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Just saw a screening of this film last night, and I think the plot section needs some revision. I'm not quite sure how to rewrite it, though. The summary there makes it sound like the bulk of the film involves Hushpuppy's journey to find her mother, which is not the case. She imagines her mother talking to her, and she calls out to her mother in some places, but the film's plot (as I recall - some of the events near the beginning I might be getting out of order) goes as follows:

  • Hushpuppy and her father Wink live in a poor multiracial southern delta community called The Bathtub. A levee divides them from the rest of the world, both physically and culturally. Her father loves her deeply, but treats her somewhat harshly, possibly not knowing how to take care of her, but also preparing her for the time when he will be gone. Others in the community have the same attitude, basically, that one must be strong to survive. She has numerous animals (a pot-bellied pig, some chickens, a chihuahua, some other birds) that she feeds and takes care of to varying degrees.
  • (this is the section where I'm a bit fuzzy on the order of events) Wink disappears one day, and Hushpuppy waits for him. He returns in a hospital gown and keeps her at a distance, refusing to talk to her about his illness, at one point angrily sending/pushing her away. She hits him in the chest, which causes him to collapse, with an apparent heart attack. She runs to town to get help, and the town's sort of teacher/medicine woman/surrogate mother figure concocts some sort of medicine. She returns, and Wink isn't where she left him. She hides in her house (she has her own shelter, separate from Wink's, all to herself). She starts cooking something. She hears Wink return, so she turns up the gas stove and hides under a box. She ends up starting a fire, and her shelter burns down, forcing Wink to take her into his own.
  • A huge storm approaches. Most of the residents evacuate, but Wink and some others refuse to leave their homes. The storm floods the entire Bathtub under several feet of water. Most of the animals perish in the flood. Wink and Hushpuppy (in their makeshift motorboat - a pickup truck bed with floats and a small outboard motor) find the other holdouts mostly unharmed, and begin to make provisions to wait out the flood waters. After several days, Wink and 2 of the other men stuff a dead alligator with explosives and blow a hole in the levee. The waters recede, but most of the wildlife in the area is left dead or dying.
  • Hushpuppy and Wink return to their home, and shortly after, helicopters begin appearing in the area, announcing that the residents are required to evacuate. Soon, men come, and drag them to a shelter when Wink refuses to go willingly. At the shelter, Wink is informed that he will die unless he receives treatment for his condition, and is separated from Hushpuppy and put in a bed at the shelter's makeshift hospital. He still reacts angrily to being forced to take medicine and be taken care of, so he organizes an escape. He attempts to put Hushpuppy on a bus bound for Des Moines so that she won't have to see him die, but she is unwilling to go. They and most of the others return to their homes in the Bathtub, where Wink becomes tired from his illness and passes out in his bed. Hushpuppy sees a beacon out on the water (recurring - she thinks this is her mother calling to her), so she and 3 other girls her age take a life preserver and swim out to it, finding it to be a boat. The captain is kind to them, and takes them with him to a floating bar/restaurant/brothel, where several women take the girls in their arms and comfort them. A woman (who seems to resemble Hushpuppy's mother, whose face was never shown) fries some chicken for Hushpuppy and holds her for a long time (only the 2nd time in her life she has ever been held, she narrates). Hushpuppy and the girls return home, where the community is at Wink's house, holding vigil over him on his death bed. She gives him some of the chicken, and they say a tearful goodbye (even though he tells her again, as he has before, not to cry). Later, they set him out on a pyre on his boat, which Hushpuppy sets aflame.

There are several recurring motifs throughout the movie:

  • Images of melting ice caps and glaciers is used to represent the climactic events, as in the world (or elements of Hushpuppy's world?) coming to an end.
  • Images of aurochs (represented in the film as giant boars, not bovines) seem to represent the dangers in the world, or fears perhaps. They are shown in some parts of the film dying, overcome by an ice age, but as the ice melts, they begin to move across the land again, purposefully. The only time they appear directly in the main plot, i.e. not in a cut sequence, is at the end, when Hushpuppy returns to Wink from the brothel. It is not clear that others can see them, but she faces them and interacts with them. There are other sequences that I interpreted to be her imagination, like when she converses with her mother (she props up a cardboard figure wearing a worn Michael Jordan jersey), so I would not have called these scenes "fantasy", as some sources seem to.
  • Hushpuppy is concerned with her place in the universe - how every piece is important, what people in the future will find of her when she's gone (the last line of the film is something like "People in 1000 years will find this and know that there was a girl named Hushpuppy who lived in the Bathtub with her father.").
  • Hushpuppy likes to hold animals and listen to their heartbeats. When she embraces her father at one point, she hears his heart fluttering. When she embraces him for the last time, she hears it beat, then stop.

Oh - it's also significant that most of the cast were not professional actors. Dwight Henry, for instance, is a baker in New Orleans who the producers basically begged to be in the film. This is well-documented enough that I'm sure good sources can be found for it.

Sorry if that was a bit jumbled. Hopefully it makes the film's content a bit more clear, though. I might take a stab at expanding the article a bit, but in the mean time, if someone else wants to use what I have here, please do.

--Fru1tbat (talk) 16:11, 29 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]


I'm uncertain as to the procedure for adding comments to this Talk page for the film "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and apologize if I'm doing it incorrectly. (The "Guidelines" only confused me further, so I've just dived in here.) I finished watching "Beasts of the Southern Wild" several minutes ago and went online to look for reactions/background/explanations/etc.; read the Wikipedia plot summary here. I just want to take issue with the plot section's statement (regarding Hushpuppy's encounter at the floating bar with the woman who could be her mother, and I think it's strongly implied that she is, especially given the film's aura of myth and fantasy) that Hushpuppy "wants to stay but the waitress tells her she can't take care of her. Hushpuppy and her friends return home ...." The woman holding Hushpuppy and dancing with her -- according to Hushpuppy, the second time in her life she has been "lifted," the first being at her birth -- tells Hushpuppy she can't take care of the girl and her daddy, as she can only take care of herself. But she adds, softly, "You can stay if you want." Hushpuppy says she has to go home. I think it's worth mentioning that Hushpuppy did have the option, then, of remaining with the woman who seems to be the mother she has clearly longed for throughout the film; the decision to leave, to return to the Bathtub and her dying father, was Hushpuppy's. She made a choice there, and a significant one: She accepted her destiny. Her father had promised her she would be King of the Bathtub, and she appears to be just that as she defiantly leads a marching procession of survivors in the film's final scene.
(Was anybody else reminded of "Whale Rider" throughout "Beasts of the Southern Wild"?)
DaneJane (talk) 09:21, 10 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Re-write

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The talk page needs to be rewritten. It is hard to follow. The biggest issue with the film, for me, is the status of the so-called "Aurochs". Aurochs are not prehistoric animals, nor do they look as presented in the film. Aurochs are essentially large cattle, which became extinct very recently. Why the makers didn't use real cattle, or give the animals a different name, I will never know. But more than this, are the animals imaginery, or real in this fantasy world. What is their purpose, other than to give the film a title? They are barely seen, and have little if any role in the film.203.184.41.226 (talk) 02:08, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A lot of your questions will be answered, once you've seen the Making of-film (accompanying the DVD edition). There you see the miniature stampede sets, the Vietnamese dwarf pigs and a lot of other things. In my head, it's quite easy to see how the explanation of the "pre-historic animals" (no-one in recent memory has seen one, so that would qualify as "pre-historic" in the heads of Hushpuppy and the others) gets associated with the dwarf pigs she's got herself at home. I.e. a fantasy animal/apparition.
Their role in the film? Well, they enhance my idea of this as a fantasy/sci-fi movie, taking place in a near future (or parallel world). To me they qualify as parts of Hushpuppy's vivid imagination, as they form part of the outer world (beyond the bathtub, beyond the levee) that she as a 6-year-old know little about.
Seeing these imaginary beasts, I got to think of another film – Where the Wild Things Are, after Sendaks' book. This is a somewhat different kind of fable, but it also deals with questions of belonging somewhere, seeking friends and finding "one's own". And about discovering the world (another world). In both Beitlin's and Jonez' films, beasts/wild things of human (people of The Bathtub and the "wild" Max respectively) and animal apparition meet, with interesting consequences. My two cents.--Paracel63 (talk) 17:15, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's not chicken, it's alligator meat she gets from the lady at the brothel boat. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.77.156.186 (talk) 07:24, 5 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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