Astrology: Film: ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ (2012)

Jul 5, 2012

 

Fox Searchlight

The Moon controls the tides, and the threat of water rising always looms large in The Bathtub, the name that locals who populate Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” affectionately call home. 

Six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Wink, her single-parent father (Dwight Henry), live in this impoverished watery community in the far reaches of southern Louisiana. Hush Puppy says her mother “swam away” and this absence of a maternal caregiver may have been the spark that impels her to care for all living things – she describes them as “hearts beatin’ and squirtin’”– that live in or around their shack.

Dad, in failing health while tending to Hushpuppy as best he can, is determined to instill a sense of Saturnine self-sufficiency in his daughter. Her spitfire responses to authority include blow torching a stove into producing a flame, cooking up a combo of grease and pet food, and lighting her own domicile on fire so she can live under the same roof as her father. 

Eventually it all comes down to a conflation of raging floods, loss of home, emotional nurture and physical sustenance – all of which are the bailiwick of the Moon. Despite their best efforts to stay put, members of the community are taken to a shelter. Wink, growing more ill by the day, wants no part of bureaucratically administered care and takes his band of insurgents back to The Bathtub.

In the end, Hushpuppy has experienced both an initiation into the Feminine through a similarly water-bound mother-figure, and an awe-inspiring face-off with mythical devouring beasts – the Moon also rules the past. With her belief in the interrelatedness of life – and newly found strength and determination – in the end she’s able to shift generational gears and become her father’s caregiver. It doesn’t get more inspirationally lunar than this, with tiny Wallis as powerful high priestess.

Astrology Film Rating: ☽ (Moon)

Facebook Twitter Email

Recent Posts

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Gone Girl’ (2022)

Containers abound in Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and based on the popular novel by Gillian Flynn, who wrote the screenplay. There are envelopes, which hold the clues for the treasure hunt Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) has prepared for her husband Nick...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Giver’ (2014)

Many people refer to their homeland as the mother country. Those people didn’t know The Chief Elder, a matriarch as stern as they come who’s running the show in the country depicted in The Giver. Directed by Philip Noyce and based on the YA book by Lois Lowry, The...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Get On Up’ (2014)

It’s all there. The riffs, the shoes that swivel maniacally as though greased, the slurrified words, the clipped throaty growls. But Tate Taylor’s Get On Up, the biopic of soul-funk innovator and icon James Brown, ups the ante by letting us see the legend living out...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Congress’ (2014)

Can the veil that separates Saturnine corporeal reality from the transcendent Neptunian realm actually be a cruel trick devised by Hollywood moguls? Yes, indeed, and it’s the premise of Ari Folman’s part live-action, part animated film The Congress, loosely based on...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Calvary’ (2014)

Everyone has a cross to bear. But a parish priest tending his flock in Ireland’s County Sligo has really gotten more than his share in Calvary, a movie that addresses archetypal Pluto issues of power, abandonment and revenge, as well as Neptune themes of sacrifice and...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Lucy’ (2014)

Luc Besson’s new sci-fi thriller Lucy could easily have been titled Mercury in Hyperdrive, a breathless tale about the archetype that rules thought and communication gone cinematically ballistic. Bigger, faster and stronger describe the new-and-improved mental...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘A Most Wanted Man’ (2014)

The grim espionage business relies, for its success, on Neptunian deception and Plutonic penetration of secrets. The most clever master spies throw a third archetype into the mix: the Saturnine User, who’ll exploit the captured by making them spy on their own people...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ (2014)

If art is the beautiful lie, can love also be ushered into existence by duplicity? That’s the question at the center of Magic in the Moonlight, a movie inspired by early 20th century Europe’s fascination with spiritualism, seances and communicating with the dead....

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘I Origins’ (2014)

The old adage – that the eyes are the gateway to the soul – gets all scienced up in I Origins, a movie that asks whether Saturnine, data-driven science trumps knowledge that bypasses logic. Directed and written by Mike Cahill, the movie’s core question – Can reality...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ (2014)

In the annals of history, many liberators of the oppressed freed their citizenry only to become tyrants themselves. It’s this age old cycle of restrictive Saturn sidling up to revolutionary Uranus – a rhythm that topples and rebuilds civilizations – that’s at the core...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Boyhood’ (2014)

For most of us, life is way too busy to allow for keen observations of minute gradations of growth and blossoming of family members, friends and other significant individuals who help grace our time on the planet. Perhaps it’s for this reason – our lack of attention...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Tammy’ (2014)

Mention the word “Tammy” and “movies” in the same breath and, with any luck, the visuals that come to mind center on Debbie Reynolds’ vocal rendition of the song “Tammy,” put to exquisite use by Terence Davies in his The Long Day Closes (1992). Reynolds’ tune is that...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Happy Christmas’ (2014)

As an exploration of the gifts and curses of creative vision, nothing beats the short, snappy Happy Christmas. Written and directed by Joe Swanberg, the movie takes a hard look at what happens when archetypal Neptune – whose bailiwick is artistic inspiration, music,...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Venus in Fur’ (2014)

If you couldn’t get enough of Jack Baker’s (Jeff Bridges) cinematic jaw-drop in The Fabulous Baker Boys, as soon as seemingly tone-deaf loser and gum-snapping chanteuse Suzie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) starts to soulfully warble her heart out and blow him away,...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2’ (2014)

Is every critter, human or otherwise, trainable? And, because training elevates the game and aptitude of the instructed, does the core essence of tutored trainees remain the same? Those questions – as well as Saturnine boundary issues about whether to label entities...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘The Rover’ (2014)

Set in a post-apocalyptic world in the Australian Outback, The Rover is a Saturnine story about two archetypal loners, each having suffered a huge personal loss that needs to be rectified in a land where procedural justice is a thing of the past. Written and directed...