TheoFantastique

The Shape of Water has won numerous awards, including various film festivals, eventually winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Obviously, the film has been very well received, but no film is universally loved. There is always the subjective element, so it’s possible to find reviews from those for whom the film didn’t work. Even so, one negative review struck me as especially curious for two reasons. First, the review was overwhelmingly negative as it equated the film and filmmaker with spiritual evil, and second, because of the reviewer. The review was written by Brian Godawa, a screenwriter and filmmaker who approaches film from the perspective of conservative evangelical Christianity. Previously I have enjoyed some of Godawa’s work, particularly his ability to encourage evangelicals to tap into imagination, to recognize the importance of myth including when it is incorporated within the biblical text, and the importance of what he calls God’s use of a “redeemed pagan imagination.” Because of these facets of his prior work, I was amazed at the strongly negative stance he took in his review of Guillermo del Toro’s Shape. Godawa and I had a few exchanges on this in the comments section of his Facebook page, but with this post I will engage more fully with some of the major concerns that I have with Godawa’s interpretation of Shape, as well as some of the conclusions he draws in his analysis.

In response to the Academy Award wins for Shape, Godawa wrote a review on his website titled “Oscar Win: The Shape of Water Reveals the Soul of Hollywood Bestiality.” The piece begins as follows:

A sci-fi interspecies romance. A mute female janitor working in a 1960s top-secret government facility falls in love with an amphibious fish-man that looks like a modern Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Okay, so I have to give the Academy kudos for not giving the Oscar to the movie that celebrates adult sexual exploitation of teens. Instead, they opted for the movie that celebrates sex with animals.

That’s like kicking out Harvey Weinstein, but keeping Roman Polanski.

And it is entirely predictable.

A theater full of moral hypocrites, sexual predators and their enablers joke about how depraved they are, and avoid speaking truth to their power, while they award best picture to a Christophobic fantasy about sex with animals.

This quote gives the reader a feel for the tone and approach Godawa takes. In his view Shape incorporates stereotypical views of Christianity, denigrates the Christian concept of the “image of God” which he sees as the major thrust of the film, and it promotes bestiality, all under the auspices of a pagan evolutionary worldview. I’ll address each of these areas with the relevant quotes from Godawa’s article.

Stereotype of Christianity
Let’s begin with the allegation that Shape incorporates stereotypes of Christianity. To support this claim Godawa references the Strickland character in the film. He is the head of the government’s secret program to study and exploit the Creature for possible use in America’s space program, and perhaps even the military. For Godawa, “Strickland represents the Christian worldview in this story as he quotes the Bible and refers to ‘the image of God’ in the dialogue.” But Godawa sees through del Toro’s ruse: “What he actually is is a stereotypical caricature of Christianity. A demonized monster.”

But let’s step back for a moment. It is clear that del Toro wants us to see the influence of a form of Christianity and some of its teachings, at least as some may understand them, in the Strickland character. Does this necessarily mean that Strickland represents all of Christianity and the Christian worldview? Not necessarily. When we consider that del Toro is a self-described lapsed Catholic and agnostic, and that his work continues to incorporate the influences of his Christian upbringing, even while he engages it critically, and that the filmmaker continues to express appreciation for Jesus (as he does in the foreword of a book on the film), it is far more likely that Strickland represents a particular kind of Christian, one using skewed understandings of Christian teachings to further his own ends at the expense of others. Surely Godawa is familiar with the history of Christianity and that the faith and the Bible have been used to justify racism, abuses of power, and the exploitation of human beings and the world they live in. In my view this reading is more accurate, one in keeping with del Toro’s biograhy and the overall approach that del Toro taking through his use of fairytale (more on this below).

Image of God
One of the main concerns Godawa has with Shape and del Toro is his alleged treatment of the “image of God.” Strickland refers to human beings being made in image of God, which for him equates with a simplistic anthropomorphism, the physical form of human beings. In one scene he is willing for a moment to allow that two lower class women, a mute Latin and African American, might also be created in God’s image, but after a moment’s reflection he corrects himself in that it’s the white, upper class male that’s the best understanding of what it means to reflect this image. Certainly no grotesque Creature from the Amazon can be understood to fit the bill. Strickland’s understanding of his divine reflection is then used as justification for his racism, his abuse of power over others, misogyny, racism, and domination of other creatures in nature. Godawa sees this as yet another unfair stereotype and misrepresentation of Christianity and an important Christian doctrine. For Godawa, del Toro is opting for some kind of paganism as an alternative.

But again I have to ask the reader to step back and question Godawa’s interpretive assumptions. Rather than a blanket condemnation of a Christian doctrine, abuses of the idea seem to be in view. Christians in the past and the present have used the idea of the image of God and human “dominion” over nature as theological constructs through which they have then engaged in colonialism, racism, labeled other cultures as “primitive” and beneath them and exterminated their populations, misogyny, and destruction of the environment and animal life. This doesn’t mean that every Christian (let alone every evangelical) holds such views and engages in such practices, but there is ample evidence of this problematic connection. Why then is it out of bounds for del Toro to critique this? Isn’t it possible to raise concerns about particular abuses and related institutions and ideas without necessarily being understood as trashing a particular Christian teaching in favor of paganism? Godawa’s interpretive approach is again called into question.

Promoting bestiality?
As we saw with the quote from Godawa at the beginning of this essay, for him Shape promotes bestiality. Indeed, the film has been given the alternative title by some as Grinding Nemo, for its inclusion of not only romance between a human woman and an Amazonian amphibian fish-man, but also sex. For conservative evangelicals like Godawa, this must be understood as an endorsement of bestiality, and this must flow from del Toro’s paganism and rejection of a Christian worldview.

Two responses can be given here. The first has to do with how we interpret stories. Although Shape takes place in America in 1962, it is a fairytale, as del Toro has said repeatedly, one written for our troubled times of division. Further, it is a form of fairytale that draws upon magical-realism, a “Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.” If we look more broadly, Shape is part of a long history across cultures of human mythical storytelling of romances and sexuality between humans and beasts. In fairytales the characters represent things, help us think self-critically, and teach us lessons. They aren’t meant to be taken literally. To complain that Shape promotes bestiality misses the mark in terms of good genre interpretation as much as leveling the charge that Beauty and the Beast or The Princess and the Frog promotes bestiality. Although the real-world setting brings the story of Shape closer to our reality, it is still to be understood as a fairytale and must be interpreted accordingly. Godawa brings an unwarranted literalism to the film. (For a good critical analysis of fantasy films see Joshua Bellin’s great book Framing Monsters.)

The second response to the bestiality allegation comes from a closer analysis of the film itself. Even if we grant Godawa’s idea that a fantasy film can or is promoting a literal sexual practice, it is not a foregone conclusion that Elisa’s character is human. She seems to have her origins and and ongoing connection to the sea, and may be some kind of lost princess, an amphibian herself. The film begins with an underwater scene that appears to be the outside of a castle before zooming into Elisa’s dwelling above the Orpheum movie theater. Her apartment’s colors and wall artwork incorporates water and underwater themes. As the film’s narrative unfolds we learn that Elisa was found on the banks of a river as a child, and she has strange scars on her neck, and she can’t speak. At the end of the film the Creature, who has healing but not creative powers, picks up an injured Elisa and jumps into the ocean. He touches her and not only heals her of her gunshot wounds, but also the “scars” on her neck. These regenerate into gills. One reading of this scene is that Elisa was not human, at least not completely so. She may have been a lost princess of the sea who was left on the banks of the shore and forgot who she was among land-based humans, only to reconnect with her true self as a sea creature after meeting the Creature from the lab. With this reading in mind the film is not depicting bestiality, but instead a natural act of sexuality between sea creatures. Regardless of whether one considers the fairytale context or a fresh reading of key elements of the film, bestiality is not in view.

False dichotomy
There are other things I disagree with in Godawa’s essay, and I’ll mention one briefly. He also takes exception to evolution, describing it as that “which relativizes morality into ever-changing subjective feelings or molecules in motion — which justifies all brutality.” This is a metaphysical interpretation of evolution, one connected to an unfortunate dichotomy between a Christian creationism and atheistic evolution which Godawa then connects to paganism. However, there are Christians who accept evolution and who see this as the way God has chosen to create. One need only think of figures like physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne and geneticist Francis Collins to know there are devout Christians and evangelicals who accept evolution and who do not read moral relativism into it. So the choice between pagan evolution and Christian creation is a false one. (Related to this, readers will benefit from Conor Cunningham’s exploration of how materialist evolutionists and Christian creationists get things wrong in his book Darwin’s Pious Idea.)

Really so far from Christian concerns?
Despite Godawa’s strongly negative concerns about Shape, and his claims that it undermines Christianity, I wonder whether it’s really so far from the concerns that Christians should have with the challenges of our times. Guillermo del Toro uses fairytale to tell a story about the power of love as marginalized, lonely people come together and challenge the forces in power in order to engage in an act of justice. It is a story that challenges racism, misogyny, bigotry against homosexuals, and the exploitation of nature. Aren’t these the kinds of things that Jesus’s message of the Gospel of the Kingdom can and should find resonance with? The Bible is filled with examples of God using things from pagan nations, even the nations themselves, to chasten and instruct his people. Even if we retain Godawa’s assumptions about “pagan del Toro” and his pagan fairytale film, perhaps we need to stand back and ask if it has something to teaching 21st century American evangelicals about love, kindness, and justice to outsiders in the age of Trump.

For those interested in another take on Shape I recommend Jess Peacock’s essay in Rue Morgue, and for a general exploration of del Toro I refer readers to my edited anthology The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro.