Southern Beasts and Lemonade

Maybe it was the time during which I watched it, but I had the closest thing to a religious experience watching Lemonade. I had never seen it before our first class and it was three days before I would march on the mall in Washington D.C. with my feminist friends and sisters. The whole experience was life changing and I think Lemonade was pivotal in getting me into an empowered mindset. Not only was it visually and auditorily stunning, the poetry by Warsan Shire peppered throughout felt like she was speaking to my soul. I’m a huge Warsan Shire anyways but I think the mixing of medium within the short film (or digital album) worked really well.

Beasts of the Southern Wild had a really similar thematic element to Lemonade, as it also used these really powerful moments of silence. I’ve spoken to some people from other countries and one thing that is sort of unique to Western societies is silence being extremely uncomfortable. Americans hate silence. We usually described it as awkward, but I think when you really get down to it, silence makes American audiences very uncomfortable. So, I think that is definitely a powerful tactic to use in order to forcibly make the audience umcomfortable and get them to think. In this way also, I think it sort of traps the viewer into confronting what is being presented to them and both pieces utilized that feature very well.

I actually had a rather positive impression from Southern Beasts, until I read bell hook’s interpretation of the movie. She pointed out a couple troubling elements in the movie and really highlighted some things that — looking back — were problematic in regards to the movie’s subjugation of racial stereotypes and domestic violence. For instance, hooks brings up how Hushpuppy comes to symbolize the angry black woman talking to herself and unleashing some sort of mysticism into the story. In this way, she postures herself as the central trope of the movie and does nothing to challenge the way black women in particular are portrayed in the cinematic universe. Her father’s depiction is also troubling, as he is unabashedly abusive towards Hushpuppy and still remains in patriarchal control throughout the movie. In this way, I believe that the movie is flawed but I also think its a great way to breach the topic of harmful depictions in order to pursue more constructive conversations about race and familial violence.