Online Response #3: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Polysemy

The polysemic nature of signs and signifiers concerns Hushpuppy, the young protagonist of Beasts of the Southern Wild, as she struggles to discover the true meaning of things.  She places her hand on a pig’s chest and later holds a chick close to her ear, sensing their heartbeats, all while delivering the first lines of the film: “All the time everywhere, everything’s hearts are beating and squirting and talking to each other the ways I can’t understand.  Most of the time they probably be saying: ‘I’m hungry.  I gotta poop.’  But sometimes they be talking in codes.”  Hushpuppy’s struggle is one of understanding the events transpiring around her: what is happening to her father, her neighbors, and her home?  What is her role in these events, and how is she responsible for what is happening? 

            To uncover the hidden codes is to attain a spiritual, existential level of understanding.  Justifying the use of figurative language in scripture, Thomas Aquinas stated, “spiritual truths may be expounded by means of figures taken from corporeal things, in order that thereby even the simple who are unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it.”  Miss Bathsheba perfectly illustrates the way to teach through corporeal symbols after setting down the bucket of crawdads in the small schoolhouse, the most formal of Hushpuppy’s educational experiences: “Meat.  Meat, meat, meat.  Every animal is made out of meat.  I’m meat.  Y’all asses meat.  Everything is part of the buffet of the universe.” 

            Miss Bathsheba uses the Aurochs as a symbol for man’s powerlessness, explaining that in primitive times the Aurochs ate babies “and the cavemans, they couldn’t even do nothing about it because they was too poor and too small.”  She correctly predicts the floods that are to come to The Bathtub, an area south of the levee, describing a narrative in which “the fabric of the universe is becoming unraveled,” at which point the “ice caps is gonna melt, water is gonna rise.”  Hushpuppy understands subsequent events as part of this narrative and even believes her actions are a driving force of what happens.  When she runs from her father, Wink, and hits him in the chest after he catches up to her, she hears the sound of thunder and senses the breaking of ice caps.  This “busting of the universe” ultimately sets in motion the reemergence of the aurochs.  Hushpuppy maintains culpability, telling her absent mother, “I’ve broken everything,” and continues in a later narration, “sometimes you can break something so bad that it can’t get put back together.” 

            Feeling responsible for Wink’s maladies, Hushpuppy goes on a quest to save him, first getting a folk remedy from Bathsheba that proves ineffective.  As his sickness becomes more apparent, the Aurochs continue to advance.  The strangeness of this creature leads one to believe it has an allegorical quality.  Director Benh Zeitlin describes his meaning of the Aurochs both literally and figuratively: “Literally they are a harbinger of death.”  Figuratively, though, “the film is really about her not just realizing that they’re not going to destroy her but really coming to, like, an understanding that her and the thing that’s destroying her father are related and that there’s a relationship between her and nature in both its good and bad ways.”  

            “It is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense,” posited Aquinas, and this is true for Hushpuppy as she tries to understand her family.  She has filled the void of her mother’s absence by creating a mother who lives with her in her own shack and wears a basketball jersey, her face drawn on the wall.  She talks to her mother, apologizes to her, and her memories of her come mostly from stories told by Wink.  The explanation for her mother’s absence is that “she swam away.”  She feels incomplete without her mother and yearns for completeness.  While floating out to sea in hopes of finding her mother, she tells the captain who picks her up that she “wants to feel cohesive.” 

             While the viewer may see the fantastical elements of Beasts of the Southern Wild as allegorical, Hushpuppy considers them quite literally.  Her age, her cognitive development, and her position as an oppressed person keep her from understanding exactly what is happening to her, Wink, and the other people from The Bathtub.  It is only after visiting her mother, the waitress, that the illusions of her self-created narrative start to fade away.  She is ready to face her fears, and she does, when the Aurochs approach.  Her friends run away while she stays, looking it in the eyes.  “You’re my friend, kind of.  I gotta take care of mine,” she tells it.  By the end of her story, she no longer depends on corporeal figures for meaning.  She understands her place in the universe and her relationship with Wink: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me lying around in invisible pieces.  When I look too hard, it goes away.  And when it all goes quiet, I see they are right here.  I see that I'm a little piece in a big, big universe.  And that makes things right.  When I die, the scientists of the future, they're gonna find it all.  They gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy, and she live with her daddy in the Bathtub."

Online Response #2: The Searchers and Western Conventions

            After years spent searching for Debbie, Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley are torn when they finally find her.  Ethan believes she is better off dead than Comanche, the tribe that kidnapped her many years earlier, but Martin still sees possibility in bringing back, literally and figuratively, his almost-sister.  Frustrated by his companion’s inflexible racism, Marty unleashes an emotionally charged exclamation: “I hope you die.” 

            Ethan’s response, a motif at this point of the film, reinforces his standing as a conventional western hero, bound by a strict moral code, stubborn, yet steadfast: “That’ll be the day.”

            His first utterance of these words occurs much earlier in the film, when he and a group of Texas Rangers ride in search of cattle that have presumably been set loose by the Comanche.  They find one cow, speared dead, and Ethan believes this to be part of an Indian plot to lure them away from one of the local families, the first step in a planned murder raid.  The men and the horses tire, and Reverend Clayton asks Ethan if he wants to quit.  “That’ll be the day,” Ethan says.  After his prediction of a murder raid proves true, he says these words one more time as he, Martin, and Brad Jorgensen search for his kidnapped nieces.  Ethan raises the possibility that the girls may both be dead, an idea to which Jorgensen takes issue:

            “But if I hear that from you again, I’ll fight you, Mr. Edwards!”

            “That’ll be the day.”

            On one level these responses work as a defense against challenges to his masculinity.  Of course he won’t quit; quitting is not what a man would do.  Neither will he back down from a fight, whether it’s against Brad or anyone else.  On a deeper level, though, “That’ll be the day” signifies Ethan’s unwillingness to change, which proves troublesome in a changing environment.  Ethan Edwards, in many ways the conventional Western hero, remains static from the beginning to the end of The Searchers; the final scene, which mirrors the opening of the film, shows Ethan walking into Monument Valley’s vast landscape, unredeemed, having only demonstrated the contradictions and negative effects of being a cowboy.

           

The character of Ethan Edwards, like other leading men of the Western genre, is stubborn, resilient, and willing to act violently to accomplish his goals.  The Searchers, though, challenges traditional Western conventions through its supporting cast of characters and their opposition to Ethan, as he dogmatically seeks to avenge his brother’s family and rescue his niece at all costs.  During three separate instances a character steps between Ethan and his would-be victims to stop a senseless act of violence.  During the first encounter between the Rangers and the Comanche, Reverend Clayton pushes down Ethan’s gun barrel and begs him to stop shooting at the now-retreating Indians: “No Ethan.  Leave them carry off their hurt and dead.” 

            “Well Reverend, that tears it!  From now on you stay out of this, all of you.  I don’t want you with me.  I don’t need you for what I gotta do.”

            Marty is the second character to get between Ethan and his gun, which he does on multiple occasions.  First, Marty pulls away Ethan’s barrel when they come upon a herd of buffalo and Ethan shoots at them indiscriminately. 

            “Ethan, don’t make sense,” says Marty.

            “Hunger!  Empty bellies!  That’s the sense it makes, you blanket head!”

            “You need to stop it!”

            “At least they won’t feed any Comanche this winter.  Killing buffaloes is like killing anything.”

            The final time Martin interferes with Ethan, he doesn’t push his gun away but instead jumps in front of the gun aimed at Debbie.  While Ethan seems the less reasonable of the two when he shoots at the wounded and retreating Comanche and the buffalo, he seems borderline psychotic in this instance as he is about to murder his niece, now turned “buck,” simply to satiate his ideal of purity.  Ethan’s brutality is never really accepted as a means to a greater good. 

           

            The portrayal of Native Americans and women also challenge traditional Western conventions.  Scar is Ethan’s blue-eyed Comanche double: like Ethan he justifies violence through vengeance.  He attacks and raids white homesteads because his two sons were killed by white men.  He is the leader of the Nawyecka Comanche, which, according to Ethan, means “Roundabout.”  Like the protagonist, he is not able to stay in one place.  His role as a mirror of Ethan is most obvious when he parrots his dialogue at the beginning of their first conversation:

            “You speak good American for a Comanche.  Someone teach you?” asks Ethan.

            “You speak good Comanche.  Someone teach you?” asks Scar, not a verbatim response, but equal in tone and meaning to Ethan’s observation and question.

            Women, too, are portrayed differently, examples of the futility of dependence.  Viewers never see the Debbie who waited to be rescued by Ethan and the Rangers as a little girl.  Instead we see Debbie as a young adult, accustomed to the Comanche life.  She tells Ethan and Martin, “Go!” when they see her for the first time in years.  Laurie also waits in vain, but for a different reason.  Her relationship with Martin is not mutual, but she hopes for him to return to marry her anyway, her fear of becoming an old maid trumping her better judgment.  The letters he sends to her while he is away, meant to reassure her, only madden her more.  Fed up, she settles for Charlie, mostly because he is there. 

            The fight between Charlie and Martin exposes the ridiculousness of the cowboy code.  Jawing at each other as they walk outside, both men stop for a minute to help each other get more comfortable.  Martin helps Charlie take off his vest in a moment of tenderness before they start biting and kicking each other.  The incongruity of this scene is not unlike Ethan’s insistence of following the code time and again.  The conventional Western hero’s identity depends on a certain amount of obstinacy, a trait necessary to survive in the American frontier.  What happens, though, when a situation calls for more subtlety?  The Searchers gives us an answer in its final scene: the look on Debbie’s face when Ethan delivers her to the Jorgensens, her new family, is not a look of joyful recognition but of fear and confusion, an ending none-too resolved.  

Online Response #1: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Online Response #1

Deconstructing Authority in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

The somewhat confusing nature of time travel in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is explained during the two friends’ bleakest moment.  Needing keys to the jail cell to release the imprisoned historical figures, Ted realizes the time machine could be the solution their problems. 

Bill: If only we could go back in time to when [Officer Logan] had them and steal ‘em then.

Ted: Well, why don’t we?

Bill: ‘Cause we don’t have time?

Ted: We could do it after the report.

Bill: Ted!  Good thinking dude!  After the report, we’ll time travel back to two days ago, steal the keys, and leave them here!

Ted: Where?

Bill: Don’t know.  How about behind that sign?  That way, when we get here now, they’ll be waiting for us.

            Bill bends down behind the sign, and, as predicted, finds the keys to the jail cell.  Ted tells Bill that they must remember in the future to go back in time and steal the keys, and then he remembers they don’t need to because they already have the keys in their hands.  What happened in the past has happened, obviously, but what will happen in the future has also happened.  Time is nonlinear and events unchangeable in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, despite its premise that Bill and Ted’s future as universal saviors might be compromised if they do not pass their history report.  Rufus, as ambassador of the future, should know their destiny is never in doubt.  After all, he lives in the post-Bill and Ted era, a time and place of universal harmony.   He also knows Bill and Ted’s own travels into history will not disrupt the present or future.  Time travel in Bill and Ted’s world does not carry the risk of the butterfly effect.   After each of their near-dozen voyages in the time machine, Bill and Ted return to an unchanged San Dimas, California, despite having done much to potentially alter the course of history.  Their predestination as world leaders/saviors ironically gives them more power and control than traditional authority figures in the film, but the inevitability of their future roles makes them subjects of a greater force, destabilizing the concept of authority. 

            The traditional authority figures of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure make their present felt early in the film, establishing a dichotomy of old authority and new authority, Bill and Ted representing the latter.  The history teacher, Mr. Ryan, and Ted’s father, Officer Logan, each deliver ultimatums: first, pass the history report or get a failing grade; second, pass history or go to military school in Alaska.  Officer Logan, in occupation and personality, is law-an-order rigidity; he is really the only character openly fighting a cultural war.  He does not actually want Ted to pass the history test, because that would only reinforce what he considers bad behavior: laziness, procrastination, lack of focus, inability to prioritize, etc.  He nearly succeeds as the obstacle to Bill and Ted’s present and future success when he locks the historical figures, essentially the history report, in his jail cells after a disturbance at the local mall.  Officer Logan is powerless in the end, though, as his black-and-white worldview cannot stop the great men of history, including his own son. 

            That Bill and Ted are figures of authority throughout the film, not just in an undetermined time in the future, is evident as soon as they start collecting figures from the past.  More impressive than their actual history report is their ability to gather a disparate group of people using little to no coercion.  Their success in managing different personalities illuminates some of the preferred leadership traits of the 1980s.  Bill and Ted are likable, charismatic, and attractive, three characteristics made more desirable by television.  This is an era one generation removed from a presidential debate in which one candidate coolly surged ahead in the polls while his sweaty opponent, betrayed by cameras, dropped in popularity.  This is an era, obviously, that is witnessing the close of the actor-president’s second term in office.  Napoleon, who spends more time in 1980s San Dimas than any other historical figure, struggles to exert his post-revolution style of leadership, with much comic effect, in an era that requires authority to look a certain way.  The princesses also modify their criteria of authority.  Engaged to marry fellow royalty soon, they surely will not lack power.  When Rufus goes back in time to retrieve them, though, they do not hesitate to accompany him; they are just pleased they do not have to marry the “royal ugly dudes.”

            If traditional authority figures are powerless in comparison to Bill and Ted, Bill and Ted are powerless to a separate figure in the film: corporations.  The world of Bill and Ted has a changing superstructure with its own implicit ideologies.  Materialism is what people value most: Bill and Ted dream of stardom on MTV, Bill’s father lives comfortably with his much younger trophy wife, and the entire population of San Dimas spends their time leisurely, either at the mall or the water park.  The powers that be that need Bill and Ted to become rulers need them not for their intelligence, which is sorely lacking, but for their ability to propagate an ideology that will make some people very rich.  Having Bill and Ted as rulers commodifies coolness.  As they perpetuate the virtues of a slacker life, Bill and Ted are also furthering the aims of MTV and shopping malls everywhere.  One would wish Bill and Ted were changed after their time-traveling adventures, but they are not.  They still do not know how to play guitar, and they arguably have not learned much about history.  They simply had the most help in their presentation.  Bill and Ted’s adventure was never about changing them, though; that Bill and Ted’s ascendancy as universal saviors is inevitable takes away their agency and makes them puppet rulers for a faceless, but powerful, authority.  

Reilly Ryan

9/8/2013