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Coulda fooled me if you said Wes Anderson directed. A decent movie but considering the subject, lacking in both tragedy and awe. The music, though charming, was perhaps too saccharine, too sentimental? What do a closeted gay man, an oppressed black woman, a communist and a fish monster have in common?
Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 27, 2017 08:36
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Sinding Johansson posted:What do a closeted gay man, an oppressed black woman, a communist and a fish monster have in common? Snowman_McK posted:If you watch the film, you may have an answer. Enlighten me? No need to be snarky. What is a fishman? An emissary/hostage from an untouched, prehistoric world. What does it mean to save a fishman? Is it an act of nascent environmentalism or political rebellion? Disregarding minor very characters, there's one gay man, one black woman and one communist. They don't exist as part of any sort of historical or even symbolic movement but only as beacons of oppression (sexual, racial, domestic, political). So again, why would they all selflessly work to help a woman with a disability save her fishman lover? The power of friendship? It's sort of childish. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 08:35
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Xealot posted:Pretty much. They’re not part of any unified movement, but why do they have to be? They’re connected by virtue of being incongruous with Strickland’s sterile, normative worldview. The extent of political comment there is that the stark and authoritarian nature of Cold War America leaves no space for all kinds of Other, which the various supporting cast represent. I think this is closer to the truth, but I reiterate my point is that the characters belong to no movements at all. To me, it's pretty much tokenism, a base appeal to trendy sensibilities, especially when compared to films like Hidden Figures, Hail Caesar or Brokeback Mountain (off top of my head, but chosen as they are all set in roughly the same time period). Well the black, communist and gay characters are all secondary you might say, but a flim like See No Evil, Hear No Evil is head and shoulders above this one when it comes to portraying the differently abled. How should we interpret Strickland? Well obviously he's a chauvinistic brute. What motivates him? Seemingly only personal success. Why isn't he the man of the future? Careerism is dead. Why does he (in the end) see the fishman as God? Isn't that a transformative moment for the character? This is an okay fairy tail film that has all the trappings of political allegory but it is actually completely vacuous. I'd say it's less self-love and more masturbation. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 19:58
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Eh, I think being sprayed with a hose signifies a related but different idea of dehumanization/devaluation more than blackness. Rambo got sprayed with a hose. A lot of prison movies feature similar scenes.
Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 21:03
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I'm don't quite understand what you mean by that. One thing I think was important but goes unexamined is Strickland's death. Why does the fishman kill him? Why does he proclaim the fishman a god? I mean in literal plot terms it's perfectly clear, but how are we supposed to interpret this? The fishman is a vengeful pagan god. Stickland, who's already on the cusp of a breakdown, rejects his prior beliefs and embraces paganism, but too little to late. I dunno. I never liked that Del Toro can never just kill his villains, he almost always has to torture or degrade them first.
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Jan 18, 2018 23:44
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Snowman_McK posted:Strickland's degradation is largely self inflicted, though. He physically falls apart due to him blocking everything out with painkillers, and his career falls apart because he simply cannot imagine that the quiet hispanic woman is the one who bested him. That's a good way to put it, but I don't think it really captures his development. It was awhile ago I saw this but iirc the four critical scenes with him are; the Cadillac man of the future bit, the rehearsed speech about his failure to his supervisor, ripping off his fingers and calling the fishman god. Unlike what some other posters have said, the rehearsed speech seems to make clear that he is not somehow the embodiment of the patriarchy or w/e else but an individual embedded within it. The rotting fingers definitely suggest a willful blindness. That's why I say that ripping them off, combined with calling the fishman a god suggest a transformation of the character. Killing him then, (after he had been disarmed?) seems vindictive. The actor Sally Hawkins is English and her character has an Italian surname btw. #Not all cleaning ladies.
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Jan 20, 2018 01:12
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A pretty good article. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jan 20, 2018 |
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Jan 20, 2018 01:20
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mary had a little clam posted:Well... a film set in the 60s with the Other being dehumanizingly hosed down by white agents of the State is a pretty specific reference to Birmingham/Civil Rights marches. Bringing up Rambo borders on being willfully obtuse unless you see a lot of other Rambo signifiers in the film? I had watched First Blood that day. I said that being hosed down references dehumanization. Rambo is hosed down in a jail, by power tripping cops who dehumanize him for being a drifter. Rambo's superpower is his connection to nature. He is disconnected from civilization. He was used and abused tool of the government. They are very different films obviously but the characters do have elements in common. Unlike in this film, Rambo does not kill his persecutors. Is the fishman; a silent, savage, demure, heavily fetishized character really a good depiction of blackness in 2018? Seriously? And to reiterate the point of that article posted earlier; is Eliza, a woman who sees herself as less than human, and who can only find acceptance by leaving society, a good depiction of disability? The actual merit in the idea of the fishman is associated with blackness is the connection between him and Zelda's downtrodden, browbeaten husband. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 04:03
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Well iirc the black man only has one scene, to show us that he's physically and spiritually broken, confined to his home like the fishman to his bathtub. He is cowardly and his marriage aromantic. This is a cynical movie where the relationship between him and Zelda reflects the reality of Eliza and the fishman's fantasy. What if the fishman never left the bathtub basically. The vengefulness of the fishman stems from the resentment of the husband. I link these characters by their relationship to Eliza/Zelda. I don't see how you can link the fishman to blackness specifically without interpreting him as a questionable caricature. I'm trying to be charitable here. E: More specifically, blackness is a human quality while the fishman is inhuman. It is the absence of blackness that propels the fishman power-sex fantasy. Sinding Johansson fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 04:24
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Moon Atari posted:That society wasn't worth being accepted by. There is no point to her fighting for approval, to be seen as valuable. The "decency" monologue explicitly states what that society sees as valuable, and it isn't anything good. There is more conviction and strength in rejecting that value system and insisting upon your own, as Eliza does. The society she rejects is the one that is broken, less than human. In this film, Eliza has heartfelt confession about why she loves the fishman, it's because he doesn't know how she is, "incomplete". The differently abled of course don't have the luxury of simply abandoning society. Society, to this day, pushes such people to the margins, keeps them out of sight and sees them as lacking some essential element of the human experience. In reality the differently abled seldom feel that way about themselves. Running away isn't some heroic act, it's falling in line exactly with society's expectations. No society is simply made up of bad and irredeemable people. Should Zelda and Giles (who have it just as bad really) leave too? It would be a mockery of the progressive movements and struggles of actual gay and black people in the 60s if they had. Aren't they part of the society that Eliza abandons? I mentioned another film earlier, 70s screwball comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil. The main characters are a blind and deaf man. Both characters explicitly reject the idea that they are 'incomplete', especially when society tries to tell them they are. 40 years later and Del Toro is moving us backwards, not forwards.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:40
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Liberal Idiot posted:I just saw this last weekend, and one detail I really liked was the way Shannon's character immediately pivots to "You are a god" when he sees what the Creature can do at the end. His worldview is so narrow that he can only see the Creature in one of two ways - either as an animal or a god, and it's entirely dependent on the power dynamic he has with the Creature at the moment. The Creature goes from subhuman to superhuman in his eyes instantly, and he's wrong in both instances. The fishman literally has magic powers though and executing people who have wronged you is not an essential element of the human experience. In fact the most common criticism of the film is that the fishman is devoid of personality. A pagan god is probably the most apt description of him. The character who is too pure for this world is (somewhat bizarrely) the communist.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:54
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Guy Mann posted:A movie directed and co-written by a man who isn't a native English speaker using a word that, while technically correct and accurate, has a problematic connotation seems to be getting a disproportionate amount of negative attention compared to the entire rest of the movie going completely against said problematic connotations. And that's assuming that you take it at the most uncharitable reading possible instead of interpreting it as, say, Eliza internalizing the language of the terrible world she lives in. Eliza goes on to dream that she can sing. Don't insult Del Toro, he is perfectly fluent and no one writes a film alone. Other films have dealt with disability much better than this one does. If you want a charitable reading, consider why Del Toro chose for Eliza to be mute. This isn't really a story about a woman's disability, it's actually a story about a woman who feels unheard, literalized. I'll restate my original point, that this movie has political trappings but not political substance.
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Jan 25, 2018 19:49
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tetrapyloctomy posted:Not that it invalidates what you're saying, but See No Evil, Hear No Evil came out in 1989. O poo poo
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Jan 27, 2018 02:34
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Has anyone seen the Amphibian Man?
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Mar 5, 2018 21:47
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