On March the 5th 2018, I watched a movie called “The Shape of Water” with my mother. The story is a fantasy from the cold war era, describing an incident between a speech-impaired person and a creature from water.
What does the title, “The Shape of Water” mean? Normally, water is flexible and people don’t regard it having some kinds of shape. However, the ancient (and possibly the oldest) Greek philosopher Thalēs, mentioned that the nature of matter was a single material substance: water (or in a modern word, liquid? Consider Aristotélēs in the later age proposed classical elements of earth, water, air, fire and aether, which were the mixture of element theory and thermodynamics finally renewed by Lavoisier). We are not considering here that the chemical nature of water is H2O and it is more accurate to mention everything is composed by atoms, mentioned by Dēmókritos. We are considering the metaphoric origin of water as a background of nature, which is based on the philosophy before natural science emerges. Thalēs thought that flexible water is an origin of everything and all the matters would ultimately be restored to the water. If we take it into mind, “water” in this movie could be regarded as some sort of circumstances embracing human beings, despite their invisibility. One’s mind, interpretation of outer worlds or phrases of texts, cultures within the group of human, their commons, differences and interactions, all sorts of invisible matters could be regarded as “water”. Even though we could not regard its shape directly, we can see something behind it in the chain of incidents throughout the movie. “THE shape” means, the incidents were an ordinary examples of “water” observed when the people from different backgrounds encounter. Not only the creature from water in complex characteristics, but also the circumstances of the story, are what we should consider in the movie. The artistic structures, simple but vivid colors and illuminations, together with abandoning apparent beauty of famous tales neglecting the true nature of human beings, invest the power of persuasiveness to the movie. Ms. Octavia Spencer did a great job as a supporting actress.
Maybe it is a little difficult for Japanese people living inside Japan, without experiences of living abroad communicating with a variety of people. However, I think we should at least stay abroad for a certain length of time besides being as sightseers, for being as a one person in the variety of cultures on this living earth.
After we watched the movie, we found out that this movie received several Oscars for 2018. Congratulations!
