Episode 184: The Shape of Water (Myth Movie Night)
/You probably know that Guillermo del Toro was inspired by The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but do you know what inspired that? We’re here to discuss the origin of our favorite Gill-Men, the party where that would lead to the Creature, and a couple of other Fishmen that might have laid the groundwork.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of gun violence, espionage, the Cold War, misogyny (in the workplace), racism, homophobia, enslavement, colonization, body mutilation, family member’s death, drowning, exorcism, interrogation, and HP Lovecraft.
Housekeeping
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Transcript
Amanda: Welcome to Spirits podcast! A boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I’m Amanda.
Julia: And I’m Julia.
Amanda: And this is Episode 184: The Shape of Water for Myth Movie Night!
Julia: The last could of Myth movie nights I really, really enjoyed, because I like doing the deep dives into the history of how our fiction is shaped by mythology and these ones have been really, really fun to get into.
Amanda: I learned so much and went down so many Wikipedia rabbit holes so I think everybody is going to really enjoy this episode!
Julia: I think so too.
Amanda: Do you know who I would follow down any internet-research rabbit hole?
Julia: I bet it’s our new Patrons.
Amanda: Our new Patrons! Eden, Keegan, Lesley, Laura, Ivey, Delaney, Ciara, Nicole, and Madison.
Julia: And, Amanda, I think I would follow our supporting and legend level Patrons into like a creepy moss covered ancient temple?
Amanda: The kind of thing that I would take a picture, put it on instagram and say “Don’t enter the fairy temple?”
Julia: Yeah, absolutely.
Amanda: Yeah. That would be: Landon, Baz, Mr. Folk, Jen, Hannah, Alicia, Sarah, Niki, Megan, Debra, Molly, Skyla, Samantha, Neal, Jessica and Phil Fresh. Thank you so much for your support, you make it possible for us to do this show, along with our superlative legend level Patrons: Drew, Avonlea, Ashelia, Chelsea, Clara, Stephen, Frances, Josie, Kylie, Morgan, Bea Me Up Scotty, Audra, Chris, Mark, Sarah, and Jack Marie.
Julia: We don’t even care if we’re taken by the fae. We love you guys that much.
Amanda: It’s worth it. Worth it. And Julia, remind us what we were drinking this episode?
Julia: So I made us a “Creature from the Black Lagoon” inspired tiki drinks, because I miss tiki drinks with my whole heart and you can hear me rant about it when we get to the refill.
Amanda: Extremely good, and when we can do so again, I look forward to patroning many many tiki bars.
Julia: Me too. Amanda, what have you been listening to, watching, reading lately?
Amanda: I have been working through the beautiful new season of Truth Be Told which is a podcast from KQED here in the Bay Area about advice by and for women of color. It really addresses a lack in the advice column and advice podcast world which is really white and doesn’t address the experiences and specific needs and perspectives of people of color as a whole. They have had some really, really great episodes recently about COVID, about racism, about healing in black America, and what white people can do to help that along and reduce harm, so it’s been something that has really taught me a lot, it’s a beautifully produced podcast, and season 2 is airing right now! So, you can find Truth Be Told in any of your podcast apps or in the link in the description.
Julia: And I just subscribed!
Amanda: It’s very good! And the art’s beautiful. It’s one of those art where I see it come to the top of my podcasts I’m like, “oh thank goodness!”
Julia: Yeah, it is really, really gorgeous. And Amanda, I have absolutely been loving this most recent season that we have been doing of Head, Heart, Gut. You and I are competing for best taste this month, along with Brandon and it has been a wild ride.
Amanda: I really enjoy getting to spend a couple of hours of my work week researching salt and saltiness, and listen, salt, chemically, is amazing. That stuff is incredible and I can not wait to share it with you and prove why, even though in life I love umami, it is not, in fact, the best taste Julia, this month on Head, Heart, Gut--which is our members-only weekly debate podcast for multicrew members.
Julia: Yes. Just for $5 a month, you can support multitude as a whole and you get the Head, Heart, Gut every week, for just $5 a month! If you join at $10 a month, you get the behind the scenes newsletter, you get to vote for stuff, you get our finsta, it’s really, really cool.
Amanda: Which is a “friends-only instagram.” I didn’t learn that until last year, so if you don’t know what that is, that’s what that is.
Julia: We’re all saying it, and I didn’t know what it was, and I was like “there’s insta in it and I imagine some other word for private or secret, I don’t know.”
Amanda: You know, just taking my cues from Gen Z in many ways and this is one of them, but yes. It’s super fun. All six of us have access to it and we’re sharing our plants and our cooking and our other things that we are picking up hobby-wise in our quarantine.
Julia: I also do a cocktail happy hour, I teach you how to do a cocktail every once in a while. I think I’m going to do a daiquiri one this week. I think that would be fun.
Amanda: Oooh. I feel like that’s too advanced for me so I’m going to look forward to learning from you.
Julia: It’s actually very simple.
Amanda: Multicrew revenue is what helps Multitude exist as a company, it helps us pay rent on our studio, and to invest in new projects and new shows. So, it really is crucial to us being able to weather uncertainty like we have over the last few months and not be completely dependant on stuff like advertisers, which come and go, and industry trends--people decided to spend on podcasts and then they don’t, but this is much like our Patreon’s for our individual shows, ways that we rely on our audience directly as a way to keep doing this as our job. So, we really support everybody who has joined and we thank you if you are considering doing it this week.
Julia: Yeah, if you love what Multitude is all about then consider signing up for the Muilticrew, you get some really great rewards and you help us create new content.
Amanda: So, hang in there guys, we are thinking of you, we love you, and we hope you enjoy episode 184: The Shape of Water for Myth Movie Night.
[Theme music]
Julia: Well, we’re back at it again with another Myth Movie Night, Amanda. I love this movie. A whole bunch. I’m glad we did it.
Amanda: Me too! I saw it in the theaters at one of my very favorite movie theaters--The Angelika, in the sort of like NoHo area of Manhattan--and it was wonderful. I know people like to make fun of it, and there’s lots of memes, but I thought it was really moving, and I really loved it.
Julia: Yeah. It’s genuinely a very nice romance and there’s a lot of action in it as well. There’s a little spy action going on, there’s a heist at one point. It’s a great movie! Guillermo del Toro gives us all the good things.
Amanda: Yeah, and the supporting cast is all one banger after another.
Julia: Rip that he wasn’t able to do it in black and white. That was the one thing they wouldn’t give him. They were like “well, you can do it in black and white, but if you do it in color we’ll give three million more dollars!” and he’s like “I’ll take the three million more dollars!”
Amanda: I get it, and maybe one day we can get a director’s cut that is painstakingly de-colorized.
Julia: I think that would be really, really nice, but we’re talking about The Shape of Water in case you didn’t read the description of the episode. I believe it’s my turn to describe the movie’s plot, is that right?
Amanda: It sure is, Julia.
Julia: Okay. We’ll make it work. I wrote down notes, so hopefully this will help.
Amanda: All right, you have two minutes on the clock. For anyone who did not see Shape of Water and would like to avoid any spoilies, you can skip forward about two and a half minutes. 3, 2, 1, go.
Julia: So, Eliza is a mute woman who uses sign language, and works as a cleaning woman at a secret government laboratory during the Cold War, because of course! The lab has captured a mysterious creature from South America and Colonel Strickland is in charge of the project to study it. The government is super interested in using the creature in order to gain an advantage against the Soviets in the Space Race, because obviously a water creature will help in space. While cleaning the room where the creature is kept, Eliza and the creature form this bond. She feeds it her boiled eggs, it’s extremely cute. Meanwhile a fellow scientist, Dr. Hoffstetler--who is also a Russian spy, because of course, Cold War--wants to keep the creature alive, but Strickland has been ordered by his superiors to kill the creature in order to study it. Meanwhile the Russian superiors are telling Hoffstetler “hey we have to also kill the creature so that the Americans cannot have it.” Eliza overhears the plans to harm the creature and decides to free him in this great heist scene.
Once the heist succeeds, Eliza is keeping the creature in her bathtub to keep him healthy, and plans to release him into the water when the tides are higher. At one point he escapes and injures her neighbor, but the creature is able to heal the wounds he’s inflicted, which is wild. He and Eliza also get it on, thank you Guillermo del Toro, however the creature grows sick in the bathtub and Eliza is anxious to get him back to the sea. Strickland discovers that whoever was responsible for breaking out the creature is Eliza and her friend, Zelda. Zelda’s husband reveals Eliza has the Creature in her apartment, but by the time Strickland arrives at Eliza’s apartment, she is already gone with the Creature. However he is able to figure out where she has gone, because of her dumb calendar. Strickland confronts them at the docks, shoots Eliza and the Creature. The creature is able to heal himself and he kills Strickland, but Eliza is still injured. And police arrive, and the creature and Eliza jump into the canal and the Creature heals Eliza in the water, while also opening the scars in her neck to reveal that they were gills the whole time! They, as the voice over says, live happily ever after.
Amanda: It’s true! It happened, and just in time.
Julia: Thank you.
Amanda: It’s wonderful. It’s a rollercoaster! I wanna rewatch this again, even though I just rewatched it for this episode, because there’s so much to love. It’s one of those films where you can watch for the acting, you can watch for the writing, you can watch for the set design, you can watch for the lighting, and there’s just so many layers of artistry.
Julia: Yeah, just like every Guillermo del Toro movie, there is so much detail involved into it and I just have to shout out Doug Jones every time we talk about it, because Doug Jones is just one of the most underrated character actors, I think, ever. He’s always “the dude behind the mask.” He’s been doing these quintessential monster characters for so long. One of the first roles that I can remember him playing was in the episode of Buffy, Hush. The main ‘gentleman’ character? That’s Doug Jones!
Amanda: Incredible.
Julia: Doug Jones.
Amanda: It’s like in Catholic school, I would just guess ‘The Holy Spirit’ anytime I didn’t know the answer to a question. If you don’t know the actor, and you’re pretty sure it’s not Andy Serkis, it’s probably Doug Jones.
Julia: It’s usually Doug Jones, yeah. Especially if it’s a Guiellrmo del Toro movie. I love the idea of people who always use certain people in their films. It’s like “oh I’m making a monster movie, better call Doug up.”
Amanda: Me too, and I just love these IMDB’s where you’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and “oh it’s only 2015 on the list.” Doug Jones is a working fucking actor.
Julia: Yeah, he is. Good for him. So I think with this movie, Amanda, I think we can start with talking about how Guillermo del Toro was very much inspired by the 1954 movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which he has said in interviews that he saw when he was six years old. In his--also, who is taking Guiellrmo del Toro to go seeThe Creature from the Black Lagoon when he’s six?
Amanda: I mean, I’m glad they did, because we got del Toro!
Julia: Yes, that’s true. So, in his six year old mind, he thought it was very clear that the Gill-man and actress Julie Adams were in love, and when they didn’t end up together, he vowed to correct that fact someday, which I just love this six year old being like “no that’s not how it’s supposed to end! I’m gonna make it how it ends.”
Amanda: del Toro’s also like ONE OF US, in capitals. I love him so much.
Julia: In fact, Amanda, originally del Toro was set to help remake The Creature from the Black Lagoon back in 2002, but the project fell through. But del Toro was still very much attached to the story, so he worked his ass off to get The Shape of Water made.
Amanda: Incredible.
Julia: But I think that’s the end of the story more than anything. I think we can work our way backwards. So, we’ve talked about the peripherals of the Classical Universal monster movies,, which technically started in 1923 with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. We talked about them when we did the history of horror movies, which is great, but the classic stories as we know them and as we’ve talked about before started in 1931 with the premiere of Dracula and Frakenstein, followed quickly by The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and the Bride of Frankenstein. The Wolf Man premiered a decade later in 1941, along with many, MANY spin-offs of those original few. Some of my personal favorites and highlights are The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Hand, Son of Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and my personal favorite, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Amanda: I bet there is one of those name generators out there where it’s just endless combinations of the original creature and modifications.
Julia: I bet there are. That would be so much fun. That would be great. I think there’s a Daughter of Dracula, too, which is also very appealing to me.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. Grand-niece of The Mummy’s Ankle.
Julia: Someone make a Twitter bot. Someone make a Twitter bot for me, for that please. I love it. But, by the time that The Creature from the Black Lagoon landed on the scene, it was the 30th Universal Classic Monsters film, and it was 31 years later. But, Amanda, before that, before that eve, I’ll take you to a party at Orson Welles’ home.
Amanda: Oh. My. God!
Julia: The year is 1941, and William Alland was invited to a party to celebrate Citizen Kane.
Amanda: Hang on. Can I just like, set the scene a little bit here?
Julia: Yes, do it.
Amanda: I’m just going to give you my headcanon of what’s happening. It’s 1941. Everybody is smoking. Everything is in black and white except for the women’s lipstick. We’re all drinking drinks out of crystal-cut goblets and we are casually racist and no one says anything. Everyone’s wearing fur and not thinking about the implications of that, and all the appetizers are really bad!
Julia: Okay. I’m into it. I feel like, with all the appetizers, it’s like foie gras, but it’s not good foie gras, and the texture is wrong. Like, all of the appetizers are soft for some reason.
Amanda: Yeah, no one’s ever heard of a runny yolk, so it’s just very hard eggs with that gray line around them on endive but they can’t let the endive just be endive, and it has a grape.
Julia: Gross. Terrible. So, WIlliam Alland. William Alland actually played the faceless reporter in Citizen Kane, and he was a member of the Mercury Theater troupe, and was considered one of Welles’ close personal friends. So, we’re at this party, there’s probably been a few cocktails imbibed, and Alland starts talking to a Mexican cinematographer named Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa wove Alland this tale of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures that would emerge out of the Amazon river once a year, steal a woman from a nearby village, and then disappear back into the river.
Amanda: Cool.
Julia: Into it. Also similar to a lot of the stories that we’ve heard before in past episodes. He even claimed to have known a friend who had disappeared in the Amazon while filming a documentary on said fish people. He even offered to provide people who didn’t believe him with photographic evidence of the creature, but it doesn’t seem like Alland ever took him up on that.
Amanda: I think that that’s a great confidence trick. To be like, “I’ll show you the pictures, don’t have ‘em with me, I’ll show them to you!”
Julia: “Yeah, come by my house some time, also I’ll buy you a drink, hey! It’s the 1940s we gotta be subtle about our sexuality.”
Amanda: Ayy.
Julia: But even if Alland didn’t ask for the pictures, the story stuck with him. Ten years later, he had moved up the Hollywood ladder and was working as a producer for Universal studios. He’d been working mostly in Westerns at this point, but he decided he liked the idea of getting into science fiction--he first he managed to get put out by the studio was It Came from Outer Space--which is a classic.
Amanda: Oh! Yeah, I’ve heard of that one.
Julia: But again, that story of the Amazonian fish man lingered in the back of his mind. He took some notes, and eventually took some beats from King Kong and shifted it to the Amazon. Much like del Toro’s basis, the original story involved a creature falling for a human woman, getting captured by scientists who brought him back to laboratories to be tested on, but later on they would revise the story and have it rewritten to keep all of the action in the Amazon, probably so they didn’t have to change multiple sets.
Amanda: Sure.
Julia: But before we go further, Amanda, let’s examine what the likely creature that Gabriel Figueroa told William Alland about at that fateful party. So I got this from a Brazillian writer who wrote an article, his name is Andrioli Costa, and I think this is a really interesting take on what the creature might be. So, one of the suggested mythical figures is that of the Ipupiara. (Ee-poo-pee-ara). This was a race of creatures that were from the indigenous Tupi people, who were the largest groups of indigenous people in Brazil prior to colonization. The Tupi people most likely settled in the Amazon rainforest around 900 BCE and eventually spread to the Southeast coast of Brazil. Unfortunately a vast majority of the Tupi people were wiped out because of enslavement and disease brought by Portuguese invaders. The story of the Ipupiara predates the arrival of the Portuguese. It’s name means “Dweller in the Water” and it is said to have--according to “Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth”-- “A humanoid torso on a mass of flesh resembling a fish’s tail. The head was somewhat like that of a seal, but its gigantic arms had five webbed fingers. The creature was said to attract humans into the waters, where it will consume only the eyes, nose, breasts, genitalia, fingers, and toes of the victim. When bodies with this mutilation appeared on the beaches, the terrified villagers refused to fish. Numerous sightings were reported between 1575 and 1585 in the region of the coast of San Vicente, and others in the early seventeenth century when terrified locals and Portoguese travelers shot and hacked at the beasts. It has been conjectured that these were sightings of the Brazilian dolphin.”
Amanda: Oh. What is the Brazilian dolphin?
Julia: The Brazilian dolphin is actually a river dolphin that can be found in Brazil. They’ve very, extremely cute but weird looking dolphins.
Amanda: Okay. Okay.
Julia: They’re pink and they have extremely fatty looking heads but then very narrow snouts.
Amanda: Sure. I mean, I do...I see how at an angle this could look like a person with a fish head. The body is very humanoid.
Julia: Right, and if you scroll down, the mouth is terrifying looking, when it’s just open like that.
Amanda: No. Try not to dwell on that one.
Julia: You’re welcome.
Amanda: Very pointy.
Julia: I also think it’s interesting that one of the notable signs that a Ipupiara is around is that bodies with no eyes, nose, breasts, genitalia, fingers and toes are found in the water, but also thinking that when you drop a body into a water that has hungry fish, those are the softest parts of the body and that’s most likely what the fish are going to go for.
Amanda: That does make sense, but I also really love this backward mythologizing. You have evidence and so you figure out what it is that made that thing.
Julia: Yes. What caused this thing? All right, we have to have a story, so, the sun goes down, what causes the sun to go down? Again, that universal storytelling that we love here on Spirits.
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, it’s really smart. It makes a lot of sense, and it’s not just. “Oh, somebody disappeared,” or “I think this person died under mysterious circumstances.” There is a pattern of behavior, you know, and what can we learn from that pattern?
Julia: Yeah, no. I love it. So, additional stories that were told about this creature. There was a story of how a Portuguese commander--who was referenced in a journal entry by Pedro Magalhães Gandavo--he managed to kill the creature. The body of the creature was said to be 3.5 meters long, had a hairy body, large bristles on its muzzle, and a finned tail that could hold its body erect.
Amanda: Oh.
Julia: Yeah, not a great image.
Amanda: No, that’s very long.
Julia: It kind of sounds like a dugong, or a manatee or something like that, to me, personally.
Amanda: Yeah. I mean, those tails can look really muscular and I guess theoretically they could stand up.
Julia: Yeah. Theoretically. Notes by another Portuguese scholar, Fernão Cardim, described there being both a male and female version of the Ipupiara--“They look like men of good stature, but their eyes are very hollow. The females look like women, they have long hair and are beautiful: these monsters are found on the bars of sweet rivers.”
Amanda: Oh. Only the sweetest ones.
Julia: Only the sweetest ones. Taste that water...tastes like honey.
Amanda: Oh no!
Julia: But he also claimed that the way that the Ipupiara killed was by embracing their victims so fiercely, that it would burst them from the inside out.
Amanda: Just a hugger, Julia.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: Just swim up to you, “Isn’t this river nice? I’m a hugger.” You’re dead.
Julia: Kind of like an anaconda or boa constrictor I imagine. Just kind of squish to death.
Amanda: Yeah, that is--in the before times, when strangers would hug you without asking, that is how it felt. When someone goes, “I’m a hugger!” and approaches you with open arms, it does feel like a river creature coming to bite me.
Julia: That’s true. I would feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the fish-man of Lierganes --which is not in South America and it’s not a South American legend, but rather a story from Northern Spain. But I think that it’s highly likely this legend would spread across Europe and then also eventually mix and infect the stories that were being told in South America post-invasion. The fish-man was an amphibian human-looking being, whose story started around 1650. The legend was that there was a couple living in a small village. They had four sons, and when the father eventually died, the mother decided to take one of her sons to another town to have him learn to be a carpenter so he could support his family.
Amanda: Okay, okay.
Julia: One day, the boy was out swimming in a river near where he was training, and he was caught up in the strong currents and despite being a very strong swimmer, he just could not get back to the shore. His friends who were with him there last saw him being dragged to the sea and assumed he died. BUT, but Amanda,
Amanda: Buuuuut….?
Julia: But five years later, some fisherman stumbled across a strange looking creature in their fishing nets that was attempting to get itself free. Though they tried to capture the creature, it managed to escape before they could fully pull it ashore. The story spread and more and more fishermen claimed to see the creature; eventually they were able to capture it by luring it with loaves of bread.
Amanda: I mean, I love bread too.
Julia: Listen, if you throw some bread, some Outback Steakhouse pumpernickel bread into the water for me and create a graham cracker trail, I will probably follow it.
Amanda: Some artisanal sourdough from SheWolf Bakery here in Brooklyn, I’m already in the water.
Julia: I appreciate that yours is a classy option and I’m like “give me that uh…”
Amanda: I thought you were referencing that for me and I was like “Julia! What a thing to remember that I love!”
Julia: Oh, no. I also love that.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s very good. Some Cheesecake Factory pre-meal bread.
Julia: Ooh. Yeah, those little sour breads. Yeah. When they captured him, they saw that the creature was in fact human shaped: it bore a striking resemblance to a young man, with extremely pale white skin and thin red hair. However, he had a stripe of scales from his throat to his stomach, more along his spine, and the fisherman swore that the boy had gills around his neck. So the fisherman did what any Enlightenment era person would do--they took him to a convent.
Amanda: I mean....okay.
Julia: A convent of Saint Francis in town took the creature in, they exorcised him--because why not--and then attempted to interrogate him, using various languages. Eventually the creature uttered simply the name of the town that the boy had been from, and when those members of the convent went to investigate, they were able to track down his family and he was sent back to live with them. This was pretty much a happy ending, which we don’t see a lot in these kind of episodes.
Amanda: No. I’m like “what’s next?”
Julia: He could never really speak again except for various words like tobacco, and wine, and bread--but not when he wanted those things, just randomly. He would always prefer to walk around naked, and if people insisted on him wearing clothes, he would always walk barefoot. Eventually, nine years of living on land, it was said that he disappeared into the sea and was never seen again.
Amanda: I am going to choose to believe it was a happy re-entering to the life that he preferred.
Julia: Yes. I would assume so. He went swimming and they were like, “where did the gill man go?”
Amanda: For a little swim!
Julia: And then he was just gone. Speaking of the Gill Man, I think we’ll dig a little bit more into the history of The Gill Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon just as soon as we get a refill.
Amanda: Let’s do it.
[Theme music]
Amanda: Julia, we are starting off with a new sponsor this week. StoryWorth is a company that makes it easy and fun for your dad to share stories with a weekly email story prompt. Questions that I don’t think I’ve ever asked my dad, and then at the end of the year they’re all compiled into a beautiful hardcover book. So, this is something that I didn’t even realize would be a great gift until I found out about it and I have been sending my dad these emails--or they send it for you--over the last few months, asking questions like “what was your favorite holiday memory as a kid?” or like “when was the first time you went on an airplane?” “Which of your siblings were you closest to?” And you can edit them as well, so you are asking questions that are relevant to your dad and your family. Whether you are sending this to a parental figure or a grandparent or an uncle, it’s just a really fun way to get those memories preserved and written down and at least for me and my dad, it’s a little easter sometimes to go into those heartfelt things over text. Knowing that at the end of it we’ll get a book that we can have as a keepsake for our family is super exciting.
Julia: Yeah, and I think it’s really nice to have a gift that makes the family feel close right now. Even when you can’t all be together physically.
Amanda: And StoryWorth is offering $10 off your first purchase at storyworth.com/spirits. Get 10 bucks off at storyworth.com/spirits.
Julia: Yeah! Try it out today, storyworth.com/spirits for $10 your first purchase. Amanda, I have tried a lot of CBD products out there, but I have to say SunSoil, for me, has really, really kind of turned me around on how I feel about CBD oil. So, they’re a company out of Vermont, they are super down to earth, and they are doing things a little bit differently. They make CBD oil that is USDA certified organic, they grow hemp on their farms in Vermont and they never use pesticides or herbicides, they keep it really simple. In fact, most of their CBD products have just two simple ingredients. They use coconut oil and hemp. That’s it. And it’s really affordable! Because they farm their own hemp and because they stick to these really simple ingredients, they’re able to offer this high quality CBD at half the price of other brands. So, I got their cinnamon oil--the CBD oil--and I put a little bit of it into my tea at night and it helps me fall asleep. And if I have headaches or aches and pains before I go to bed, I really notice the difference. It makes it much easier for me to fall asleep when I take it.
Amanda: And I will say this is definitely the best tasting CBD oil that I have before. Some CBD oils have a somewhat medicinal flavor, but when I tried this one I was like “oh man, I could actually take this in my tea and appreciate it.”
Julia: Yeah, yeah, it’s really nice. I usually have it with a Chai or with a non-caffeinated black tea before I go to bed. It’s really, really good. So SunSoil makes pure and simple CBD products at an unbeatable price. You can get 30% off your first order by going to sunsoil.com/spirits. That’s S-U-N-S-O-I-L.com/spirits for 30% off your first order.
Amanda: Absolutely! And if you’re looking for something to try, I like the full spectrum hemp extract, which I think is really great. 10mg dose, but they have lots of resources on their website if you are making your first purchase and want to figure out what is right for you. Julia, do you know how sometimes you know that you have to do something and it will make you feel better but you just don’t want to do it?
Julia: Yes. All the time.
Amanda: For me, that is sometimes therapy. WHen I am feeling low energy, or just low in general or I want to collapse on my couch and watch the new season of Queer Eye and do absolutely nothing else, it can be pretty challenging to motivate myself to go and do it, but what I really appreciate about BetterHelp--which is how I get my therapy virtually--is that there really are no excuses for me not to do it. I can take my phone calls with my therapist in my own house, I can send her a message if I am in the middle of the week thinking about something or I’ve been journaling and I want to share an insight with her. It is not like I have to write a professional email, it is an app that is secure and makes it really easy to talk to my therapist any time that I need. It’s also available for people worldwide, so no matter where you are right now and what you’re looking for out of therapy, BetterHelp is a really great high-quality and affordable option for you. It is less expensive than traditional offline counseling and they even offer financial aid which I really appreciate and have taken advantage of. They’re also committed to facilitating great matches between you and your therapist, so they make it easy and free to change counselors if you need to, which is not true in traditional counseling, let me tell you.
Julia: Yeah. But BetterHelp wants you to start living a happier, better life today, so you can visit their website and read all the testimonials that are posted daily at betterhelp.com/reviews or you can visit betterhelp.com/spirits--that’s better, H-E-L-P--and join over 8000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional.
Amanda: So you can get this special offer for spirits listeners today with 10% off your first month of counseling at betterhelp.com/spirits. Better H-E-L-P.com/spirits.
Julia: Thanks BetterHelp!
Amanda: And finally, we are doing a cross promo this week with Clever Creature, which is an experimental variety podcast. They describe themselves as a “creative leap of faith” which I think is wonderful. Season one is coming out now, it started in May and it goes through August of this year--2020. Each episode the producer writes a story and a song inspired by one random word. There’s also an audio diary entry about the process and then a “bonus track” guided meditation at the end. So it really is a wonderful, creative, wacky escapist time to spend in your week.
Julia: They also sit down with writers and creators like David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Etgar Keret, and other guests to talk about creative risk-taking and growth. So if you’re feeling like you need a little motivation in your creation, I think this is a great show to check out. And the audience is actually invited to join in their creative community on Himalaya premium, to join the conversation, share their own creative experiments, and to meet new collaborators.
Amanda: So it’s just a really wonderful weird lovely little community that I think Spirits listeners would enjoy. So, look for Clever Creature in your podcast app or go to the creator Jason Gots website at Jason G-O-T-S.com to learn more. Now, let’s get back to the show.
Julia: So, Amanda, I’ve been craving Tiki drinks since we haven’t really been able to go to bars lately, so I decided to make my own, and the recipe I found for this cocktail specifically is The Creature from the Black Lagoon inspired. Since the Creature from the Black Lagoon is from Brazil, one of the main ingredients is Cachaca, (ca-sha-sah) which is a sugar cane spirit - it’s a little spicy, a little sweet, kinda fruity, and then the rest of the drink is fruit juices, coconut and spiced rum, as well as a little bit of midori.
Amanda: You just get one big ole batch in the blender and you have yourself an evening!
Julia: Yeah, heck yeah! Or just one of those little things with the spigot.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. That would be awesome.
Julia: I do love a batch cocktail. I feel like batch cocktails are under appreciated
Amanda: They are! Especially if you have two people there and you’re going to drink it throughout the day or at night. You don’t have to worry about storing it or it getting diluted. It’s just good stuff.
Julia: Yeah, exactly. Now that we have our cocktails in hand, one of the things I would love to talk about is how the Gill Man appearance and costume was created. When William Alland finally got to make his movie and he was picturing the Gill-Man from the story that Gabriel Figueroa told him, he pictured him as a “sad, beautiful monster.” He even said “It would still frighten you, but because of how human it was, not the other way around.”
Amanda: I see it. I mean, there’s defined pecs and abs, so that makes sense.
Julia: Yes. So he really wanted to approach it as an aquatic development of a human--so, a human who evolved in the water rather than on land. Call back in particular to the Spanish fish-man like I said before, a human who just developed more time in the water. Alland originally pictured a creature that was quite eel-like, with a very sleek appearance. However, the final version was much bumpier, with frills and gills. The final design was done by the team of Millicent Patrick and Bud Westmore, as well as their production team. The final costume, which could be worn on land ANDin water cost $15,000 to make, which I calculated, is $143,930.30 in 2020 dollars.
Amanda: That is a lot of money, but on the other hand, this is the centerpiece of your movie. It’s not different than a custom hot rod in Fast and Furious. The most natural analog to this movie, right now.
Julia: Uh huh. Absolutely. Fun fact about Millicent Patrick real quick because I find her to be a really fascinating part of the Gill-Man’s history, she was originally one of Walt Disney Studios’ first female animators. You know the very scary demon guy from Fantasia? Chernabog?
Amanda: Yeah. Try not to think about him, but I do.
Julia: She was the one that created him!
Amanda: Incredible.
Julia: She also is often cited as being the first woman to work in a special effects and makeup department when she started working for Universal Studios. She worked with Alland in It Came From Outer Space before he created The Creature from the Black Lagoon. She was originally went on the press tour for the movie, the press tour dubbed “The Beauty who Created the Beast” because she led the charge on the final design, but Bud Westmore, who is an asswhole and was jealous of the attention she was getting, changed the tour to “The Beauty Who Lives with the Beast” so that she would not get credit, and when she returned from the tour, she was informed she had been fired because Westmore was so jealous that she was getting all the attention.
Amanda: What a dick!
Julia: Yeah, he’s an asshole. Anyway, it’s all bullshit, if you want to read more about that and the work that Millicent Patrick did, check out The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara; the book is all about Millicent Patrick’s work on the Creature and you should read it.
Amanda: I love sort of untold histories of film-making and the contributions of so many different kinds of marginalized people that were just completely erased or not documented in the first place because people in power wanted credit.
Julia: Yeah, really old paperwork re-discovered by researchers in the 2010s is the reason why we know Millicent Patrick worked on the gill-man. Before that she was just erased from history, which is wild to me.
Amanda: That’s awesome. Another shout out to the librarians, archivists, and researchers of the conspirator collective.
Julia: You’re all great. We love you so much.
Amanda: We truly do.
Julia: So, Amanda, based on the lore and background created by Alland for the movie, the Gill-man was designed to be fully amphibious, so able to breathe in and out of water. The original Gill-man had webbed hands that were clawed at the tip of each finger. Despite the thick skin of the creature, it also distinctly had accelerated healing abilities. It is much stronger than a typical human, and perhaps more uniquely, it has a dormant set of lungs in case its gills are to become damaged. Which I think del Toro used rather well with the ending of The Shape of Water.
Amanda: Totally!
Julia: Look at del Toro really looking back at the canon established in that first movie and then making it much more interesting and much more romantic!
Amanda: Again, ONE OF US, only much, much more skilled than me.
Julia: Another story that might have influenced the creation of the Gill-Man, the first that comes to mind, for me, is the Deep Ones from H P Lovecraft’s extended universe. I’m always a little bit hesitant about talking about Lovecraft because so much of his canon is about like “fear of the other” which is very thinly veiled racism, or hell, even sometimes it’s not even veiled at all, sometimes it’s just racism, but the way that the Deep Ones are described definitely aligns with The Gill-man’s appearance. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, this is how the Deep Ones are described “I think their predominant color was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs.
Amanda: Same.
Julia: “Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked. They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible.”
Amanda: Man, what prose!
Julia: Yeah. H P Lovecraft has his moments, when he’s not being explicitly racist. He’s just a bad person. Fuck! Anyway, I also am grateful that neither the Gill-man nor the Fish Man from The Shape of Water did any hopping whatsoever.
Amanda: Nope. No hopping at all.
Julia: ‘Cause that would have been bad.
Amanda: See, Julia, I think it’s interesting. I am also grateful that the creature did not have more than four limbs and I imagine here that I think my main issues with these animal mashups--it’s either more or fewer limbs than it should have. No limbs at all is scary. I love a worm, I love a cephalopod, I love a snake, they’re so elegant, but when one detracts the limbs that I think ought to be there from this particular creature, that is when we run into some trouble and certainly if we add just far too many limbs. Just in a centipede type direction, that’s just gonna be no good for me.
Julia: I get it. I understand. I think I have that to a lesser degree than you do, but I understand it nonetheless. So, Amanda, much like the fact that the Gill-Man had survived since prehistoric eras, as established in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Deep Ones were said to be immortal and could only die by violence or accident. So I think they are a very good analog to what the Gill-man would later become.
Amanda: Sure.
Julia: So, Amanda, at the end of the day, Guillermo del Toro went very much for a more romanticized version of all of the origins that we talked about today. While there’s been many versions of the Gill-Man--both before and after his conception--very few have taken this river, sea, or swamp monster and portrayed it as a romance. I mean sure, as we talked about how in Splash, plenty of people are happy to romanticize a mermaid before it actually feels human, for the most part, but del Toro took something that was designed to be monstrous and allowed it to be seen as beautiful instead. And honestly, kudos man. Thanks for that. Like Alland intended when he wrote The Creature from the Black Lagoon - del Toro’s aquatic man really is a “sad, beautiful monster”, and I think that’s what makes the film so compelling.
Amanda: Yeah, and I love how the camera doesn’t shy away from the aspects of the creature that are different, and you really get to fall in love with the leading man and lady, both of whom are distinctive looking and not cookie-cutter put them on a magazine and this person is everybody’s ideal, but they are ideal for each other, and that’s--I don’t know. It’s just so romantic in that way.
Julia: I really love the design that del Toro finalized for his version of the Gill-Man because I think that it is romantic but also feels dangerous in a lot of ways. Beautiful eyes, for one, which Guierllmo del Toro always gets with his characters. Especially when you’re looking at Abe Sapien from Hellboy or something like that, which is a very similar character, but he took that design and he created something a little scarier, a little bit more frightening. This version of the Fish Man is very spiny and has these very dark, pointy parts to him, but also he feels ideal in a way, and I don’t know how else to describe that, and I think a lot of it does come from Doug Jones’ performance.
Amanda: Totally.
Julia: I also think that there definitely are other points of origin for the Gill-Man. Like I said, there’s tons of swamp monsters, river monsters, sea monsters that kind of could fit the bill and lay the groundwork for what the creature would become, but I really did feel strongly about the ones that we talked about in this episode because I think that they really do align with what the creature ended up being.
Amanda: Absolutely and I think it makes so much sense that this movie, Shape of Water, was explicitly inspired by a film that del Toro saw as a boy and he wasn’t recreating anything, and he wasn’t trying to do one better. He was trying to say “what was compelling about this movie to me and what elements of that do I want to bring forth into a new world with a new story?”
Julia: Yes, and I like--he said in an interview basically, he chose to set this in the Cold War rather than in modern day society because he said he can play it as a fairy tale. He can tell people, “a long time ago during the Cold War,” and it let’s people’s guards drop a little bit.
Amanda: Yeah. It totally does, and it also is a sort of--it’s that thing where there’s enough removed that we can embrace it and we stop questioning about “is this realistic or not?” and more “what do I want to happen? And if I let myself play in this place of possibility what can I take away from that into the real world?”
Julia: Yeah, absolutely. And Guiellrmo del Toro does a great job with that, I feel like, in all of his films. He is able to create a world that feels real, but also is not a threat to what the modern day world is, but also comments on it. He’s so good at that.
Amanda: Yeah. I just finished reading--this is a complete non-sequitur, but I finished reading Little Weirds by Jenny Slate, her new book, and it was so touching and just staggeringly beautiful the way she writes, and a lot of the book is about injecting imagination into the daily world, and this sort of tension between “I have such a bizarre world inside me and my brain goes in such different directions that it’s so easy to feel as if I need to grow up or need to get it together” and all this other oppressive language that we use, “but what if instead I were to just bring a little bit of that universe with me everywhere I go?” And this image I have is almost like a scent or--do you know when you walk out into the summer from an air conditioned building and the little bit of air conditioning clings to your skin?--that’s how I imagine sort of a little bit of wonder and a little bit of otherworldliness that you can bring with you no matter what circumstances you’re in.
Julia: Yeah, it’s like an aura. It surrounds you but it doesn’t have to necessarily permeate into the rest of the world, and you shouldn’t let the world take away your aura.
Amanda: Absolutely not! The world is richer for it!
Julia: Yes! So, I think that everyone should be like Guiellrmo del Toro, bring a little bit of your weird into the world, tell the stories that you want to tell no matter what inspired them, and just live your weird.
Amanda: “Live your weird.” I love that. And remember everybody,
Julia: Stay creepy.
Amanda: Stay cool.