Baltimore during the height of the Cold War. She communicates with sign language, finding communion with only two people who have learned her language – her neighbour Giles, and her coworker Zelda.
During her shift, Elisa sees a creature who has been brought into the military research facility she cleans, a water creature dubbed The Amphibian Man. Elisa feels an affinity for the creature, and she begins to find connection with the creature as they occasionally meet for Elisa’s lunch.
But the creature is being used for military experiments, and when the Amphibian Man’s life is threatened, Elisa acts and rescues him from the facility. Away from the facility, Elisa and the creature’s love blossoms even more.
If this was a typical romance, the couple’s primary problem would be their ultimate difference – the fact one is a fish monster and the other is a human woman. But this is not the difference that plagues them. What plagues them, what causes them strife, is the other genre: the monster movie.
If the movie was told through the perspective of any of the other character – well, at least the ones from the facility – this would be a quintessential monster movie. We have a strange otherworldly monster, who may or may not be a god. Something that seems otherworldly, unable to exist in this world without causing fear and angst.
The Amphibian Man is, quite frankly, scary. From Elisa’s point of view, we see him as primarily sympathetic, but one of the first scenes we as an audience see of him is a bleeding and injured Colonel Strickland. The man had lost two fingers. We immediately see, therefore, that the Amphibian Man is violent. Maybe only when brought to it – as we do know that Strickland is a complete ass – but it is still possible.
The Monster
Monsters are often a reflection of what we fear the most. Monsters are often what lives on the borders of the possible. Monster Studies scholar Jeffrey Cohen notes how important it is that monsters live on the borders of what is possible, and as such often come to represent the Other. They represent the foreigners, and the worlds of the unknown. Here Be Dragons. A monster is a reflection, one which reflects a culture back on itself. It shows us what is respectful and “normal” and contrasts this with what is scornful and disgusting.
The different perspectives on the Amphibian Man reflects this perspective on monsters. He’s a hybrid, a creature policing the boundaries of the possible. He’s amphibious, possessing the ability to move between land and water without disrupting his breathing. And he’s humanoid, a creature unlike anything else the world has ever seen.
The definitions and categories the Amphibian Man is putting on display are the boundaries of personhood. What bestows someone personhood? For Dr Hoffstetler, the primary scientist in charge of studying the creature, he begins to see the creature as having personhood because of his ability to communicate. He sees the creature and Elisa together and realises his ability to understand human speech means there is some form of personhood bestowed on him.
For Elisa, however, things are different. And its this difference that is at the core of truly understanding the importance of the Shape of Water.
Communication and Personhood
There are three main human characters: Elisa, Giles and Zelda. Each of them have an important place in a discussion of the way personhood is experienced, communicated, and felt.
Elisa is mute. She is not deaf, and so not a part of the deaf community. She has to communicate with her friends and the world around them through signing, putting her also somehow outside of the hearing community, despite being able to hear. For some of the movie, her signing just seems to be a natural flow. Zelda understands her, and so does Giles, and the fact Elisa is signing doesn’t stand out.
But then Elisa communicates with others. One of my favourite scenes is the confrontation between Elisa and our antagonist Stickland, when Elisa bravely begins to sign “Fuck You” to Stickland, but he’s unable to understand her direct in-your-face insult. He knew it wasn’t something good, but didn’t know what it was and therefore was powerless – to an extent – against it.
But at the core of this scene is also the primary way Elisa is situated in relation to other members of society. She sits outside of them, unable to communicate fluidly and freely with those she lives and works around. For Hoffstetler, would this give Elisa a form of personhood? She may understand human speech, but she cannot voice it.
Giles, too, sits outside typical society. He’s a closeted gay man, and his decision to help Elisa comes after he is forcibly rejected by a restaurant owner, after the owner revealed he was both racist and homophobic.
Zelda, too, is marginalised. She is Black woman, someone firmly on the outskirts and often rejected and silenced. Her discussions about her husband show how it is not just her position as a person of colour that Others her, but particularly her as a Black woman.
Both Giles and Zelda are silenced as much as Elisa. While it is not a physical removal of their voice, their social voice is still removed, ignored, and silenced. Giles is thrown out of establishments alongside a Black couple. Zelda is often ignored by her own husband, and looked over when it comes to higher-ups in society.
The Amphibian Man is, too, on the outskirts, and the way he is controlled and his existence is put at the mercy of the white men who run the facility mimics the positions of his saviours. It is these people, on the outskirts of society, who see him for what he is. And this also includes, to an extent, Hoffstetler himself, a foreigner in the middle of Cold War America.
The Effect of Mixed Genres
Sometimes, mixing genres can be strange and one can overshadow the other. But in this case, in the case of the Shape of Water, the mixture of genres shows us exactly what is at the core of the movie.
If this movie had been made from a slightly different perspective, a monster movie, then the villain of the film, Richard Strickland, would have been the hero. He would have been the victorious strong man who was able to hunt down a monster and use it to help his country. But because the film’s perspective is flipped, and we’re following the marginalised, he became a villain.
Mixing the typical monster movie with romance has one important effect: it softens the roles of many characters, and provides a human filter on the monster. The way we are focused on the romance narratives means that we, as an audience, are also focused on the way people treat the creature. We see humanity, similar to the characters who also see humanity and personhood in the creature.
In other words, it is primarily because of the addition of a second genre – the addition of romance – that makes the monster movie more poignant. It changes the perspective of a monster movie, making us suddenly sympathetic for the monster because we see the human inside. The Romanticism of this added genre makes us see new perspectives on the dynamics of communication. Love gives us new languages: body language, the language of love and community - forms of communication which are sometimes the only ones available to someone like Elisa.
Sometimes, mixing genres can muddle things. It can confuse the outcomes and make things unclear. Or maybe one genre outshines the other. But sometimes, when done masterfully and beautifully, the mixing of the genres can reveal aspects and dynamics of one another that is, otherwise, lost.