Sermon Commanding You to the Movie Theater

Loud whispering.  Crinkling candy bar wrappers.  The crunch, click, crunch, rustle sounds of someone tossing back popcorn into their obnoxious throat.  The insult of high prices.  CGI.  The ubiquitous pop song overlay pushing around my emotions.

The movies make me cranky.

But on rare occasions, I do not leave the theater disappointed or, as is more often the case, highly annoyed at the state of humanity.  On rarer and rarer occasions, a film crawls into the world and succeeds at more than ticket sales and escapism.  It ruins us.

Such is the way of Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, based on a book by Lucy Alibar. Reviews label the film under the category of fantasy, although I'm not sure why other than a few nods at traditional myth, including a mythical creature, and a looseness about time and event.  The fantastical aspects of the film, even its apocalyptic bent, strike me more as brilliant bursts of imagination from the main character, a six-year old girl named Hushpuppy.  Hushpuppy lives with her father, Wink, in "The Bathtub", a makeshift town somewhere in Southern Louisiana.  The folks inside The Bathtub live close to the earth and its beasts: shrimp, alligators, crabs.  They are deep in the muck in more ways than one.  After Wink contracts a mysterious illness (which is either caused or alleviated by alcohol--or both), and the Bathtub is drowned by waters let loose with the help of a broken levee, Hushpuppy embarks on a hero quest of magical proportions: like many heroes, she starts her adventure by going in search of her mother who she believes "swam away" after her birth.  And like many heroes who leave their known world for another place, Hushpuppy desperately needs an elixir.  She wants to fix what has broken, although by the end of the film it's hard to tell whether the broken thing is her ailing father, the town, her own spirit, or the entire world.  As Hushpuppy explains, "If one piece busts--even the smallest piece--the whole world will get broke."

The film wrecked me.

I haven't stopped thinking about it since I saw it a week ago.  I could list many, many reasons why I'd recommend the film, not the least of which is the dignity with which Zeitlin treats his characters and their complicated lives, but I finally figured out what lay at the heart of the thing for this viewer.

Based on my short personal history, I understand two major ways of dealing with trauma: 

1. By analyzing the facts.  In large part, psychotherapy attempts to do just this: mine the history, the patterns, the "relational triangles", the major life events of the patient in order to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical and give the patient tools to break into better patterns.  This approach relies heavily on causation. 

2. By making up new facts.  By recasting the facts or eliminating them altogether.  You know the score: those people who tell tall-tales about themselves or their families.  They often seem delusional and you want to shake them back into reality.  If you could only see the truth, we think, as though truth were an easy fish to bait out of the water.

Both methods have flaws.  The first can be reductionist--I once had a friend who broke up with a guy because, she said, "I'm so tired of having to pathologize myself."  She was right to save herself, because the first approach insists on labels: alcoholic, introvert, single mom, survivor, immigrant. But the second method can become a way to stay inside the trauma--ask any writer--it can be enticing to rationalize through story.  Usually, the truth of the matter sits somewhere between the two approaches.  The healing occurs somewhere between the concrete and imaginary, this world and the other.  Human creatures need earth and air.  I haven't found anything better than art, especially literature, to bridge the two.

The real courage Hushpuppy displays in Beasts of the Southern Wild is her ability to narrativize her plight and elevate it into the realm of myth while staying rooted in the "thingness" of the world.  This is not a hero with a cape, but a hero with rain boots.   And Zeitlin, to his credit, does not baby us or her by having Hushpuppy live in easy, Hollywood danger.  This child and her people live on the constant cusp of real, serious, believable danger.  And if you don't buy that argument, it would behoove you to have a long conversation with anyone who lived through Hurricane Katrina.

In my mind, Hushpuppy reigns up there with Huck Finn, Homer Macauley, Eliot of E.T., Kahu Apirana of Whale Rider, and other brave and broken children.

What does this movie have to do with God?  Well, I guess I want say that we need the buoy of our sacred stories, but we also need to get dirty.  

At one point, Hushpuppy's long lost mom, or her stand-in (we're never quite sure, set as we are on the brink of reality) picks up the tired child and dances with her.  Hushpuppy says, "I can count all the times I've ever been lifted on two fingers," and we understand how badly this little girl, like all of us, needs to be cradled.   But when her mother offers for her to stay, Hushpuppy chooses to go back to The Bathtub and to her dying father.  Doing otherwise might leave her hero quest incomplete.

This beautiful movie and its tiny heroine will lift you.  And then it will end and you will spill out of the dark theater into the garish light of this world with all its beasts.

And that seems just about right to me.