Image description: still from The Shape of Water: Elisa and the creature face each other lovingly through the glass of his tank.

I didn’t get to the The Shape of Water until well after it had been awarded the Oscar for best film. A few months late to the party, entering the cinema I was excited yet apprehensive: Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) has been one of my favourite films since the Pale Man terrified me aged 13; I’ve experienced Sally Hawkins (Made in Dagenham, Happy Go Lucky and Paddington) as a practically flawless, charming, actor in some other of my top films; and, well, this one had just won an Oscar.

So excited yes. But apprehensive. Because no matter how Oscar-worthy, TSOW was yet another to add to my ever-growing list of films featuring a disabled character (played by an able-bodied actor), made by an able-bodied director. Yet, I thought perhaps that as a more ‘artsy’ offering than the sanitized The Intouchables (2011), or the patronizing Wonder (2017), that I would have fewer issues with this offering.

I was wrong. What I sat through for just over two hours was not just furiously ableist in its casting, but the very bones of its storytelling was steeped in offensive, outdated, and harmful stereotypes of the disabled experience. It terrified me more than any of the other films on my list (even Me Before You (2016), that ‘romcom’ focused on assisted suicide).

The rest of this post will contain spoilers for The Shape of Water

From the start, del Torro uses the main character, Elisa’s, muteness as a cheap, shorthand way of portraying her as ‘other’. Indeed, the whole plot revolves around those who are ‘other’, in a move that places disability on the same plain of difference as having gills and being a ‘water God’. Elisa and her Fish Man fall in love because they are both outsiders, both ‘other’ – she because she is mute, he because he is the creature from the black lagoon.

Or do they? Actually, no. The real reason for their relationship is expressly discussed in a speech given by Elisa about halfway through the film. It was during this speech that I decided to never again give del Torro’s films any of my time or money.

I say it was Elisa’s speech. Actually, she signs while her words are voiced by an able-bodied character. Now, this is a trick which I’m not denying could work well as a way of exploring the marginalization of disabled voices in another context, but here it just added insult to ableism. Elisa’s – now twice-removed words – come at us through the voice of Giles as she explains why she must save the fish man:

‘The way he looks at me … he doesn’t know what I lack or how I am incomplete’.

Forgive me if I focus on a single word, but this seems radically different from if this line had been, ‘he does not mind what I lack’. It is not just because Elisa and the creature sail in the same ‘otherness’ ship that they fall in love, but because he does not know that she is disabled. In one scene del Torro not only links disability with incompleteness, otherness, a defined lack, but also makes it expressly clear that the only way Elisa, or more generally The Disabled, can find love is with someone who is also ‘other’, but more importantly with someone who does not even comprehend that she has a disability.

This is not my experience. But, from conversations in the street to newspaper headlines, I am aware that two things are widely believed about disabled people. That we struggle to find love, and that our physical/cognitive difficulties make us feel that our lives are ‘lacking’. It is this sense of lack which then makes us so ‘inspirational’ when we achieve … well, anything.  The fact that I cannot walk affects my life in only very small ways; how the able-bodied community, on the whole, reacts to my inability to walk is what makes me feel like an outsider. It is being faced with a set of stairs, an inaccessible bathroom, or watching films like this which remind me that I should feel like I lack something despite my relative comfort in my own body. A large proportion of the population clearly feel that way about me — when I see films like this, I start to question if I should too.

This is why TSOW scared me so much. The world, on the whole, seemed not to notice it as a film about disability because – in Elisa’s speech and the central relationship – it reflected exactly what people think the experience of being disabled is like: lonely, unfulfilled, and unloveable. It created a fantasy world in which it was more believable for a woman with a disability to fall in love with a Fish Man, than for an able-bodied character to love that disabled woman. 

But the disabled community doesn’t need our very own army of loving Fish People who don’t understand our disabilities to slink off into the water with. We need able-bodied people to stop perceiving a lack in us on our behalf which we, for the most part, don’t see in ourselves. We need to stop being seen as people with attributes which have to be ignored to reach the ‘real’ person underneath the disability. Rather, we need society to be so accepting of our disabilities – whether this be by building ramps, or simply engaging with us as equal beings – that those disabilities can somewhat melt away and become as unimportant to the outside world as they so often are to us. This is not to say that I don’t have bad days. Days when the very fact that my legs don’t work would probably upset me even if we lived in a totally accessible world. But that is because I am a person who can feel different things at different times. 

But mostly we need to be allowed to start telling our own stories, so that the same harmful, terrifically upsetting, stereotypical ideas stop being recycled in order to ‘move’ or ‘inspire’ able-bodied audiences. Disabled lives are more complicated, fulfilled, and normal than del Torro knows. Films like this are lacking, films like this are incomplete, not the disabled lives they seek to portray.