Necessary Nerding: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a dramatic film about a five-year-old girl on a quest. Along the way, she faces and defies the terrors that lurk in the wild. Although the movie is critically-acclaimed, winning prestigious awards from the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, and has the most adorable protagonist named Hushpuppy, I could not connect with the film. I wanted to love it, but I just couldn’t.

Three particular points left an acrid taste in my mouth:

1.  The striking similarities between the movie and a novel by science fiction writer Octavia Butler,

2.  A plotline with an invisible mother who Hushpuppy longs for but the mention of the mother in the movie only conjures the Beasts, and

3.  The constant insistence of Hushpuppy’s father that she be a man.

All of my observations have to do with metanarratives of black motherhood, femininity, and the co-opting of black women’s cultural production. For those of you who haven’t seen Beasts of the Southern Wild, I don’t want to provide too many details and spoil it for you. But those of you who have already seen it, let’s talk about it…