One
Before getting to the point, I must admit that I am biased against Guillermo del Toro.
Del Toro is undoubtedly a well-known director, but it's hard to tell how much of his popularity is earned by his work and how much is earned by his Twitter status and "bad" taste.
Has Del Toro ever made a masterpiece? Maybe "Pan's Labyrinth" barely touched the side. But his movie-going tastes, the dozen or so Tweets he forwards on average every day, and his "Strange Hills" filled with all kinds of bizarre collections are the source of most of his presence. Check Douban if you don't believe it: the highest-rated work he gets here is not any of his films, but his album showing his notes, collections and hobbies, "The Fantastic Ideas of Guillermo del Toro".
However, to use an inappropriate analogy, the fan enthusiasm thing is like garbage on the court. Only when you have the strength to support these external and secondary things will they themselves produce enough meaning.
Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino's fan passion is contagious first of all because their work is good enough. The former's camera movement is so powerful that you'll go see an opera film shot by Michael Powell in the 1950s in order to study its origins; the plot details of the latter are so interesting that you'll be willing to throw a dark meme for him, looking for Italian Westerns and Japanese sword films that were born in the 1960s.
What about Del Toro's fan passion? It is indeed admirable. After all, not everyone can maintain their enthusiasm for cheap B-grade films in their fifties and still be like an adolescent teenager. But no matter how much you love The Shape of Water, are you really willing to convince yourself that it's a masterpiece? Would you really like to see the 1954 Black Lake Demon For it? I guess the answer is no.
Stills from The Shape of Water.
After all, "The Shape of Water" is just a routine to show Hollywood's industrial standards and "social conscience", not to mention that even this "prince-princess" fairy tale, which has been told countless times, has been so listlessly told by Del Toro.
And the Oscars' recognition of this routine work is once again an illustration of Hollywood's creative exhaustion and the fallacy of politically correct beliefs. As long as there is a fan complex in the film, the judges will pay for it; as long as the film calls the minority, the judges will feel obligated to push it to the podium.
As for its artistic standards, it is one of the aspects that Hollywood and the Oscar jury are least concerned about. They don't care if the film shows the peculiarities of marginalized people, whether it reuses Hollywood stereotypes in creative ways. The Oscar competition has become a standard test paper, as long as you fill in the answers that should be filled in, and the handwriting is not too sloppy, the examiner will give you a good score. As for whether you are not distracted when answering the questions, or whether the views reflected in different questions are contradictory? Who cares！
The Oscars are a self-hypnotic scene used by Hollywood, and they take for granted that those who watch the hilarity around them will also be brainwashed by their hypnosis. But at the very least, as a melon eater, I want to maintain the ability to think independently. In my opinion, "The Shape of Water" is like the pond where the monsters in the film live, full of stale stench.
Two
Del Toro is a very clever director, and at the beginning of The Shape of Water, he arranges a masturbation scene for the heroine, the mute cleaner Alyssa. This design will meet the needs of almost everyone: straight male audiences will shock the heroine's carcass; feminists and disabled sympathizers will think that the scene respects the desires of women/disabled people; as for Cult fans, they will find a reason to self-proclaim this movie: The movie I love to watch is an edgy adult fairy tale, unlike the Disney movies you like.
But there is an interesting question in this scene: is Alyssa the subject of desire, or the object under the male gaze? We don't know, after all, Alyssa has lost her voice and can no longer gain a voice in this movie. And simply and crudely viewing the scene as a voyeuristic representation of the heroine by a male director is too far-fetched to be any different from those who hold the politically correct stick to criticize quentin, Woody Allen, and The Three Billboards.
But we can find some harsh noises in the film's attitude towards other women. As a representative of black women and the working people at the bottom, octavia Spencer, the cleaner, naturally cannot be offended. So like the security guard (Michael Sannon) who projects his desires suppressed by American Puritan values on Alyssa, director Del Toro seems to project all of his desires suppressed by the rules of political correctness on Michael Shannon's wife in the film. As the only able-bodied caucasian woman with more scenes in the film, the character named Elaine has only one breast for the whole movie.
Doesn't the setting for Elaine inherit the objectification tendency of mainstream Hollywood movies toward women? It's just that this tendency is wrapped up in a revisionist critique of the dominant values of the American 50s. But del Toro clearly has a double standard in his attitude towards both women, and the erotic references that often appear in the film to go straight down the three ways confirm this.
Because it does not have much to do with the overall expression of the film, their appearance is particularly glaring. Do they embody the adultness and progressiveness of this clichéd fairy tale? It's possible. But it seems to me that this phenomenon is more suitable to be explained by Freud's theory: when you cram a bad taste director like Del Toro into a politically correct iron shelf, even if his manifest consciousness has always been healthy and normal, his subconscious will desperately look for outlets to vent his irrepressible desires.
Three
Although wrapped in the shell of a B-movie, the entire setting of "The Shape of Water" is fully in line with Hollywood's political correctness creed: five positive characters, all representatives of marginalized groups.
Alyssa represents the disabled and the underclass, her colleague Zelda represents people of color and the underclass, her roommate Jill represents the gay/LGBTQ community, and Robert Dimitri, a scientist of Soviet descent who helped her rescue the mermaid, represents foreign immigrants who walk on thin ice under the ideology of the Cold War. As for Alyssa's mermaid lover, it contains all the oppressed people of the world. Such a character setting can simply make Hollywood liberals reach multiple climaxes.
Correspondingly, the villains in the film are all white straight men with sound limbs. Richard, a sexually deranged security guard, has only one mission in life to complete the tasks given to him by his superiors, and his superior, General Hoyt, is the embodiment of Cold War ideology. As for the sweet shop clerk who fascinated Jill, although he was from Canada, he completely followed American conservative values and discriminated against blacks and gays. On the faces of all these white straight men, four words were clearly written: "The party fights the same thing."
Following the creed of political correctness is not a problem, as long as the characters can be made vivid and real, then a film can completely complete self-consistency within the framework of its own setting. What "The Shape of Water" offers, however, is a brief illustration of the political situation in the United States: the positive characters are mostly angels who lack the complex dimensions of human nature, while the negative characters have neither the deterrent power that a demon should have, nor the personality that a brilliant villain should have. If you don't believe it, look at the faint lines in the film, it is really embarrassing enough.
Even among the positive characters, we can divide the grades: at the very least, the Soviet scientist played by Michael Stubbah clearly has more room to play than the two characters played by Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Whether it's his uneasiness in the face of superior spies or his relief in the face of Michael Shannon, Stubba's character has a more complex multi-faceted nature, and his performance allows us to see how a character actor can take on different levels in a limited amount of time.
But it was Jenkins and Spencer who were nominated for Best Supporting Actor. They hardly have any highlight moments in the film, but the Oscar jury still decided to give them recognition. Because standing behind them are two marginalized groups that need to be appeased. As for Soviet immigrant scientists, sorry, there is no such species in the United States anymore.
Such a result seems to indicate that the black and gay community, which has been oppressed by the Hollywood system for decades, has finally raised its eyebrows in these years. This is the progress of society and the victory of the affirmative action movement.
Wait a minute, let's take a look at the actor who plays the "breast" – Lauren Lee Smith. Why can this good-looking white actress only play "breasts"? On the one hand, the reason is probably that her acting skills are really not very good. But another part of the reason is that she starred in the large-scale erotic film "Sleep with Me" in 2005. In Hollywood logic, if you have starred in similar movies, then whether your performance in it is good or bad, you can only play some slut roles in your future career.
Will this be just an isolated case? So let's look at another example. Chloe Severnie, at the age of 26, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Boys Don't Cry," but she had a great future, but she did not get a major role in mainstream commercial films for more than a decade after she played a pop-up role in Vincent Gallo's NC-17 film "Brown Rabbit."
Coincidence? Maybe. After all, Sevini herself is mixed with the independent film circle, and perhaps she does not subjectively want to enter the mainstream. But you're saying that Hollywood didn't discriminate against her after Brown Rabbit? Probably not. Otherwise, how to explain that she could only get a role by agreeing to act in nude scenes in many subsequent films?
Hollywood may indeed be moving toward great multi-ethnic unity, yet it remains conservative in the face of deep-rooted Puritan values in the United States. And that's a joke, because almost everyone knows that even the inside story of Hollywood's sex scandals and unspoken rules in recent years is just the tip of the iceberg.
Compared with the collapse of moral standards, the hypocrisy of appearance is even more repulsive. Although "The Shape of Water" vigorously maintains the appearance of Hollywood's harmony, on the other hand, it also follows the old rules of Hollywood movies to objectify women, then stigmatize women, and finally throw stigmatized women aside.
Four
The Shape of Water is in a way a sentimental film because it's full of fandom of 1950s Hollywood. But I'm sorry, the shadow complex is almost a dirty word in today's abuse by countless people. If you're making a movie just for the sake of fans, you're still going to go for a fan.
How much of the many fan elements that Del Toro added to The Shape of Water contribute to the overall expression of the film? Anyway, the eyes are clumsy as I can't understand. The "Black Lake Demon Tan", which it pays tribute to as a whole, is originally an outdated bad film, and several old films played in the theater and on TV in the film have neither any intertextual relationship with the content of the film, nor do they reveal more of the protagonist's inner world to us in an indirect way.
To put it nicely, these old films provide the film with a certain sense of the times; to put it badly, this is just a trick used by Del Toro to capture those elderly Oscar judges. As for the black-and-white song and dance scene that appears suddenly in the film, although it is very stylized, it completely escapes the overall temperament of the film, so that people can't help but wonder: Is this a scene added by Del Toro on the set after watching "Philharmonic City"?
"The Shape of Water" does have a good production, but its production level has not achieved any breakthrough in the genre it is in. And its content, although it completes the dual task of equal rights and fans, pokes the hearts of the Oscar judges, but the weak narrative, the speculative but careless depiction of marginal groups (del Toro really should look at "Tuina" and "Strangers by the Lake") and the dual attitude towards female characters make its final award seem ridiculous.