"Beasts of the Southern Wild"

            A. Filmmakers are storytellers, and storytellers are magpies.  They glide into the backyard, poke around in the garden and under the swing set, and look for shiny items to take back to their story-nests. They nose their way into the shed and, before we know it, into our other storehouses—larder, pantry, wardrobe—those places of culture, religion, myth and history where we store our collections. They’re not fussy about tradition, faith, reason or logic. They take—they steal!—what they need for their stories.

            So we shouldn’t be surprised in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012) when we find six-year-old Hushpuppy living alone in a tumbledown mobile home thirty-five yards through trees and underbrush from her father’s tumbledown shack; or we see her take a football helmet out of the freezer section of a rusty, unconnected refrigerator, put it on, and fire up the stove with a blowtorch. The writer of the story is a magpie, gathering found pieces the way his characters do in the movie, constructing the minutiae of daily life. The writer steals from history: the event of Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005. From sociology: the phenomenon of people in low-lying areas who refuse to evacuate when a hurricane threatens. And from political environmentalism: the dire warnings of what will happen to us as our planet warns. He dips into the spirit of myth and invents the auroch. Back in the day, he intones in the voice of Hushpuppy, the aurochs ate little children for breakfast and were the king of the world.

            B. When we go to a movie, we join a conversation.  The partners are the filmmaker, the story told through the medium of the movie, and ourselves the audience. Robert K. Johnston writes of a critical circle in which “the larger universe, or worldview, that shapes the story’s presentation” (150) is a fourth element; but this obscures the nature of worldview. Realistically, worldview is unique to each of the conversation partners.

            The movie presents a mythical worldview, which is made believable by having it funneled through the mind of a child. In a voice-over, Hushpuppy says, “The entire universe depends on everything coming together just right.” The filmmaker’s worldview comes forward in Hushpuppy’s last dramatic action: she faces down the pursuing aurochs, who represent forces of chaos and destruction, and goes in the house to take care of her dying father.

            What is our, the audience’s, worldview? Something complex and many faceted; the sum of our experiences, education, temperament and character! Let’s examine a particle of it. We are a theology student who has just learned of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of the divine mandate. The many settings that make it possible to live a good life—family, church, school, cultural institutions like the movies and so on; Bonhoeffer calls these the divine mandates. “They are places where the Word of God can be heard and give guidance to life” (Lovin, 106). What do we hear of the Word in “Beasts of the Southern Wild”? How does it amplify our worldview?

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