Beasts and Utopia

Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in the time of Henry VIII. Benh Zeitin and Lucy Harrison wrote the script for Beasts of the Southern Wild, adapted from Harrison’s play Juicy and Delicious, during the current American presidential administration. Utopia is presented as the description of the island of Utopia, a land purported to host the perfect society, by the fictional philosopher and traveler Raphael Hythloday. Beasts is the story of Hushpuppy, a wise and precocious girl who lives in the insular Bathtub, an area of low ground in the American south which hosts a hedonistic and insular self-sufficient society of people who make do with whatever washes up on the banks and shores of their watery homes. The two works seem to be so different that they could not share themes or concepts, but the opposite is true. Utopia and Beasts of the Southern Wild demonstrate versions of a Utopian society, and each lampoons the prevailing societal norms of its time in its own way. This becomes apparent when themes and concepts from More’s work are compared to their counterparts in Beasts.

In the idealized society of Utopia, the concept of near-total equality in work output is used as an indirect criticism of the highly imbalanced society of the romanticized England of More’s day. King Henry enjoyed a lifestyle of lavish luxury and could use his power to build his personal wealth at the expense of the lower classes. A large proportion of the society perhaps toiled their whole lives to enrich the nobility, who lived in leisurely circumstances. In More’s Utopia, however, everyone works the same six hours per day, and receives the same compensation. Individuals work for society as a whole, rather than for their own ambitious motivations, and are free to cultivate their own pastimes when not working. This is presented as relieving them from the burden of ambition.

In a similar criticism of today’s societal system in America, The Bathtub is depicted as a certain kind of ideal civilization, outside of the control of the imperfect American scheme. While Americans are supposed to be connected via the internet and aspire to the American Dream, the people of The Bathtub live largely hand to mouth. In a jab at American norms, this is made to seem freeing, in the same way that freedom from the pursuit of wealth is liberating to Utopians. No one works at all, except as much as is necessary to fish, catch crawfish or cobble together boats or homes from flotsam and jetsam. Everyone is free to pursue his or her own interests, which apparently tend toward Zydeco music, strong drink and finding excuses to celebrate a holiday. For the people of The Bathtub, it is a perfect existence that is eventually threatened by a coming storm and the reemergence of an ancient and powerful predator.

If the perfect existence of Utopia is threatened, as a last resort, there is war. If it cannot be avoided, the Utopians hire mercenaries, and if that is impossible, fight themselves. If that happens, they look for every advantage, including encouraging the assassination of enemy leaders by their people, before joining battle. They do everything they can to avoid a fight, and then fight only as fiercely as is necessary to win, preserving the land upon which they are fighting if it is possible. Once the battle is over, they go as quickly as possible back to life as it was before the conflict. Their goal is not conquest, but preservation of their way of life, which is a statement, perhaps, against the use of England’s military In Henry’s time to further its ambitions.

In Beasts, the people of The Bathtub use a minimum amount of force, like the Utopians, to meet their goals, and perhaps not enough. They see an existential battle ahead with the storm that will submerge their homes, as well as with the paternalistic government that wants to dismantle their separate society. Also, there is recurring footage of rampaging beasts that reminds the viewer giant predators are on the way to The Bathtub to wreak havoc. Rather than preparing for a battle, The Bathtub’s residents choose the most passive path possible, riding out the storm in their homes, and attempting to live as if nothing has happened after it passes. They do not fight, either, when agents of a fictionalized version of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, their strikingly clean and brightly-colored shirts illustrating the contrast between The Bathtub and Big Government, forcibly remove them from their homes. Finally, the foreshadowed predator confrontation arrives, and a souped-up pig-like adaptation of an extinct European beast awakened by the storm, shows up in numbers. Again, there is no fight. The diminutive Hushpuppy, made to seem more so when she is placed in the foreground against the massive background of the pig-like beasts, seems to reason with them. The house-sized horned monsters bow and depart. All of this may be a statement about the American tendency to throw weight around when given the opportunity. The denizens of The Bathtub do not take the fight to the enemy; rather, they do their best to survive without fighting at all.

Whatever the decision – to fight or not, to trade or not, etc. – Utopians do not have a King to look to for guidance. Rather, everyone is nearly equal in standing. There are leaders, called “phylarches” (More), who serve under “Senior Phylarches” (More), who meet in committee under a Chief Executive to do the state’s business, but they are all democratically elected. Further, they are not allowed to discuss state business outside of committee, under penalty of death. It is assumed that this results in a decided absence of intrigue and politicking, the polar opposite of life at court in More’s time.

No one at all is in charge in The Bathtub, however. When the storm is imminent, Hushpuppy’s father, Wink, does not gather a consensus and recruit support in order to come up with a plan for everyone. Instead, he announces he is staying, and loudly pressures others to stay, too. He is a leader by nature; he convinces some to stay. He is not, however, giving orders. As the storm looms and the scene gets darker and darker, some of his friends choose to take their chances in their homes, and others make a run for it. What is apparent, however, is that “the government” is not deciding what should happen; instead, each person makes his or her own decision. That is not to say that The Bathtub’s people live in anarchy. They function as a whole when escaping from the bright, sterile camp to which they are evacuated after the storm, through tacit mutual agreement. They work together capably without leadership to get Wink back to the dim, comfortable safety of The Bathtub so he can live out his final days in familiar environs. This leaderless group decision-making contrasts with the society Beasts is critiquing, as evidenced by the Big Government evacuation order that is enforced after the storm.

It is the calling into question of styles of government and society that make More’s Utopia and Zeitin’s and Harrison’s Bathtub similar. The fictional societies do not seem to share significant traits, in that one is set in the time of More and Henry VIII (just before his daughter Queen Elizabeth I's reign), and the other is set approximately today. Utopians do not have the benefit of modern technology, as an example, and The Bathtub’s residents enjoy accurate weather forecasts and gasoline engines on their claptrap boats. To make the similarities in Utopia and Beasts of the Southern Wilds clear, it is necessary to compare the devices used by the authors to critique their contemporary societies. It is upon analyzing the way the works examine the distribution of labor, the potential for armed conflict, and the system of societal decision-making, that it becomes clear both are “Utopian” works.

Works Cited

Beasts of the Southern Wild. Dir. Benh Zeitlin. Perf. Quvenzhane Wallace, Dwight Henry. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012. DVD.

More, Thomas. Utopia. London: Cassell and Company, 1901. Project Gutenberg.