Guillermo Del Toro Thanks Mary Shelley
Guillermo del Toro wins BAFTA as best director for 2018
As he has on other occasions, Guillermo del Toro, in his acceptance speech on winning the best director honor at the BAFTA Awards, where other winners thanked their agents and mothers, thanked Mary Shelley, referring to the 18 year old girl who created a monster to represent the fear man has in his own psyche and foibles. Del Toro says that Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein saved him and he often thinks of her in his work. If she was still alive, she might return the favor.
The reference for Del Toro is his view that the horror film monster is a stand-in for the audience’s fear of what they themselves might become if overcome by the inner demons everyone carries. A working theory that has served to scare movie goers since the medium began, not to mention comic books, plays and of course, novels.
The fantasy drama film “The Shape of Water” directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer. Set in Baltimore in 1962, during the height of the cold war search for new possible weapons, the plot follows Hawkins as Elisa Esposito, a mute from childhood female custodian at a high-security government laboratory, where a singular humanoid amphibian creature has been captured and special tanks have been built to contain it. The government, led by the archly brutal Michael Shannon as Colonel Richard Strickland, wants to understand his secrets, though Strickland seems more interested in tormenting and torturing the being than understanding it.
The lonely Elisa lives in an apartment above a movie theater, just next door to the kindly, also lonely and gay, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins, who serves as a unofficial sort of father figure-friend. Elisa goes through a regular morning routine of bathing and masturbation before heading to work as a janitor at the secret government facility, where she works alongside Octavia Spencer as Zelda. They are present when the creature is brought in a specialized tank. Hawkins hides to observe the creature from afar, and when no-one is around, makes friends with it, feeding it from her lunchbox of hard boiled eggs.
The aquatic creature, like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, having no name, but looking very much like an upgrade of the iconic “Black Lagoon Creature ”, takes a shine to the kindness of the young woman and a passion for her boiled eggs. When Elisa learns that Strickland intends to vivisect the creature, she hatches an elaborate rescue plan, enlisting the aid of Giles, Zelda and Michael Stuhlbarg as Robert Hoffstetler, a sympathetic scientist and secret Soviet Spy.
Keeping the creature alive in her bathtub with boxes of salt, the mute lonely lady janitor no longer needs to masturbate with a real live fish-out-of-water creature available, and some mysterious lyrical underwater lovemaking occurs, until the government villains close in and Hawkins must help the creature escape in a poetic, romantically violent denouement.
The film offers a stunning design look, which also won a BAFTA for its artists, enveloping the decidedly odd, yet lyrically fascinating story in a world vision where its human-creature romance can take its flight of fantasy.
One can see the influences of the Frankenstein story in the film, although this creature is not created but merely found. What it presents is Del Toro’s monster as human psychological id concept, though it seems to owe as much inspiration to watching the 50s “Creature From the Black Lagoon” escapist horror film and wondering, if the scaly fish monster from the deep carries the beautiful girl off in his arms, what exactly does he intend to do with her? And how does that work?