The day hurricane Katrina hit we were sitting around tables at a restaurant somewhere outside of Atlanta.
I finished my pizza, fidgeted with the salt shaker, and glanced at the corner of the room where a television hung, fixed on CNN. I remember the text as it crawled across the bottom of the screen, and I remember the footage of the correspondent who was struggling to stand upright in spite of the wind and the rain.
A few days later, we found ourselves volunteering with the Red Cross, offering support to those who had fled from New Orleans to Georgia in the wake of one of deadliest hurricanes in American history.
With the news of the disaster came announcements detailing the mandatory evacuation notices that were given to residents of areas considered to be at risk. And with that news came reports of families who were refusing to leave. We couldn’t understand it; from the outside looking in, theirs was a completely senseless, and potentially reckless, decision.
Televisions and radio stations aired footage of individuals who remained resolutely insistent on staying put. Among them was Patricia Kelly, a third generation resident of the Lower 9th Ward, who offered her explanation: “I don’t know nowhere else that I could go to because I was born and raised here in New Orleans and I would like to stay here, you know, and rebuild from what I had lost.”
Unlike many of the images of survivors that were emerging, Kelly, whose voice was heard on NPR, was among a significant number who, in the words of the story’s reporter, seemed “rather composed and peaceful” in the aftermath of the disaster. “She was sitting in the shade of a beauty shop,” he recalled in disbelief, “and a friend of hers was cooking some red beans and rice on a grill; they were having a picnic.”
While director Benh Zeitlin hesitates to make a direct connection to that particular time and place, it is clear that his wildly imaginative 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild is a depiction of one such New Orleans community.
Set in the Bathtub, a fictional wetland village located below the levee, the story centres on the lives of the recently-widowed Wink, a fisherman prone to fits of drunken rage, and Hushpuppy, his six year old daughter. The two, played by newcomers Dwight Henry and Quevenzhané Wallis, brazenly forge out a life for themselves in a chaotic state of semi-feral poverty.
And then the hurricane hits.
In the face of the oncoming storm, and then in its wake, the village’s remaining residents rally together in a spirit of revelry and sheer defiance. Despite the damage done to their already-primitive houses, the growing strain on their access to food, and a mysterious and progressively worsening illness that threatens Wink, the community refuses to acknowledge any sort of need that would warrant a request for help or constitute a reason to leave.
When officials finally manage to escort the community’s remaining residents to a nearby shelter, the extent to which they are out of place quickly becomes evident. “It looked more like a fish tank with no water,” observes Hushpuppy, who, along with the others soon plan an escape in order to return to the wetland.
Beasts of the Wild is beautifully filmed, and features a narrative that functions neither as a sentimentalized take on the impact of Hurricane Katrina nor as a patronizing portrayal of an indigent American community. It offers a fantastical, moving perspective on a brutal disaster, blending prehistory and poetry, through the imagination of a six year old.
It is a film that depicts a person’s deep connection to the land on which she lives. It may hard for the viewer to see in the overgrown community of Bathtub what Hushpuppy loves so much, but it is her home and it is what has made her. As she says in her own beautiful prose:
“When it all goes quiet behind my eyes I see everything that made me, flying around in invisible pieces.”
I am still not sure that I understand the will to stay, but I am also not sure that is what Zeitlin, and Lucy Alibar, with whom he co-wrote the film, was concerned with capturing. The force of human spirit that is found in this mixed-race, lower-class band of eccentrics in the aftermath of extraordinary devastation is something, yes, but the willingness to finally acknowledge the pain of suffering and admit the need for assistance and relief is another matter altogether. It is that sort of breaking point that the film works towards.
The real beauty of The Beasts of the Southern Wild is the grace that is found after things fall apart.
http://youtu.be/ZF7i2n5NXLo
