A World Under Water: Rethinking the Levee in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Abstract

During the opening sequence of Benh Zeitlin’s apocalyptic tale Beasts of the Southern Wild, the six-year-old protagonist Hushpuppy and her father Wink are drifting on a provisional boat made up of discarded spares as they stare at a giant levee that separates their home, the Bathtub, from ‘the dry world’ on the other side. Dwarfed by the enormous wall, Hushpuppy and Wink contemplate the industrial landscape beyond the divide as they float across the waters blocked by the construction. While the image clearly positions Hushpuppy and Wink on the side of the excluded, abandoned and precarious, opposite modernity’s marvel, Wink confidently declares ‘Ain’t it ugly over there? We’ve got the prettiest place on earth’, before Hushpuppy’s voice-over elaborates that ‘up above the levee, on the dry side, they are afraid of the water like a bunch of babies. They built the wall that cuts us off’. From the outset, the film offers a stark reminder that climate precarity takes place within the context of colonial and capitalist division, where the end of the/ one world is premised on the growth of another. The levee dramatises the margin of Hushpuppy’s universe and simultaneously positions her as marginalised in a sternly hierarchised order. ‘A site of dispossession’, as Katherine McKittrick would put it, the levee as border, edge and limit is simultaneously spatial, imaginary and socially produced, relegating precarity to the invisible, nonhuman and adjacent. In centring the child’s perspective, however, the film renegotiates the physical and phantasmatic expulsions achieved by fences and walls, viscerally remapping (if messily) the unimagined spaces of climate dispossession.