Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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This post discusses plot points from Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, both of which are based on true events.

Before The Weinstein Company bought 26-year-old writer-director Ryan Coogler’s debut feature Fruitvale, an examination of the 24 hours that lead up to the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station on New Year’s Eve in 2008, Mike Fleming Jr. wrote on Deadline that “The feeling from buyers I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it is that Fruitvale has the potential to be one of those festival pictures that come out of nowhere — like Precious and Beasts Of The Southern Wild — to capture audience and critical acclaim.”

What Fleming didn’t note in his post is that Fruitvale, Precious, and Beasts Of The Southern Wild all star African-American actors, and both Fruitvale and Precious, which was directed by Lee Daniels, were directed by African-American men. Sundance has gotten more buzz this festival for the number of films in its narrative feature competition that were directed by women. But it’s equally important to note the festival’s role in creating buzz for films about African-American characters that translate into distribution deals and profits: Precious made $47.6 million domestically on a production budget of $10 million, while the even lower-budget Beasts has made $11.5 million on a $1.8 million production budget.

Two of the best movies I saw at this year’s festival, Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, an examination of the growth of a fictionalized version of the relationship between Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) and Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond), directed by Kanye West collaborator Alexandre Moors, fell into that category. To a certain extent, they’re formally similar chronicles of deaths foretold. Both begin with footage of the real-world events they explore, Blue Caprice with a montage of news footage of Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree, and Fruitvale with cell phone video of Grant’s shooting on the BART platform. But from there, they become complementary movies on separate paths. If Fruitvale is about how prejudicial suspicion of black men can inject deadly violence into a specific life at random, Blue Caprice explores how two men build a highly specific and fatal future.

In Fruitvale, Oscar (an exceptional Michael B. Jordan) is year out of prison and almost compulsively on the make, a young man attempting to close the gap between his considerable charm and his lack of discipline. As the movie begins, he’s just talked his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) into taking him back after he cheated on her, though he’s less successful in talking the grocery store manager who fired him for lateness into giving him back his job, even when he tries to manipulate the man’s emotions and white liberalism, asking him “You want me selling dope, Brad?” At the store, he flirts with Katie (Ahna O’Reilly), a young white woman who’s gotten herself bollixed up trying to pick fish to fry for her boyfriend for a New Year’s Eve dinner. “It sounds like he’s black,” Oscar teases her, before putting her on the phone with his Grandma Bonnie, who sets Katie straight. When he finally comes clean to Sophina about losing his job, he does it two steps, first telling her that he’s unemployed, and finally admitting that he’s been so for several weeks. In between that admission and ditching a stash of marijuana he intended to sell to make the month’s rent, Oscar’s in a precarious, but hopeful position: he’s made some moves away from both dishonesty and criminality, but hasn’t started to look for legal employment or started to feel a serious pinch. As he tells Sophina, who explained to him of her New Year’s resolution to cut carbs that it takes 30 days to form a habit, he needs to “just not fuck up” for a month.
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Wired’s Observation Desk videos are meant to be quick takes on important issues, which is kind of too bad, because I could listen to Adam Rogers talk all day about ecological post-apocalyptic science fiction and why it matters.

This, I think, is the important takeaway: as Rogers puts it, “We hope that science fiction can be, in some cases, better at teaching us things than science.” By this, I don’t think he means that science fiction communicates the facts better than a biology or climate science textbook, but that fiction can give visceral life to concepts that feel abstract even when they’re clearly laid out with facts and figures that should be intellectually and emotionally comprehensible to us. Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he talks about, does a terrific job of communicating what it is like to ride out a hurricane in insufficiently hardened shelter, and what it’s like to see a landscape we’ve come to know radically rearranged in the aftermath of the storm. Educating people is one thing. Getting them emotionally invested and activated is a second step, one which art is particularly well-suited.

And that’s the reason why I get so frustrated with science fiction that is conceptually lazy or sloppy, or oriented towards spectacle rather than making an idea visceral for the audience. Not everything has to be sober, or substantive, or educational, of course. But I hate watching people make science fiction, in particular, that’s intended to leave the viewer with absolutely nothing, no connection to the things going on around them, when they leave the theater or turn off the television set.

I’ve written before about Beasts of the Southern Wild, the apocalyptic fairy tale about people living outside of the levees in Louisiana, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, remains one of my favorite movies of the year, and stars the most original superhero of the summer in six-year-old Hushpuppy. It’s a deeply, intensely political movie, though not along conventional lines: director Benh Zeitlin told writer Jeremy Butman of his characters, who live through a hurricane and resist efforts to relocate them behind the levees, that “It’s not like the movie is advocating that people not be rescued from disastrous situations. But it’s that condescending notion of, ‘We know better, you should live somewhere safer,’ which definitely infuriated me after the storm and that was a big entryway into the movie.”

I was also intrigued by what Zeitlin said in response to what I think is the most substantive critique of the movie, that it can seem to glorify extreme poverty, an answer that also clarifies the ideas behind his world-building:

The Bathtub is not a place where money exists. The whole idea of the Bathtub is that it’s a society where all the things that divide people have been removed. So there’s no religion, no politics, no money, no one sees race, there’s no rich and poor because there is no currency. So, I never thought about that because to me the Bathtub is this utopian place. And the poverty thing, to me it’s much more like it’s been cut off from the world, and it’s a survivalist place where they have to build everything by hand, they have to live off the earth. You don’t have any commodities to sustain yourself, but to me there’s no poverty there. There’s this ultimate freedom that exists there. But part of it is that when people see a trailer it’s like, “Oh, it’s a trailer. Poor people live in trailers.” That’s how I know it has been looked at, but I think that people are bringing certain preconceptions. When you see a trailer there’s a certain association. When you see black people in dirty clothes there’s an association. Those are things that people are bringing in because they’re used to those aesthetic elements communicating a very specific narrative about misery and poverty. So, it’s not that I don’t understand the reaction, but I don’t know that it’s in there.

Science fiction and fantasy can create new things, of course. But I think it’s easy to forget that they can also help us question the associations we have with images and signifiers, and pose challenges to our visions of what counts as affluence, or comfort, or an aspirational lifestyle. Respecting Hushpuppy means, at least for the duration of the movie, accepting her worldview. As she puts it, “Daddy says on the other side of the levee, on the dry side, they afraid of the water like a bunch of babies…The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world…Daddy’s always saying that up in the dry world, they ain’t got none of what we got. They only have holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in wrappers and babies stuck in carriages…Me and my daddy, we stay right here…We’s who the earth is for.”

It’s going to be an excellent summer for movies. As I’ll lay out tomorrow, The Avengers levels up the superhero movie. The fact that there’s already talk of a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel means we could be headed into a world with two big action franchises anchored by women. Prometheus looks visually and conceptually astounding. The Dark Knight promises to be a visually and intellectually rich conclusion to a powerful, darkly moral trilogy. Brave will finally put a girl at the center of a Pixar frame. But in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I wanted to call your attention to a movie that won’t get a third of the promotional heft of any of these movies but that is audacious and wonderful, intimately engaged with questions of poverty and global warming, and that features a little girl as a superhero. I refer, of course, to Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, and finally has a trailer out:

In addition to being just hugely fresh in perspective and subject matter, Beasts is interesting to me because some of the special effects were crowdsourced. I’m curious to see how audiences react to them—and to what y’all think of this trailer amidst a blockbuster glut.

The idea of the apocalypse is so big, and so overwhelming that it’s hard to look at directly, even in art. We can have heroes who avert the end of the world, or who even if they can’t stop the devastation, survive to carry on humanity’s legacy, as in 2012 or Deep Impact. And we can have mad anti-heroes like the ones in Southland Tales, who see what the other people around them can’t, who make us feel smart and sympathetic for being perceptive enough to believe in them. But both of those scenarios don’t really get at the full horror of the apocalypse: in the former, the only people we’re invested in survive; in the latter, we get to walk away pleased with ourselves if sorry for the recently and cinematically departed. One of the many things that makes Beasts of the Southern Wild, the joyous and insanely original movie that was the best thing I saw at Sundance, so remarkable is that the main character, the 6-year-old girl through whose eyes we see the world and who we want badly to survive, may also be the person who’s brought about the end of all things.

Her name is Hushpuppy, and she lives with her father Wink in a region called the Bathtub, which we’re meant to understand lies outside the levees in Louisiana. Hushpuppy’s mother, a figure of legend who was so beautiful she caused water to boil when she walked into the room and gave miraculous birth to Hushpuppy after shooting a gator, is long-since vanished. Life in the Bathtub is wildly celebratory, even in the midst of what most viewers would probably define as extreme poverty (and which they may find disturbing when it’s recast as magical realism: there is nothing transcendent about poor children eating cat food, as Hushpuppy does in one sequence, though it’s made clear that moment is a low). There are no marble countertops or Wolf stoves in the Bathtub. But Hushpuppy is absolutely convinced that she’s not deprived. “Daddy says on the other side of the levee, on the dry side, they afraid of the water like a bunch of babies,” she tells us in her introduction not just to her neighborhood, but the code she and her neighbors live by. “The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world…Daddy’s always saying that up in the dry world, they ain’t got none of what we got. They only have holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in wrappers and babies stuck in carriages…Me and my daddy, we stay right here…We’s who the earth is for.”

All of which makes it more disturbing when Hushpuppy comes to believe that she’s thrown the world violently off its axis. After a series of incidents involving a blowtorch, a football helmet, and Wink’s short-term disappearance, Hushpuppy, in a moment of acting her age, strikes her father. Even in her terror at the thought of being punished or abandoned by Wink, Hushpuppy is philosophical: “If Daddy kill me, I won’t be forgotten,” she insists. “I’m recording my story for the doctors and the scientists. In a million years, kids in school will know that there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her Daddy in the bathtub.” So it makes sense that her reaction to hitting Wink happens on the same scale: when he falls, icebergs shear off the poles, long-frozen aurochs begin to float towards land and defrost, and a storm — presumably Katrina — soaks the Bathtub, leaving behind a landscape that’s drowned, and seemingly dying of a mysterious ailment. “Mama, I think I broke something,” Hushpuppy tells her missing parent.

What follows is both a rollicking adventure to the levees, the post-Katrina refugee centers, and back to the Bathtub — and a profound moral reflection on Hushpuppy’s responsibility for the calamity that’s fallen her community and her family in the form of Wink’s illness. Beasts of the Southern Wild may not explicitly be a movie about global warming, but there’s no mistaking the movie’s profound respect for interconnectedness, whether Wink’s teaching Hushpuppy to survive in the Bathtub without him, and perhaps without any community at all, or Hushpuppy’s reflecting “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right.”

The movie also has a deep skepticism of government-run recovery efforts, which attempt to medicalize Wink and civilize Hushpuppy, rejecting them as another symptom of drylanders being out of sync with the states that are natural to them. That’s a somewhat radical proposition in a world where much of the debate has been whether the government response to Katrina was sufficient, not whether it was attuned to deep ecology. But there’s an extent to which that reaction is in keeping with the movie’s radical perspective on our relationship to the dreadful events we’re complicit in creating. We — and Hushpuppy — need time to face up to the terrors we’ve unleashed, and what we have to give up in order to banish them.

When she runs away from the Bathtub after her escape from civilization’s clutches, Hushpuppy tells us, “Everybody loses the thing that made them. That’s even how it’s supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen. They don’t run.” She ultimately faces up to her responsibilities. It remains to be seen if we can do the same.