Southern Beasts

A friend and I went to Cinema 21 the other night to watch Beasts of the Southern Wild.

A remarkable and unique film, Beasts of the Southern Wild asks you to step back into your childhood and view tragic and confusing moments from that perspective.  A little girl is being raised by a single father in the most desperately poor community, isolated (by choice) from the rest of southern Louisiana, and facing utter destruction from a hurricane.

The little girl - Hushpuppy - knows her world is going wrong, and thinks it partly her responsibility.  Hushpuppy says, "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the whole universe will get busted."

Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhane Wallis in her very first acting role)  is our observer who tries desperately to take the right action to save her world.  Her daddy Wink (Dwight Henry in his first acting job as well) seems at first a drunken layabout who feels some small obligation to his daughter, but not enough to let her stay in his own house.  Wink, in fact, seems to be a large part of the threat to Hushpuppy's existence.  As the movie evolves, though, we begin to realize that Wink is just like the rest of us, trying to do what he thinks is right and best for all.

My friend mentioned after the film that she'd never been exposed to a life like that experienced by the characters in the movie.  She was referring in part to the extraordinary poverty, pitiful living conditions, ignorance, and occasional brutality of a life lived in the rough.  Most of us, blessedly, are not exposed to that kind of existence.  But, it's always been with us, whether we see it or not.  People do live under bridges, in gullies beside the freeway, in a row of bushes next to an apartment house.  They carry everything they own.  They are, for most of us, aliens living a life so different from our own that we cannot imagine it, just as my friend could not imagine it.


That kind of poverty bends your perspective of what's right and wrong, and who matters and who doesn't.  Once during the winter while talking a walk at lunch time, a homeless guy I'd seen around a lot gestured at me and said, "Give me your coat, man.  My bud's stole mine last night."  My knee-jerk impulse was to say, "Well then, they weren't your friends then, were they?"  But, I didn't.  I said something like "Too bad."  It seems to me now that the homeless guy was really pointing out the fact that he was a member of a society to which I did not belong, and as an outsider, I didn't matter to him while those members of his own society did matter, even if they happened to steal his coat.

This kind of us-versus-them attitude seems to be deeply woven into the human fabric, and comes out in this movie very clearly.  Wink believes that he needs to toughen Hushpuppy up because it's a hard, cruel world out there and the only one you can count on is yourself.  But he had it a little wrong.  Hushpuppy could also count on her own society.  Her people will take care of her and keep the rest of us, the aliens, at bay.

Go see the movie.  It's absolutely unique and worth the effort.