A speaking silence: “universal language” and multilingualism in The Shape of Water

Abstract

Framed by Guillermo del Toro as “a love letter to the cinema,” the academy award-winning feature The Shape of Water (2017) speaks to one of the core debates in film studies: film’s status as a “universal language.” Paradoxically both propagating and critiquing this idea of universality, a vast knowledge of film history, cinematic techniques, and a desire to create what the director calls a “cinematic Esperanto”—or a globally legible film tradition—informs a film that celebrates the multiplicity of “languages” possible in film as a medium. Reading The Shape of Water as a series of films-within-films—fantasy within realism, black-and-white within color, and a silent film within a “talkie”—I reveal the myriad communicative forms accessible within cinema as a visual, temporal, and mobile medium. The foregrounding of “a speaking silence” in the interactions between the mute Elisa and the Amphibian Man, a pre-linguistic, but communicative, sea creature, acts as a set piece—a silent film within the larger film proper—that celebrates the universal language of gesture, while the situation of this nested narrative within a larger film tradition of “talkies” speaks to the ultimate displacement of the fantasy of universality by the adoption of the voice in film. Through a close attention to film stills, the formal composition of scenes, and the sparse, multilingual dialogue, I examine The Shape of Water’s critique of a monolingual “universal” filmic language and celebration of the radical multilingualism possible in the cinema.

Keywords:

• universal language
• Guillermo del Toro
• The Shape of Water
• silent film
• multilingualism
• film studies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexander Regier for his comments on an early version of this essay. Thanks also to my colleagues, Bren Ram and Sophia Martinez Abbud, for their generous feedback, and to Joseph Campana, who challenged me to allow for messy complexities, rather than simplifying my argument into a neat binary. As always, thanks are due to Helena Michie for encouraging me to step outside of my scholarly comfort zone, and to Gordon Hughes for teaching me to “see” critically.

Notes

1 For more on silent film’s renaissance in the twenty-first century, see the recent volume New Silent Cinema, in which scholars explain this resurgence as a “haunting” of new media by its ancestral form, and situate the return within a “long trajectory of nostalgia and curiosity”; Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo, “Introduction,” in New Silent Cinema, ed. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–16, at 3.

2 The connection between universal language and unity can be traced to a speech attributed by Lillian Gish to the infamous director of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith, in which he is said to have claimed that “universal language” can “make men brothers and end war forever”; Lillian Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 183.

3 I have not identified a new binary struggle. W. J. T. Mitchell writes of film that “[t]he history of cinema is in part the history of collaboration and conflict between technologies of visual and audio reproduction”; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2002): 165–81, at 175.

4 The concept of “universal language” is particularly laden with ideological baggage. As Miriam Hansen has noted, the “universal-language metaphor […] harbored totalitarian and imperialist tendencies to begin with”; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 78. Mary Ann Doane, building on Hansen, has pointed out the elision of class, race, and gender differences in the receiver (or spectator) of such “universal language” as the receiver is imagined to be a “neutral spectator,” when such an audience is “in actuality representative of the middle class” Mary Ann Doane, “Facing a Universal Language,” New German Critique 41, no. 2 (2014): 111–24, at 112.

5 The idea of film as a universal language and questions surrounding medium legibility have been thoroughly theorized by film scholars and media theorists over the years, including Jean Epstein, Hansen, and Doane, and my intention here is not to relitigate these questions, but rather to explicate a single film’s engagement with these complex debates and the ways in which del Toro modulates and mines the questions surrounding film’s legibility in pursuit of “cinematic Esperanto.” For more on the debates surrounding film’s ability to create connections and catalyse communication, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and idem, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), where McLuhan posits the idea of a “global village,” which new media make possible. Film, as a new media form, participates in this project of connectivity, which is, for McLuhan, optimistic and utopic. For the understanding of film as a hieroglyphic language, see Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970).

6 The actual quotation differs slightly from “cinematic Esperanto” and comes from a Spanish-language interview that del Toro gave on his film Pan’s Labyrinth in 2007, in which he states: “El cine es el esperanto del mundo actual,” which the author of “Esperanto Filmoj and the ‘New Esperanto’” roughly translates to “Cinema is the Esperanto of the modern world” and is later disambiguated to “film is the new Esperanto”; Leks, “Esperanto Filmoj and the ‘New Esperanto,’” Esperanto Language Blog, https://blogs.transparent.com/esperanto/esperanto-filmoj-and-the-new-esperanto/ (September 26, 2015, accessed February 2, 2023).

7 Emanuel Levy, “Shape of Water: Love Letter to Cinema from Del Toro,” Emanuel Levy, Cinema 24/7, https://emanuellevy.com/review/featured-review/shape-of-water-del-toro-love-letter-to-cinema/ (December 30, 2017, accessed February 2, 2023).

8 Del Toro’s status as a writer/director working in multiple languages and whose body of work is comprised of many Spanish-language films makes him uniquely attuned to the ways in which the voice limits artistic production and the audience to which these films are legible.

9 I define “gesture” as communicative motion. This includes the use of dance, pantomime, and body language in the film as well as, problematically at times, ASL. This form of embodied communication depends on motion and vision for its legibility. It is inaudible and nonverbal.

10 Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 11. Jean Epstein’s Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926) where he writes of film that the medium makes possible “the most secretive correspondences between minds [… as a] surprising language was born; its nature was unexpected, easily assimilated through the eye but not through the ear,” Jean Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l”Etna, trans. Stuart Liebman, in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, eds. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 287–310 at 297. For others conceptions of film as a universally legible medium, see Discrete languages. See also poet Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), where he introduces the idea of film as a hieroglyphic (visual) and universally legible language.

11 Film, as the perfect medium for expressing visual language, relies on the sense of sight, a sense often given priority in Western society and esteemed as a sense over which bodies have a certain amount of control, as opposed to hearing and smell, which are involuntary.

12 Charlie Chaplin, “A Rejection of the Talkies” (1931), in Focus on Chaplin, ed. Donald W. McCaffrey. Film Focus Series (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 63–65, at 63.

13 The problem is not the addition of sound to film (silent films were almost always accompanied by music), but rather the addition of vocal speech, which makes the film illegible to viewers from a different linguistic background. This is not, as first appears, a hierarchical distinction between the senses, where vision is coded “good” and hearing “bad.” Instead, it is the question of the purpose of language that is under consideration. Should language unite or divide? Discrete languages will always prove divisive, since they exclude those who are not assimilated into that language from participation and understanding. Gestural language—the visual, tactile language used by silent film actors—on the other hand, is “a universal means of expression,” legible (like music) to all; for more on silent film’s universality, see Chaplin, “A Rejection of the Talkies,” 63.

14 Balázs/Carter, Béla Balázs, 11.

15 Jean Epstein, “Pure Cinema and Sound Film,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, eds. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 356–62, at 362.

16 Balázs writes of film as “a surface art […] in it whatever is inside is outside. Nevertheless—and this is its fundamental difference from painting—it is a temporal art of movement and organic continuity”; Balázs/Carter, Béla Balázs, 19.

17 Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, 183.

18 Genesis 11:6.

19 Abraham Geil, “Between Gesture and Physiognomy: ‘Universal Language’ and the Metaphysics of Film Form in Béla Balázs’s Visible Man,” Screen 59, no. 4 (2018): 512–22, at 513.

20 Ibid..

21 The story of the Tower of Babel comes from Genesis 11:1–9, ESV. The Lord divides the “one people” of Babel though multiplying their languages so that “they may not understand one another’s speech,” and without the ability to communicate vocally, the children of men disperse across the globe and are divided into different nations. This division, according to the story, is predicated upon the multiplicity of tongues introduced by God. Unification can never occur where there is a lack of understanding.

22 The impact of Balázs’s film theory and other writings on del Toro’s work can be traced in the adoption of the fairytale genre for his film as well. A survey of Balázs’s recently translated fairytales evinces an interest on the part of the theorist in the radical legibility of visual cues. In “The Opium Smokers,” two deaf mutes learn to communicate with one another through touch and gesture, a structure mirrored in del Toro’s fairytale film. For more on the ability of touch and gesture to connect human beings soul to soul, see Béla Balázs, “The Opium Smokers,” in The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 86–89.

23 Dan Lausten Dff claims that “the color’s so powerful and a big part of the story [we’re] telling,” and explains that del Toro views color, like the music in the film, as languages that communicate for Elisa in the absence of voice; Trevor Hogg, “Brotherly Love,” British Cinematographer, https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/dan-laustsen-dff-shape-water/#:∼:text=Dan%20Laustsen%20and%20Guillermo%20del,Primes%20provided%20by%20Panavision%20Toronto (2017, accessed February 2, 2023).

24 Alec Morgan, “Creating Cinematic Esperanto,” Film International 15, no. 4 (2017): 88–103, at 89.

25 Del Toro makes no secret of his desire that the film be read as “a love letter to cinema.” I read this “love letter” as an interrogation of film’s medium specificity—a testing of the bounds of the visual, mobile, and temporal representation of language through gesture in contradistinction to the “speaking pictures” of poetry and the “mute poetry” of painting; Levy, “Shape of Water, n.p. The mute poetry/speaking picture paradigm has become proverbial. Leonard Barkan in his book Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures traces the lineage of this phrase as follows: “‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture,’ [is] credited to Simonides of Ceos, [and] first appears in Plutarch’s essay On the Glory of Athens (346F),” Barkan, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 28.

26 Ibid., n.p.

27 The film has also been productively read by political activists as a critique of Donald Trump-era politics, by eco-humanists as a commentary on the destructiveness of humanity in the Anthropocene, and by feminists and anti-racists as a commentary on the “othering” of marginalized figures (whether this marginalisation stems from disability, minority status, or sexual deviance). For the political reading of the film, see John M. Richardson, “The Shape of Water: An Allegorical Critique of Trump,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/the-shape-of-water-an-allegorical-critique-of-trump-93272/. (March 18, 2018, accessed February 2, 2023) For the eco-reading, see Jennifer Degnan Smith, “The Shape of Water: An Ecopsychological Fairy Tale,” Ecopsychology 11, no. 1 (2019): 43–48; and Joni Adamson, “People of the Water: El Río, The Shape of Water, and the Rights of Nature,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 3 (2020): 596–612. For a feminist and anti-racist commentary, see Edward Chamberlain, “Rethinking the Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, and Space in the Cinematic Storytelling of Arrival and The Shape of Water,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21, no. 7 (2019): n.p. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3666/ (accessed February 2, 2023).

28 Alex Suskind, “‘The Shape of Water’: Sally Hawkins on the Art of Romancing a Fish-Man,” Rolling Stone, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/the-shape-of-water-sally-hawkins-on-the-art-of-romancing-a-fish-man-202783/ (December 1, 2017, accessed February 2, 2023).

29 For a compelling explication of the connection between gesture, language, and the soul, see Herbert Josephs’s gloss on Denis Diderot in Herbert Josephs, “The Language of Gesture,” in Diderot’s Dialogue of Language and Gesture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 48–63, at 50, 61.

30 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 3–6.

31 Perhaps equally important, given the noted connection between boxes, cats, and the uncanny, would be a reference to Schrödinger’s cat experiment, where the fate of the dead/live cat remains indeterminate until the box is opened.

32 Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, The Shape of Water: Screenplay (Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2016), 62.

33 Del Toro originally intended to film The Shape of Water entirely in black and white (potentially another callback to the days of silent film); Hogg, “Brotherly Love,” n.p.

34 For more on touch and communication in the film, see Degnam Smith, “Shape of Water,” 45.

35 Paul Tassi, “There’s Something Important You Probably Missed in ‘The Shape of Water,’” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/03/05/theres-something-important-you-probably-missed-in-the-shape-of-water/#5f10ed691aa7 (March 5, 2018, accessed February 2, 2023).

36 Since the late nineteenth century, according to scholars who study sign language, such as David Armstrong, we have lived in an “oralist society” which has gradually eroded the respect due sign language as a codified form of systematic communication. This has changed slightly since the 1950s, which saw a renewed interest in sign language as a form of effective communication. But the damage has been done and sign language no longer enjoys the “widespread acceptance within the intellectual community [… as] a legitimate form of human language” that it enjoyed before the oralist victory; David Armstrong, “Signing and the Language Faculty,” in Show of Hands: A Natural History of Sign Language (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 2011), 64.

37 Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 29.

38 Ibid., 62.

39 In her insightful comparison of The Shape of Water film with its later novelistic counterpart, Lucia Opreanu shows how the novel elaborates on the idea that Strickland exerts control through vocal violence; Lucia Opreanu, “The Sounds Beneath: Dominant Discourses, Silent Voices and Cultural Echoes in The Shape of Water,”Analele Universitatii Ovidius Constanta 30 (February 2020): 182–97, at 184.

40 Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 62.

41 Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 88.

42 Ibid., Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 47–48.

43 Balázs/Carter, Béla Balázs, 10.

44 Balázs bemoans the overvaluation of voice and the devaluation of gesture in contemporary society, writing, “[S]ince the advent of printing the word has become the principal bridge joining human beings to one another. The soul has migrated into the word and become crystallized there. The body, however, has been stripped of soul and emptied”; ibid., 10.

45 For an account of the differences between these two forms of gestural language, see ibid., 25.

46 Ibid., 10.

47 Ibid., 25.

48 This interchange is not in the published script, so I have included the time stamp from the film; The Shape of Water, 45:39–45:42 (added emphasis).

49 The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017), 46:29.

50 In the original script, a line followed this declaration stating that if she let him die, she would be devastated to “[n]ever see his eyes, see [her] again”; Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 48 (added emphasis).

51 Ibid., 47.

52 Guy Lodge, “Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a Much Needed Ode to the ‘Other,’” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/30/guillermo-del-toro-the-shape-of-water-is-a-much-needed-ode-to-the-other (November 30 2017, accessed February 2, 2023).

53 Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 88.

54 Del Toro and Taylor, The Shape of Water, 16.