Water sports

Shape of Water (d. Guillermo del Toro)

For a poetically titled movie, it makes a vulgar point to spell out the anatomical part involved in the inter-species sexual encounter that the movie might just as well be called the Shape of Penis. The movie is insistently heterosexual in its point of view that Aquaman can fuck a woman but a gay man can spurned by another guy. Its racial politics is just for show like the snippets of civil rights demonstrations shown on the TV while the sassy black woman from The Help is…well, just a help. She constantly complains about her husband that the couple’s representation veers close to the findings of the Moynihan Report. The Alpha Male is also Trumpism embodied. The actor musters and registers the White Rage of the times with a more pointed sexism than racism. His virility is carefully laid out, inexplicably, with an overhead shot of him humping his bare breasted wife (a touch sexist for a throwaway role/shot), and the shot of a young woman admiring his purchasing power. Del Toro needs to build this guy up so that he can pull him down bit by bit. What the director wants to do is to undermine this American triumphalist narrative but he can’t seem to imagine a non-heterosexual and genuinely queer formulation of love, desire, and existence as an alternative. For him, difference is purely appearance. The alien creature may have gills but he has a functioning dick for penetrative sex. The effect is that it’s the non-hetero and non-white folks who continue to be alienated in this fantasy tale. Where del Toro may have succeeded is when he offers a different but still problematic version of America: America belongs to the dreamers; romantics; to those ennobled to self-sacrifice, like the Russian dude; or, as the final sequence indicates, to those who self-deport.

#2018 #March