The movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin, is a story that uses family as a base model to talk about the inheritance of lifestyle and culture and how people should live. The mainline is Hushpuppy growing up and inheriting her father Wink’s lifestyle. Analyzing this movie step by step from three stages: setting, scenes, and the behind meaning can much help to have better comprehension.

In terms of the characters, Hushpuppy the protagonist is set as a little girl because this can make the biggest contrast for becoming a “wild man”. She is the child of the southern residents who means the southern future. She and her father Wink reflect the continuance of human culture. Since she is a very little kid, this can make the people have a much stronger realization of her growth. Hushpuppy’s father Wink, in the audiences’ first impressions, makes a big contrast of appearance with his daughter. He is a rude man with strong muscles and even a three times larger body in visual size than Hushpuppy. This kind of character can immediately let the audiences think of the powerful and wild and also a reliable father. The fact is so that Wink is a father who truly loves his family and his daughter Hushpuppy. He represents the southern residents who have a wild lifestyle. His illness is an obvious foreshadow for the climax and cleverly ending the story for highlighting the culture inheriting. Hushpuppy’s mother, no matter in the memory or the bar, represents the complete family that Hushpuppy wants. She is formed to be a standard southern woman who is beautiful for her healthy and strong, and this corresponds to Wink’s characteristic setting. Her existence is also the symbol of the perfect lifestyle that most people pursue. The other southern residents together build a bigger family for Hushpuppy and Wink and other residents in the community. This makes the living environment in the movie look more real and acceptable for the audiences. Hushpuppy also constantly learned from them and became a truly wild southern person to inherit this lifestyle.

Most of the main scenes that tell the main idea are concentrated in the second half movie. In the crab party, Wink and other residents want Hushpuppy to eat the crab in a more wild way, and Hushpuppy proved that she is strong enough to handle it. This is the first time that the movie directly comparing the southern lifestyle with the others and it requires Hushpuppy to choose to be a truly wild southern man. This is also Wink’s love and education that he wants her daughter becoming staunch and strong in facing a challenge. In the talking with the shipman who eats a lot of the chicken biscuit and keeps the wrap, the lifestyle topic extends forward. The movie now says that it is important for everyone to have a lifestyle and their own decision on it. If we lost the direction in our busy lives, we are hard to remember who we truly are. We live in the world just like the shipman sailing on the sea in the movie, there is no exact destination but we need to have our lives in a kind of style just like he constantly eats chicken biscuits because this is life or we will forget why we are alive. In the floating bar, the mother-like chef is a beautiful dream for Hushpuppy’s perfect life, but Hushpuppy finally chooses to face the truth though at the beginning living alone scene that she wants mom so much. This chief is illustrated as the same as Wink’s memory for making the audience a sense that Hushpuppy has achieved the pursuing life, and then this scene enables people to chose what they truly want if they were in this situation. Hushpuppy made her decision to accept Wink’s death and to live like what Wink taught before, to be a man. When Wink’s ends, Hushpuppy became a true southern man but not a child. Hushpuppy facing the prehistoric aurochs is a fantastic technique that showing Hushpuppy has been brave and strong as the same as Wink wants. This is the time of the inheritance of southern wild lifestyle and culture. Those are the main scenes telling the main idea. There are still other interesting functional scenes for understanding the plot and relationships of characters At the most beginning, little Hushpuppy feeding the animals and lives by herself showed how different the wild southern lifestyle is. Wink shooting the storm shows that he loves his daughter. In the emergency shelter scene, the rescuers are illustrated as rude people who used violence to control the southern refugee and shot to the kids. They represent the outside people who cannot understand the southern lifestyle. The repeating displaying of prehistoric aurochs constantly reminds audiences of the wild sense and build a dreaming climax for Hushpuppy’s growth.

This movie implies a lot of ideas towards the inheritance of lifestyle and culture. Wild southern residents are not understood by the government. Their lives are limited in the shelter and their lifestyles are erased by the rescuers. This is an accusation towards the American government that the truth is not as good as the official voices. However, the whole story still gives hope of the southern future by Hushpuppy and other children, that they are inheriting the spirits, cultures and lifestyles of their predecessors. Then, extending this idea, the parent-child relationship is the most fundamental and influential way to continue the culture. Wink and Hushpuppy’s story is not only a family story, it indeed is the miniature of human history. There is still a lot of different culture in the world but they might be too weak to continue to keep being themselves in the development of globalization. The cultural integration should respect converged peoples’ opinions and focus more on making the converged people feel more comfortable in the change of lifestyle, for example, slow the speed and protect the current situation. In the end, the most important in the movie is advocating for individual life. Learning from Hushpuppy, what people need to know more is that we must face the truth and under this premise to decide what kind of life we want. We need to keep doing something to be ourselves but not living in the lie of the dream just like Hushpuppy rejected the mother-like chef to go back home to Wink. She at the end understands that she and the lifestyle she wants are the same as her father, thus she inherits her father’s life as a southern wild.

References

Zeitlin, Benh, et al. Beasts of the Southern Wild. 20th Century Fox Film Corp., 2013. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat02755a&AN=cul.b1037598&site=eds-live&scope=site.