ISP Week 4: Beasts of the Southern Wild critical reviews
‘Glorifies poverty and recklessness, but it’s actually a nuanced look at how peoples’ worldviews are tied to where they came from.’
‘It portrays the poor community as too vibrant or too joyous’.
‘The film never adopts the perspective of the city dwellers. Instead, it tells its story solely through the eyes of Bathtub residents, who view the faraway factories with a mix of contempt and fear.
(Referring to Hushpuppy as the underdog) “Dangerously hedonist—an apolitical, individualist hedonism with a tacked-on ending suggesting an incipient social movement.”
It doesn’t gloss over bleaker aspects of Beasts’ run-down setting, he certainly places them in context.’
‘Mistaken sympathy for advocacy. In actual developing countries, one of the first things that rural citizens demand … is adequate health care and hospitals.
‘These basic features of modern life… are represented as oppressive institutions, places we need to escape.”
‘The viewer should leave the film with a greater understanding of the way that complicated political histories can make people distrustful of institutions widely perceived as universal goods. A more nuanced interpretation is that an effective institution must treat the people it hopes to serve with compassion and sensitivity.’
‘Deploys a casual racism, vilifies public health workers, and romanticizes poverty’
‘Far from deploring the abuse and neglect, the film ennobles her father. For he is dying, and it is therefore his solemn duty to “prepare his daughter for an uncertain future’
‘It skims the surface of serious matters without asking us to actually grapple with their complexities: We can feel guilty, virtuous, and indifferent all at once.’
‘Turning poverty into a kind of sentimental, specious poetry’
‘It depicts the harsh realities of poverty but then aestheticizes it.’
‘Poverty is ugly and cruel and will pinch the hopes and dreams out of even the brightest children.’
‘The whole point of narrative art, it seems to me, is to discover ways of understanding one another, not just understanding ourselves.’
‘In casting social workers and public health officials who presume to think that a six-year-old girl should be fed, clothed, and looked after by adults as villains, the film tells us that we needn’t worry, that the poor just want to be left to fend for themselves. This is the film’s ugly operating assumption’
‘Black and celebrate their attachment to nature, when the title of your movie contains the words “beasts” and “wild,” you leave yourself open to accusations of racism, to claims that you see black people as primitive, if not altogether savage.’
‘Accused of romanticizing people who don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.’
‘Urbanization has been black Americans’ most recent trend, but it is not our historical norm. Thinking of ourselves exclusively as city dwellers helps us forget one of the greatest crimes committed against us: the systematic separation of black folks from their land.’
- https://www.indiewire.com/2012/06/the-post-katrina-politics-of-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-233446/ :
‘Zeitlin has had to defend the film’s underpinnings, about race, class and the displacement of the poor.’
The film is a ‘direct political statement about people being displaced. People should not be forced to leave their homes. The whole movie is about why you can’t be pulled out of your home.’
‘The Bathtub hopefully is an answer to that question. Because this is the greatest place on earth. We have the most freedom, we don’t need money, we don’t need all these things that are thought of as necessary. We don’t need that because we have this place that feeds us both literally and spiritually.’
‘These people need help, let’s get them out of here and teach them how to be more functional citizens.’
Emma Coe Film Studies 