Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
The equivalent of flash
fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple,
linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the
use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations
of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.
Shhh
(2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a
young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister
Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's
scorn.
She regards her younger
brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide,
insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence,
his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been
cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the
results under a knit cap.
Although the children
share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous
appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame,
as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an
extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why
Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.
Once he faces the monster,
feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and
Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his
sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his
lips and says “shhh!”
At the end of the picture,
half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the
monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who
looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the
original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing
down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room
after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to
eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the
monster's prey.
The filmmakers offer
several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that
confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior.
However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by
Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.
The first two pictures
depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:
- He lies supine on the floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”
- The next picture shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips, and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object. Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”
Several of the next
drawings concern the monster:
- Guillermo tells Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “. . . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
- As he stands before the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His passage to the bathroom, [sic] locked away a creature would appear.
- Guillermo loses control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
- He dared not even wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”
The next two drawings
focus on Guillermo himself:
- Guillermo holds a hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of our dear boy.”
- As Guillermo takes a pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question: “Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”
The final picture is text:
“Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.
During the movie's action,
we learn these facts about Guillermo:
- He is neglected (left alone) much of the time.
- He is artistic and imaginative.
- He cuts his hair to feed the monster.
- His sister is emotionally and abusive toward him.
- He stutters.
- He is incontinent.
- He is asthmatic and relies on an inhaler.
- He finds the monster both frightening and disgusting.
- Earlier, when he called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he does the same thing.
To understand the monster,
we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.
Consulting psychological
theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and
trichophagia,
or the compulsive eating
of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a
psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state,
a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and
loneliness.
Although stuttering can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by “stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,” and “low self-esteem.”
Urinary
incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but
emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response
precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine
can also cause urinary incontinence.
Although asthma
is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s
response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release
of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the
airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to
discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore
the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe
stress he experiences on a regular basis.
It appears that the
alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters'
emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for
Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young
child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to
a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia,
stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has
low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.
There
seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none
of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen
nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to
her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her
demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the
alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each
in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members
appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the
grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.
The monster appears, then,
to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness,
and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's
emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's
emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his
mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he
feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of
the family.
The narrator tells the
audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so,
the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he
creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he
may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented;
he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and
cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his
fear.
He can also picture an
adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh
treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low
self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and
grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the
place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive
himself and to cleanse himself.
His artistic ability
allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having
accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer
his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By
overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem,
stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining
confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and
he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the
monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not
need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of
his room.
He overcomes the part of
the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's
victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced
his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth,
she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust,
humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat
that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must
bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.
Instead of picturing
himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his
sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor
becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she
helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster
he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low
self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and
grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head,
but the essence of his soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche warns,
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the
abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems
to inform the short film.
In the final analysis,
there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is
willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far
as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling
her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she,
presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a
finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss
as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no
qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which
had been his own.
Whether his father and his
sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains
that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he
has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through
the exercise of his imagination.
Shhh
is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is
amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The
drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The
psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is
alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.
Nevertheless,
the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern,
analyze, and appreciate.