Room for (Materiality's) Maneuver: Reading the Oppositional in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water

In an important work of narrative theory regarding oppositional storytelling, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative, Ross Chambers argues: "For deprivation of the power to speak is most usually not literal: if one excludes infants and animals, and those who are held incommunicado … what is usually meant by the phrase is exclusion from the powerful positions of 'preexisting,' socially derived authority."¹ The idea appears as commonsensical enough: removal of the power to speak usually occurs not in the material sense of being incapable of articulating with a voice but as closure from opportunities to seize narrative authority. Thus, this argument of socially imposed voicelessness enables Chambers to explain how narratives offer a platform for alternative voicings of marginalized experience that work to achieve "shifts in [the domain of] desire" in order to inaugurate alternative futures of investment in devalued lives.²

Our argument here moves alongside Chambers's argument regarding the provision of "narrative oppositionality" as an alternative space from which to speak experiences of social devaluation.³ Yet we also intend to extend the parameters of narrative theory— and media studies—to include materially voiceless subjects that Chambers could envision only as exceptions to the rule organized around participants who are infant(ilized), animalized, or otherwise "held incommunicado." Further, our argument works alongside recent film studies analyses of the politics of the audio track, specifically the authority of voice-over to externalize the otherwise suppressed interiority of voiceless subjects.⁴ Rather than "give voice" to voiceless subjects in a humanist mode that overvalues spoken communication as a most valued possession of embodiment, we argue that neo-materialist modes of storytelling offer other avenues for valuing the alternative capacities of nonnormative subjects, particularly human and nonhuman animals.

Bodies that might be enlisted among those that are materially "incommunicado" include the mute disabled protagonist Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and the warbling amphibian figure (Doug Jones) who populate the 2017 Academy Award-winning film by Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. All of Chambers's categories of exceptional (i.e., literal) voicelessness are on display in this fantasy universe to materialize the deprivation of the power to speak for those occupying "peripheral embodiments."⁵ Whereas voicelessness is often regarded as a metaphor for political powerlessness, we foreground actual communication disability as a way to explore a more phenomeno-logical representational strategy at work in the film. In The Shape of Water, representations of speech communication prove innovative in their deployment of a neo-materialist approach to disability. Neo-materialism involves an encounter with the more "lively agential realism" of matter that counters the tendency to discount forms of embodiment as passive, inert surfaces awaiting ideological imprinting, as is often the case in social constructivist-based readings.⁶ First, the protagonist, Elisa, is a woman who literally cannot vocalize her thoughts because her communication "disorder" (i.e., muteness) leads her to use sign language as an alternative pathway for expression. For example, in one scene the head of security at the OCCAM Aerospace Research Facility (her place of employment), Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), sexually threatens Elisa in the infantilizing language of patriarchy: "You're not much to look at. When you say you're mute, are you silent entirely or do you squawk a little? I don't mind those scars or that you can't speak either. Kind of gets me going."⁷ For Strickland, muteness represents an inferior characteristic of voicelessness that is also a sexual turn-on, as Elisa would not be able to articulate refusal; yet the first two forms of objectification also position her as a child, one he can easily control beneath the patronizing tutelage of government-based, paternalistic oversight. In this exchange Strickland references Elisa as desirably incommunicado, sexually exploitable, and thus deserving of her minimum-wage employment as one of the "shit cleaners" at OCCAM. What Chambers might analyze as the political silencing of femininity by heteronor-mative aggression surfaces in Elisa's experience of voicelessness, an inability to talk...