PATTERNS AND POTENTIALITIES PT. 2

In Part 1, I attempted to show how the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities could be in conflict within the scope of one particular short story, that being a particular Steve Ditko tale. In this essay I'll hold forth on how the conflict can help or hurt a particular creator's creativity.

I would not rate highly most of the films on which del Toro served as writer and/or director, either specifically as metaphenomenal films or generally as cinematic works. I got moderate entertainment from PACIFIC RIM and the first HELLBOY, was bored with MIMIC and the HELLBOY sequel, and had a strong positive reaction to PAN'S LABYRINTH, though I've not been moved to watch it again since seeing it in a theater back in 2006. I saw 2017's Oscar-winning THE SHAPE OF WATER and frankly loathed its politically correct tedium so much that I've had no stomach even to trash it. But some positive mention of CRIMSON PEAK-- the film he wrote and directed immediately prior to SHAPE-- caused me to seek out the film on DVD. After watching both the movie and del Toro's commentary-track, I posted this review on my movie-blog. In short, I rated CRIMSON as del Toro's best work, which is doubly ironic since the movie only enjoyed moderate success and certainly did not display as wide an appeal as SHAPE. Even allowing for the possibility that SHAPE may have been given a greater publicity-push by its studio, I can't deny the obvious fact that the later film succeeded with its target audience and CRIMSON did not.

Elsewhere I've described CRIMSON as a "love letter to Gothic melodrama." It may be that, even though I was fascinated by the layered density of symbolism in the film, its basic Gothic premise-- young bride comes to a mysterious house and learns terrible secrets about her groom-- was too static and/or old-fashioned to appeal to audiences in 2015. In contrast, SHAPE has a far more accessible gimmick, and one with a clearer narrative thrust. In 1962, Elisa, a downtrodden cleaning-woman, both mute and of Mexican extraction, works at a government-run installation. Elisa discovers that the installation is studying a strange "Amphibian Man"-- a clear shout-out to 1954's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON--  and she falls in love with the alien-looking but intelligent humanoid. When the young woman finds out that the Evil White Man running the project plans to dissect the Amphibian Man, Elisa and her cohorts successfully break the humanoid free and return him to the sea, and in addition, Elisa's romantic feelings are rewarded by a "happily ever" union with her beloved.

Despite SHAPE's derivative nature, it could have been a decent film, had del Toro not subsumed the mythopoeic potential of his concept by trying to teach the audience a lesson about the pernicious influence of Evil White Men. I could have tolerated a certain degree of didacticism had I felt that villainour Colonel Strickland had been more than just another stereotype. But it wasn't enough for del Toro that he should be a government drone lacking empathy-- which is actually not too far from the characterizations of most humans in the 1950s Creature-series. But when del Toro found it necessary to have Strickland expose his genitals to Elisa and the other cleaning-women-- inevitably, all women of color-- then I could no longer view SHAPE as anything but an interminable series of virtue-signaling. Evidently some audiences were able to either (1) focus on the romance and action while ignoring the political signaling, or (2) largely shared del Toro's political sympathies and so did not mind the film;s clunky posturing.

Now, I've repeatedly said that I view the primary purpose of art to be expressive rather than intellectual, but that intellectual concerns can generate emotion that their concerns, while didactic, can bleed over into an artist's expressive potential. No such "bleeding" takes place in SHAPE, but something of the kind does occur in CRIMSON PEAK.

During del Toro's commentary for CRIMSON, he goes into great detail about his aesthetic influences, but makes only occasional references to the moral universe of his film's characters. And certainly CRIMSON had as much potential as SHAPE to be a tiresome didactic lecture. Heroine Elsa-- whose name is, oddly, similar to that of SHAPE's Elisa-- is an heiress, but her family's money comes from hard-headed business practices, not from aristocratic entitlement. In contrast, Elsa's groom Thomas Sharp is an English baronet, and thus he does come from "old money," though Elsa eventually learns that the family's "absent father" squandered the family's riches. As a result Thomas and his sister Lucille inhabit a decaying manse right out of Poe's "House of Usher." Further, in the hope of renovating the property, the Sharps have taken up the practice of bride-murder, in which Lucille pimps out Thomas to wealthy matrons, and then covertly murders them so that Thomas inherits their fortunes. Elsa is just another target to Lucille, but because Thomas falls in love with the American heiress, the siblings fall out over killing Elsa, despite the fact that the two of them have been incestuously entwined since adolescence.

In his commentary del Toro talks about the film's theme as a need to break away from the past. A small-minded approach would have made CRIMSON an indictment of Old European aristocracy, and nothing more. Such a reading of CRIMSON is possible, but only by ignoring how thoroughly fascinated del Toro is with his subject matter. Didactically, he may have wanted to say that the corrupt siblings should have broken with their polluted past, and that Elsa, despite being initially deceived, is on a path to truth by rejecting their ways and overcoming Lucille's emnity. Yet, because del Toro was in love with the Gothic melodrama, he shows far more investment in the perverse world of the Sharps than he ever does in Elsa's journey to self-knowledge. That's what makes CRIMSON PEAK a rich treasure-trove of mythic images and discourse, while the only "shape" in SHAPE OF WATER is that of being an over-intellectualized reflection of a real myth, that of Universal's "Creature" films.