MOVIES FEBRUARY 19, 2013
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Every couple of years a movie comes along that exposes the sorry state of contemporary film criticism. I’m not talking about the Jackass franchise or anything starring Danny McBride. I mean the sort of sentimental claptrap that sends otherwise sensible people into raptures of moral self-satisfaction. Dances with Wolves or Crash, for example, both of which rode white liberal guilt like a hobbyhorse all the way to the Oscars. Or, most recently: Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film that deploys a casual racism, vilifies public health workers, and romanticizes poverty.
Loosely adapted from a one-act play by Lucy Alibar and directed by Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of Hushpuppy, a six-year-old girl who scamps around in her undies with a group of proud outcasts on the wrong side of the Louisiana bayous. Nobody in this jungley spit of land they call The Bathtub appears to work. Or bathe. Or feed their children. Hushpuppy is mostly left to fend for herself, eating cat food and living in total squalor. Though her father, Wink, complains that he has to worry about her “all the damn time,” mostly he drinks, trashes his shack, and fires his rifle for the hell of it. “I’ma bust your ass,” he shouts, and then does just that—smacking his daughter hard across the face. Far from deploring the abuse and neglect, the film ennobles her father. For he is dying, and it is therefore his solemn duty to “prepare his daughter for an uncertain future,” as A. O. Scott puts it.
The film probably won’t win any of the four Academy Awards it’s been nominated for—too much Oscar-bait stand in its way—but the festival favorite has already earned its share of culturally pretentious awards, including something called the Humanitas Prize for work that “explores the human condition in a nuanced, meaningful way.” 1 Critics across the board have gushed. “Let’s all agree: This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy,” writes Scott. Drinking their days away, none of them working, yet supposedly bound by a principled ethic of libertarian solidarity, the grownup residents of The Bathtub are “wise, unpretentious and self-reliant,” Scott adds. To The New Yorker’s David Denby, these wastrels are “determined to hold on to their miserable piece of earth, which, for them—and for us, as art—is as close to paradise as anyone could imagine.” 2 (By these lights, so was Jonestown.) Newsday’s Rafer Guzman praises Wink’s “excellent parenting skills.” 3
In short, Beasts of the Southern Wild comes to us as one of those movies “the industry can be proud of,” which the great bullshit detector Pauline Kael called out in her famous 1969 essay “Trash, Art and the Movies”—a film we feel honored to acclaim. It skims the surface of serious matters without asking us to actually grapple with their complexities: We can feel guilty, virtuous, and indifferent all at once.4
Beasts does this primarily by turning poverty into a kind of sentimental, specious poetry. Sentimentality has its uses, of course, not the least of which is to mask unpleasant realities with comforting hooey. Basically, it’s a form of moral and intellectual pornography, an easy way of getting off that, in the case of Beasts, begins and ends in patronizing attitudes of racial superiority. Just as nineteenth-century readers were endeared to the “funny little specimen” of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, audiences and reviewers have also taken complete leave of their critical faculties over Beast’s Hushpuppy with her big eyes, shock of Don King hair, precious voice-over narration, and cutesy-pie name. Scott calls the girl an “American original”; in fact, though, Hushpuppy is just yet another iteration in a long and cherished line of pickaninnies. Beautifully played by Quvenzhané Wallis (six years old at the time of the shooting), the headstrong and scrappy Hushpuppy is just about the most adorable thing to come along since that kid in Webster. Then again, the pickaninny is always cute, always amusing, like a mischievous pet in a YouTube video. That’s her raison d’être.
Hushpuppy is just yet another iteration in a long and cherished line of pickaninnies.
This is not to say that a white writer or filmmaker has no business depicting poor black children. The whole point of narrative art, it seems to me, is to discover ways of understanding one another, not just understanding ourselves. But the most incisive art also asks that we reckon with the perversities of our affections. Flannery O’Connor, for instance, captured the noxiousness of the pickaninny’s appeal in her trenchant fiction, which invariably included characters whose moral myopia helped its readers more clearly see their own unthinking prejudices. (In the story “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” for instance, a Southern woman believes that “little Negro children were on the whole cuter than little white children”; as far as she’s concerned, the sentiment excuses her more persistent bigotry.) No such characters appear in Beasts: The film lacks the crucial critical distance to throw such prejudices into sharp relief.5
Yes, I know: Most films are more morally vacuous, and depicting an adorable tyke who stands her ground is hardly the worst offense. It’s just that this film makes it altogether too easy. It depicts the harsh realities of poverty but then aestheticizes it. The script has Hushpuppy staring down the figments of her imagination—huffing and puffing giant prehistoric aurochs—but we are given no reason to believe that she won’t end up either an unemployed drunk like her father and his friends or a wistful prostitute like the woman we assume is her absent mother. True enough, she is a bright and self-reliant girl. But let’s not kid ourselves: Poverty is ugly and cruel and will pinch the hopes and dreams out of even the brightest children.
Beasts does something more pernicious than simply celebrate poverty. In casting social workers and public health officials who presume to think that a six-year-old girl should be fed, clothed, and looked after by adults as villains, the film tells us that we needn’t worry, that the poor just want to be left to fend for themselves. This is the film’s ugly operating assumption: if you are already poor (being black doesn’t hurt either), you are uniquely suited to thrive in squalor. It doesn’t matter how young or neglected you are; it doesn’t matter that your dad slaps you around when he’s angry and abandons you when he’s not; that your mom, it seems, is off working in some kind of floating whore house; that you’re not given a proper education or a bed to sleep in; and that you share your meals with hogs and dogs. That’s just your natural habitat. If you can catch catfish with your bare hands—if you can “beast it” in the film’s parlance—you’re going to be all right.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Zeitlin. The film is often lovely to look at it, radiating excitement for the surprising places artful imagery and editing can take us—an excitement largely absent in the recent work of earlier breakout directors, not to mention the listless efforts of far too many wry low-budget films sheathed in timid irony. That Zeitlin’s film is also patronizing and borderline racist, that it sentimentalizes poverty and glosses over neglect, and that it skirts tough questions by resorting to a half-baked and naïve fable—all of that is unfortunate, and Zeitlin should be held to account. But equally troubling are the critics who have become too intellectually disengaged to point out, and perhaps even see for themselves, Beasts of the Southern Wild’s shoddy claims to superior virtue. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps they’re only too happy to make such claims for themselves.
Thomas Hackett is a writer and film-maker living in Austin.
25 comments
Thomas Hackett seems to think that "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is an essay that straightforwardly advances Zeitlin's own views of poverty and negligent or abusive parenting. That is nonsense. "Beasts" is a fantastical exploration of one girl's subjective experience. Why do the government workers have a tint of villainy? Because Hushpuppy views them that way - after all, they are trying to remove her from the only home she knows, a home that, while not ideal, she has idealized. Zeitlin isn't necessarily advancing his own views through his character - given charitable interpretation, we certainly shouldn't jump to that conclusion given that Hushpuppy's perception of her home is obviously naive, idealistic, and childish because she's a, ahem, child - but instead exploring the character herself and exploring the long-held and uncontroversial idea that one man's trash is another man's treasure. Now, I suppose Hackett might say something like this: "That is all well and good, but in showing Hushpuppy's perspective of the Bathtub as so overwhelmingly positive - in fact, positively fairy-taleish! - he downplays the horror of poverty. Children living in squalor in New Orleans don't view the dirt and filth as 'home,' they view it as a problem; they want to be helped, to be lifted out." And I agree with Hackett. Poverty is bad. What a difficult and complicated proposition to defend! But at no time during "Beasts" did I think, "This director wants me to rethink my views on the role of the state in alleviating poverty," or, "This director wants me to, without reservation, sympathize with an abusive father." On the contrary, while the movie is not wholly removed from questions of politics - what is? - it is much more concerned with displays of beauty - that fireworks scene! - strength in the face of adversity - her standing up to those rumbling, monstrous boars! - and the stories we tell about our homes. That's not racism. And Mr. Hackett should think twice about impugning the abilities of other film critics before he launches into a tirade so bereft of nuance or interpretive charity.
- dcarpenter
February 19, 2013 at 12:59pm
This is one film I intend to miss. The child star and her director were on Leno a while back. The director described her performance as "miraculous." You could see the kid's head swelling with smugness and self-satisfaction right there. Bad director. The clip Leno showed looked like a 3-D cartoon, very colorful and very busy. It also looked a bit like the old Amos and Andy show, where a clever black or two outsmarted the rest of the dumb blacks. It was fitting that 'Amos and Andy' was created by whites, as was, I assume, 'Beasts.' As the reviewer says, in real life, the kid's character would very probably have ended up as a drug-addicted prostitute who shoots somebody or gets murdered. That's usually what 'surviving' amidst extreme poverty means, and I don't think it should be celebrated. This film proves again how little liberals know or even care about black poverty--or any poverty, for that matter. I agree with the reviewer about the liberal vanity in Six degrees of Separation that allowed a clever black to exploit whites. BTW, I saw an interview years ago with the black con man whom the play and the movie were based upon. He was an impetuous little snot. He ended up throwing an alcoholic drink in the interviewer's face and stomping off the set. And he had conned a whole gaggle of silly, white-liberal geese. That says something not only about his vanity, but that of his marks.
- magboy47.
February 19, 2013 at 2:08pm
It's important, though, to separate the virtues or shortcomings of a piece of art from one's moral feelings about its creators. Regardless of the child star's "smugness" or the "black con man" who was an "impetuous little snot," it is possible that the movie is, you know, good. The moral goodness of a movie's director or star, after all, is a mostly (if not wholly) separate question from the aesthetic goodness of the movie qua movie. It would be silly to let your misgivings about a director's appearance on Leno keep you from watching the movie. And, anyways, if you can sit through Leno, you can sit through anything.
- dcarpenter
February 20, 2013 at 12:22am
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Magboy...I suggest you see the movie. Your comment and Hackett's review illustrates an 'ill at ease' with a movie that deals with poverty, yes, and the relationship between a dying father and daughter, but also deals with community, in particular the community of the 'bath tub'. There is the underlying premise of those that live on the other side vs. those that live in the 'bath tub'. Would the issues of poverty, race, community, broken homes and single parenthood touched on in the movie be more to your liking if the two main protagonists were white? Would the feelings of your liberal guilt about poverty be lessened or be less vain? Living here in New Orleans, all of those issues exist among my neighbors and community regardless of whether they are black or white. The review gets hung upon on the race issue to such a degree that he fails to see the movie. His review only indicates he watched it and couldn't get past his uncomfortable feelings about seeing someone, in this case, black, living in squalor. He further and purposely I think, fails to understand (because again he's hung up on Hushpuppies hair and not bathing daily in the movie) the complexities of her relationship with her father until the Bathtub community is forcibly moved and suddenly the community that they knew (poor as it might have been) was gone. Their only solution is to return to their 'home' where her father wants to die. The movie's intent, I think, was not to cast patronizing aspersions on the authentic poor black experience but to actually examine, in it's fantastical realism, the human condition and more explicitly the human conditions of love, community, family and home regardless of whether or not you live in the 'bathtub' or on the high ground.
- singlspeed
February 19, 2013 at 2:38pm
Having seen it in a packed theater here in New Orleans on a weeknight in a mixed crowd of black, white, young and old where plenty of people reacted to it in a positive way...I wonder...had they also been duped? Were their feelings and reactions to the movie less genuine or legitimate than Hackett's apparent distaste?
- singlspeed
February 19, 2013 at 2:43pm
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SINGLSPEED, you're right, I should see the movie, but not because I need to see poverty. I grew up poor in Flint, Michigan, in a neighborhood populated by white refugees from the Ozarks. Later, I lived for 10 years in the inner city of Detroit, right next to some of the worst projects in the country. I also worked for Urban Renewal in Detroit and entered many Lower Eastside homes that were every bit as ugly as those in the poorest districts in the South. So 'Beasts' would not introduce me to squalor. I have no white liberal guilt, because I'm not a liberal--I'm a Near Leftist. The reason I probably won't see the movie is that I've already seen it in life, i.e., the way that the poor, black or white or otherwise, mistreat each other. And it's been going on so long that it's no longer an issue of poverty, but of culture. At this juncture in history blacks are mistreating each other much more than whites are or have for quite some time. Check out the murder rate in Chicago, if you don't believe me. I checked it out in Detroit when I lived there, every day on the news. The year I left, in the Seventies, a thousand people were murdered in a rather small big city--Detroit (there was a drug war going on). I have to admit, the kid in 'Beasts" is cute, but is there any ray of redeeming light in the movie? That might prompt me to see it. As it is, I've seen enough of poverty to not want to see it recreated, without any redeeming qualities, in a movie.
- magboy47.
February 19, 2013 at 3:35pm
magboy...the reason I suggest seeing the movie isn't because I thought you needed to see squalor. Far from it. I think the reviewer got stuck on the presentation of 'squalor' and subsequently stopped paying attention to the intent of the movie - which after having watched it a second time, is secondary. There is a redeeming light to the movie. After the girl's father dies, her hope is neither diminished or demeaned in that she understands she is but a small but important part of the universe and that what family she has/had is and will always be a part of her even when they are gone. Believe me when I say the movie is not 'poverty porn' or 'ruin porn'. Far from it. I wanted to suggest that you watch it with open mind and not take the reviewers narrowed view too much to heart. If anything, compared to Weeds or Strawdogs, this is a much more uplifting movie even if that moment doesn't occur until the very end.
- singlspeed
February 20, 2013 at 1:01pm
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2,19,13, 5:15 pm, est///Wow! Simply splendid comment by DCarpenter. I'd read this misconceived review so oddly out of synch of what an evocative and compelling character Hushpuppy is: I paraphrase, "When the scientists look back at us a hundred years from now, they'll say 'Once there was a Hushpuppy who lived in the Bathtub with her daddy." Those words have been reverberating in my head ever since I saw the movie a few weeks ago. I loved it and loved her.///Anyway, I had read the review and was formulating an answer to it but was beaten to the punch by Dcarpenter. On top of that I'm not sure I would have so incisively and directly located the answer to the review in Hushpuppy's perspective informing the movie. (I'd like to think I would've. I left the movie understanding its diverse parts were resolved by her subjectivity. And in that regard, I never thought, as some have, that magic realism is present in the movie. Fantastical things exist only in Hushpuppy's mind and and the movie's art conveys that.)//Magboy, I also think you should see this movie. It's so far away from being sentimental about poverty. Hackett really missed the critical boat on this one, intellectually and emotionally.
- basman
February 19, 2013 at 5:59pm
It's particularly strange that Hackett misses the importance of Hushpuppy's perspective given her omnipresent narration. Your quotation is a good example. It shows her inflated sense of importance of herself, her father, and her home - scientists will find her and the bathtub important enough to study far in the future - and imbues the story with the feeling of fantasy - "Once there was..." a close cousin to "Once upon a time."
- dcarpenter
February 20, 2013 at 12:07am
And thank you for the compliment, Basman.
- dcarpenter
February 20, 2013 at 12:24am
2,20,2013,10:45 pm, est///One point Dcarpenter: I'm not sure her view of herself is "inflated" though it's surely resolute in its way, just as she is-- she's a tough, resilient little kid brimming with consciousness and vivid external engagement with her world. After all, the essence of subjectivity is the privileging of the self. And, too, given what I originally quoted, she does what we all do in our subjective lives--construct stories about ourselves, our world and their relation, our lives in our own "bathtubs." One way of saying what the movie's about is its exploration of that relation in Hushpuppy, and, by the way, its partial resolution too///You're welcome Dcarpenter.
- basman
February 20, 2013 at 10:54am
That's true, but privileging oneself is different from deeming oneself worthy of a case study 100 years in the future. To be clear, I'm not using "inflated" negatively. Seeing oneself as the center of the universe is an almost universal characteristic of child and adolescent nature, and in that sense it makes the movie that much truer to a child's subjective experience. It's been fun reading your comments. Thank you for the good conversation. With that, though, I'll probably be bowing out.
- dcarpenter
February 20, 2013 at 1:09pm
2,20,3:20 pm, est///Okay Dcarpenter this'll probably be my last words too. I wouldn't say Hushpuppy is doing anything remotely like "deeming oneself worthy of a case study 100 years in the future." But if you're using the word "inflated" to highlight the intensity of her subjectivity as a kind of universal incident of it, I'd agree with you.///Cheers, Itzik Basman
- basman
February 20, 2013 at 3:21pm
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Okay, singlspeed and basman, I'll see the movie. But not for a few months. I do like movies seen from the perspective of a kid. I love Days of Heaven, which is narrated by a young migrant-worker girl from a hundred years ago. And, of course, there is the stunning cinematography that adds so much to that movie.
- magboy47.
February 19, 2013 at 8:42pm
Thank you, Thomas Hackett, for expressing my anger & disgust with this film. The child is lovely, the cinematography beautiful, but the attitude is patronizing. I almost walked out of the theater. It is evident from the comments made here that many are not able to separate their positive responses to the child from the criticism of the paternalistic attitude of the filmmaker. Bravo, Mr. Hackett, I'll be following your reviews. You have great insight.
- kcunning
February 20, 2013 at 8:19am
I find this review to be liberal racism at its worst, frankly. It bends over backwards to drain the life out of a piece of art wholly unique and organic by shoving it in to the reviewers need to punish the world for hateful stereotypes, talk about self righteous liberal bullshit. Isn't it quite clear what he thought of the brilliant young actress who played the lead? Projection anyone? Such lazy reductionist thinking never entered my mind about her, and no he does not know my mind better than I do. Hey Thomas - I AM a social worker, God forbid someone has the nerve not to shove us in to some lame dehumanizing Florence Nightengale trope. We can be real assholes ok? We often have power over fragile people and have no idea how to appropriately reach across cultural differences - we should be viewed skeptically. We should also be viewed just like any other human being: varied and unqiue. You know - like all people? That storyline was about characters in fraught power dynamics, not about a pickinanny and her misunderstood helper angels. The hypocrisy is awe-inspiring: on the one hand, you scold the director for not cowing to the lame Noble Social Worker trope, on the other you shove this poor little girl in to the tiniest box you can possibly find and scold us for not doing the same. By doing this, you deny African Americans, social workers, little girls - or anyone else - access to the full range of human behavior. You're too busy preening in hoary, airless late 80's politically correct scolding - assuming that of course you know what we're all unconscious thinking much more than we possibly could. After all, you're you! Awful awful awful review, the worst I've read in years. I feel like he sat through this, but didn't even see the movie. He couldn't.
- WandreyCer
February 20, 2013 at 8:26am
Forget the review. Why invented this dumb layout where the text always obscures the headline photo? If the photo is interesting or valuable, why not display it so that it can be seen? Did people (consultants most likely) really get paid to think this up?
- roidubouloi
February 24, 2013 at 12:52pm
2,25,13, 6:55, est/// "Did people (consultants most likely) really get paid to think this up? ' Sure did and still are, and got paid to f... up functional access via any Tablet, regardless of operating system.
- basman
February 25, 2013 at 6:57pm
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I admit that I stopped watching this movie off Netflix because I couldn't take it. I did feel that poverty was being romanticized, and I resented the resort to the appeal of a painfully cute-as-kittens little girl. Well, maybe "resented" is too harsh -- found myself resistant to, as one does when one feels a clumsy finger jabbing ineptly at one's buttons. All that running around with fireworks -- somebody's gonna get hurt! That was actually my thought, which, of course, is not in the spirit of the movie. Rather, we're supposed to revel in the unadulterated life force, the uncomplicated joy, the exotic beauty of this neurosis-free ritual, which, for me is eye-roll-inducing and puts my Kaelish bullshit detector on high alert. The romanticization of poverty is of a piece with the romanticization of children, of "primitive" culture, of animals, of nature, of everything free of the apparently noxious odor of modern human civilization, and I find that instinct depressing and counterproductive and emotionally and intellectually cheap.
- JakeH
February 24, 2013 at 3:26pm
The movie isn't on Netflix...
- dcarpenter
February 24, 2013 at 9:11pm
Then it must have been Amazon instant video. I use both services.
- JakeH
February 25, 2013 at 2:04am
Yes, in fact, I remember that it was Amazon, because I had to "rent" it, I hadn't gotten through it, and the question was whether I would bother to finish before the rental period was up -- you get something like 48 hours to finish after you start -- and I said "nah." Sometimes I feel that I need to watch a movie I don't like just so I can talk about it intelligently, without accusations of ignorance, but, on this sucker, I decided to forgo that privilege in favor of the stuff backing up on the DVR.
- JakeH
February 25, 2013 at 2:09am
2,25,2013, 6:55 pm est///Jake you've been disagreeing with me all too much of late. As George H.W. Bush said of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, "This will not stand."
- basman
February 25, 2013 at 6:53pm
I know! What's happening?! Someone's getting wronger.
- JakeH
February 26, 2013 at 4:18am
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I probably agree with Wandrey the most, of all who have expressed themselves thus far. However, my deeper feeling about this movie is, in a slightly different way, radically opposite to Hackett's. I think that Beasts of the Southern Wild has all the cheerful anarchic frankness of a junior teacher nervously consulting the handbook to see how to manage the children's "unstructured play" hour. What struck me was not how the Bathtub adults didn't "bathe their children" (what a weird lip-pursing finger-wagging locution from Hackett -- what's wrong with "wash"?) but how unconvincingly clean the kids seemed to always be. What struck me was how theatrical the supposed free life of the community looked. What struck me was the absence of genuine relaxation -- these people were more stressed-out than a Connecticut town filled with hedge-fund manager families. What Beasts of the Southern Wild lacks for me is exactly what it purports to have reserves of: wildness.
- ironyroad
February 26, 2013 at 12:53am