Beasts of the Southern Wild

The echoing worlds of a little girl seem to transcend time and space.  Her journey culminates in a pivotal realization, that she is a part of something.  “When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me lying around in invisible pieces…I see that’s I’m a little piece of a big, big universe.  And that makes things right.  When I die, the scientists of the future, they’re gonna find it all.  They’re gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the bathtub.”  Telling her story through a web of metaphors and symbols, through mystical creatures and real life natural disasters, she invites us to reflect on the nature of man, his fight for survival, and the necessity of community.

Medieval theorists and writers focused on the multiplicity of signs found throughout literature. And their theories can be applied to a variety of texts.  Augustine spoke specifically of how things are learned through signs and their ability to carry multiple meanings.  He states that: “For a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses.” (155)  In Beast of the Southern Wild, our tiny protagonist uses and explores an array of signs in order to tell her story.  Most predominately, perhaps is that reoccurring theme of a heartbeat.  A heartbeat is a sign for life and survival.  Hushpuppy begins her tale, speaking specifically of heartbeats, (as the audience hears the faint thump in the opening moments) and how every living thing has one.  She explores the heart beat of nearly everything in her world as she tries to make meaning in her world and understand this sign, which appears in both a natural and given form.  Hushpuppy listens to and for the heartbeat of both the alive and the dead; she puts her ear to the crab, the leaf (given), her father, the old man in the hospital (natural).  The filmmakers further highlight this sign with heartbeat sounds when Hushpuppy and her father are on the truck/boat, the heartbeat of industrial sounds, after she punches her dad’s heart, or the faint thump as his heart stops.  Percussive music further emphasizes this theme and figurative language is found in the dialogue as Wink describes the mother seeing her baby for the first time.  He states that her “heartbeat so big, she thought it would blow up.”

Augustine’s writings can further aid us in this quest to make meaning of this text, Beasts of the Southern Wild, in his understanding of higher and lower things and the necessary progress toward home.  Wink needs to journey home and won’t let the things he uses/needs (the hospital, medicine, operation, etc.) take the place of what he loves (his independence).  Hushpuppy on the other hand, journeys to find her mother, begins to love the notion of being held, (and who could blame her, for it’s only happened twice in her life!) but for a moment, she is distracted from her journey home by spending time with the corporeal being that prior to this moment had just been an old shirt and imaginary advice from an absent mother. 

This film is most certainly a parable and as Dante would likely term, polysemous.  Additional viewings or a varied audience creates a multiplicity of meanings.  Upon my second viewing, it moved from being merely the story of a young girl’s journey with her daddy in a rundown fishing settlement (historical or literal interpretation)  to an epic tale of survival against the elements, fears, people and things (mythical and actual) that would threaten her physical and spiritual existence (allegorical interpretation).  The moral (tropological) reading of this film upon a second viewing centers on the importance of community and the love of the higher power in the world (perhaps Augustine’s vision of God) and neighbor.  Wink wouldn’t allow his neighbors to abandon the bathtub.  Likewise, in facing disaster after disaster, this small community rallies together to support each other and return home.   The children are also taught to “take care of people smaller and sweeter than you.”  Or the importance of being held, as in that beautiful moment where Hushpuppy declares: “This is my favorite thing.”  Throughout the piece, Hushpuppy focuses her thoughts on creation and the elements and the universe.  An anagogical reading further illustrates the quest of the mortal in overcoming her “Beasts”, interior and exterior, mythical and real.  Aquinas talks about the need to look deeper, to discover metaphor and hidden meanings in order to understand people.  Hushpuppy does this herself as we are treated to her imaginative vision of the world, through the lens of her eyes and her voice as our guide. 

Aquinas also comments on the need of Holy writ to put forth divine and spiritual truths by means of comparison with material things.  And while some might scoff at looking at this text as a piece of holy writ, isn’t each of our own journeys Holy in some way?  (Boccaccio would likely tell us here that we shouldn’t judge things we don’t understand…and then ridicule us further!)   Therefore, can’t we, as Hushpuppy does, use metaphors in a corporeal form to try to extricate meaning?  The polar ice caps melting become the world falling apart in Hushpuppy’s own natural disaster.  She sees the “fabric of the universe coming unraveled.”  The children are taught in parable and metaphors that then emerge as corporeal beings in the Aurochs, giant mythical cattle-like characters.  And when they come in their killing path, things start to die.  Further metaphors are visible in the repetition of the light house, the shirt that becomes her maternal figure, the wrappers that remind the captain of who he is, and a number of other fascinating examples.  Hushpuppy even compares a hospital to a fish tank with no water, where hurt animals are plugged into the wall. 

We must be active in our interpretation of text, and must find text that is worth interpreting.  Boccaccio admonishes: “You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind.  If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another.  If obstacles arise, then still another, until yours strength holds out, you will find that clean which at first looked dark.”  (p. 200)  Further, Dante asks us if the text (film) move us toward an ideal?  Does it make us fight and take an active role to understand and interpret the text?  Each of the medieval theorists, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Boccaccio advocate pursuing a higher path when it comes to text interpretation, to find multiple meanings – that often take a number of readings and a significant amount of study before we grasp it all.  Sometime in our pursuit of understanding, we may feel as our young protagonist did about the parts of her universe that she didn’t understand, that it was: “talking to each other in ways I can’t understand.  Sometimes talking in codes.”  But if we can walk away from a film and understand the reason the story is best told allegorically, through the lens of a child, perhaps we will take a step closer to understanding a child’s point of view or vision in other circumstances.  Hasn’t Christ asked us to “become like the little child” in trying to receive his messages?  If not that, then perhaps we can walk away, feeling empowered, like Hushpuppy on her return home, when we see four girls and four 4 beasts, wading deep waters, conquering fears and obstacles.  She turns and stares her destiny down, which in turn bows down to her command.  Or perhaps we can take from the film the simple message that the “whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right” and it becomes each of our jobs, no matter how small, poor, sick, removed or otherwise to try to fix it.