Something So Broken: Black Care in the Wake of Beasts of the Southern Wild

Abstract

“Care is the antidote to violence.” —Saidiya Hartman at In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe (2017) “The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away.” —Naomi Klein (2015) “Y’all better learn how to survive now.” —Miss Bathsheeba, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) Louisiana. A dark boiling sky. Beasts of the Southern Wild opens in an anarchic place of car scrap and driftwood, feral animals and tumbledown shacks. We are at the end of the world in a swampy bayou way out in the Gulf of Mexico. A young black girl lays her hand against the body of a pig and tilts her head to listen for the heartbeat. A few moments later, she holds a baby bird to her ear, listens deep, eager to get to the heart of the matter. Animals, for this girl, are close as kin. Their heartbeats (which we also hear, thump-thump-thumping) bespeak the ebb and flow of life. As the girl’s opening voiceover tells us: “All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting, and talking to each other the ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying: I'm hungry, or I gotta poop. But sometimes they be talkin' in codes.” The heroine and narrator of Beasts is six-year-old “Hushpuppy,” a preternaturally wise, motherless kid played with mesmerizing force by Quvenzhané Wallis. When we meet her she is stomping around her cardboard-and-tin home dressed only in a dirty undershirt, panties, and rubber boots. Semi-orphaned, Hushpuppy lives in a Louisiana tidal basin—dubbed the Bathtub—with a rowdy, multiracial group of misfits and a sickly, floundering, alcoholic father named Wink (Dwight Henry) who swings between harshly neglecting and aggressively mentoring his daughter. Vulnerable to floods and storm-surge waters, the Bathtub is separated from the mainland or “dry side” by a levee. On the dry side sits a blurry factory, industry, consumerism, and a filthy haze. It may be “rich” and “safe” but it is spiritually desiccated. Life in the Bathtub is bare, bufferless, and broken but it is also full. Full of booze, junk, bacchanal, decay, fireworks, grief, experience, knowledge, extremes of catastrophe, and drunken rapture. People and animals roam freely, untethered to wealth or materialism. Life may tilt toward tragedy in the Bathtub but it is juiced with uncommon liberty and moments of pure communal joy. If this is the frontline of climate change, then carpe diem. A festive fireworks celebration during the opening sequence captures something of the film’s “precarity be damned” ethos. Faced with brewing storms and floods, The Bathtub locals are determined to hang on and protect their autonomy and collective way of life. It is better to be wet and alive in their view than to live in a “dry world”—better to experience self-sufficient squalor than soulless state-dependency; better to stay in place than endure the violence of resettlement. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) is one of the most influential and most discussed “climate change” films in recent American history. On the fifth anniversary of its release, I excavate scholarly and popular debates about the film to probe the film’s virtues and blindspots. Is Beasts of the Southern Wild a means to symbolize “climate resistance” (Mirzoeff 2012) or a naturalizing of “black suffering” (Brown 2013a)? What might we learn from the disunity of response to this film?1 Five years after its release, Beasts continues to offer its viewers various ways of thinking through the present-day world in the context of climate change, neoliberalism, and racialized violence. There are many themes drifting through Beasts of The Southern Wild, several of which I will parse later in this essay, but the central one is a celebration of resilience and independence in the face of durational loss or “slow violence.” The film offers a booming tribute to the tenacity of the Bathtub’s multiracial outliers, who go to extreme lengths to defend their homes and their magical if improbable community in the wake of climactic disaster. (The improbability of this community will be a recurring motif in criticism of the film, as I will soon discuss.) In this all-but-drowned place, there is no character more emblematic of this gritty survivalist spirit than Hushpuppy. Ever capable, Hushpuppy cooks (catfood) and cares for herself and a posse of domestic animals. Ever resourceful, she lives bare and in the near open without even proper attire to protect her from the elements. Her very features, from her wild hair to her fierce scowl to her honed stare, appear sculpted by years of sparring and inclement weather. Her big six-year-old eyes seem to have already absorbed it all—scenes of slow catastrophe and unexpected tenderness. The film’s power derives in large part from its faithfulness to Hushpuppy’s feisty and elegiac perspective. She is the only focal point of a disintegrating world. The camera floats and tilts in her direction, capturing the ruined textures and tones of her tenuous surroundings. She is the story’s motor and momentum. She is the community’s storyteller, recording their history for the benefit of “the scientists of the future.” Her freeform delivery, fanciful, laced with wonder and ecological anxiety, narrates what it means to love a wounded place with all your wounded heart; and, by extension, what it means to be fervently attached to all fragile places (be it a post-Katrina bayou, a grief-stricken community or the planet itself.) Through her empathetic eyes we are connected to the weave of the universe, from visions of particles flying through the air, to melting ice caps to Arctic avalanches to prehistoric creatures. The viewer’s proximity to Hushpuppy’s inner life is deeply stirring but also, as some critics and scholars have argued, gravely unsettling. The film taps into a series of concerns about what it takes to “survive” in a time of growing instability and climate change. 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