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."
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