“In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.” Isolated from the mainland and surrounded by water, the Bathtub is a wilderness of poverty with a small community struggling to survive. Hushpuppy is a six-year-old girl who lives with her father, Wink. She’s fierce and unbreakable and considers the Bathtub “the prettiest place on Earth.” The Bathtub is offshore from New Orleans, isolated by levees, existing self-contained on its own terms. The distant profiles of drilling rigs and oil refineries might as well be mysterious prehistoric artifacts. A fearsome storm is said to be on the way, but existence here is already post-apocalyptic, with the people cobbling together discarded items of civilization like the truck bed and oil drums that have been made into a boat. Their ramshackle houses perch uneasily on bits of high ground, and some are rebuilding them into arks that they hope will float through the flood. Hushpuppy is on intimate terms with the natural world, with the pigs she feeds and the fish she captures with her bare hands; sometimes she believes animals speak to her in codes. She lives in desolation, and her inner resources are miraculous. She is so focused, so sure, so defiant and brave, that she is like a new generation put forward in desperate times by the human race.
Hushpuppy and Wink are close, and her father does all he can to teach her survival skills. That doesn't stop him from giving her a whack alongside the head when she carelessly starts a fire. We understand how literally her mind deals with the world when she tries to hide from the fire inside a cardboard box — as if she will be safe if the flames can't see her.
In one of the beginning scenes in the film, Hushpuppy goes to a makeshift school. There she is introduced by her teacher to aurochs, an extinct beast frozen in ice caps at the South Pole. I find this very crucial to the film because from this scene, the viewer is introduced to close-angle shots of the beasts. They journey from the North Pole to Hushpuppy’s home of the “bathtub.” The beasts add a fanciful element to the film, focusing on mythology. This is their explicit role. The aurochs also have a meaningful role in the theme, as they symbolize a conflict (the death of her father) nearing closer and closer to Hushpuppy. During this scene, the viewer sees close up angles of the huge aurochs crashing through towns and “breaking” them. Throughout the film, the audience begins to see more of the beasts in line with understanding more of the nature of Hushpuppy’s struggle. This climaxes in the final scene when we see all of the aurochs facing down Hushpuppy. They appear as huge and menacing pig-like creatures. This symbolizes the menacing realization that Hushpuppy will be left alone after her father’s looming death. By molding the aurochs into the sequence of the film, Zeitlin adds to the feeling of childish wonder. He helps the viewer connect with Hushpuppy’s fear.
Because of this connection between us and Hushpuppy, I highly recommend this film. Not only do you feel this connection, but you also see things put into perspective. Are we the uncivilized people? Have we destroyed all that nature has to offer? This movie makes you think about what you’re not only living in, but what you are living for.
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