First, let me say a bit about my big quibbles with the movie. In many respects it's a great film. The acting is VERY well done, the scenery beautiful and atmospheric, and many of the main themes are well conceived and portrayed. On a certain level, the film is a haunting reproach to how our country handled hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. But... here is where the End of the World scenario just doesn't work for me. The Great Flood, the river Styx, swimming to Elysium - all these symbols have pride of place in the film. Yet they don't quite seem to add up to anything. Towards the end of the film, the characters leave their homes and try to swim to Elysium (a brothel in this version). But only the children (only the little girls) go there. And then they swim back again. Why do this? Why reference Elysium at all? And though they save animals from the Great Flood on a boat, there is no covenant with God to renew the land, nor any rainbow to mark a new beginning. The allusions are there as guideposts, but they don't really guide us anywhere... All the elements are there for a full blown apocalypse, one that affects not just the people of the Bathtub (the marginalized island/estuary zone that houses the heroes of our story), but everyone else in New Orleans and beyond, but that apocalypse never comes.
This is of particular interest to me in a scene when the men of the Bathtub blow up a levee so they can drain the floodwaters from their homes. Presumably that water goes somewhere and affects others, but we don't get that story. Yes, we know the water goes elsewhere and we can guess what happens, but that isn't the point. I expected something bigger here, based on reviews I'd read and the symbolism used throughout the film. Yet we never get to the big payoff - the film only goes so far and no further. We only get a perspective based on this small community. Which isn't itself a big issue, if the film wanted to remain linked to that metaphor. The end of a community as the end of the world. Get to the thick of things through microcosm. But the movie overlaps these issues with a larger version of the end of the world. The ice caps are melting (which supposedly causes the storm that floods the Bathtub) and that will eventually release the Aurochs, human-eating creatures from a pre-hisotric time. These creatures are cut into the story throughout the film to give us feeling of impending doom, not just for the residents of the Bathtub, but for everyone. Yet when they appear they could be nothing more than a figment of a little girl's imagination. Another very intriguing metaphor, but one that remains problematical. Are these animals real? Can others see them? Why do they leave so easily? Where is the big payoff for the story and for the themes surrounding these symbolic creatures? In short, is this or isn't it magical realism?
Magical realism was first introduced to the Americas through the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World. Carpentier called it lo real maravilloso or marvelous realism, but it is usually considered the initiating point for magical realism in Latin American. Carpentier saw this marvelous realism as something that is very American - it occurs when a pre-columbian or pre-eurpoean mystical tradition (in the case of his novel, a specifically African tradition) comes in contact with a more 'realistic' European culture. This then flourishes in the Americas, where the two cultures meet. Marvelous realism relates events realistically, but includes the fantastic qualities of life inherent in the Americans as part of that reality. Gabriel García Márquez and his 100 Years of Solitude, however, is what most people refer to when they discuss the definition of magical realism. García Márquez's works were published at a time when Latin American texts were highly sought after for translation, so his version of the idea become popular within the US very quickly and caught the attention of a wider audience. 100 Years of Solitude, though based in Columbia and filled with exotic locales, foreign cultures (at least for North American readers) and strange occurrences, attracted universal attention because of its straightforward style and attitude toward those miraculous events. At the death of one character, García Márquez chronicles flowers falling from the sky. He writes:
He saw through the window that a rain of tiny yellow flowers was falling. Through the night they fell over the city in a silent storm… So many flowers fell from the sky that the dawn revealed the streets carpeted with a compact quilt. (García Márquez 173, my translation) [i]In this passage, the flowers are not presented as a miracle or a strange, otherwordly incident. Instead, the author depicts the event as he would any other flood, with precise, descriptive wording and an even, credulous tone. This, along with the fact that everyone in the town - everyone in the world - accepts these magical happenings as fact, as reality, defines García Márquez's style.
And this is what bothers me about Beasts of the Southern Wild. It tries to be magical realism and falls short. The whole world doesn't really believe in the aurochs, nor do they even see them or acknowledge them by the end of the film. And the film itself, though filmed with incredible, gritty realism, does not treat the animals with the same non-challance. The film appears almost gothic, Edgar Allan Poe meets Cormac McCarthy, not really like 100 Years of Solitude at all.
I did, however, read a recent article that helped me to reevaluate my opinions on this matter. In the article (which you can find here), the author suggests a new kind of magical realism, based not on the Latin American variety (which has found a place in the US through writers like Cristina García and Toni Morrison, among others), but on a new, North American variety. The reviewer writes:
What's interesting about the possibility of magical realism flowering in North America is how much this species may differ from the original South American variety. South American magical realism also occupied the fringes, the marginal zones where the individual mind, not the consensus of the real, could rule. But in Latin American fiction, this often took place in a joyful, florid explosion of inner identity; from Gabriel García Márquez to Like Water for Chocolate, indigenous fables and aromas burst through from a pre-colonial past through the hard paving of the Europeanised present.
Beasts of the Southern Wild hollers exuberantly, but there's something frenzied about it as well. It's an intoxicated wake, as well as a celebration. American magical realism, if it comes to pass, could mean a retreat into the imagination, rather than a reunion with an inner self. America's golden-age protagonists – its chatty hacks, taciturn PIs and secretive dames, eyes always ahead – never had much time for the inner self. Hushpuppy, drunk on dreams of ancient creatures and impending floods as she searches for her lost mother, certainly has one, but it threatens to wash away the whole of reality in the film.I think the possibility of a new American magical realism is very intriguing, especially as we start to look inward instead of outward. And I think I'll have to leave that possibility for another post. But think on this: if magical realism can be explained in this way, where we don't reveal the inner self and retreat to the imaginary, does that mean that American Psycho is really just magical realism?
[i] “Vieron a través de la ventana que estaba cayendo una llovizna de minúsculas flores amarillas. Cayeron toda la noche sobre el pueblo en una tormenta silenciosa… Tantas flores cayeron del cielo, que las calles amanecieron tapizadas de una colcha compacta” (García Márquez 173).
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