In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I went to see this with big_daz on Wednesday night at the Everyman, Leeds. It's the second new release I've seen in the cinema this year, which is already more than I manage some years in total. If there were more films like this to go and see, that would be very different.

It is framed in multiple ways as a fairy tale. One is the two bookended voice-over sequences which begin by describing the main character, Elisa, as a princess and end by talking about her happy ending. They turn out to be voiced by her neighbour, who has spent his life painting advertising posters but is quickly being made obsolete by the camera, who keeps his television permanently tuned to old black-and-white musicals and comedies, and who ponders whether he was born too early or too late. That is, we are being told a story by a man disconnected from reality whose job is to sell fantasies. Elisa herself we first meet fast asleep on her couch, sunk deep into a watery dream-world, while throughout the film sound and light from the cinema over which she lives leak up into her apartment, and at one point she herself breaks out into a black-and-white song-and-dance routine to voice the love for the creature which she cannot speak. Perhaps some time in the decade before 1962 (the film's dramatic date) she has sat downstairs watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, absorbed its soundtrack in her sleep, and been living it in her dreams ever since? Later on, she returns the favour, sending the watery by-products of her own fantasy romance dripping onto customers nodding off in the auditorium below when she floods her bathroom to turn it into an aquatic playground. In fact, between her voicelessness and the fact that she was both found by water as a baby and ultimately finds her happiness there, she may as well be the Little Mermaid, on land only ever temporarily while she finds her prince.

All these markers of fairy-tale status are of course crucial cues in allowing us to accept the extraordinary story of a romance between an ordinary woman and a humanoid amphibian with magical powers. But they also allow us to enjoy another kind of fantasy alongside it: that of a bunch of underprivileged outsiders successfully sticking it to The Man. Elisa is mute. Giles, her ageing advertising-designer neighbour, is gay. Zelda, her best friend at the facility where they work, is black. And infiltrated into the facility's team of scientists is 'Bob', aka Dimitri, a Russian spy who has come to feel as strongly about science as he does about the motherland. Meanwhile, The Man himself manifests as Colonel Strickland, the facility's authoritarian, racist, misogynistic boss, who tortures the creature as much for fun as to learn anything from it and who takes the decision to vivisect it rather than trying to study it alive without it even occurring to him that this might be something to pause over, let alone actually doing so. In all this, he's the successor of Dr Mark Williams from the original film (LJ / DW), but much more starkly militaristic and exaggeratedly nasty. And boy, is it satisfying to see him out-foxed by our plucky band of misfits, pulling off the creature's liberation from the facility while he can't begin to imagine that they could even be capable of any such thing.

This might all sound rather heavy-handed, except that each character is drawn with such humanity it's impossible not to believe in them. In fact the entire story is approached with the same utter seriousness which makes Hammer's dark fairy-tales just as compelling. No-one here has their tongue in their cheek, or behaves like an avatar standing in for a particular social group. Instead, each has their own inner turmoil and believable home-life (Zelda's lazy husband, Dimitri's careful ironing), including Strickland, whose career trajectory still doesn't quite satisfy his perfect all-American wife. On both sides of the balance, it's important that these characters aren't clichés and don't jump straight into their assigned roles. Elisa's friends need a lot of persuasion before they'll help her rescue the creature, while we see the system that creates Strickland in the even less sympathetic General Hoyt above him, and in how easy it is for a smarmy car salesman to talk him into buying an expensive Cadillac in a colour he doesn't like.

The film is also dripping with deeply symbolic detail, which likewise might have seemed over-done if it weren't for the fairy-tale framing and the believability of the characters. Most obvious is the colour-palette, all muted, swampy greens and blues in scaly patterns to suit the aquatic theme, but also to set off occasional departures the more starkly - like the red dress and shoes which Elisa is suddenly wearing the day after she and the creature have found out how to express their affection physically. Perhaps next most obviously, the oppressive machinery of capitalism. Vents and pipes above the creature's tank resemble not only the original Gill-Man but also (to me at least) the Machine-Mammon from Metropolis (1927). Elisa, Zelda and their co-workers are slaves to the facility's clocking-in system and CCTV cameras. And when the creature staggers into the cinema below Elisa's apartment, he finds it showing scenes of slaves working in the mines from The Story of Ruth (1960).


The cinema complex itself is called the Orpheum, perfectly underpinning Elisa's use of music (and boiled eggs) to win the confidence of the creature - though she plays it jazz on a portable record player rather than singing to the lyre. The facility is called the Occam institute, which drove me to Wikipedia - I know the basic principle and couldn't see how it might apply to this story, but found my answer in the biology section, where it turns out that it has featured quite heavily in debates around evolution and the matter of whether or not any animals share human-style psychology. There we are very much amongst the concerns of del Toro's story. Finally, in case it wasn't clear enough how rotten Strickland is, he spends most of the film with two of his fingers, severed by the creature after one too many electric shocks and reattached by surgeons, blackening and reeking as the attachment fails and they die on his hand. Towards the end, in one of several body-horror moments which had me squirming in my seat and putting my own fingers over my eyes, he acts out just how literally he has gone to pieces by pulling them off and throwing them at the terrified Zelda. I'm sure there is much more besides.

Nothing quite stops the niggling world-building questions bubbling up. Like, if the creature is 'from the Amazon', why does it seem to need saline water and return quite happily to the ocean at the end? And how exactly would its ability to switch between lung- and gill-based breathing systems be any particular help in the Space Race, as both the Americans and Russians seems to think? But ultimately none of these matter next to Elisa's coy, satisfied smile and the electric blue lights flickering across the creature's body. For that, everyone involved deserves my profoundest thanks, and I only hope the cinema industry as a whole is watching and learning.

IMDb page here. Seen round at Daz Towers with big_daz and gillywoo.

Shot in black and white, and given its macabre subject-matter and Victorian setting, this felt more like a Hammer film from their still-actually-quite-serious era than it did an early 80s David Lynch number. Which I guess was Lynch's intention.

It was moving and powerful, and did lots of very interesting things with the issue of gazes and exploitation. The uncomfortable similarity between Bytes, the freakshow proprietor who exhibits John Merrick to the public for money, and Dr. Frederick Treves, who 'rescues' him but then exhibits him to fellow doctors, is explicitly addressed, while there's also a lot of stuff going on about who is audience and who performers in the theatre, whether windows are for looking out of or looking into, and the general relationship between seeing and being seen. All of which, of course, then neatly poses the same questions to the audience, watching through a fourth wall. Thought-provoking symbolism = yay!

For a David Lynch film, it was a pretty straightforward narrative, but there were some rather bizarre sequences about machines and pollution, which I was somewhat nonplussed by. I didn't think anyone had ever thought John (or properly Joseph) Merrick's condition was caused by either, so I wasn't sure what the point was, really. However, a bit of Googling today reveals that one form of elephantiasis is thought to be caused by 'persistent contact with volcanic ash', so I guess maybe that was Lynch's point after all. In fact, DNA tests on his remains published in 2003 suggest that the problem was a combination of two rare genetic disorders - type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF1) and Proteus syndrome - but Lynch could not have known that in 1980.

big_daz also had a book chronicling the true story of Joseph Merrick, which I had a good browse through after we'd seen the film. It showed that quite a lot of things had been changed for the sake of the story - for example, massively exaggerating the extent to which Merrick was ill-treated by Bytes, and completely inventing an episode in which the latter steals Merrick back from the hospital where Treves is looking after him. It also clarified what Merrick's childhood had been like, and how he came to have been so well-educated - something completely unexplained by the film. In fact, his whole life up to his time as a 'novelty exhibition' in Leicester is very eloquently chronicled in his own words, while good old Wikipedia supplies the rest.

None of which undermines the quality of the film, of course. But the real story is just as interesting in its own right.

This Saturday, I had another gathering round at my place to watch the week's Dr. Who episode, followed by whatever took our fancy. Father's Day was up to the usual standard, and we had much geeky excitement discovering the updates on Clive's Mickey's website afterwards, as well as just generally discovering the Geocomtex one, which I hadn't seen before.

We also watched more of damien_mocata's excellent Friday Night Armistice tapes, some Red Dwarf stuff, and QI (at my insistence!), while simultaneously soaking Jaffa Cakes in Absinthe, eating trifle, spitting Jaffa Cakes across the room (mainly damien_mocata), and probably some other stuff, but it all seems a bit of a blur now...

Sunday commenced with a good long lie-in, continued with some intensive mucking-about-on-LJ, and then went and got all intellectual on me, when the delectable thebiomechanoid invited me out to see 5x2 (aka Cinque Fois Deux) with her and a friend at the QFT.

The film was one for provoking questions, rather than providing answers, and it certainly prompted a lot of debate between the three of us afterwards. In essence, it tells the story of the decline of a relationship in five stages. The title can be expanded to mean 'five [events in the lives] of two [people]': those events being their first meeting, their marriage, the birth of their child, a dinner party and their divorce.

The story is complex in itself - there were a lot of interesting explorations of (anti-)romance, sexuality, morality, different kinds of love and the interplay between different kinds of characters. But what it made it a little different from the norm was that the five events were told in reverse chronological order: rather like Memento, but with longer chunks. In other words, the order which I have listed above is actually completely reversed, the result being that when, at the end of their first meeting you see them both swimming off into the sunset, it looks like a perfect romantic ending in both appearance and its context at the end of the film... except that you, the viewer, actually know already exactly how it is all going to pan out. (I wouldn't be giving too much away if I said 'not well').

There were also all sorts of intriguing resonances between the different chunks of the story and the different characters within it, which were simply presented 'as is', leaving you to guess whether they had any deep and profound meaning or not. And on that topic, thebiomechanoid, I did look up the clauses of a European Civil Marriage ceremony, and found that article 213 reads:

"The spouses have the duty to live together; they owe it to each other to be faithful and provide help and assistance."

The other clauses which are usually read out can be found here, on a page about the wedding of Prince Laurent of Belgium and Claire Coombs, and they match perfectly with my memory of the clauses read out at the wedding of Gilles and Marion in the film. So I would say that it definitely is significant that that was her room no. in the hotel, since of all the clauses it is this one that relates most closely to the problems in their marriage.

After the film it was on to Dukes for excitable conversation about the film, Diet Coke, exam motivation, tall buildings, LJ (inevitably), Cambridge, jazz and how we didn't really feel much like going home. But, eventually, we did, and, with regret, brought the weekend to a close.