WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

*Photo from starbustmagazine.com

Is it weird to feel both somber and jovial at the same time? To laugh and smile while the world literally comes apart around you, while on the inside all you really want to do is cry? That’s the type of feeling watching Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zetilin, both encourages and evokes in its audience such as myself. Taking place in a post-apocalyptic setting where much of the world is being swamped by rising sea levels as the polar ice-caps melt Beasts of the Southern Wild focuses in on the story of six-year old girl named Hush Puppy and her life in a bayou community known as Bathtub. In between dealing with a sinking home and an ailing father, the melting ice-caps have also released prehistoric animals known as aurochs, which are incidentally migrating straight towards Bathtub.

It’s a bit more intimate then the last film I watched about global warming, which was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Rather then discuss broad implications and general concepts, like Al Gore did, Beasts of the Southern Wild creates a microcosm for its viewers to absorb, watching the personal life of Hushpuppy play out in probably the worst case scenario of environmental disasters. And for the most part we see her and her companions confront said disasters with the kind of festivity that would make the orchestra in Titanic jealous. There is little or no somber remorse amongst the community of Bathtub, who live their lives like each day was there last… which it may in fact possibly be. But the good times do not in fact keep on rolling. Even the bubble of Bathtub, for all its lackadaisical resilience is not in fact anymore secure then the bubble of one’s childhood, which Hushpuppy must quickly grow out of in this harsh world.

By the end of the film audiences will be left with a simple but sobering message. No matter how much we run from out problems, whether they are our own individual tragedies or looming environmental disaster, one must have the fortitude and resolve to face them. Unless we can accept and embrace that message, we can never truly move forward. It’s not a new message, but Beasts of the Southern Wild carries it better through its ability to take complex issues and packaging them into an intimate and personal story. And the message resonates all the more because of it.