In 1960, a state-of-the-art beachfront laboratory nestled in the Caribbean island of St Thomas began training dolphins to understand the human language. A curious researcher in her twenties – Margaret Howe Lovatt – stopped by the lab, and was gradually invited to become a regular visitor to the Communication Research Institute, informally known as ‘Dolphin House’. In 1965, Margaret began to live around-the-clock in the Dolphin House’s custom-built ‘dolphinarium’, for which the laboratory’s upper-floor walls were completely waterproofed and the floor flooded with water, allowing dolphins and researchers to live together full-time. Controversies followed involving the boundary-blurring relationship between Lovatt and her dolphin Peter – “it wasn’t sexual on my part… Sensuous perhaps” Lovatt related to the Guardian half a century later – as well as the dangerous mistreatment of dolphins in the project. Dolphin House’s work was abandoned within six months – Peter was said to have killed himself.
The residual dream of John C. Lilly’s since-dissolved Dolphin House takes on a new, more compassionate and egalitarian life in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, a genre-bending fantasy film about the relationship between the frustrated Elisa, played with subtle mastery by Sally Hawkins, and a ‘river god’-style creature pulled from an Amazonian river, now housed under classified government care (Doug Jones) and nicknamed ‘the Asset’ by government suits. The basic architecture of Lilly’s ‘Dolphin House’ frames the film, which explores the intersection between the military industrial complex, the scientific research apparatus, and the unplumbed mysteries between nature and women.
Elisa Esposito is a bored and unfulfilled mute janitor who works the night shift at a top secret government facility in Baltimore during the 1960s. She has a solid daily routine. She wakes up, masturbates in her bathtub, says hello to her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) while packing her boiled eggs for the day (or rather, night) and heads off to work in the Occam Aerospace Research Center. There, she enjoys a close friendship with her fellow custodial staff, the chatty and charismatic Zelda (Octavia Spencer). This routine is disrupted by the arrival of this so-called secret government ‘Asset’, housed in a room she is assigned to clean. The Asset, a gangly, anthropomorphic amphibian with soulful eyes, is treated with disgust and cruelty by its keeper, the gruff, short-tempered government agent Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). Strickland keeps the creature in chains, and tames its strength with an imposing electronic baton. Elisa spends her nights cleaning away the splattered blood in the Asset’s room and slowly develops a much more compassionate relationship with the creature. There’s even a scene in which Elisa and ‘the Asset’ bond in a room flooded with water, à la Lilly’s ‘Dolphinarium’ (without, unfortunately, the waterproofed walls), in which woman and ‘river god’ share a meaningful and elegiac connection.
Elisa eventually cooks up a madcap escape plan for her new friend, aided by Giles, Zelda, and a sympathetic Russian scientist. What follows is a delightful yet heart-wrenching race to save the Asset from recapture, involving an increasingly unhinged Strickland, competitive Soviet spies, and a deeply displeased cinema manager who confronts Giles about the water that keeps dripping into the downstairs theatres. Tropes such as the eager-to-please macho military man, the ostracised gay artist, and the inequality of marital relationships are both presented and unpacked along the way. Large-scale Cold War politics take a back seat in Shape of Water, which isn’t to say that it’s an apolitical film – rather, it views politics through the lens of the day-to-day lived experiences of the under-appreciated and the marginalised, juxtaposing their god-like dignity of the latter with the petty self-interest of men like Strickland. “I don’t want an intricate, beautiful thing destroyed!” protests one of Elisa’s allies when facing orders to kill the creature. Yet to men like Strickland, this is the necessary and inevitable collateral of a war started and waged by men insulated in secret government cabinets. What are these deaths to the divine right of well-heeled statesmen to play god with the world?
Reflecting on her relationship with the Asset, Elisa signs to Giles “When 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”. Elisa, belittled by Strickland for being mute, is moved by the Asset’s ability to see and value her on her own terms – he does not measure her dignity or respectability against a ‘standardised’ norm of ‘humanity’ as other people are wont to do. It is an action that perhaps comes easily for the Asset, himself an outcast that borders the line between the human and the animal. The inherent dignity of being alive – regardless of how it might serve the interests of the powerful, or measure up to a common norm – is unapologetically celebrated in The Shape of Water.
Although del Toro has stated in interviews that the Asset is not an animal, but a ‘river god’, the creature’s scales and fins link him with the animal world. The Asset stands at a liminal space between animal and human – his cruel treatment at the hands of Strickland is analogous to the questionable experimentation of dolphins in Lilly’s Dolphin House. But his acceptance by the other characters opens up a different model of interaction between human and nonhuman life, reminiscent of Cora Diamond’s critique of Peter Singer and his idea that animal rights should be advanced on the basis that animals also demonstrate standards echoing human moral goodness. Diamond argues that we do not make these moral decisions with regards to animals based on this neutral telescoping of cold, hard logic – we do not eat our pets because they have greater ‘moral worth’ than other animals – but rather by random but intuitively felt assertions of self-belief – this is the one I have chosen to love!¹ Likewise, Elisa’s warmth towards the Asset is not the result of following a series of hard logical propositions within her psyche, but rather something that comes from the outside that then deeply transforms her interior.
In his director’s statement for the Venice Film Festival, Guillermo del Toro notes “love is the most gentle and most powerful force in the Universe” and remains “free and formless until it pours into its recipient, until we let it in”. Here the film makes a radical departure from its fellow marine-researchers at John C. Lilly’s ‘Dolphin House’. While the animals there had their worth measured against their ability to meet a human norm – mastering the English language – the Asset in The Shape of Water transforms the people it touches from the outside, showing the small-minded folly of measuring the worth of life according to an external yardstick. As a tribute to that which is different, misaligned and misunderstood, The Shape of Water offers both an incisive critique and stunning exemplar of the ways in which ‘difference’ can make our world beautiful – if we are willing to listen.
So far, much of our track record in listening to ‘the other’ on their own terms, is poor. We are inclined to take that which is foreign – the immigrant; the unruly woman; the Amazonian ‘river god’ – and render them palatable through the lens of material self-interest. We celebrate the immigrant who serves our nation; tell men to support feminism on the basis that the movement also serves their interests, and run experiments that batter and kill animals on the basis of their potential use to us. The Asset is seen by the government only in terms of his use for Cold War geopolitical manoeuvring – ignoring that he is, in his own way, a powerful god. In this conditional celebration of ‘the different’, we remain locked in the realm of self-interest – never mind that meaningful compassion starts from leaving the prism of the self. Shape of Water subverts the way in which our societies have traditionally been taught to love ‘the unfamiliar’, illustrating that a film can be both searingly smart and whimsically charming. At a time marked by a profound sense of hopelessness, there is necessary salvation to be found in the consideration of what is different, ostracised, and hated. We just have to overcome our prejudices and look.
1 Cora Diamond, Eating Meat and Eating People, Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 206 (Oct., 1978). Available online here.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review and staff writer at Another Gaze. She tweets at @becbecliuliu.