Flowing bodies, between fairytale and horror - The Shape of Water

These notes are a little old by now. When I watched Guillermo del Toro's highly praised film, I was writing about the concept of the fairy tale body, its grotesque flux as found in the old tales and taken up again by Gaiman and Henson. For carreer reasons, that research is unlikely to continue as such, but here's how I found its tropes in this particular movie.

 1. An off voice, announcing a narration, is heard framing the entire film. The fact of using a narrative voice is in itself already a resource commonly used to distance the action from reality, as a subjective an hypermedial narration. The voice in SoW also clearly quotes fairytale tropes: "The reign of the good prince", "a faraway place" and "an endless love" refer both to an dislocation of the action in time and space, which is unspecific but distant from the narrator's current position. (Cfr. Antonsen) It also constructs the narrated space as a compensatory heterotopia (Cfr. Foucault "Espaces") in which values lost to the present are kept safe and perfect.

The narrative discourse is strongly self-reflexive, and even though that is not my point here, it is mostly speaking about telling a story, which it is currently not telling; which, as a voice, it will never tell, but which we will see through the film. Is this a pseudodiegesis, or a demarcation of actual silence? It is even marking this narration as only conditional: "If I told you"
Finally, the voice also incurs in tropes of the fantastic: it insists on the truthfulness of its account while being very ambiguous about it. Thus, an ambiguity about the narrated concept of truth is created. This matches the ambiguity the voice itself has: Is it the absent voice of the main character, many years after the story took place? In that case, the truthfulness would be reinforced. Or is it a heterodiegetic narrator? In that case, the story would seem utterly unreal. The distance, however, remains unclear and reinforces the question of truthfulness.
 

2. The chime music and the green lights, following a dreamy girl through an old fashioned town, follow a stylistic line made popular by films like "Le Fabouleux destin d'Amelie Poulain". In that sense, the sense of the unreal and romanticized fairytale atmosphere is reinforced.
 

 3. There are several references to "The Little Mermaid": Not only is the main character an underwater creature, he, as well as the female protagonist, are both mute, as is Ariel when she come to earth. Elisa has several dancing scenes, which also connect with Ariel's deal to get legs.
 

4. Bodies are an important topic to the film. In one of the first scenes, Elisa is already shown completely naked and masturbating, where her body takes the whole of the screen. Her body is clearly shown as female, but it is arguable to what degree she can be perceived as sexualized or objectified under the cold light of the bathroom. Although generally embodying a closed notion of the proportionate and feminine, Elisa's body is also marked by an imperfection which takes narrative and metaphoric importance: her scars. The scars are remarked upon as an imperfection and as part of a past, never told story. They are also visually a metaphor for gills, which remark her similarity and connection to the sea creature.
Elisa's muteness is remarked strongly as a disability. While the film gives her sign language a strong presence and underlines both her ability to function and her frequent frustration, muteness is not a visible part of her body, and therefore does not really affect her representation as proportionate and clearly gendered.
The sea creature, on the other hand, is shown as differentiated from the humans in the film through remarkable make-up effects. It must also be noticed that the body is approached only progressively by the film. First, only  bubbles and movement indicate its presence in the water. In a later scene, it can be seen as a shadow under the water. Then, it progressively emerges from the water pool, first showing its eyes, later revealing itself completely. The creature is marked as inhuman by its scales and flippers, but its proportions are not only masculine, but extremely so, hard and muscular. This is made relative again by the fact that it has no visible penis. Elisa explains the presence of a penis afterwards, as something that is worthy of discussion. (see below for body and discourse) In terms of gender, it can be said that his role as a man is not apparent, but he does fulfil it.
The body of the creature is, especially in the first half of the film, subject to severe damage. One may say that most wounds are superficial, but it does shed a lot of blood and is constantly pictured as weak and helpless. With the help of Elisa, it heals and thrives to finally be released into the open sea (the play between water and space could itself deserve an entire discussion of its own). The character therefore fails in performing as a reassuring and protective man during most of the film. This failure is nonetheless reversed in the final scene, where the creature not only saves Elisa's life but kills the antagonist. Thereby it embodies even the more toxic aspects of the masculine role.
Particularly interesting is the treatment of the antagonist's body. His behaviour underlines almost parodystically an extreme performance of toxic hypermasculinity: he is an authoritative father, a reliable servant of his nation, economically fluent, dressed cleanly and pragmatically, but also always ready to apply violence, honouring his own penis and blocking any form of empathy. Although his strong and well dressed body stands as a symbol of hypermasculinity, it is mutilated early on in the film. The lost fingers can even be read as a symbol of castration, reflecting the anxiety that he does not control the phallus, i.e. the power that he applies. (Cfr. Butler)
His masculine performance also implies a self-representation as closed and stable individual. Precisely as he positions himself as an agent of the Law, he presents his body as exemplary and complete, as opposed to the disabled, dysfunctional and abnormal bodies of most other characters. Through the mutilation, however, his body becomes subject to transformation and disintegration. He is opened into the flow and instability of the organic. To his detriment, his body itself escapes the Law by which he pretends to control it. In deed, he attempts to sew his lost fingers back on and spends most of the film with a bandage covering his mutilation. However, the dead fingers gangrene and smell, and he ends up pulling them off himself. The grotesque flow of his body has escaped his control, and he has failed to embody the Law that his masculinity represents.
 

5. Bodies are often described through language. The antagonist's soliloquy on the body of God is particularly explicit, concluding that God "looks a little bit more like me". Bodies are measured against an ideal body, and this ideal body is constructed through power and language as that of the proportionate white male. In this particular scene, it is differentiated from that of the back woman Zelda who is "even" similar to God, and the sea creature, which is too unlike God to be considered human.
In that same sense, Elisa implies that her lack of speech removes her from the act of describing and valuing bodies. Her focus would be visual, as in dance and film - as the film itself which we are watching. Film thereby describes itself as a more sincere medium than language and as a more direct access to the body beyond discourse. (Cfr. Warner)
This argument, clearly present in the film's aesthetics, does not escape contradiction. Elisa after all expresses herself through sign language which does have grammatical structures as abstract as those of spoken language. She also describes the creatures penis through sign language. Yet, at a certain point, sign slips into gesture and language turns into metaphor, disintegrating. Thereby, it tends to replicate the body rather than to control it.
Of course, similar processes would also be conceivable for spoken or written language, but the film expresses it through signing because this has stronger affinity to film itself. One more interesting aspect of signing is that it precisely is produced through the visibility of the body. It is the hands, the gesture, the presence which create the sign. It is therefore not only the body constructed through discourse, but the discourse embodied in gesture.
 

6. Are these, then, bodies of fairy tale? They are rather bodies of the fantastic, incomplete, hurt and healing. Bodies that are subject to fear and sexual desire. Bodies which ultimately seek the dissolution of fixed identities by dissolving into water and becoming shapeless.
The fairy tale discourse, retaken at the end of the film, is rather a vehicle of turning the horror of an intrusion fantasy and represent it as a productive tale of evolution. The liberation and development through the embrace of imperfection is a narrative rather close to that found in many fantasies of Neil Gaiman. The relative distancing of the fairy tale discourse allows to give bodily instability a positive connotation, whereas intrusion fantasy allows to connect it to worlds of experience.
 

References

Antonsen, Jan Erik: Poetik des Unmöglichen. Mentis, Paderborn 2007.

Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter. Routledge, London 1993.

Foucault, Michel: "Des espaces autres" in Dits et Écrits, vol. 2. Gallimard, Paris 2001.

Warner, Marina: From the Beast to the Blonde. Chatto & Windus, London 1994.