Also just getting the whole crew together, that reunion was incredible. The most incredible feeling was seeing people lined up at the Prytania. That was the peak for me. Place, yes. People, no. The land continues to change. Every time I go down there, there are places we shot that are gone. There's land that's now water. There was a feeling there that I really wanted to capture. One of the hardest things to get on film is real joy. It's very easy to capture pain. We really worked and studied these Les Blank films to see how we could get across this feeling he captured in reality, and hopefully we pulled that off.
Here slivers of land snake until they run up against the Gulf of Mexico, the rising water from bordering canals lapping onto thin roads that have a habit of disappearing.
Fishing boats idled nearby. In this former gas station, two years ago, beasts were built. Wasps have now taken up residency among the props. The finished product, a parable about the end of the world as seen through the eyes of a five-year-old in a fictional bayou community called The Bathtub, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it was bought by Fox Searchlight.
But for the cast and crew, this Sunday night screening in the Montegut Recreation Center, co-sponsored by Rooftop, Court 13, producer Cinereach, distributor Fox Searchlight and the New Orleans Film Society, this may as well have been the only time this movie was going to be seen anywhere.
It's a mix of New Orleans culture, South Louisiana culture, and the aesthetic is taken from the Bayou, but it's definitely a heightened aesthetic. Especially with the poverty: The bathtub is not a place where money exists. The whole idea of the bathtub is that it's a society where all the things that divide people have been removed. So there's no religion, no politics, no money, no one sees race, there's no rich and poor because there is no currency.
So, I never thought about that because to me the Bathtub is this utopian place. And the poverty thing, to me it's much more like it's been cut off from the world, and it's a survivalist place where they have to build everything by hand, they have to live off the earth. You don't have any commodities to sustain yourself, but to me there's no poverty there. There's this ultimate freedom that exists there. But part of it is that when people see a trailer it's like, "Oh, it's a trailer.
Poor people live in trailers. When you see a trailer there's a certain association. When you see black people in dirty clothes there's an association. Those are things that people are bringing in because they're used to those aesthetic elements communicating a very specific narrative about misery and poverty. So, it's not that I don't understand the reaction, but I don't know that it's in there. In a certain sense I see that in an essential way politics has nothing to do with your work.
But at the same time you're playing with a lot of themes that are explicitly politicized—global warming, poverty It's not that it's not supposed to relate to the world. The Bathtub is a statement, for sure. But to me, within the context of the movie, it's a statement that this is utopia. That's what the movie tells you, and that's what the characters tell you, and that's what I'm trying to say with it.
This is the greatest place you could ever live and that you could fight and die for. I want audiences that come from places that are completely the opposite of that to look at this and be like, "Wow, if these things didn't divide me from everyone around me, I would have this incredible freedom and I would fight for this place. So that's the goal, that people will get behind the Bathtub and accept a lot of things that they've preconceived as bad. I think it's a real thing. When you go down there, there is, without any money, way more fun and joy happening in South Louisiana than there is in New York City.
It's this decadent experience where you don't need money to have a feast every night and to celebrate. That is definitely something that I'm trying to glorify in the film. It's not a miserable place. The poorest parts of that town are not miserable.
There are certainly problems that I don't have in the movie. I'm not dealing with the harsh realities, but that's not the idea. The idea is the good parts of it. And it's not a piece of realism, so I don't have to deal with the bad parts of it. It does seem that there's some kind of implied, not political statement, but when you have the Bathtub put in opposition to this horrible, smoky dystopia on the other side of the levee, and when the government comes into the Bathtub and starts forcibly taking people from their homes, you do get a somewhat anti-American message.
Is there some kind of political statement going on there, or is it just simple juxtaposition? I guess it is a political statement. People should not be forced to leave their homes.
The whole movie is about why you can't be pulled out of your home. The inspiration for making the film was the post-Katrina reaction of, "Why do you still live here? Why can't you just move to St. Sentimentality has its uses, of course, not the least of which is to mask unpleasant realities with comforting hooey.
Then again, the pickaninny is always cute, always amusing, like a mischievous pet in a YouTube video. This is not to say that a white writer or filmmaker has no business depicting poor black children. The whole point of narrative art, it seems to me, is to discover ways of understanding one another, not just understanding ourselves. But the most incisive art also asks that we reckon with the perversities of our affections. No such characters appear in Beasts : The film lacks the crucial critical distance to throw such prejudices into sharp relief.
Yes, I know: Most films are more morally vacuous, and depicting an adorable tyke who stands her ground is hardly the worst offense.
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