beasts of the southern wild

movies:  The movie Beasts Of The Southern Wild was released to a very limited number of theaters back in July and is now getting its opportunity at art house theaters around the country.  It is a movie directed by Behn Zeitlan about a somewhere post-Katrina Louisiana where families are trying to make due and just survive.  It's setting is so amazing to watch.  You see people living in a world that you know is more or less the present that looks so disorienting in its presentation because you can hardly believe it could exist in your own world.  The lives of these people is primitive, with the farming of animals in stilt raised homes that barely look like anything we could conceive as such, with nothing in their lives besides the occasional bottle of alcohol that resembles the world we know.  There seem to be no jobs, no money, no commerce beyond the bartering of goods.  The characters seems to exist in world that while we know is our own, it seems impossible.  And the only real glimpse of our world is seen from a boat made out of the cover of the bed of a pickup truck floating down a river built of flood looking out over an industrial complex that appears to be at least remotely modern.  Yet we know, in that inexplicable way that you just know, this is in our world.  This does really exist.
The story of this world is told through the eyes of Hush Puppy, a young girl stuck in this hard luck life because she was born into it.  As we watch the juxtaposition of her life the story is put in motion.  Her youth gives her seeming love for all things that represent life.  We see her even holding small animals up to her ear to listen to their heartbeat to understand them better.  The other side is her father.  A man who has been beaten down by his circumstance, being stuck in this primitive world could be better if he were just elsewhere.  He takes solace in a bottle(although we don't even know if those bottles are filled with alcohol since Hush Puppy drinks water out of those bottle in place of cups or a real water bottle), takes his sadness out on his daughter, and ultimately struggles to find peace.  Despite this difficult relationship, Hush Puppy and her father do clearly love each other.  This is seen as they play primitive and often animalistic games together, breaking things and yelling like animals as they smile together.
That story is book-ended by Zeilan showing opposite sides of how one deals with a very basic human circumstance: death.  At the beginning of the movie Hush Puppy does a voice over to a celebration of a funeral, stating that in the bathtub - that part of New Orleans below the levee where the water won't go down, there are no tears, they celebrate the life of those who die because they need something to celebrate, it is their only time to celebrate.  The images of people drinking and laughing, fireworks going off while Hush Puppy runs through the woods with sparklers streaming from her hands, seems like the epitome of how to celebrate life even in the face of the horrible adversity these people have endured.  Maybe it even seems that epitome because of that adversity.  By the end of the movie that celebration of life holds less meaning when Hush Puppy's father dies of a terminal illness.  She sits by his side watching him go, and as tears streak down her face he tells her that in the bathtub there are no tears.  Not only can she not hold her tears back despite her father's words but his come as well, despite his own words of strength, as he looks upon the loving and wonderful child he is about to leave to that cruel world in which they both live.  Then that meaning is restored through that love of life that only a child can continue to have.
That world is most well summed up by Hush Puppy's teacher.  She tells her class that we are the same as animals.  All we are is meat, flesh, food, part of a world in which all beings fight for survival and those that stay alive are the ones who find another piece of meat that can sustain them just a little while longer.  And that is what this movie is really about.  It is a movie set in a world that looks so unlike anything we want to acknowledge would be a part of our own with characters that have nothing that looks like a life we want to acknowledge could exist in modern day let alone in our own country.  They are people - Hush Puppy and her friends, her father and his, fighting for survival every day from the moment they wake up till the moment to go to bed.  They kill and cook what they eat.  They use what is left to them to get around, from old trucks to a broken abandoned row boat.  They are beasts looking to survive in the wild.  Meat and flesh hoping not to be bested and have their little bit of the wilderness stripped of them.  And that wild in which those southern beasts live, while looking so different from our own, only reflects what it is that we go through every day.  Work, eat, pray, love, dance, cry (as long as tears are allowed in your bathtub).  We are all beasts in the wild.  And as Hush Puppy says, people will look back and see how we lived and how we survived and they will know who we are.  And who are we?  Despite our cell phones and our internet and our high rise condos, we are all just beasts, just meat and flesh.