#tsowmeta

So does that mean we should think the ending is a false one? That Amphibian Man got to be free but Elisa succumbed to her wounds and this is why Giles never saw her again? The scars were just that after all. It was clearly too obvious that this is truly how the movie is intended to end.

But this isn't just a story. Del Toro & Company punctures this whimsical romance with some harsh realism. This isn't like our traditional gruesome fairytales, where things go from dark to grim. It's just... life. Elisa lives a simple, unfulfilling life. She has good friends and isn't necessarily unhappy, but it's not enough. She isn't the sexless, passive woman of many of those stories. She's real and complex and multidimensional.   We have Strickland being the epitome of 1960's toxic masculinity, chalk full of sexism, racism, and ableism. The people around him can see he is gross but they pretend everything is okay because they feel helpless or that the error is actually in themselves. Amphibian Man is ethereal, godlike, and fantastical, but he's also scared, brutal, and lonely. He's vulnerable and yet loving.

All these things and more, throughout the movie, point to a harsh realism, and I think this is an intentional contrast. These elements are intended to be side by side. I seem to recall Del Toro saying that he wanted to make this movie as a sort of ode to cinema and the stories they tell. I find it then, most likely that this story within a story is intentional on his part. He doesn't want us to watch the movie once, go 'oh that was a good twist' and set it aside again. He wants us to to be particpants. With this story format, we get to ponder it, engage with it, and make it our own.

Personally, I choose to believe that Elisa got her happy ending. Given everything I've said above and more I can't articulate, I think Gile's story is happening side by side the actual story, and they twine together at times, and diverge at others. Does Giles know that Elisa masturbated in her tub while she cooked him eggs every morning? Are we supposed to think that he supposes that's so? Did he suspect that Elisa sat on the bus, painting her finger against the window pane of a bus, and making water follow the motions of her fingertip? It's not unreasonable, but also not necessary. And again, it's up for each and every one of us to decide.

At the end of the day though, I don't think the question was ever meant to be 'why did you make this so obvious,' but rather, 'do you really think that's how it ends' and what does it reveal to you about the way you interpret that. What does it say about the things you enjoy, the messages you think the movie is trying to convey, what you'll accept as reality vs stories, your own preconceptions, and a whole host of other questions.

So if you love this movie but are annoyed at this element, let me suggest analyzing instead what you think of the ending. Was it real? Is the movie really a beautiful love story if it's not real? Does it makes sense that we begin and end the story with Giles's narration and the twist isn't that Elisa might not have made it? How important is it that a movie surprises us?

The writers could have written Strickland making the mental jump to Elisa. She, afterall, was the one who stood before him, a look of defiance on her face after questioning, and signed something he could not understand at him. It would make sense. The writers chose that, for whatever reason—be it his desire not to believe it was his crush or his inability to lay such agency at the feet of a disabled, petite little white girl and/or consequently his likely inclination to see a black woman as more the villain—Zelda would come to his mind first as the likely culprit. He arrives at her home more unhinged than ever.

As I watched this scene in the theater, I got really tense. I didn't want to see another black woman killed on screen. Another black man. For surely he was unhinged enough that he would rain his wrath down upon Zelda's whole family, especially after his story about Delilah and the destruction of all those people during Samson's last act of strength. At this point, I imagined the creators had written themselves into a corner. It seemed wholly inconceivable that this clearly racist, obviously sexist, power hungry, despicable man would be utterly incapable of walking away from a black woman who had known about the "theft" of all of his control without killing her.

If it had happened, people would say 'it's the only thing that made sense' and that this is where the plot was inevitably going to go. But don't forget, he could have just as easily been written to go directly to Elisa's. Elisa could have headed out—as she was determined (though admittedly reluctant) to do—before he arrived. She could have seen him pull up and Giles could have distracted him. There are a dozen different ways that scenario could have been handled. But writers wrote Strickland going to Zelda's.

However, the writers of this movie are not to be trifled with. Zelda's husband, Brewster, interjects through Strickland’s intimidation. Despite Zelda's efforts to protect Elisa and our beloved fishman, he reveals that he'd overheard Zelda's affairs and knew Elisa had 'The Asset’. Brewster, who upon Strickland's entrance, was (understandably) cowed by our unhinged antagonist and did nothing to stop him threatening his wife, speaks over his wife’s wishes and cedes to Strickland's authority and domination. Given the set of prejudices and ways of thinking of our antagonist, this was the perfect—perhaps the only—conceivable way that Strickland was to be gratified into 'bestowing mercy,' as I can't help but imagine he feels in that moment.

With Brewster's obeisance, Strickland's world falls back into place. A man, in deference to him, put his wife 'in her place' and for that pleasing (to Strickland) behavior, so will he ‘reward’ them. He didn't have to. What Zelda and Elisa did was against the law, almost certainly traitorous. He'd already linked them with a Russian spy (Dimitri), and he was willing to shoot Elisa when it came down to it. It would have been evil for him to kill them, but he would not have been punished. Zelda and Brewster were not safe from him until that moment, until Brewster gratified his ego and thus assured him that the world was, in fact, as it should be (according to The Book of Strickland ( •́ ⍨ •̀)) . And the writers did not have to do it that way. If they hadn't, many would have defended the decision of the killing as having made sense from the Watsonian (Strickland's) point of view. But the writers (Doylist) decided that's not how they wanted their film to play out. Theirs was a story of romance and triumph/hope for those society deemed unworthy (lower class, disabled, black, gay, etc).

As I watched this scene though, I was simply struck at how this is such a clear cut example of how you cannot give a story a pass for something horrible happening just because it 'made sense' for that story/character or the world that story was set in. Creators still choose the world they set their stories in, still write the characters into these scenarios. It is a choice, and whether that choice is good or bad does not remove the responsibility of telling that story from the creators' shoulders.

And likewise, we can enjoy a story for it's consistency of character (Watsonian perspective) and world and the ways the protagonists overcome or engage in those narratives while simultaneously being critical of the choice by the writers (Doylist) to put these characters into these settings and these scenarios where they continue a harmful trend of killing off their black and/or queer characters.