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Hollywood fantasy infatilises adult public

Last Updated 21 March 2018, 15:36 IST

Guillermo del Toro's 'The Shape of Water' walked away with both the 'Best Picture' and the 'Best Director' Oscars this year, in itself something of a feat. The film has been hailed by the Western press and it also won the Golden Lion at Venice earlier. It is promoted as a 'fantasy', a nebulous category which needs reclassification.

'The Shape of Water' is set in the Cold War years, with Russian intelligence and the American military establishment as its principal villains. The protagonists are a mute Hispanic woman, her African-American friend and her next-door neighbour, a closeted gay. In one stroke, therefore, the film is including all the political categories relevant today. Hollywood has generally been liberal in its attitudes and the film is evidently meant to make a statement in Trump's America. Rather than being truly 'imaginative' like Lewis Carroll or The Wizard of Oz, therefore, it can be understood as political allegory, a rather inferior category which merely presents the familiar in unfamiliar terms.

 In the film, Elisa Esposito lives alone above a cinema and works as a cleaning woman at a top secret military establishment, with Giles, an illustrator in advertising, as her neighbour. One day, a mysterious swamp creature (labelled an 'asset') is brought in and she learns that it was worshipped as a god by a South-American tribe until it was captured by the military and transported here in a container. The creature, which is humanoid, is also an amphibian, and the military plans to vivisect it. The biological information thus obtained is expected to be of help in the space race. The humanoid has antagonised Colonel Strickland, the security-in-charge, whose fingers it bit off, and Strickland relishes torturing it with an electrical appliance. But Elisa discovers that she can communicate with it in sign language and that it loves music. She falls in love with it and the two have a relationship. She finds allies in Giles, her African-American co-worker Zelda and Dr Robert Hoffstetler, entrusted with studying the creature, but also a Russian spy; he is a well-meaning scientist at heart and distrusted by his Soviet superiors.

'The Shape of Water' tries to recreate the 1960s with its films and its music and is quite lovely to look at. The innocence of the music and cinema stands in sharp contrast to the doings of the military and further emphasises the film's liberal agenda – the joyousness of popular culture versus the clandestine political activity, kept a closely guarded secret from the guileless public. The 'innocence of the public' is a significant motif here and it may suggest why fantasy is such a key genre in new Hollywood cinema. The proliferation of animated films also points to the increasing infantilisation of the public, which is consuming material once only meant for children. The issue is what this large-scale consumption of fantasy by adult audiences implies.  

As already brought out, 'The Shape of Water' deal with political issues today but 'allegorised' in such a way as to distance it from the actual experience of political life. One can interpret the swamp creature as a recognisable political entity – for instance a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay from whom military secrets are being extracted in a way not legally permissible (as in Zero Dark Thirty). The distance between the political experience depicted or allegorised and the shape it is given in Hollywood 'fantasies', I propose, corresponds to the gap between what is happening and what the public does not know about, but suspects.

What is not known but 'imagined' thus takes the shape of 'fantasy' in Hollywood texts. 'Fantasies' can allegorise all kinds of political experiences but 'The Shape of Water' appears to be dealing with the military's dealings outside the US, which the media hardly reports. The non-reporting of happenings thus becomes the fertile ground in which the imagination works. The swamp creature brought back from the jungles of Brazil becomes token representation of what the unrestricted imagination of the public makes out of US military doings abroad.          

I conclude by proposing that the proliferation of fantasies in Hollywood texts points to the increasing non-participation of the public in political life, which leads to a decline in understanding. 'Fantasy' thus steps in to fill the knowledge gap: the less that is the known, the more that is imagined.

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(Published 21 March 2018, 13:58 IST)

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