Ephemerality
Defined in Beasts of the Southern Wild
“When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me
flying around in invisible pieces. When I look too hard, it goes away, but when
it all goes quiet, I see they are right here. I see that I’m a little piece of
a big, big universe and that makes things right.“ Hushpuppy’s (Quvenzhané Wallis) final
lines in Beasts of the Southern Wild
summarize her recognition that ephemerality does not necessitate the mutual
exclusivity of permanence and impermanence; instead, the idea of ephemerality
pertains to the natural interaction between both what is eternal and what is
fleeting. Everything that now is will pass in order to maintain the balance
between creation and destruction. However, in passing, all that fades gives way
to new births–an infinite creation. Although this formation of the future from
the present becomes an eternal web of connection among all that has been, all
that is, and all that will be, the connections are subtle; and the
inevitability of impermanence is so overt we often can’t see these subtle
connections that endure even after death and change. Therefore, we feel a sense
of loneliness and begin to fear loss as we undergo these constant changes that
seem only to destroy our relationship with what has been. We learn to grasp
everything –objects, memories, relationships, lives, moments through pictures
and words, anything we can–in an attempt to prevent more loss. But it is not
until we let go that we can finally discover how our one small piece connects
with the whole of the universe. We are able to observe and experience this
struggle to let go through Beasts of the
Southern Wild as director Benh Zeitlin inserts us into this story and this
world using techniques such as non-diegetic sounds and self-aware cinematography
that help us foster a deep connection with the characters on-screen while
maintaining an awareness of our own experience through this film.
The audience is immediately brought into
this journey with a moment to assess what we see “when it all goes quiet” as
there is very little noise during the first two minutes of our introduction.
Both dialogue and music are absent, we hear only the noises found in nature
such as the rustle of wind or the chirping of a bird. Our senses are not immediately
overtaken, and our awareness of ourselves remains intact so as the story
progresses we experience the change, the emotion, and the empowerment, not
second-handed through the characters in the film, but first-hand in ourselves. Through
this, Zeitlin is able to impart the struggles and triumphs of letting go not
only on his characters, but also his audience.
Zeitlin also utilizes the unsteadiness of a handheld camera to keep us
aware of the camera and, by extension, ourselves. Because of this, we rarely
lose sight of our own emotional experience and all that is felt and realized in
the fictional world directly translates to our reality. For example, we
experience a major insight–that we need not attempt to force a semblance of
permanence since we’re all already permanently connected to the universe–not
through Hushpuppy, but next to her, leaving us with a deeply-founded sense of
connection to all things that were, are, and will be.
In order to lead his audience to this insight, Zeitlin uses a
compilation of bold soundtrack, at times suffocating, then freeing
mise-en-scene, and cinematography that portrays ephemeral qualities.
The struggle for permanence permeates this entire film. All of the
characters have a large quantity of random objects strewn among the first half
of the frames. In an attempt to gain a sense of control and add permanence to
our lives, we collect objects which, being inanimate, are not subject to
change. Hushpuppy collects all of the objects that used to belong to her mother
in order to keep her mother with her in a tangibly permanent way. She
eventually learns, however, that collecting tangible items is unnecessary since
she is intrinsically connected with the whole universe and everything that made
her. By the time she expresses this realization through her voiceover at the
end of the film, “when it all goes quiet, I see they are right here,” the
mise-en-scene is free of the clutter of seemingly permanent objects that she
once felt she needed to stay connected. In great contrast to the opening scene
that showcased piles of objects–tires, old cars, and scrap metal–the final
frame showcases only the small community that Hushpuppy is now a part of while
the background is washed out and completely free of objects. The contrasting
mise-en-scene between the opening scene and the final scene visually portrays
Hushpuppy’s ability to let go and finally see the inherent connections she has
within herself and in her world.
Zeitlin creates for us the same feelings of struggle for permanence with
the opening title sequence. The title suddenly appears on the screen and takes
over the entire frame with its large bold font. In the same way, the music
accompanies the title as it crescendos and almost overwhelms the audience with
the loud repetition of strong sound. Both the title and the music work together
to make their presence know and yet as suddenly and boldly as this sensory
overload appears, it is gone. Zeitlin uses the opening title to alert us to the
fact that no matter how big a presence something may have, and no matter how
permanent it may seem, it will always disappear.
Although our instinct may be to attempt to strive against this
impermanence in order to minimize loss, Beasts
of the Southern Wild exemplifies how attempting to control loss will only
make things more difficult. Hushpuppy does, to a certain extent, attempt to
create a sense of permanence through the collecting of objects; however it is
the rest of society, the “dry side” as Wink might say, that struggles the most
to create a world in which everything is long-lasting in an attempt to rid
themselves of, or at least postpone, loss. “They built the levee that cut us
off,” the concrete, seemingly permanent levee that keeps the dry side safe from
the water. Since the water represents change, in its own ability to change
state and shape and in its power to implement change by many means including
flooding, the dry side is also keeping themselves safe from change. When
Hushpuppy and Wink sit on their boat and look at the levee, all the water… all
the change is located on their side while the industrial side shows no hint of
water, disrupting the balance between creation and destruction.
When we are then shown a closer look at the dry side during the scenes
in which Hushpuppy and Wink are at the Open Arms refugee center, the dry side
is shown to be suffocating. The color palate of the scenes in the hospital
seems sickly, filled only with white and light blue, as green and other vibrant
colors cannot exist on the dry side because water is needed for growth.
Hushpuppy even describes the hospital as “a fish tank with no water” and
without water nothing can change and everything remains stagnant. It seems,
though, that this is that the people of the dry side desire. They attempt to
prolong life by “plugging people into the wall” and preventing them from
passing through their own natural change to death. Hushpuppy is also subjected
to this suffocation after she struggles to help her father and is then put into
the only tight outfit she wears throughout the film. Her collar is even tight
around her neck and it seems as though she is literally being suffocated by the
society on the dry side.
After feeling the suffocation of attempted control of death and seeing
the pain her father experienced in the hospital, Hushpuppy finally realizes
that her father truly is going to die. In the shot in which Hushpuppy peers
into her father’s hospital room, the frame’s edges are of the blurred curtain,
cuing us to the fact that we are seeing exactly what Hushpuppy is seeing.
Therefore we are fully aware of Hushpuppy’s being witness to the torture her
father was put through in forcibly being kept alive.
With this acknowledgment of soon-to-be loss, Hushpuppy fears being left
with no one and she finally seeks out her mother and finds her in a floating crab
shack which is perhaps the most overt visual metaphor for ephemerality in the
film. The music is disconnected with both the action in the scene and the film
as a whole. We hear a jazz tune that seems to come from a distance and when the
camera moves through the room to show what Hushpuppy is seeing, she looks over
at the singers but there is a dissonance between what we see and what we hear.
The jazz song is also very different in style to every other song in the
soundtrack yet we have heard it once before during Hushpuppy’s imagined
interaction with her mother. This exemplifies the fact that this moment in
time, or this moment in the film, is dream-like and separated from the urgency
that saturates all else that Hushpuppy has been subjected to thus far and yet
provides a connection of this place to her mother. The blurry lights on the
walls and the faded lighting of this scene also help to show this moment in
time as dream-like, and therefore brief or ephemeral.
This is the place, however, where Hushpuppy finds her mother and, in doing
so, comes to realize that although everything is transient, she will still
always be permanently connected to “everything that made her.” We are given a
narration through mental subjectivity of Hushpuppy’s flashback to her birth
that serves to remind her of her most obvious connection with her father–his
hand in her creation. Perhaps she needed to find a tangible connection with her
mother in order to realize this ever-lasting connection she has with the
universe… she had to find what made her to feel that connection.
This newfound support gives her strength to be one of the brave ones who
“stay and watch” the passing of the life that made her. She also now has the
strength to face these monsters, the aurochs–her fears of loss and
abandonment–head on. In one of the few medium long shots, we are able to see
the proportional difference between the aurochs and Hushpuppy, how the aurochs
size is daunting in comparison with this small girl, emphasizing the immensity
of all that she, and by extension we, have to face. A shot reverse shot of a
close up of Hushpuppy’s face and the Aurochs’ eye serves to enhance our
understanding of their connection, as they see eye to eye and we can no longer
compare their differences in size.
This shot reverse shot is similar to that of the close up shots from
Wink’s face to Hushpuppy’s face and back again as they have their final moment
together. The similarity in editing makes it known that at least one of the
challenges she must face is her dad’s passing. The eye line match between Wink
and Hushpuppy does not simply create a continuity shot; it also deepens the connection
between them. The intimate close up of their faces also serves to foster both a
visual and an emotional connection between these characters’ emotions and the
audience. Expressed through tears, “no cryin,’ ya hear?” elicits the deep
emotional reaction that is brought about from the pain of losing a tangible
connection with a loved one.
The close up shot of Wink’s hand wrapped around his daughter visualizes
the culmination of their tumultuous relationship. At first the only moments in
which these characters touched were aggressive, but now a tender moment finally
arises and Hushpuppy is held for the third time in her life. The importance of
this final connection is made clear through the camera’s focus on Wink’s hand.
This is how Wink departs. He and Hushpuppy are physically connected, helping to
solidify the realization that this relationship, and all connections, can
transcend death.
Hushpuppy demonstrates the strength that arises from letting go of the
objects, the monsters, and the fears, and finally feeling the interplay between
transience and permanence in her final scene. From behind the flames, we
observe her watching her father’s body float away and although the flames seem
to lick at her face, she stands tall and does not falter. This is in great
contrast to the scene in which she originally fears she has lost her father and
calls out to him, for in this scene she fades in and out of focus, becoming so
blurred at one point that she is barely recognizable as even human. Previously
she feared this loss and felt that she may also disappear, however now, the
camera’s focus does not falter. We watch Hushpuppy move forward with great
strength through the water that begins to thrash at her feet and hear her
explain that “the scientists of the future are gunna know, once there was a
Hushpuppy and she lived in the bathtub with her daddy.” She will not disappear.
In one way or another, she will live on, just as Wink lives on through her. No
matter what changes occur, she is now aware of both her own transience and her
space in eternity, enabling her, and the audience, to persist even while
experiencing great fear, great change, and tremendous loss.
