For some reason, it seems that civilizations on the brink of collapse lose the capability of interpreting the world around them. You could say that dreams die before the civilization that created them dies. And that seems to be what's happening to us. We don't seem to be able anymore to create believable narratives.
A good example is the recent movie "The Shape of Water" (2017) Guillermo del Toro. An interesting movie on several counts, but a narrative disaster. How is it that we can't create a decent plot anymore? It has to be something deep inside the belly of our civilization. But let me examine this movie in some detail.
The cycle of the humanoid aquatic monsters started with the first "The Creature of the Black Lagoon" (1951). It was a good movie, considering the kind of movies produced at that time. It had action, mystery, a breathtaking pace. And the story was fascinating, with the monster falling in love with a human woman. So I can see how Guillermo del Toro wanted to start from there to pursue a related idea: to explore the sexuality of people who are handicapped or marginalized -- even seen as monsters.
The new version of the story can be seen as successful in many respects, and indeed it has good points. Mainly, it is kept together by a truly stellar cast of actors, especially the character of Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins. But the film is an abject failure in narrative terms. It has credibility holes so large that an aircraft carrier could pass through them.
Just as an example, there is this dangerous monster kept chained in a pool in a high-security government facility. The chain is not so short that the monster can't reach people with its arms, and we see that he snapped off two fingers from one of the characters of the movie. Nevertheless, the security of this place is so poor that it can't prevent a cleaning lady from entering the room to have her lunch while sitting on the edge of the pool and befriend the monster by offering him boiled eggs -- come on!
The real problem is not so much the credibility of the plot, it is its predictability. The evil guy is evil, the good girl is good, and about the pathetic Russian spy, you can see from the first scenes that he will be betrayed by his friends -- hey, Russians are supposed to be evil, aren't they? Given these elements, the movie plods along, as exciting as a Catholic mass.
Let me say something more about the main evil guy of the movie, the character named Strickland (a suitably evil name for an evil guy). Michael Shannon does an outstanding job playing him, but the result is disastrous nevertheless. The problem is the same: lack of subtlety, or, which is the same, predictability. As a character, Strickland is overdone from the first scene when he pees in a urinal in front of the cleaning ladies and boasts that he never washes his hands afterward. It is just embarrassing for everyone, including for the viewers.
I would say that the sin of the screenwriter was to be so nasty on Stickland who is so abused, physically and mentally, in the movie that he may generate some sympathy on the part of the viewer. People have a certain dignity that you shouldn't deny anyone, not even to a character in a movie. So, Strickland has two fingers bitten off by the creature and he suffers because of that throughout the movie. In the final scene, he is hit hard on the face by another character, and then killed by the monster. But what's truly bad is how his privacy is invaded: what sense does it make to show him to us while having sex with his wife? That's a totally gratuitous scene: it has nothing to do with the plot, nor with the fact that Strickland is evil. Again, even a movie character should be entitled with a minimum of personal privacy.
I would say that there exists a general role in literature: the mark of a bad writer lies in despising one's characters. Conversely, a good writer is someone who cares about his/her characters, no matter whether they are evil or bad. Think of the prototypical evil character of Western literature: Shakespeare's Iago in Othello. Shakespeare himself is somewhat baffled by Iago's evil behavior, but he never mocks him, nor enjoys having him suffer punishment. That's why Shakespeare is Shakespeare (and Del Toro is not Shakespeare).
An example of a writer who made the mistake I am mentioning is Gustave Flaubert when he describes the death of his heroine, Madame Bovary. Flaubert indulges in describing all sorts of gruesome details related to the death of the poor lady. In a sense, it is a retribution for the behavior of a person who, at her time, was considered evil. But, apart from that scene, Flaubert's novel is a masterpiece in the art of storytelling and the writer is clearly symphatetic to his character, although he judges her morally flawed. The Shape of Water instead, fails over and over in the mistake of belittling its characters. For this reason, it is only a shadow of something that could have been but wasn't. And probably never will be.
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