The Shape of Water: A Bathysphere Into the Unconscious

(Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the Oscar nominated (best picture, best actress, best supporting actor and actress, among others) The Shape of Water, go see it before reading this. If you’ve seen it, I invite you to read on.)

When I find myself returning over and over again to images and themes from a recently viewed film, it’s usually because it has struck a resonant chord with some part of my psyche. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water left me chewing on its deep psychological themes of archetypal shadow, paranoia, finding ourselves reflected in another, and the redemptive power of love.

The Shape of Water begins underwater, as we first see the sleeping protagonist, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), mysteriously floating above her bed in her flooded bedroom. She is dimly lit by the shadowy teal colored light that is to become the predominant color of this film, and we are invited to join her in the realm of the unconscious, the realm of dreams.

The film follows the enigmatically mute Elisa, who works as a humble cleaning woman in a top secret government laboratory near Baltimore, Maryland, during the height of the Cold War. Despite her silence, Hawkins gives us a window into her character’s wistful dreams through a richly expressive performance.

In the bowels of this labyrinthine complex, a hideous half-man, half-fish monster (played by Doug Jones in a surprisingly tender role, communicated entirely through gesture and posture), reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, is cruelly ensconced by sadistic researchers. His tormentor (Michael Shannon), who brought him back from the Amazon and dubbed him “The Asset,” projects upon the monster all that he rejects about himself—his sadism, his amorality, and his rage. In a richly ironic scene, the tormentor asks a subordinate if the hideous creature could indeed be a god, as the natives in the Amazon believed. With disdain, the tormentor proclaims, "We're created in the Lord's image. You don't think that's what the Lord looks like, do you?"

This theme of Jungian shadow repeats throughout the film, both in all the fears that the monster represents in his keepers, and writ large in the tensions between the American G-men who want to exploit the monster to gain an advantage over the Soviets, and the KGB spies who wish to deprive the Americans of any advantage they might gain from studying the monster. Fear and paranoia play a predominant role in this Cold War détente, where fears of the worst aspects of “the other people” across the sea are never far from conscious awareness.

[pagebreak] Surprising to the viewer is the degree of tenderness between the monster and Elisa, who sees in him a reflection of her misfit-mute self. She begins to whimsically befriend him, with Glenn Miller records and hard-boiled eggs snuck into the laboratory. The tension of the film builds as we wonder what other connections these two could possibly share. As Carl Jung once remarked, "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." In this story, both Elisa and the monster, two misfits born into the world to be misunderstood, are able to embrace their own tenderness and vulnerability through being with one another, and through this meeting, the fullness of their humanity is on display. It's an unexpected delight to see the depth of our grace on display by a sea monster whose skin glows blue when he feels that most human of emotions, love.

MORE: Bearing Witness Is Our Greatest Offering

Elisa's closest friends, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), an African American coworker who not only translates Elisa's sign language but cautiously comprehends her quirks, and her neighbor, Giles (Richard Dawkins), a gay man who risks humiliation should he fully permit himself to be seen, represent both fellow outcasts and objects of projected derision, but also are trickster characters who conspire to help Elisa in her love affair with the monster.

The director, del Toro, has accomplished the same enchantment he achieved in 2006's Pan's Labyrinth, set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In that film, a subterranean monster (the faun) is able to reflect our most human qualities, and by examining the response of the other characters to the monster, we learn about those parts of ourselves that we most disown. By loosening our need for realism and leading us down into an unconscious, hypnogogic world, del Toro allows us to risk befriending those monstrous aspects of our selves that we fear most, and by doing so invites us to embrace our wholeness.

WEIGH IN: Do you agree with this review of The Shape of Water? Leave your comments below.

Andrew Penn was trained as an adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric clinical nurse specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. He is board certified as an adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric nurse practitioner by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Currently, he serves as an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California-San Francisco School of Nursing. Mr. Penn is a psychiatric nurse practitioner with Kaiser Permanente in Redwood City, California, where he provides psychopharmacological treatment for adult patients and specializes in the treatment of affective disorders and PTSD. He is a former board member of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, California Chapter, and has presented nationally on improving medication adherence, emerging drugs of abuse, treatment-resistant depression, diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder, and the art and science of psychopharmacologic practice. 

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors. Blog entries are not medical advice.