This is on rewatching Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film, The Shape of Water.
Roger Ebert wrote that the film “is all about, the loneliness of those born before their time, born different.”
The film moved me deeply. It’s is about a lonely woman who dreams every night of her entire drab world become poetry in water, a ballet of drowning. She knows somehow that is her element, not the landlubber life she leads where every morning begins with boiling an egg for breakfast. (I know many of you can sympathize with the existential numbness of that hardboiled egg in the morning.) Until she realizes that her boss is keeping a hyrbid sea creature trapped in a warehouse for future scientific investigation.
Cruelty to animals, anyone? And if our society is pretty numb to that too, this motif magnifies that banal cruelty. But against all odds the woman rescues the creature, arranges for its escape back into the sea, and then runs, or rather swims, away with it. Because this is her true element too—she’s always had marks on the sides of her neck that were clear remainders of gills. Maybe she was once a sea creature similary captured and modified by scientific experiments, her memories of the oceanic reprogrammed to landlubbering?
This is not even to mention that we all walked in water once, and even now we begin in that generative pool, the amniotic, in our mothers’ wombs.
Water, water everywhere.
Lately, I too have been having a dream about water. You see, I have this son. Wild and wise. My own private Heathcliff.
Loving, sweet, troubled, kind, distant, afraid, angry, gentle, powerful, frail as a teardrop. Sometimes I want to fold him close in my arms so that nothing can hurt him. Sometimes I just want to tell him, “I am here.” But I’m afraid he will swim away if I do.
Strange fish, children, you know.
Alien creatures we mothers nurture in the deep pools of our bodies, and then one day must let go, and then again let go, and then again, because in the end they’re not ours. Mothers, you know how hard that letting go is.
So, in my dream, my son wakes up and finds himself under water. His bed, his phone, his empty pepsi cup, his stress ball, his cats—perched on the footboard, waiting to see what happens next, cats always do—floating in water. The water has risen and covered everything.
But my son isn't afraid, won’t drown, and won't hurt.
Because he’ll know what he's drowning in is his mother’s love—oceanic, timeless.