The Shape of Water

March 2018

Just One Sip — Summary

“To me, the thing love and cinema have in common is that they are about seeing. The greatest act of love you can give to anyone is to see them exactly as they are. That’s the greatest act of love because you wash away imperfections.”

Guillermo del Toro

Some might say this is a love story. Others might say it’s about finding the confidence to be yourself. And even others might say it’s a reflection of the truly horrible and noble things humans can do to not only other creatures but also to each other. In “The Shape of Water,” we follow the Elisa Esposito, a mute woman who works as a night-shift janitor in a secret government laboratory in Baltimore during the Cold War. Her life as a nobody — who no one even spares a second glance to — dramatically changes when a mysterious, heavily-guarded creature is brought into the facility for testing and research. Somehow, this amphibious creature sees her for who she truly is, and as they quickly develop a closer bond, she realizes that he is dying and only she can save him. Told through vignettes from each character’s perspective all interspersed together — a poor black women struggling to make a living in this era, a traumatized soldier who loses his grip on reality, a housewife-turned-working-mother coming to terms with the benefits and costs of being an independent woman, a gay artist who struggles to be true to himself when the world persecutes and turns its back to him, and even from the perspective of the god-like creature himself — this book surfaces the essence of what it means to be loved, what it means to sacrifice for those you love, and what it means to be human.

[SPOILER ALERT]: The rest of this blog talks about key events that happened throughout the story. If you wish to avoid spoilers, I’d recommend watching the movie, reading the book, and then returning to this. (Or you can read this first and then read the original material — whatever floats your boat.)

Why I Chose This Book: Janelle

Back before “The Shape of Water” won Best Picture and Best Director at the 2018 Academy Awards Ceremony — before it even became a legitimate contender as a nominee — there was already plenty of public chatter about this story. “It’s about a romance between a blind woman and a creature.” “It’s about the truth behind seeing yourself for who you really are.” “It’s about a girl who gets with a fish.” — you get the idea. Yet with all of the wide array of comments, almost everyone I knew who saw the movie said, “You have to watch it.” At that time, we were just wrapping up our previous book club selection, and I happened to discover that the story from “The Shape of Water” was captured both visually through cinema and orally through written words. Guillermo del Toro not only directed the movie, but he also helped co-author this book, which was released a few months after the original screening release last December. With that in mind, I thought this would be an interesting new take on how our book club traditionally approached new reads. Of course, as with any book-to-movie or movie-to-book adaptation, there were bound to be differences in artistic interpretation and expression, and I fully expected pieces of the story to be left out due to other creative constraints. What I was most excited about, though, was to figure out what those missing elements were and to discuss how the absence (and insertion) of certain narrative points could both make and break the many ways we can interpret the same narrative sequence of events.

Discussion Themes & Questions

Character Development

• Primary: Elisa, Strickland, the Gill God / creature / asset
• Secondary: Zelda, Giles, Dr. Hoffstetler, General Hoyt
• Mentioned in book but not movie: Lainie

Recurring Motifs

• Eggs (e.g. Elisa’s gift to the creature, Lainie’s breakfast for Strickland)
• The green candy (especially when comparing reading about it and seeing it on the screen)
• Hoyt’s redactions
• Strickland’s decaying fingers
• The color green (movie only)

Movie vs Book

Strickland’s backstory

• The book actually starts out with his narrative arc and details the horrors he endured in order to find and capture the creature in the Amazon. In the movie, this backstory was completely skipped over, which ultimately made Strickland’s character far more one-dimensional as the “obvious bad guy” versus a soldier who suffered from severe PTSD and was struggling to re-acclimate to civilian life.

General Hoyt’s presence

• In the book, General Hoyt never actually appears in person — he appears once in Strickland’s memory of the massacre he committed during the Korean War, and outside of that flashback, Hoyt only exists as the ever-present and foreboding voice in Strickland’s head that forces the soldier to do terrible things. In the movie, however, Hoyt visits the research laboratory several times, and he is shown as a loud, fat man — almost night-and-day to the ominous presence he embodies in the book.

Lainie’s narrative arc

• The book spends a good portion of time detailing Lainie’s experiences in venturing out of her home and role as a housewife and finding independence through her own job and paycheck. It is through her courage that she is able to indirectly teach Giles how to be more confident in himself, but this whole narrative section is completely untouched in the movie. Just like her husband (Strickland), Lainie is shown more as a one-dimensional character in the film.

Different methods of character development

• The book lends itself well to naturally capturing people’s individual thoughts in the moment (through omniscient third person) while not breaking the fourth wall. With film, it is that much harder to convey this deep layer of character development without coming across as facetious (e.g. how comedic movies often break the fourth wall) or disingenuous (e.g. giving certain characters more “narrative” time than others).

Final Thoughts

JT

I found the book adaptation of the Shape of Water to be a fantastic read. It delivers far more depth (no pun intended) than I anticipated. If one were to have watched the movie first, they might suggest that the story primarily focuses on Elisa’s character development and relationship with the creature. Where this book truly shines, however, is in Strickland, Elaine, and Giles’s character development. Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus flesh out Strickland’s backstory with great detail, revealing a haunted psyche entrenched in the turmoil of PTSD. In the film, Strickland himself may be seen as the monster — his motivations perhaps misconstrued for self-preservation. Yet in the novel adaptation, Strickland himself is a victim. He is trapped by memories of his served time in Korea, his toxic loyalty to General Hoyt, and the trauma of the jungle. It is an imagined spectre that haunts Strickland in his descent to madness, and the novel captures it in a way that the film does not. On the other hand, Elaine’s character development in the book is inspirational. She steps aside from Strickland’s shadow in the household, finding self-fulfillment and furthermore enabling Giles’s own personal revelation later on. This interaction provides the missing link that left Giles’s character development lacking in the film.

All in all, I would highly recommend watching the film before reading the novel. The novel presents the story with much more character depth and backstory — while also altering the flow of certain events.

Sam

As the only person in the group who watched the movie before the reading the book, I appreciated the novel for its much more in-depth treatment of the characters. For example, from the movie alone, I found Strickland to be a one-dimensional character who is only focused on achieving his goal of capturing “The Asset.” The book, however, delivers the character’s backstory that helps explain the origins of Strickland’s behavior and also provides his internal dialogue that reveals his emotional vulnerability.

We had an interesting discussion on how the novel is inherently more suitable for providing this sort of information that make character development much easier. With the text, you have full visibility into what every character is thinking, and the reader can pick up on the smaller details that end up contributing so much to character development. The text’s advantage is that it is much more explicit than the movie, so the cost of conveying an idea is much lower, granting the luxury of providing deeper storylines for each of the characters.

I also noticed that race wasn’t a focus in the movie, but came up several times in the novel. Using one of Zelda’s thoughts as an example: “Elisa’s a good person, but she’ll never get it. How could she? Things go wrong at Occam, and it won’t be the white woman who gets blamed” (17). While I would’ve liked to see the movie touch on this theme more, I also found it difficult to imagine how to convey Zelda’s thought in a visual format.

Ophelia

I was so excited when Janelle picked a book/movie combination this month. Strong opinions tend to follow book-to-movie and movie-to-book adaptations— they are ripe with topics for discussion, and The Shape of Water was no exception.

Although the depth of character development in the book is incontestable, I ultimately preferred the movie. I was drawn to the use of vivid colors throughout the film, and loved how del Toro assigned colors to the primary and secondary characters. The use of visual elements that wove through different settings (i.e. eggs) was so clever! I was impressed by Sally Hawkins (Elisa) and her ability to convey extreme emotion through only her facial expressions — she gave me Renee Falconetti vibes from the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. The movie made Elisa’s inability to speak much more apparent, but also pigeonholed Strickland into a cookie cutter villain. I was disappointed that the movie didn’t include Strickland’s backstory — his experiences in South America were so central to his behavior and motivations. Instead of a movie, I thought the book would be more compelling as a 10-episode Netflix show. Since the movie skimmed over several secondary characters (i.e. Lainie, Strickland), the Netflix show format could’ve been a better medium to tell del Toro’s tale with more depth.

Our discussion made clear how impactful the medium of storytelling is to the moral of the story. With the book, I read about how a group of “invisible” misfit characters banded together to help a creature escape, while with the movie, I was watching a love story unfold.

Janelle

Overall, the book was a really interesting and relatively easy read, and it certainly was a genre that we as a group haven’t touched in a while. Even though each chapter was short and the author’s style of writing wasn’t too verbose, I felt like I still had a deep understanding of each character and how their individual stories intertwined to create this convoluted escape plot. In terms of the narrative itself, I was surprised by how the book actually felt more like a coming of age story than it did a romance. I was expecting it to be a lot more about the relationship between Elisa and the creature (which is what I felt the movie depicted very clearly), but the book actually felt like it dealt more with a cast of unexpected heroes, each of whom played a pivotal role in helping the creature escape. Furthermore, I also thought the ending was incredibly ambiguous — even though it might be easy to assume that Elisa had gills and “was a fish all along,” I don’t think that it was necessarily a confirmed fact. For all we know, she could have legitimately died from the bullet in her heart before the creature could take her into the water to save her, and the end scene/chapter could have very well been a figment of her imagination….

Additionally, I feel like I would have enjoyed the movie more had I watched it first before reading the book. Because I read the book first, I used the book’s version of events as the source of truth, and anything that strayed away from what happened in the book ultimately made the movie seem half-done. Also, I was very surprised at how dark and graphic the story was — every chapter involving Strickland always made my heart feel on edge — which is why I was a bit bothered by how light and heavily romantic the movie felt between the music orchestration, the color treatment, and even the way the creature was portrayed. However, I do recognize that the book was written as an adaptation after the movie was originally released. Perhaps Guillermo del Toro realized that film wasn’t enough to do these characters justice, so I appreciated how he and Daniel Kraus were dedicated enough to this story to want to close the gaps in character development by writing a novel adaptation.