Amphibious Magical Realism? The Shape of Water as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

guillermo del toro is one of the leading directors of our time. His most renowned film to date is The Shape of Water (2017), which won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score. I would like to explore the reasons for the film's success by first assessing the suitability of a term that has been used in connection with its style—magic or magical realism—and then homing in on the film's central character, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman in the fictional Occam Aerospace Research Center in Baltimore in 1962. Because Elisa Esposito moves from a position of silent victimization to one of agency, her development can be illuminated through an analogy to Bertha Pappenheim, the first patient of psychoanalysis. Better known by her clinical case name in Freud and Josef Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1895), Anna O., Pappenheim was treated by Breuer for hysteria but later became an activist for women's rights. I will use her transformation from hysteric to activist as a lens through which to view Elisa Esposito's evolution from underdog to savior.For those not familiar with The Shape of Water, I will give a brief summary. The film is a contemporary rendering of the story of Beauty and the Beast and was inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which del Toro first saw as a child. Elisa Esposito falls in love with a magical amphibious creature (Doug Jones) who has been captured for use in the space race against the Russians; the secret government laboratory in the Occam Center intends to employ the creature (referred to by those in the laboratory as “the asset”) to determine conditions that can be withstood during space flight. But Elisa is thwarted by a government agent in the laboratory, Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who wishes to vivisect the creature rather than test on it alive. Elisa elicits support from her gay neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a commercial illustrator, and her black coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who help her rescue the creature from the laboratory and take it to her apartment, where Elisa and the creature experience a period of amorous happiness. Matters are complicated by the fact that the Russians are also interested in the creature. A Soviet secret agent, Dimitri Mosenkov (Michael Stuhlbarg), has infiltrated the laboratory as a marine biologist named Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, and resisting the orders he receives to kill the creature and Strickland's plans to vivisect him, he instead helps Elisa save the creature. In the end Strickland shoots Elisa and the creature, but the creature is magically restored and slashes Strickland's throat. The creature plunges with Elisa into the canal, embracing her as she comes back to life and as the scars on her neck are transformed into gills. In contrast to Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which the amphibious monster is killed after he abducts a female member of the expedition that discovers him in the Amazon, The Shape of Water concludes with the felicitous union of Elisa and the creature.This précis does not even mention the importance of water in the film, the element that accommodates the amphibious creature as well as the site of erotic encounters between him and Elisa. The settings and costumes of the film foreground various shades of aqua and green, reflecting the fact that water virtually flows through the movie: both the first and the last scene take place underwater, and water—bathwater, the tank in which the creature is held, rain, the canal—plays a prominent role throughout the film. As my summary suggests, the film defies genre classification; reviewers Kevin Lally and Doris Toumarkine call it “a fairytale, a sci-fi fantasy, a cross-species love story and a Cold War thriller all wrapped up in one gorgeous, visionary package” (120).To pursue the question of how the highly contested term “magical realism” is and is not suitable to The Shape of Water, I will take Wendy Faris's now standard study, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, as a touchstone, since much of what she writes about fiction is relevant and illuminating for film. (Fredric Jameson's 1986 essay “On Magic Realism in Film” is not a generic discussion but rather is limited to analyses of three specific films.) In associating the concept of magical realism with film, it is useful to keep in mind that the term was initially used in connection with the visual medium of painting. The term first appeared in a short essay by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1923 and was given currency by his 1925 treatise titled Nach-Expressionismus. Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Post-Expressionism—Magical Realism: Problems in Recent European Painting). Roh identifies this style of painting in certain works of artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Pablo Picasso, Georg Schrimpf, Joan Miró, and Alexander Kanoldt. In attempting to distinguish magical realism from expressionism, Roh calls attention to elements that are not so much fantastic, or actually magical, as defamiliarizing with relation to quotidian reality. Hence, the connection of Roh's coinage of the term with current literary criticism has been questioned by recent scholars. Anne Hegerfeldt, for example, in writing about magical realism, claims that “the overlap [of Roh's term] with today's literary concept is marginal to non-existent” (13). Yet many of the features Roh discusses in distinguishing post-expressionism from earlier periods—such as the treatment of color, tone, proportion, light, and shadow; the questions of abstraction versus figural representation, of dynamic versus static forms, and of simplicity versus agglomeration or ornateness; and the issue of angularity—all reflect the technical aspects of painting, thereby highlighting the visual nature of magical realism as it was originally conceived. This linkage supports the association of magical realism with film.Returning to the question of the appropriateness of the literary concept of magical realism for The Shape of Water, perhaps most obviously, the settings in del Toro's film “detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world. . . . Realistic descriptions create a fictional world that resembles the one we live in . . . ” (Faris 14), or rather the one in which the inhabitants of Baltimore lived in 1962. Del Toro is at pains to create the most realistic world possible, on both the individual and the social levels. We see Elisa waking up, turning off her alarm, getting up, bathing, preparing her breakfast and snack, dressing for her trip to work, and the like. More broadly, the viewer who is old enough to remember 1962 will recognize the clothing, the hairstyles, the makeup, the period-appropriate props, the advertising billboards on the highway, the cars—most strikingly, the brand-new teal-colored Cadillac Strickland buys—and even the references to television shows such as Bonanza. Faris cites Brenda Cooper's observation that the mysterious events of magical realist narratives “share the fictional space with history” (15). A character in The Shape of Water mentions missiles being sent into Cuba, and during Giles's abduction of the creature from the laboratory, we hear the voice-over of an actual broadcast from President John F. Kennedy, with a warning about the Russian threat and a plea to Khrushchev. Moreover, “the future,” that watchword of the decade, aimed as it was at the moon, is invoked again and again: Giles's employer exhorts him to convey the future in his designs, pie ads proclaim that “the future is here,” Strickland's son asks him whether people will all have jet packs in the future, and a car salesman persuades Strickland to buy the teal Cadillac by stressing that it embodies the future.By contrast, as Faris notes, “[i]n terms of cultural history, magical realism often merges ancient or traditional—sometimes indigenous—and modern worlds” (21). Del Toro claims that the amphibian man “needed to have a very strong ancient energy” (“Summoning a Water God”). Often magical realism's indigenous element belongs to Latin America, the geographical region with which magical realism is most commonly associated. In this respect as well, The Shape of Water conforms, insofar as Guillermo del Toro is from Mexico; on the level of content, in contrast to the film's distinctly North American milieu, we learn that the amphibian man was found in the Amazon River.And yet there is a fundamental difference between the depiction and role of the amphibian man in The Shape of Water and the presence of the magical in conventional magical realism, a difference intimated by the creature's origin in a space so different from 1962 Baltimore. Faris observes that in magical realism “the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them” (1); “[t]he magic grows almost imperceptibly out of the real . . . ” (14). Similarly, in the introduction to a collection published years earlier, Faris writes with coeditor Lois Zamora that “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing” (3). Later critics have continued to emphasize the equivalent status of the real and the fantastic or supernatural in magical realism. Christopher Warnes, for instance, defines magical realism as “a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence. On the level of the text neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality” (3). Warnes asserts that the most characteristic feature of magical realism is “that it naturalises the supernatural, integrating fantastic or mythical features smoothly into the otherwise realistic momentum of the narrative” (151). In The Shape of Water, however, the amphibian man is regarded by all the other characters, albeit with different valences, as distinctly “Other.” Fleming, the head of security at the laboratory, announces the arrival of the creature by exclaiming, “This may well be the most sensitive asset ever to be housed in this facility.” Whereas conventional magical realism is characterized by “irreducible elements of magic recounted with little or no comment” (Faris 11), the amphibian man is an object of universal fascination in the film.Given this fundamental difference from classic magical realism, a better label might be “grotesque realism,” a term coined by Jeanne Delbaere-Garant in an essay in the Faris and Zamora collection. Delbaere-Garant distinguishes three variations on magic realism in contemporary literature in English: psychic realism, generated from inside the psyche; mythic realism, in which magic images are borrowed from the physical environment itself instead of being projected from the characters’ psyches; and grotesque realism, in which “[g]rotesque elements are used to convey the anarchic eccentricity of popular tellers who tend to amplify and distort reality to make it more credible.” Delbaere-Garant continues, “I would suggest, further, that ‘grotesque realism’ be used not just for popular oral discourse but for any sort of hyperbolic distortion that creates a sense of strangeness through the confusion or interpenetration of different realms like animate/inanimate or human/animal” (256). This definition reflects the etymology of the term “grotesque,” from the Italian grottesca, referring to cave paintings that combined incongruous elements, such as elements from the human, animal, and/or botanic realms. The asset in The Shape of Water, as a humanoid, hybrid creature, is a quintessentially grotesque being. On the one hand, he is, as Giles describes him, a “wild animal,” severing two of Strickland's fingers, killing and eating one of Giles's cats, and bearing the attributes of a large fish. On the other hand, both Giles and Hoffstetler describe him as “beautiful,” and he is attractive enough that Elisa falls in love with him and develops a sexual relationship with him. The asset's attractiveness is illuminated by sculptor Mike Hill, quoted in an article by Graham Edwards that describes in detail the special effects used in the film: Together, we tried to give him a face that was handsome, strong and believable as this god-like being. . . . The trick also was to not make the creature so fantastic that he outshone everyone around him. He was one of the leads and had to fit realistically among the other characters. It was a fine line. I started with his lips, which I tried to make appealing so Sally's character would want to kiss him. From there it was about making a strong jawline, putting a cleft in the chin, and giving the face pleasing proportions. (30–31)From her first encounters with the creature, Elisa feels a special kinship with him, eventually recognizing that he is sufficiently intelligent to learn sign language. He demonstrates tenderness toward her and toward Giles, employing his magic to restore hair to Giles's balding head and to heal the wound he accidentally inflicts on Giles's arm. In view of the creature's hybrid nature, “grotesque realism” emerges as the most apt generic characterization of this film.Zooming in now on the central character in The Shape of Water, in what remains of this article, I would like to focus on the figure of Elisa Esposito. Although virtually all fictional characters undergo some sort of development, as indicated previously, Elisa's specific progression from silent victimization to agency is analogous to the case of Anna O./Bertha Pappenheim, who overcame her early hysteria to become a champion of women's rights. Although in the instance of Anna O. the motivating, curative force was psychotherapy, and in the case of Elisa it is love, numerous parallels exist between the two figures.Anna O.’s case study was recorded in detail by the doctor who treated her, Freud's colleague Josef Breuer, in their jointly published Studies on Hysteria of 1895. Their research on hysteria, gleaned from their experience with mostly young, upper-class Jewish women in Vienna in the 1880s and ’90s, constitutes the beginnings of modern trauma studies. These women were referred to Breuer and Freud for psychoanalytic treatment when various physical ailments proved to have no organic basis. In his first paper on hysteria, published in 1888, Freud described the syndrome as a “neurosis in the strictest sense of the word . . . based wholly and entirely on physiological modifications of the nervous system” (Freud 1: 41). Symptoms included convulsive attacks, hysterogenic zones of the body, disturbances of sensibility, disturbances of sensory activity, paralyses, and contractures (1: 42–47). These symptoms tended to be excessive and could occur in isolation. “It is especially characteristic of hysteria for a disorder to be at the same time most highly developed and most sharply limited” (1: 48; emphasis Freud's). He conjectured that the “surplus of stimuli in the organ of the mind . . . is distributed by means of conscious or unconscious ideas” (1: 57). But in his 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud credits Breuer with making a decisive leap forward in research on hysteria with his insight that “the symptoms of hysteria . . . are determined by certain experiences of the patient's which have operated in a traumatic fashion and which are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols” (3: 192–93; emphasis Freud's). The aim of analysis was to uncover these traumatic scenes; however, Freud believed that it was impossible in every case to get directly back to the originating traumatic scene, which in his initial view was inevitably sexual: “Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience” (3: 199; emphasis Freud's).Here we arrive at Freud's notorious seduction theory, formulated because he had so often heard his female patients in analysis describe instances of sexual molestation by older male figures—their fathers, their uncles, a family friend. But when he presented the theory to his colleagues, the reception was so cold that he realized his professional reputation was at stake. He retracted the theory and postulated that these narratives on the part of his patients were merely sexual fantasies. The disservice he thereby did to the psychic well-being of these young women is obvious.Breuer's treatment of Anna O., by contrast, was successful. Freud himself wrote, “This case will retain an important place in the history of hysteria, since it was the first one in which a physician succeeded in elucidating all the symptoms of the hysterical state, in learning the origins of each symptom and at the same time in finding a means of causing that symptom to disappear” (3: 29–30). Breuer treated Anna O. over a period of eighteen months, in 1880–81, beginning when she was twenty-one. In his case study he describes her as “markedly intelligent, with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition” (Breuer and Freud 21). He notes that one of her essential character traits was “sympathetic kindness” (Breuer and Freud 21). With a monotonous family life and an absence of adequate intellectual stimulation—typical conditions for girls of the time—she found an outlet in daydreaming and the activity of her imagination. But while nursing her sick father, she began to demonstrate a series of disturbing symptoms that could not be organically diagnosed: a pronounced squint and other disorders of vision, paralysis of her right arm and leg, partial paralysis of her neck and left arm, somnolence, sleepwalking, weakness, anemia, a chronic distaste for food, a severe cough, fantasies that she was being tormented, and hallucinations of black snakes. Most tellingly for our purposes, her linguistic faculties became impaired: she at first was at a loss to find words, then lost her command of grammar and syntax; eventually, she put words together “laboriously out of four or five languages and became almost unintelligible” (Breuer and Freud 25). Finally, “[f]or two weeks she became completely dumb and . . . was unable to say a syllable” (Breuer and Freud 25). When she eventually regained the power of speech, she spoke only in English rather than in her native German. It was in this second language that she coined the famous phrase “talking cure” to characterize what finally had put an end to her maladies: describing her symptoms in detail to Breuer.The curing of the hysteric Anna O. performed by Josef Breuer laid the foundation for her identity as the women's rights activist Bertha Pappenheim. In 1888, at the age of twenty-nine, she moved with her mother to Frankfurt, where she became involved in social and political activities. For example, she read aloud in an orphanage run by the Israelite Women's Association, and in 1896 she became director of the orphanage. She sought to orient its educational program toward vocational training rather than toward the single-minded goal of marriage. In 1895 she participated in a meeting of the General German Women's Association in Frankfurt and later contributed to the establishment of a local chapter. She subsequently began to publish articles on the subject of women's rights and translated Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman into German. Most notably, she was elected the first president of the League of Jewish Women and led it for twenty years, until her death in 1936. In this capacity she continued to pursue equal rights for women.Numerous parallels emerge between Anna O./Bertha Pappenheim and Elisa Esposito. I am not suggesting that Elisa is a hysteric but am rather using the trajectory of Pappenheim's life as an interpretive lens through which to view this cinematic character. Anna O.’s pathology is analogous to the fact that Elisa Esposito is an outsider in both the metaphorical and literal senses. “Esposito is an Italian surname thought to derive from the term for ‘placed outside’ or ‘exposed’” (Wilde et al. 3). She is an orphan, having been found as an infant in a river “where she had been ‘placed outside’” (Wilde et al. 3). Just as Anna O. was confined by the mundane duties characteristic of women of her day, Elisa occupies the conventionally feminine and menial occupation of cleaning person. Above all, Elisa's victimization by her muteness is analogous to Anna O.’s hysteria, in particular her linguistic disturbances. Although the precise origins and nature of Elisa's linguistic disability are not revealed in the film—we learn simply that her larynx was cut when she was a baby—the scars on her neck render her infant trauma visible to the viewer. As Petra Kuppers writes, “[t]he experience of disability is often figured as a traumatic personal history, culturally marked as ‘private’ tragedy. Within literature and film, disability often becomes the symptom of trauma” (186). “The social narrative of disability sees it as negativity, and the social world excludes disabled people through environmental and attitudinal barriers. Language and narrative re-present disability as pain and tragedy” (Kuppers 185). Certain characters in The Shape of Water, notably Richard Strickland, define Elisa Esposito in terms of her disabled physicality, thus underlining her negative social status in the first part of the film.As a mute woman, Elisa inhabits the silent space that women have occupied throughout Western history. The film demonstrates the ways in which feminine silence accommodates patriarchy, as embodied in virtually caricatured form by Strickland, the epitome of masculine brutality. As Edward Chamberlain points out, the fact that Strickland and not the creature is the true monster in the film is graphically represented by the considerable attention afforded his reattached fingers (6), which rot and stink so strongly that he eventually twists them off. In the midst of a decidedly unsensual sexual encounter with his wife, Strickland demands that she be silent; similarly, in making an overture to Elisa, he tells her that he is sexually stimulated by her silence: “It kind of gets me going,” he says. As David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder observe, “[f]or Strickland, muteness represents an inferior characteristic of voicelessness that is also a sexual turn-on, as Elisa would not be able to articulate refusal; yet the first two forms of objectification also position her as a child, one he can easily control beneath the patronizing tutelage of government-based, paternalistic oversight” (152). The historical link between masculine violence and feminine silence is reflected in the expression “stopping the silence, stopping the violence,” invoked at feminist rallies against rape in the late twentieth century (Griffiths 186). Writing about the recent field of feminist studies, Jennifer Griffiths points to the intersectionality between racism, sexism, and violence (187), all of which are abundantly manifested in the character of Strickland. As Alison Wilde and colleagues note, the name of the area where the creature is held captive and watched over by Strickland, T4, is “undeniably a reference to the Nazi programme Aktion T4” (2)—evoking an association with the ultimate connection between racism, sexism, and violence in fascism. Significantly, Giles and Zelda—the gay man and the black woman—are the only human characters in the film who can understand Elisa's signing. Del Toro describes Elisa, Giles, and Zelda as “invisible,” reflecting the way in which all of them are marginalized by the 1960s heteronormative culture portrayed in the film: “What I wanted was invisible people getting together and rescuing another invisible entity. . . . That's the reason they can take him—because they're invisible. And the creature represents all the outcasts. He's like the patron saint of otherness” (quoted in Edwards 30).In her attention to the intersectionality of racism, sexism, and violence, Griffiths might have included homophobia as well. The film depicts the link between racism and homophobia in the figure of the young man who works in the pie shop and who disgustedly rebuffs Giles's advances just before refusing to serve two black customers. But feminine communication, in contrast to silence, signifies power and agency in the face of all these forces. Just as Anna O. overcame her hysteria through the “talking cure” she engaged in with Josef Breuer, Elisa moves from a position of victimization to one of agency in the scene in which she vehemently signs to Giles that they must rescue the creature from the laboratory. She insistently signs that the creature does not see what she lacks: “I move my mouth like him. I make no sound, like him. . . . The way he looks at me, he does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am as I am. And now I can either save him or let him die.” This pivotal scene is the turning point of The Shape of Water and the motor for its subsequent action, as Elisa and Giles engineer the abduction and salvation of the amphibian man. Elisa's newfound agency is reflected in her signing “Fuck you” to Strickland after he interrogates her and Zelda about the creature's disappearance.Elisa's status as agent rather than silent victim is further expressed in a fantasy scene visually distinguished from the rest of the film by its rendering in black and white, reminiscent of the Hollywood movies she and Giles often watch together: in the fantasy an elegantly attired Elisa sings “You'll Never Know” (a 1961 popular song by Shirley Bassey) to the amphibian man as they dance together. Philippe Rouyer views this fantasy segment as quintessential evidence of the film's cinematic heterogeneity. As he observes with reference to this scene, “le film est aussi une ode à tous les genres de cinema qu'il mixe allègrement. Au conte, au thriller et à la comédie, Guillermo del Toro ajoute le film musical . . . ” (“the film is also an ode to all the cinematic genres which it joyously combines. Guillermo del Toro adds the film musical to the [genres of] tale, thriller, and comedy . . . ”) (15).Both the historical Anna O. and the cinematic Elisa Esposito, then, progress from a state of passive victimization to one of empowered agency. What early psychoanalysis did for Anna O., moving her away from hysteria and ultimately toward her identity as the feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim, is accomplished for Elisa Esposito by the power of love. As del Toro observes, “The movie is about love. That's the one force we're really afraid to talk about now” (quoted in Gray).