Beasts of the Southern Wild

In class recently, we have begun to discuss Ecological Thought in more depth. What particularly interested me was the ideas about totality, Ursula Heise’s essay ‘From the Blue Planet to Google Earth’, and even James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. An ecosystem that is simultaneously self-sustaining and yet existing in a state of fragile interdependence on the life that it holds is something that is explored in the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film primarily follows the life of a six year old girl name Hushpuppy, who grows up in a liminal bayou community called the Bathtub, separated almost entirely from the rest of the world by a levee. Yet the film is extremely ecologically minded, open to themes not only of childhood and human relationships, but the very existence of nature itself and the precarious but essentially reliant relationship that exists between humanity and nature.

The premise of the film is that, presumably through Global Warming, the ice caps have begun to melt, releasing into the world the prehistoric creatures frozen within (which are implied to be the long-extinct Aurochs). Meanwhile, the introverted community of the Bathtub are struggling with the aftermath of a large tropical storm, the effects of which cause immediate devastation to both people and nature. But it is the aftermath of the storm that causes the ecosystem to fail, and the completely localised community of the Bathtub to suffer most. The salt from the storm poisons the water, and the food supply with it. All life begins to die, and the residents of the Bathtub are left to either move on and adapt to modern, mainstream, globalized life or to continue live in an environment that may no longer be able to sustain itself. One of the main themes of the film is the question, as Hushpuppy puts it, whether it is possible to ‘break something so bad, that it can’t get put back together’.

Hushpuppy is acutely aware, even before it begins, of the ecological disaster that is about to engulf them. ‘The water’s gunna rise up so high, there ain’t gunna be no Bathtub. Just a whole bunch of water’. In Beasts of the Southern Wild, humanity is represented as just as, if not more, fragile than nature itself. Nature is represented here as capable of feats of great power; not just in the form of the tumultuous storm that signals the beginning of the end of the Bathtub, but also in its ability to renew and return.

One of the most interesting motifs in the film is the recurring use of the large and potentially unstoppable force of the recently re-animated aurochs. The film is spliced throughout with small scenes of the aurochs charging violently through wilderness and habitation equally, and in one particular scene they are shown as eating their own kind. Of course, this is not supposed to accurately represent that herbivorous aurochs of history, whose descendants live among us as the domesticated cow, but to instead give us a glimpse at a time when humanity was not the dominant species on Earth, but merely one of many weaker species living in fear of the world around it. ‘Strong animals,’ Hushpuppy states, ‘know when your hearts are weak, and that makes ’em hungry.’ Here, the aurochs are shown to us as the stronger animal, unaware of the changes that have taken places over the centuries since their supposed disappearance, and they begin to make there way to the now-uncertain and fearful community of the Bathtub.

Perhaps the most important scene in the entire film is one of the last; the climactic confrontation between the powerful and nigh-unstoppable herd of aurochs, and small, six year old Hushpuppy. It is easy to assume that Hushpuppy’s bravery in standing against these large beasts, and their subsequent bowing to her as a symbol of humanity’s dominance over the subservient forces of nature. But I think that this is not the intention of the film. Instead, I propose that it symbolises the equal and opposite forces of humanity and nature. The bowing of aurochs brings the animal closer to Hushpuppy’s level. She acknowledges that they are equal partners in their claim of survival, stating that ‘you’re my friend, kind of,’ creating a relationship, not of animosity, but of respect.

She follows this by acknowledging that regardless of this relationship, her bonds to her fellow humans are stronger, ‘But I gotta take care of mine.’ Unlike the aurochs (and therefore nature itself as represented in the aurochs), who are assumedly self-sufficient, the humans are fragile and needy. Hushpuppy must return to her family, and help them to recover from the ecological mistakes that they have made, in order to once again bring everything back to the way it should be. It may be that she is not even talking solely about her human ties, but instead about her home community, the Bathtub, and the greater ecosystem that makes it. Her desire to return there is a desire to restart the community, and to care for the ecosystem anew. After all, Hushpuppy has already stated her belief that as ‘the whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right [then] if one piece busts, even the smallest piece…the entire universe will get busted.’ The Bathtub, as small and insignificant as it seems, is the whole universe to both the people and creatures that dwell there.

The fixing of the ecological state of the Bathtub is not implied to be the impossible task that Hushpuppy at times assumes. The very presence of the aurochs, an animal that has been broken from the chain of existence completely by its extinction, so ecologically broken that its reappearance should be impossible, has been restored to life by the actions of the very same creatures, the humans, that originally drove it to extinction. Of course, unlike the deliberate actions of hunting and destruction of habitat that lead to the disappearance of the aurochs, it is the accidental actions and second-hand reactions that leads to the melting ice-caps and the re-emergence of the aurochs here. Yet their very presence suggests that it is not possible to ‘break something so bad that it can’t be fixed,’ as Hushpuppy initially believes. Perhaps even in the harshest of adversity, the Earth and nature are able to self-renew. Nothing is permanent, but nothing really stops existing; the world is not graspable only in the human terms of time and space, but in a cycle of rebirth and death that goes on for perhaps infinity.

Clips from Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2012. Dir. Behn Zeitlin, Court 13 Pictures, USA.