Two critical views from Jayna Browne and Christina Sharpe at
Social Text
http://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-i/
How does a little black girl child
orphaned and abandoned become a vision for climate resistance for so many
people who watched the film? It is precisely this kind of misprision,
this not feeling or seeing, that subtends an event like the death of
Glenda Moore's sons during Hurricane Sandy. Riffing on Invisible Man, optic white does not see your plight.
This isn't the first case of black
children being depicted as insensitive to pain, or of black suffering and
survival being used to symbolize American democracy….The film romanticizes
their abject poverty….This is no maroon society, nor is it like any community
of generationally poor people in the US or the global south I have ever seen.
Instead the film recapitulates the continuing currency of black suffering, and
acts as a kind of "crisis porn," showing how black pain is erotically
charged.
Sadly, all the vibrancy in this film is generated by
a crude pornography of violence. At the center of this spectacle is the
continuous physical and emotional violation of the body and being of a small
six year old black girl called Hushpuppy …. Subject to both romanticization as
a modern primitive and eroticization, her plight is presented as comically
farcical. Some audiences laugh as Hushpuppy, when enraged at the antics
of her disappearing alcoholic oftentimes abusive wild man dad Wink, burns her
shanty house. … Hushpuppy has a
resilient spirit. She is indeed a miniature version of the ‘strong black female
matriarch,’ racist and sexist representations have depicted from slavery on
into the present day. Like the unrealistic racist/sexist stereotypical images
of grown black women in the recent blockbuster film The Help … Hushpuppy is a survivor. From the onset of the
film, she is depicted as a wild child, so at home in the natural wild of the
Gulf of Mexico bayou world
Screenwriter Lucy Alibar originally
wrote Beasts of the Southern Wild as a play called Juicy and
Delicious, which was about an 11-year-old white boy and his father in
southern Georgia, where she grew up. In adapting it to a 6-year-old black girl
in the Louisiana swamps, Queens-bred director Benh Zeitlin turns it into a
maudlin exercise in cultural tourism
the reviewer for Forbes liked it, which is a bad sign
Beasts of the Southern Wild . . . .
seemed to devolve into a kind of poverty porn . . . . with noble intentions
attempting to redefine the spaces in which poor, rural communities exist in an
American framework, but in my opinion, just keeping those same communities
positioned as the strange, freaky, idiosyncratic Other. What’s worse here is
that Beasts of the Southern Wild
plays out as a kind of poverty porn put into black face, with no actual mention
of blackness or race as a presence.
