Guillermo del Toro’s wonderfully weird The Shape of Water
is stuffed full of unexpected movie homages.
Del Toro takes joy in mixing together a mish-mash of references to everything
that's personally moved him in relation to this story --
from monster horror to old musicals to biblical epics.
And the resulting texture feels fitting for a film that can best be described as
a Fairy Tale for Adults.
So here are some of the movie references and homages
we caught in The Shape of Water.
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Now back to The Shape of Water.
Del Toro saw Creature from the Black Lagoon when he was a kid.
And he found his young heart longing for the creature
to get a happy ending with the woman he fell for.
"It started when I was 6.
I was 6 when I was watching Creature from the Black Lagoon."
"There's a similarity between the creature and the --"
"Yeah, the creature swims underneath Julia Adams.
I thought, what a great love story.
I was 6, I thought, I’m sure it’s going to end well.
The creature's gonna come out well."
He said he felt the same way about Frankenstein’s monster and King Kong.
So The Shape of Water began out of re-imagining this monster story --
what if the beauty fell for the (so-called) beast?
Speaking of, we can’t help but draw comparisons to Beauty and the Beast,
especially Cocteau’s version from 1946 which is also a sophisticated adult fairy tale.
A beautiful woman feels somehow different from other people --
Belle is obviously beautiful to those around her, but her inner beauty makes her “weird”
to them.
Here, Elisa is the “princess without a voice.”
Del Toro told Variety that he wanted to create
”A new type of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in which the beauty is someone you can relate
to --
not a perfect princess.”
"I also wanted the main character to be beautiful,
but in a way that was unique and powerful, not model, not Hollywood.
That you fell in love with her rather than simply admiring her."
Meanwhile, Michael Shannon’s Colonel Strickland is the Cold War-era Gaston,
who appears picture-perfect but is a beast inside.
The creature here is the romantic heartthrob of the movie,
while the Apple Pie image of the successful All-American provider
is the true monster whom the narration alludes to at the start
as the one who almost ruins everything.
The other difference between this and Beauty and the Beast Del Toro remarked on to Variety
is that here “the beast doesn’t need to transform to find love.”
In Beauty and the Beast, the beast has to transform into a human
to get a happy romantic ending.
But here the beast doesn't have to change.
Elisa ends up entering his underwater world.
This might remind us of Tom Hanks joining Darryl Hannah’s mermaid
in the ocean at the end of Splash,
or the princess becoming an ogre at the end of Shrek.
And it’s avery clear reversal of the ending of Creature from the Black Lagoon,
where the creature is shot repeatedly and dies,
while the human escapes.
Here instead the Creature survives multiple shots,
and he and Elisa escape into the water.
The conclusion is a perfect way to express the movie’s “the monster is us” theme.
Elisa understands that it's many of the humans who are the truly monstrous ones,
and the creature is perfect just as he is.
"And the themes, the idea of embracing the otherness,
of understanding, not transformation, as a motor of love,
those are very new for me, and they’re very much today."
We can make even more comparisons to other movies
about humans interacting with non-humans --
like E.T. or Black Stallion, or John Carpenter’s Starman,
which actually did embrace the romance between the alien and the human.
Ultimately Del Toro builds on his influences to creat a result that is wholly original,
and perhaps weirder and more spectacular than anything we’ve ever seen before
in the Monster-Human Romance genre.
"Oh, to be young and beautiful."
Del Toro apparently Sally Hawkins a blu-ray set to prepare her for playing her mute character.
It features the works of great silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel
& Hardy.
Then, to give us the vibrant, tender world inside Elisa’s head,
Del Toro uses musicals.
Elisa’s jam is watching old Hollywood musicals on her best friend Giles’ TV.
They dance along to Shirley Temple and Bojangles on the staircase in The Little Colonel.
Betty Grable performs “Pretty Baby” from Coney Island.
We see 1941’s That Night in Rio.
Elisa dancing with the broom is a nod to Fred Astaire with the hat rack in Royal Wedding.
She also plays the creature records by Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman.
Her love story takes the form of musicals to show us
how civilized, how heartfelt, how refined her inner soul is.
But lest we get the wrong idea,
Del Toro makes it clear that this isn’t a sugarplum, sexless fantasy,
and that’s the way we know right away it’s an adult fairy tale --
from the start we get her masturbating to her egg timer.
Then she’s courting the creature with eggs,
so there’s an obvious sexual connotation to that food.
When the romance progresses, Zelda makes her explain
how the sex actually works with the creature,
so the mechanics are not just glossed over.
Elisa’s name recalls the heroine of one of the most loved musicals ever,
My Fair Lady, based on Pygmalion,
"Stuffed with nails, you ought!
Here, take the whole bloomin' basket for a sixpence!"
the story of a cockney woman who’s made over into a lady
and taught to speak properly by Henry Higgins.
We see a dark version of Higgins in Strickland.
He’s turned on by Eliza because she can’t speak,
and even covers his wife’s mouth during sex so that he can feel total domination.
He likes the idea of creating someone’s identity.
But we also see lighter versions of the Pygmalion story --
in the way that Elisa “civilizes” the creature with her music,
and ultimately in the way the creature introduces Elisa
to a more sophisticated new world.
Giles and Elisa watch Hello, Frisco, Hello and echo Alice Faye’s song “You’ll Never
Know.”
"You’ll Never Know..."
This actually won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1943.
When Elisa later sings this song to her love in her mind,
she imagines the two partaking in a pretty hilarious black and white song-and-dance number
based on Fred and Ginger in Follow the Fleet.
The moment is a beautiful expression of Elisa’s true voice,
in the language of old movies she loves,
a voice that can’t be heard in this world.
When she finally goes into the water at the end, the scars on her neck --
which are assumed to be an injury that made her mute --
become gills.
The symbolism is that she’s been a fish out of water her whole life without quite
knowing it --
that she couldn’t speak in this world of air because her voice belonged in water --
and now, perhaps, she'll even be able to sing.
The movie’s final words explain the title, The Shape of Water --
speaking of a “you” that has no shape because you’re felt everywhere.
And you, the water that surrounds Elisa is the love and understanding
that was missing from her world.
That love and understanding to del Toro is what the creature himself represents.
"The creature here is literally the Shape of Water."
Elisa lives above a cinema that is showing a biblical epic, The Story of Ruth.
The biblical Book of Ruth is all about loyalty to a family and faith
that is discovered rather than born into --
as Ruth converts and faithfully serves her husband’s family even after his death.
The Shape of Water is also a story of a woman who realizes her true life lies in a new world,
and her true faith is in a new God,
and she is loyal to that newly awakened faith.
And while it's not exactly a direct reference to the movie version,
the other biblical story that heavily features in The Shape of Water
is Samson and Delilah,
Elisa’s best friend Zelda has the middle name, Delilah.
So Strickland calls her Delilah.
He uses the story of Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength
as an example of female cunning and betrayal.
"No man leaves Delilah."
It’s his way of reminding this black woman that she is “the other” -- an evil female.
And in Strickland's eyes, the story is fulfilled --
the women steal the “Asset” from under his nose.
He brings up the story again to taunt Zelda,
telling her Samson still regains his strength by trusting in God, to win in the end.
Yet shortly after, Zelda manages to warn Elisa that Strickland's after her
and puts her own useless husband in his place while she's at it.
So we get a reversal of the Samson and Delilah story.
Maybe the story written by men telling us
Delilah was an evil seductress wasn’t the whole truth.
Maybe she had a good reason to take the man’s strength away.
Strickland all this time has been so sure that he is the man made in God’s image.
"You may think that thing looks human.
But we're created in the Lord's image.
You don't think that's what the Lord looks like, do you?"
But just before his death, he realizes he’s made a huge mistake.
He's been attacking a god.
Revisiting the Delilah story is representative of what the movie’s doing overall --
looking back at stories we think we know,
so that we can hear them from the perspective of the Other --
a black woman, a closeted gay man, a woman who literally can’t speak,
and a monster who’s really a god.
"It’s a movie about love and loving the other, and not being afraid of the other."
Elisa’s cathedral window is an homage
to the window in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.
And Powell and Pressburger are a big visual influence on del Toro generally.
"Yes, you're quite right."
The director was was also inspired by melodramas, like the work of Douglas Sirk.
"But the look, yes, Douglas Sirk, Powell and Pressburger,
particularly The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Tales of Hoffmanm,
Vincente Minelli, musicals with Gene Kelly, Charade,
Stanley Donen’s camera work, William Wyler, his work with actor and camera..."
The long list of various movies that touched or influenced Del Toro's style in some way
here
is a hint that he’s expressing a tender love for the medium of cinema itself.
"I wanted to make a movie both with love and in love with cinema, both --
and for me they’re indistinguishable."
Del Toro said he uses the color Red only to signify cinema or love --
so he used red for the door to the movie theater,
and he also used red in relation to Elisa and her love.
We do catch a bit of TV in the movie, too.
Giles watches Mister Ed, the show starring a horse,
another nod to the intelligence and majesty of non-human characters.
"I just don't understand it."
"Don't try to.
It's bigger than both of us."
Strickland’s family watches The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis at home.
At a superficial glance, we might think this is just a standard wholesome sitcom
to match their cookie-cutter life,
but it was actually a subtly revolutionary show,
It's said to be the first that made teenagers the main characters,
unlike the family-centered Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best.
So on Strickland’s own TV we get another a quiet sign of a country
that’s moving away from him under his nose.
We hear Strickland’s wife declare Bonanza to be “too violent” for the kids to watch.
He also visits a Cadillac dealership where he’s sold on the pitch
that four out of five successful men in America drive a caddy.
So these images in his mind of success and domination
trap him into a mindset of never being able to fail --
as if live were only about winning and losing.
"You deliver, that's what you do.
You deliver, right?
Right?"
And there are even more influences and references we can spot here and there.
In addition to Ruth, the cinema is playing 1958’s Mardi Gras.
And it’s hard not to at least mention del Toro’s own earlier work,
especially Pan’s Labyrinth, which also combines magical realism with real-world wars and horrors.
In the end, one thing that’s refreshing and very different about
all of the influences or echoes we can find in The Shape of Water,
is that the movie isn't being intellectual and self-reflexively clever here.
You don’t need to know what movieis playing on Giles’ TV to appreciate the story.
You just have to feel the emotion that all of these textures add up to.
"And the thing that is important for me is to be shameless and earnest, and not postmodern.
Not reflective, you know?
Because we live in a time when we are so cynical.
It’s super easy to sound smart.
When you talk about emotions and love you sound corny.
And we're almost afraid of that.
I wanted to make a proper melodrama."
Overall, del Toro’s wide assortment of loving influences and shout-outs reminds us
that we’re watching a movie that doesn’t want to fit into a neat, obvious genre,
because it really can't be reduced to a neat label.
It’s a stunning fable full sweet fanciful surreality that doesn’t gloss over the sex,
blood and cruelty.
The final result is a story that’s very new and strikingly relevant to our times.
"We live in a time of fear and hatred and rage.
Everyday on the news, everyday on social media, everyday in our lives
we’re told to fear something, fear the other,
fear the other religion, the other immigrant, the other gender...
and it’s a time to embrace the fact that there’s no us and them,
but only us, and that’s what we have."
Hi guys, this is Susannah.
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