The Southern Movies series explores images of the South in modern films as well as how those images affect American perspectives on the region.

Set in coastal Louisiana, 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild is a beautiful movie, a heart-wrenching movie, and a unique movie. Its story centers on a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her terminally ill father in The Bathtub, an unorthodox and free-spirited community that sits in a low-lying, flood-prone area. Hushpuppy is often left to take care of herself. Her mother is not with them, and her father’s oddly protective style of parenting is punctuated by periods of drunkenness or absence. However, she does have some quasi-parental support from other adults, like her teacher Miss Bathsheba. The ultimate challenge, though, for the little girl and those around her is posed by rising waters caused by storms and climate change, a silent antagonist that is represented metaphorically by a herd of ice-age monsters. Of course, we should understand the symbolism, post-Katrina. The film won a slew of awards, including several Oscars, and its star Quvenzhané Wallis has been hailed and praised for a stellar performance.

Beasts of the Southern Wild opens with a view of Hushpuppy’s life, starting with a view of the dilapidated mobile home on stilts where she lives by herself. She is a small African-American girl who stomps around a large overgrown yard strewn with rusted metal, debris, and discarded items. She has wild, messy hair and wears a dirty tank top, orange underpants, and white galoshes. We watch her play with small animals and with mud. An overdubbed monologue plays alongside eerie, childish music; in it, Hushpuppy elucidates some of life’s truths that she believes she understands. There is no adult in sight until a man appears in an adjacent thrown-together building. He is also African-American, probably middle-aged. He moves around, wearing jeans, boots, and a white tank top under which we see his wiry build. The structures that he traverses also appear to be abandoned or makeshift. Eventually he goes to a cooler and removes a whole chicken, plucked and gutted, to throw on an outdoor grill.

Next, we see the duo riding in water in a boat made from the bed of a pickup truck. It is also makeshift, though the father – whose name is Wink – and daughter seems satisfied, even pleased. They drift up to a dam-like structure and beyond it, on the land, are huge industrial facilities. The father speaks first, remarking that the facilities are ugly and that they have the most beautiful place on Earth to live. In her overdubbed monologue, Hushpuppy explains to us that these are “the levees,” which cut them off – from what we don’t know yet – but we are beginning to see: this is coastal Louisiana, and the encampment that serves as their home is in the flood plain beyond the structures that keep the city dry. An aerial view confirms this for us, and as her monologue continues, we get to zoom out and survey the larger situation. Hushpuppy tells us that her people, living in a place they call The Bathtub, have holidays constantly, live as they please, and openly reject the world “on the dry side.” We watch them party and drink and yell, people of all races and ages, as they hold bizarre parades, play music, and run around with fireworks. This is no ordinary community, and if the people were doing anything wrong, we might call them outlaws. But here, they appear to be living in relative harmony, together, having fun and living off the land and what few dollars they may have among them.

The scene then breaks to the classroom of the matriarchal teacher Bathsheba. She has a few children gathered in her school, and she is rather harshly informing them of the facts of life. Every living creature is meat, she tells them, as she prowls among cages and aquariums with animals and jars full of slimy grasses. The children stare as though they are being scolded. She also tells them about the Orax, starting the story from a tattoo on her upper thigh; this creature from the days of cavemen, which resembled giant razorback hog, would eat little human children right in front of their parents— but the parents didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves. No, they got work on survival. They, too, must think about survival, she tells them, because when the polar ice caps melt, where they live will be underwater.

As Bathsheba delivers this life lesson, Hushpuppy drifts off into her imagination. She combines the imagery from a poster of the snowy South Pole with Bathsheba’s descriptions, coming up with a scene of these Orax trapped and frozen within the melting icecaps. Soon, they will emerge from the icebergs that break off and drift away into warmer waters.

Back at home, Hushpuppy is now fully dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and she is searching for her father, who doesn’t answer. She shouts that it is “feed-up time,” yells for her father, even squeals. But he still does not come. In the scenes that follow, we understand that Hushpuppy is sometimes abandoned for days. She explains in her overdubbed monologue that she might have to eat her pets, if her father doesn’t come home soon. However, this isolation also allows her to reveal to us why her mother is not around. As Hushpuppy bounces around her extremely messy trailer, she tells us that her mother loved her so much she couldn’t stand it, and then “swam away.” This is the tale that her father told her, one that she enshrines on the wall using a crude drawing, some lights and beads, and a number 23 basketball jersey. Missing her mother, she takes down the jersey, lays it across the a chair at the dinner table, and begins to cook them dinner (what looks like dog food sauteed in the bottom of a pot).

In the daylight, we hear her father’s voice, and Hushpuppy goes running for him. This series of scenes is full of tension as the true nature of the situation is revealed. Wink appears, walking through the tall grass, and he is wearing a hospital gown and ID bracelet. He tries to ignore Hushpuppy, but she won’t let him, so he yells at her to go away. Returning to her own house, she turns up the propane gas on her stove to full blast in an attempt to blow it up. When it does, though, she scurries into her den and under a cardboard box. We know that this box won’t save her from a certain house fire, and her monologue provides her own mythic narrative of how she will be remembered by future children after she is dead. But her father bursts in to save her, and she runs away. Outside, they argue and yell at each, and he hits her. Fiercely angry at this, Hushpuppy hits her father and wishes death on him, and he falls on the ground in what looks like seizure. As thunder booms in the sky, Hushpuppy believes that she has killed her father. Watching, we know that he is obviously very sick and has overexerted himself after fleeing from medical treatment. Absent his explanations and any real world experience, she creates her own conclusions out of the little she knows. Juxtaposing the thunder and her mental images of the crumbling icebergs at the poles, she runs to the shore and shouts to the sea, “Momma, I think I broke something.”

Yet, this is not her fault. A severe storm – probably a hurricane – is coming. The community’s families are piling into cars that are lined up to evacuate, and people are encouraging her to do that, too. Instead she wants to save her father. She has sought Bathsheba’s help, and the woman makes a concoction of plants or herbs (or something) and gives them to the girl. However, when she returns, Wink is gone, so she hides the medicine jar in a tree and begins to search. And there is her father, wandering by the roadside, watching the evacuation but encouraging his fleeing neighbors to stay and ride out the storm. We know now that he will do just that, keeping his daughter by his side and endangering them both.

Amid these difficult scenes, Hushpuppy continues to imagine the icebergs that contain the Orax. She narrates for us, so we understand her worldview: the world is cracking up, and she must save herself. We see the long, warlike tusks of the beasts suspended in ice. The fierce creatures are bound up now, but will soon be freed.

The fierce storm rattles their home, while Hushpuppy’s irrational father yells threateningly about how he will defend them. He puts her in a life boat inside of their home on stilts and tells her that, if the water gets that high, they will push through the roof and sail away. She is not comforted, however. In a bizarre effort to console his child, the wild man gets his gun and begins to shoot into the sky, proclaiming to the storm that it can’t scare him. His antics only serve to scare his daughter even more.

In the morning, we see that nearly everything has been wrecked. Waterside homes are submerged and destroyed, and even trees are torn from their roots. Among the devastation, we see Hushpuppy’s father burst through their metal roof and lift her out as well. Their house on stilts now has water higher than its doorway, which gives us a sense of just how much the tides have risen. No one is anywhere in sight as they ride in their truck-bed pontoon boat, calling for friends. Here, we see more of Wink’s unorthodox parenting style as he teaches his daughter how to fish in the murky water using only bare hands. He leans over the side of the boat, sifting through the water, until he snatches catfish out, then explains that you have “whack it with your fist.” He gloats over his catch, then urges Hushpuppy to punch the fish, to kill it, but it cuts her as it writhes and flails. She winces at the pain, but her father tells her that she can’t worry about that— You got to whack it! he repeats. Though his method of parenting this little girl seems harsh, we also know that he is teaching her to survive in the harshest environment imaginable.

In the night, as her father sleeps, Hushpuppy is playing pensively. She goes to father after being frightened by some bumping noises and see the burst-open veins and capillaries under his skin. Rather than bother him, she sits in the doorway of the house, looking out at the light on a faraway buoy, wondering out loud if that is her mother. She says out loud to no one that she thinks she has broken everything. To reinforce this point, we then the terrible Orax – several of them – trotting through the mist, grunting and huffing. By now the symbolism is clear: this looming threat is coming to overtake Hushpuppy and destroy everything she knows.

The next day, they arrive in what was the main drag of the community, and their friend Walrus splashes into the water as he walks out his door, expecting to step onto his landing. He and his wife Little Jo have the local bar and liquor store, and two others Jean Battiste and Peter T have weathered the storm with them. They have been drinking all night. There are beer and liquor bottles strewn everywhere. Wink and Hushpuppy come in and join them. Wink begins drinking, and Hushpuppy lies around eating crawfish and crabs, all of which must have come from the chemical-dense water that has flooded their little world.

In the darkness, Wink asks Hushpuppy if he has told her the story of her conception, a strange question to ask a child. She remains silent but watches and waits. Wink then tells a strange story about his love affair with her mother. He shares that they were so shy that would barely talk. Until one day when we see her come out with a shotgun and save him from an alligator that was stalking him while he slept in a lawn chair. Wink claims that her mother was so pretty that water would boil when she walked past. After their union, Hushpuppy was born four minutes later. He punctuates the fantastical tale by insisting, mostly to himself, “I got it under control.” We know that he doesn’t, and we also know that he knows that he doesn’t. But he has a child depending on him, so he has to tell himself that he does.

The scenes that follow offer a montage of the group’s efforts at survival. Hushpuppy takes the boat over to Miss Bathsheba’s floating house, and there are her classmates, three other girls who appear to be alone. Using what they have, they rebuild as best as they can from the detritus left behind by the storm. Jean Battiste makes a little garden on the porch, and buckets of seafood are dumped out onto the long table. They are all laughing and smiling, living just as freely as they had before the devastating event. Bathsheba interjects a dose of reality into the conversation when she reminds them that the salt water will kill everything that it has covered, but Wink shrugs her off by insisting once again that he has it under control. The scene is punctuated by another instance of Wink’s bizarre parenting style. When one of the party people tries to open a crab for Hushpuppy to get the meat, Winks interrupts by demanding that she do it herself and yells harshly at her to smash the crab’s shell without help. Once she does, she flex her tiny muscles and screams triumphantly as the others cheer her on.

In the following day (or days), the ragtag crews works toward survival as Hushpuppy narrates in her overdubbed monologue. She explains to us that they weren’t going to “sit around like a bunch pussies.” They were going to get up, work, organize, and scrape together what they had.

Amid this new communal life that is based in Bathsheba’s house, Wink and the other men decide to execute an idea, after surveying the total destruction of the place they love. They load up quietly in Wink truck-bed boat and head for the levee, where they intend to blow a hole in it, which they hope will allow the water in their area to recede. Bathsheba wakes up as they are leaving, and she knows that what they are doing will be disastrous. The little half-baked – and probably half-drunk – militia that they are, the effort to stuff a dead alligator carcass full of dynamite is stymied by the failure of their friend Peter T to hold on to the switch. Peter is an older man who dresses sharp and seems to mind his own business passive, and rather than push forward with the others, he floats passively and only apologizes for his error. However, it is Wink to dives for the witch, as Bathsheba pulls up in her own boat, screaming at them stop, because they all know what will happen if they succeed. It is Hushpuppy who pulls the trigger. (We cannot tell from the visuals exactly what happens, but using its own style of cinematography, we know that the water goes down.)

The newly drained land reveals just what Bathsheba described. The trees are dead, and mud is everywhere. Standing on the roof, Hushpuppy screams at the buoy light, “Momma! Momma!” With her father sick and her mother absent, Hushpuppy makes an attempt to fix what she believes she has broken. She goes to an old tree and gets the jar of medicine that Bathsheba mixed up when her father fell down earlier. The medicine is a tepid-looking mixture of water and grasses, and she takes a handful and puts it into her father’s mouth while he sleeps. Of course, he wakes up spitting and cussing. He fusses at his daughter, but she informs him forcefully that she can see that he is sick. What follows is another episode of Wink’s strange parenting style. He repeats his main rule – No crying! – several times then pours them both some liquor from a bottle, teaching her to wash down her pain with alcohol. She asks him if he is going to die and leave her alone, but insists that he won’t. The scene ends with the two of them flexing their muscles in a show of power. But the Orax are still coming, and now they are running at full gallop.

What comes next, instead of the mother she has been calling to for help, is a search party enacting a mandatory evacuation. Groups of men appear and search the houses and structures. They come to Wink’s house, and he tries to fight them but he is subdued. He, Hushpuppy, and the others are taken into custody. Yet, instead of any kind of jail, they go to a shelter in small building that appears to contain a medical clinic. There are people all over, some sleeping on the floor, all appear to be as destitute as they are. Wink and Hushpuppy are separated as he is being given medical treatment, while Hushpuppy is bathed and put into a smocked dress. She and the other children are housed in a small playroom, and it is obviously that Hushpuppy does not know what to do in this situation. We also know that the workers and doctors must believe that they are helping the evacuees, but we know that this not help that they want. Severely weakened Wink fights the doctors, Hushpuppy rails again the discipline in the playroom, and they all marvel at the people who are “plugged into the walls.”

But this situation cannot hold them, and Wink, Walrus, and Jean Battiste stage a riotous escape. They raise a ruckus, sneak toward the doors, and begin running toward a bus that is carrying other evacuees away. We sense that they are heading back to The Bathtub, then Wink puts Hushpuppy on the bus and closes the door behind. He remains standing in the parking lot after saying to the bus driver, “Put her somewhere good, okay.” Once Hushpuppy realizes what he is doing, she bursts out of the bus to stay with him. Hushpuppy is angry with her father, because she believes he is trying to abandon her. He pleads, however, for her to go. “I’m dying . . . My blood’s eating itself. You know what that means,” he yells back. This is Wink’s first show of weakness, and it is also in this scene when we understand why he has been such a harsh parent. Wink knows that his daughter will be a very young orphan, so he has shown that he loves her by making sure that she will never lack the skills to survive. His methods may have seemed strange, even abusive, but ultimately, he understood that it was necessary.

Rather than getting on the buses, though, the group heads back to The Bathtub. Wink wants to go home to die, and they take him. Hushuppy sees her father coughing up blood, then walks among the ruins, surveying the corpse of a dog whose entrails have been ripped out. She explains in overdub that this is what happens in Nature. Suffering and elimination are real.

Then, Hushpuppy makes her move. Suddenly, she runs to the waterside and begins to swim to the buoy light that she has been calling to. The other three girls follow her into the water. We know, watching, that this is terrible idea and that they are in real danger of drowning, by underestimating the task. The girls swim and swim, then are picked up by a man in strange type of vessel. One would hesitate to call it a boat; it looks more like a watchtower set atop a truss with a barge-like platform underneath. The man is older and white, and he is dressed in black with a black fedora. We first expect that he might be a danger to the girls, but he just gives them a ride and talks to Hushpuppy as he drives. The little girls asks where they are going, and the strange man only replies that it doesn’t matter; his boat will take her wherever she needs to be. He also offers her a chicken biscuit while explaining that he eats them all the time. He throws all of his wrappers onto the floor, because they remind him of who he used to be.

Soon, they arrive at a floating bar called Elysian Field, whose sign says “Floating Catfish Shack” and “Girls Girls Girls.” The place appears to be a backwater house of prostitution, in addition to being a bar and grill. When they arrive, a host of women in negligees greet them, and within the dimly lit place, we see men dancing with these women to slow music. Some of the women begin to dote on the girls, but Hushpuppy is not looking for them. After a moment, she finds who she is looking for. Though we never do know for sure whether it is her, Hushpuppy believes that she had found her mother, who is a cook in the place’s kitchen. (This particular women resembles the woman we saw when Wink was describing her mother, and among the four girls, she takes Hushpuppy up especially and leads her into the kitchen.) Aside from the others, we see more evidence that this is her mother. The woman swills Miller High Life, just as she did in the scenes we saw from the past, and she speaks to Hushpuppy just as harshly as her father does. As she prepares to fry some seafood, she tells the little girl that some people try to say that life will be all “hunky dory” but “you better get that shit out ya head.” For a bit, we see the girls slow-dancing with the other women, and this mother-figure embraces Hushuppy, who hangs on her and soaks up the affection that she has clearly been missing.

However, this scene cannot last, and before we know it, the four girls are stomping their way through the high swampy grass back at The Bathtub. Hushpuppy is holding a paper sack in her fist, and in a moment we will see why. Yet, there is another arrival, too: the Orax are here, wading through the stream that winds among the grass. As the girls come over a hill, the beasts are upon them, and the other three girls run away screaming. Hushpuppy, however, continues to traverse the mud and debris toward the makeshift hovel where her father lay dying, surrounded by his few friends. As she walks a gangplank, she turns and confronts the animal, staring it down, her tiny figure in stark contrast the Orax’s immense size. The tense scene continues, and finally, she says, “You’re my friend, kind of . . . I got to take care of mine.” All of the Orax, which have all knelt to yield her strength, turn and leave. Hushpuppy has faced her greatest fear.

Inside, she shares the fried fish with her father, and we understand that he knows: she has found her mother. Though they are both shedding tears, they remind each other one last time, “No cryin’,” and she falls onto his chest. Next we see, Wink is getting a Viking funeral, set aflame in his truck-bed boat and pushed away. The film ends with a note of hope. The hardscrabble crew – Hushpuppy, Walrus, Little Jo, Peter T, Jean Battiste, Bathsheba, and the girls – stride across the washed out road as Hushpuppy explains to us that hundreds of years from now children will study history and know about her, her father, and The Bathtub. This crew will not be able to restore and rebuild what was here, because the destruction from the storm is too great, but they will survive.

Beasts of the Southern Wild takes a mythic approach to a real situation: the threats to coastal communities on the Gulf Coast, particularly those in Louisiana. The Bathtub would certainly represent an extreme example, showing us people on the fringes of society, living – possibly squatting – seemingly without property rights or law enforcement in an environment that might be called Edenic if it wasn’t so filthy. They are happy, though, and we know that societal restraints will not hold them. For any of the flaws or faults that we see in The Bathtub – lack of hygiene, alcohol abuse, etc. – the people don’t want a mainstream life in modern America. They want to live free of what most of us would consider preferable, even if it means facing the dangers of their chosen lifestyle. This, in itself, is quintessentially Southern.

As a document of the South, the film succeeds in several ways, too, but these successes come to us as metaphors that point to actual characteristics. The first, of course, is the fierce individualism of the community in The Bathtub. This mythic handling creates a portrayal that strikes at the heart of two important features of Southern life: self-determination alongside the value of community. Another is the closeness with Nature. The film critic Roger Ebert wrote that “Hushpuppy is on intimate terms with the natural world, with the pigs she feeds and the fish she captures with her bare hands; sometimes she believes animals speak to her in codes.” For their meals, the father and daughter rely heavily on what they produce nearby, yet they do enjoy some products from the industrialized food system. And third is the acceptance of eccentricity. Though Southerners are often derided for intolerance, within our own communities we are often exceptionally tolerant of those whose personal tendencies are odd or even strange. Finally, the little microcosm of The Bathtub is a multiracial community, just as the larger culture of Gulf Coast is. If this little cluster of people had been racially homogeneous, the message would have been a very different one. In The Bathtub, everyone is in it together.

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