Nelson Winrow Writing 101 Howard A Place To Call Home: Place Attachment in Beasts of the Southern Wild A storm

is coming. Its big. The biggest youve ever seen. Your life and livelihood are in danger. You have two options: stay, or leave. If you stay, your only protection from the storm is a tin shack, hidden in the swamp. Your chances for survival are slim. Your home will be flooded You have little electricity. No medicine. No paved roads. You already subsist only on what you can catch in the water. On a good day, you share food with your pets. This isnt a good day. After the storm, your only recourse for food will be wild animals around your home; they will most surely be dead before the storm ends. You are poor beyond poor. You have no job. You have no money. Every day is a struggle for survival. You have almost no worldly possessions. Packing up would be simple easy. All around you, your neighbors, fearing for their lives, are loading up and leaving. Help and security are just a short car ride away, right across the levee. Food and shelter right around the corner. The choice is simple: you have to leave. Your life depends on it. Yet you dont. Why not? For what reason would you choose to stay? In the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, Hushpuppy, a six-year old girl, and her father Wink, a rampant alcoholic, live in conditions similar to this. The two members of the Doucet family are residents of a Bayou community called the Bathtub. Not long into the film, this

community has to face a storm the likes of which has never been seen before. However, even though it puts their entire existence in a position of what Judith Butler would call precariousness, that is, incredible danger, the Doucets choose to stay, and they stay with defiance. The immediate consequence of their decision is obvious they chose to stay in a rundown shack on the wrong side of a levee during a hurricane instead of leaving for the safety and security of civilized society. To understand what would make them stay, one has to start with the idea of place attachment. Examining the biological and sociocultural aspects of the Bathtub that lead to the development of this place attachment helps to explain the deep bond the two of them have with their bayou home. Once the processes behind this attachment are made clear, it becomes easy to see why they would feel such pride in the Bathtub. By closely examining how the film portrays their feelings toward the outside world, and their opinion of the structure of civilized society, it becomes evident why they have such disdain for life on the other side of the levee. The combination of this mistrust of the outside world and the intense bond the two have with the Bayou then serve to explain why they would make themselves so vulnerable by staying put through the storm. When considering why, in the face of such overwhelming danger, Hushpuppy and her father would want to stay in the Bathtub, one has to understand the sociological concept of place attachment, which is defined by Altman and Low as the bonding of people to places (Altman 2). This bonding of Hushpuppy and her father to the Bathtub is central to the idea of why they refuse to leave and why they feel such pride in staying. This place attachment, according to Altman and Low, is fostered through multiple processes, the most relevant of which

in relation to the Doucets are biological processes and sociocultural processes. Altman and Low describe biological processes as those which yield and ecological fit between people and places (Altman 8). They could be considered as the tools by which people connect with their environment. Robert Riley, in paraphrasing Paul Shepards work, asserts that people see their environment not only as a survival resource but as the educational tool of human development, (Altman 14) and through touching, exploring, [and] naming (14) whats around them, people gain a distinct biological attachment to their environment. This can be seen in Beasts through Hushpuppys exploration of the environment around her. From the very beginning of the movie, the way Hushpuppy interacts with the animals around her indicates a native attachment to her surroundings. Throughout the movie, animals heartbeats are used as a sign of life. The implication here is that she can feel the life of the animals around her and naturally has an innate connection to them based in the heart, which, biologically, is one of the most important parts of the animal body. This connection to nature is further strengthened by the fact that it is established before a word is ever spoken in the film; the opening scene involves her treating a bird, and the second starts with her feeling the heartbeat of a sleeping pig; over a minute goes by in silence before she speaks. By beginning the movie with these actions, Beasts implies that with regard to Hushpuppys character, more important than any dialogue is her connection with the environment around her. It is through this touching and exploring of the environment that she becomes so biologically attached to her surroundings - it is the way in which she learns about the world around her. In addition to this innate connection with nature, she is also taught by her society that she, as a human being, is in no way above nature. While at school, Hushpuppys teacher tells her and her classmates Im meat. Yall asses meat. Everything is part of the buffet

of the universe. The sentiment expressed in this statement is one of equality with nature. According to the values taught by the Bathtub society, human beings are meat, just like the rest of nature, and are a part of the ecosystem, not above it. Visually, this is reinforced in the scene by Hushpuppy constantly being either at eye level or below the animals shes looking at, implying equivalence between humanity and the fauna in the Bathtub. Her society teaching her that she is nearly equal to wild animals also teaches her that she is at the mercy the environment around her. This strengthens the connection that she has with the natural world around her because she has to know the danger of where she lives to be able to survive there. The Doucets doesnt live in the Bathtub alone. They live in a community, and this community is also one way in which they become attached to the Bathtub. The sociocultural interactions that lead to this attachment can be characterized as the pressures that the community puts on Wink and Hushpuppy to stay, and these interactions derive themselves from the relationships the Hushpuppy and Wink build throughout the community. The strength of these connections between the Doucets and the community around them become readily apparent after disaster hits the Bathtub. In the wretched aftermath of the storm, the first thing Wink and Hushpuppy do is to look for their neighbors. After figuring out who made it through the storm and who didnt, the residents gather for a funeral the Bathtub way. No crying allowed. During the celebration, Hushpuppy tries to open a crab with a tool; her father forces her, however, to Beast it, and break it open with nothing but her bare hands. The entire room backs him up. The importance of the scene is in that last part the entire room ( made up of whats left of the community), bands together to teach Hushpuppy a lesson in resiliency and strength, a lesson

which plays a part in the rest of Hushpuppys decisions throughout the movie. They show just how the community helps foster her attachment to the Bathtub in much the same way that the biological processes did before. This idea of place attachment serves to explain their reasons for staying in multiple ways. Altman and Low suggest that place attachment plays a role in fostering individual, group, and cultural self-esteem (Altman 10). This self-esteem is illustrated in the first few minutes of the movie, when Hushpuppys father, looking at a power plant on the other side of the levee, where civilized society lives, says Aint that ugly up there? We got the prettiest place on Earth", a sentiment Hushpuppy echoes not long after when she says They [the outsiders on the other side of the levee] think we all gonna drown down here. But we aint goin nowhere. These are not empty words, either. Even with the massive storm threatening down on them and a significant portion of the Bathtub population deciding to leave, Wink and Hushpuppy make no attempt to remove themselves from the precariousness that they face by staying home. In fact, during the most tempestuous scene in the movie, Wink leaves what little shelter they have to and runs out into the storm, screaming and shooting his shotgun into the stormy night air. Even when natures full force is bearing down on him, Wink chooses to fight (by quite literally shooting the storm!) instead of running from the Bathtub. To him, there is no other option of where to live. The Doucet family truly sees the Bathtub as the place where it belongs, even while enduring abject poverty and struggling for survival. For this attachment to their home to occur, Hushpuppy and Wink have to have an alternative a place they dont want to live: the other side of the levee. From the very beginning,

Hushpuppys narration shows their contempt for the world on the other side of the levee. Daddys always saying that up in the dry world, they got none of what we got, she says, while the scene of one of the many Bathtub festivals playing in the background. The question then becomes what exactly it is that they got that normal society doesnt have. The answer is hinted at in the next couple lines of narration. They got fish stuck in plastic wrappers. They got babies stuck in carriages. They key word in this statement is the word stuck, which is repeated for emphasis. As the wild celebration is happening onscreen and Hushpuppy is describing the world outside the Bathtub, a sense of constriction develops with regard to the outside world. The Bathtub, then, is its polar opposite the Bathtub is freedom. The classical 17th century philosopher Gottfired Wilhem Leibniz defines the conditions for freedom as such: Freedom in spontaneity, in virtue of which we determine ourselves; and in contingency, that is, in the exclusion of logical or metaphysical necessity (Rutherford) The Bathtub offers these two definitions of freedom for its inhabitants. Because the Bathtub is, in its very nature, a marginal society, it operates by a completely different set of rules as the society it is excluded from. The latter criterium, contingency, is defined as the exclusion of logical or metaphysical necessity, which basically means that nobody makes you do what you do, you do it because you want to. The first criterium, spontaneity, is more easily defined, and there are plenty of examples of both throughout the movie. In the first ten minutes of the movie, Hushpuppys asserts that The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world,

implying that the residents of the Bathtub celebrate just for celebrations sake. This view is also echoed by the massive unexplained party going on in the background, which also lends credence to the idea that the Bathtub is a place of unrestricted freedom. Edward Relph states Place and Placelessness that to be human is to have and to know your place (Altman 166), and to Hushpuppy and Wink, the Bathtub is the place that makes them feel human, and they are willing to fight and die to keep it that way. The world on the other side of the levee, then, has to have something wrong with it that make the Doucets feel unhuman. Hushpuppy described her first experience with the sterilized, civilized world as it being like a fish tank with no water. Thats exactly what Hushpuppy and her father were in this environment fish out of water. The structure of the other side of the levee was something neither of them were used to, and neither of them took well to being told what to do: when told he would quickly need a life-saving surgery, Wink tried to fight the doctor for telling him how to live. The attitude that the civilized people had with regard to the residents of the Bathtub is one of superiority as Hushpuppy puts it, they say we were here for our own good, as if the residents of the Bathtub couldnt fend for themselves where they lived. Outside of the realm of fiction, when faced with a similar situation, Carl Singleton, a Katrina refugee, told the outsiders, who ran the facility that he was staying in: Im here, but I own my own homeI worked just like you for years. Its not like we want to be here. (Overcoming 225) Like the Doucets, Singleton was forced from his home by disaster and then looked down upon in the eyes of those who were tasked with helping him after being forced to be where he was. This, along with the fact that they tried to force him into an invasive surgery, led to a deep

feeling of mistrust between Wink and anyone beyond the levee, further strengthening his attachment to the Bathtub. This characterization of the civilized, outside world as being sterile and unforgiving leads to a discussion of what the aims and goals of the societies on either side of the levee are. As mentioned earlier, for Hushpuppy and Wink, the safety and security of the civilized side of the levee were never far away, yet they chose to stay in the Bathtub because it offered a special type of freedom, both freedom to do what they wanted, and freedom from doing what others told them to. However, civilized society is shown as having different goals. When the first appearance of a civilized man occurs in the movie, the first words he says to the Doucets are This is a mandatory evacuation zone. For the Doucets, this represents everything wrong with life on the other side of the levee. The word mandatory connotes that someone is being forced to do something under the threat of the law. This violates Liebnizs second condition of freedom, contingency. For people who have largely lived autonomously, this is a massive change, and the Doucets werent ready to give up the freedoms they enjoyed for food and shelter. The phrase evacuation implies a removal from the Bathtub. For Hushpuppy, this would mean severing those biological and sociocultural ties that bind her to the Bathtub, where she learned to talk, speak, and live, to a place that she described as being a fish tank without water, where neither her nor her father feel like they can survive. The last word in the phrase is zone, which brings into the discussion the idea of place, of who belongs where, and by what right you can claim an area. The people from the other side of the levee are making an attempt to encroach upon their land and are portrayed as aggressors, particularly because they take the citizens of the Bathtub

from their homes. Not once in the movie is a theft ever committed in the Bathtub it is portrayed in the movie as an a place where people give and share freely with one another. These outsiders, however, came to take the Bathtub from its inhabitants. It makes sense, then, why the Doucets would choose to distance themselves from this society and stay in the Bathtub. By combining this mistrust with the biological and sociocultural place attachments that they have developed by living there for so long, Wink and Hushpuppys decision takes on a different light; instead of being seen as them choosing to stay in a place of intense precariousness, the Bathtub actually appears as a refuge a healthy alternative to the intense structure and encroachment that they would have had to face had they left. By staying through the storm, they are reaffirming what values they hold highest, and rejecting the idea that they need to give up their freedom to live and survive. Relph says that to be human is to have and to know your place. For the Doucet family, the world on the other side of the levee is a place where they dont belong. The place where they feel human is the Bathtub, and they would risk life and limb to keep it that way.

Works Cited Beasts of the Southern Wild Videorecording]. Beasts of the Southern Wild Videorecording]Prod. Lucy Alibar, et al. Perf. Anonymous 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012. <http://search.library.duke.edu/search?id=DUKE005742267>. Overcoming Katrina : African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond. Eds. edited by] D'Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand, et al. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Web. Place Attachment. Eds. edited by Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low., Irwin Altman, and Setha M. Low. New York: Plenum Press, 1992. Web. Rutherford, Donald. Leibniz on Spontaneity. Leibniz Vol. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Web.