This topic comes from a discussion I had on another web site.
Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water has been met with mostly positive critical notices and stands to clean up in the Oscar noms in a few days. I haven’t seen the movie yet so I won’t comment about it beyond stating that the plot is basically a variation on The Creature from the Black Lagoon which, in turn, was a variation on the age old “Beauty and the Beast” story. In nearly all versions of the tale, it’s the same: you have an often-beautiful human female paired up with a usually grotesquely-ugly monstrous male. The female in these stories looks beyond the male’s appearance and loves him for what he really is (or at least has sympathy for him). No matter how outlandish and fanciful things might get, we don’t really question the specific role each gender plays in this type of story. We’ve seen it a million times before and we accept it.
But what about a gender-flipped version of this tale? Can anyone imagine a human male similarly falling in love with love with an ugly and monstrous female without it being a comedy? Aside from dismissing the situation as being completely ludicrous, I think most people find the male character depraved, pathetic, and even creepier than the female monster. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but it would take a filmmaker with a considerable amount of talent to believably pull off a story like this.
I haven’t seen CFtBL in a while, but I don’t think the Beauty in that tale gains any affection for the monster.
I can see guys watching The Shape of Water and thinking, “Hey, I may be ugly, but at least I’m a fucking human being!”
Sally Hawkins’s character is definitely not supposed to be a beauty. A gender-flipped version of the story would be one in which a lonely, plain man with a disability is drawn to a female creature with a body that works like a human despite the fish-like aspects of her. In particular, she becomes his first sexual partner, and she’s good at it.
Well, The Shape of Water was itself a gender-flipped Splash*, like, beat for beat right up to the end, so it kinda already has been done. (Ah… you specify not a comedy. Well, I found Splash more romantic than this film was–and Tom Hanks’s protag had more genuine, believable emotions/doubts than Sally Hawkins did, which made it more suspenseful, too.)
As far as unattractiveness: The water monster here wasn’t all that ugly, and hit the main Masculine Desirable Traits: muscular, buff arms/legs, strength, dangerous, and even some grace as a dancer.
Minus the earlier film’s likeable protagonist, sense of humor, actual growth of a believable relationship, and an antagonist who wasn’t a cartoon–yep, Eugene Levy was less cartoonish than the grotesque government dude). Gosh this was a disappointment! Sigh. I’m really against the zeitgeist lately. Between this and The Marvelously Overrated Mrs. Maizel, I’m weirdly cold to some of the most recent biggest critical/popular hits. And it’s pissing me off because I’m no snob… I was enthusiastic about seeing both and truly wanted to like them! Something in me is lacking, I guess.
I think when comparing the premises of **The Shape of Water **and a hypothetical gender-flipped version, audiences would give a lot more slack to a woman than a man. More than likely, he would come across as so pathetic and creepy that you’d want tell the creature, “You can do a lot better than him.” Also, they probably wouldn’t resist the temptation to ridiculously sexualize the female creature by giving her a prominent non-mammalian breasts and making her resemble a Gigeresque fetish fantasy.
Penelope (2006) was about a guy falling in love with a pig-snouted Christina Ricci. Then, in B&tB fashion, she is changed by someone offering her true love despite her looks.
The movie is less male-centered than I make it sound but I’m comparing it to the OP’s requested themes.
Mild spoilers for The Shape of Water since the OP hasn’t seen it
[spoiler]The movie never addresses the question of consent. I mean, yeah, the fishman seems to readily agree to sex, but there’s a power dynamic (he’s a captive, she’s associated with the captors),
he’s a completely different species whose ability to consent is unknown, and since he’s the only known one of his kind, his age and cognitive ability to consent can’t be inferred. He could have been a teenager, or mentally impaired, or drugged by the captors, or suffering from stockholm syndrome,
or any number of issues that could call into question his ability to consent to sex if he were a human.
I’m not saying the movie should have addressed those issues – it didn’t present itself as sci-fi, it’s a very stylized fantasy world where fishman consent issues don’t really belong. But I think there’s a good chance audiences would be asking more of these questions if the genders were reversed, and it were an awkward lonely maintenance guy having sex with a captive fishlady of unknown age and mental capacity.[/spoiler]
One example I can think of from literature is in China Miéville Perdito Street Station there is a human male character who is in a relationship with a Khepri, which is a species with a human body but a beetle for a head.
As for TV/movies, I really hate to get into judging real people on their appearances online (it is cheap and adolescent and jerky) but suffice it to say that I find Rebel Wilson very, very, very unattractive, and there was a briefly-running series where she (I think, I never actually saw it other than flipping channels) looked like this and had twodifferent men falling for her. The show was a comedy, but I believe that the relationships were played straight.
If the characters were both human beings in a real-life setting, it wouldn’t be creepy at all. I’m referring to fantasy, horror, and/or science fiction stories.
But why do you think audiences would find the guy “creepy”? Do you know of a film where that scenario played out and the guy was thought of as creepy? If not, you’re just projecting with no actual evidence.
Have you ever read comments on news stories about teachers having sex with students, and noticed how different the reactions are to ‘hot 30-year-old teacher bangs student’ if the teacher is a woman vs a man? A woman having sex with a man who’s under her authority is seen very differently than a man having sex with a woman who’s under his authority. Since the societal picture is that men are horndogs who always want to bang anything they find attractive, the man is ‘taking advantage’ of the woman while the woman isn’t. Turning the prisoner/kid/ward into an unknown alien being doesn’t really cast that off.
That probably is the closest but even there it’s just her nose that’s affected. She isn’t mostly animalistic like a traditional B&tB story would be.
You’re close to the point I’m trying to make. A gender-flipped variation on a B&tB type story is considerably more difficult–if not almost impossible–to pull off because men have the perhaps unfair and inaccurate reputation for being shallow superficial jerks.
That didn’t appear to be what the OP was asking though. He didn’t say anything about the female creature being “under the authority” of the male character.
