We just recently saw at the Crescent theater downtown the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. I think Wednesday night is its last showing here, but if you can’t catch it here, for goodness sake rent it. It is a mythic tale of epic proportions of the human spirit. It is about a fictional community living in a fictional lost bayou somewhere outside of the levees in southeastern Louisiana called the “bathtub”. The community is almost tribal living in what we would deem squalid conditions, in broken down huts and ramshackled mobile homes, makeshift boats, living off of the bounty of nature alone; but somewhere, somehow amid this squalor is a sense of dignity. The dignity of belonging to a community perhaps….a community that takes care of each other with what little they have. The only glimpse we get of the modern world are the refinery towers looming ominously beyond the levee. Their contingency to each other in this community reminded me of the loaves and fish story. Sharing begets abundance.
The protagonist of this epic tale is a young girl whom we know only by her nick-name, Hushpuppy. She is single minded and intrepid, and stubborn. She lives with her temperamental and sometimes abusive father. Their relationship is volatile though their love for each other is real. We find out early on that he is dying, and while he is still alive he endeavors to teach Hushpuppy the skills of survival. Her mother moved out when Hushpuppy was very young….We learn that the mother ends up in a brothel alongside a landing in a distant bayou. Through her imagination Hushpuppy still has conversations with her mother…she muses about the nature of the universe; its intricate and beautiful and dangerous order…She muses that though person, animal, plant, anything animate or inanimate have a place in this exquisite mysterious tapestry of existence…there is still a very real possibility that things are on the verge of unravelling. In her dreams she is tormented by aurochs, ancient massive tusked boar-like animals that she had seen once in a book about cave drawings. The more ill her father becomes the closer these beasts come to her in her dreams.
Inevitably, a hurricane comes ashore and decimates the bathtub community…belongings washed away….livestock…the massive influx of salt water would wipe out much of the life of the bayou…the order of the cosmos unravelling. Hushpuppy and three of her young female friends hitch a ride with a fisherman to the honky-tonk where her mother worked….She needed to get away from the death befalling her father and the faltering life of the bathtub….She needed to see her mother in the flesh….an oracular meeting. Her mother affirms her resilience, her certain place in the textured fabric of the universe…she reminds her of her own formidable power that comes with being conscious of one’s inexpendability as a working part of the creative order…..She reminds her of the beauty of this life and of its danger…all of the one whole….Much of this knowledge was not spoken, but communicated by a long loving embrace between daughter and the one who bore her into this world.
Hushpuppy returns with her friends to the bathtub…..she has found her selfhood which at its heart is freedom from fear and the knowledge of love….The tusked aurochs now trampling through the delta bearing down on Hushpuppy and her friends…the brute violence of the universe coming for them…the girls scream…the dream now alive in the flesh….except Hushpuppy who turns and stares the beasts down…and if my eyes didn’t deceive me, they knelt before her and then departed. Hushpuppy then enters the shack where her father lays dying, and without fear and with a heart full of love she is able to attend to and honor his death…that too a part of the nature of things….the divine order.
A friend/parishioner recommended this movie to us, and I e-mailed her after seeing the movie to thank her for the recommendation…She e-mailed back and asked what I thought it meant…so here’s a go: That God is like a mother (though God is never mentioned in the film) God is like the resilient feminine, that part of human nature that can say with all due conviction…Let it be….she who is the nurturer and sustainer, the plumb-line of the divine realm, which is one and the same as the natural realm…She is single minded, intrepid, and stubborn… And it is about living into one’s selfhood, one’s true humanity, which is a freedom that banishes fear and engenders love…love the most powerful force of the universe. And this selfhood may only be accomplished in community….community whose life’s blood is sacrifice for the good of the whole…..community, a microcosm (and a messy one) of the created order entire….and that indeed, truly, we are each a small but exquisite part of an exquisite whole, the beauty and the danger….I want in.
