“A small city, near the coast but far from everywhere else …” — Guillermo del Toro, writer/director
If “The Shape of Water” wins best picture at the 90th annual Academy Awards on March 4, waves of people who didn’t get around to seeing it – along with fans who want to see it again – will be treated to this line about the “Queen City of the Patapsco”:
“It’s still Baltimore … no one likes Baltimore.”
The line is spoken by the film’s villain – a military-industrial creep named Strickland played with great military-industrial creepiness by Michael Shannon. Frustrated at work and at home, he is complaining about not being able to get ahead in the world to his nitwit wife in their split-level “rancher” that could be Mount Washington or Gardenville, but certainly is not Hollins Street Market.
Little geographic detail is given but we do know that the story (filmed in Toronto, if you’re paying attention Gov. Hogan) is set in Baltimore, revealed through radio broadcasts, a laundry truck and the bile that spills from Strickland.
Just before unloading his frustrations on his wife during a middle-of-the-day clinical coupling, Strickland wonders what it might be like to “settle down … in a real city.”
OK, no one likes Baltimore. Who cares what you think, mister? But Baltimore not a real city? That’s like saying Asian crab meat is just as good as Maryland lump backfin. It ain’t true.
And, in a tale as awash in aqua as this one, shouldn’t at least one building bear the name of the great spigot-man, Abel Wolman? It’s not like del Toro isn’t familiar with some of the more intimate aspects of Baltimore; he has a true-to-life statue of Baltimore-born sideshow performer Johnny Eck in one of his Los Angeles homes. Other than that, there has been no explanation of why del Toro set this film in Baltimore.
While the once-and-future Baltimore will always be as real as a broken water main on your commute, the time in which this drippy love story is set – when steamed crabs were cheap and plentiful and “The Land of Pleasant Living” was more than a slogan — might be as good as it ever gets in our fair and stubborn town.
The era is the Kennedy administration, that strange period of radio static somewhere between Elvis and the Beatles.
It was a gone-before-we-knew-it golden age for 940,000 city residents for one bedrock reason: Good paying jobs available across the social and educational spectrum. From union-guaranteed middle-class wages at Bethlehem Steel to white-collar careers in offices above the factory floor at General Motors and Noxell and London Fog.
Today there might be 625,000 people in the city proper with little or no indispensable buffer between rich and poor. If you want an authentic glimpse of the “real city” where this fine film takes place, spend an afternoon at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Key Highway. Think of your great-grandparents and try not to weep.
But if you venture out on the museum pier where the steam tug Baltimore is docked, don’t get too close to the water.
Here, in the most real of cities, the homeless, the drunk, the murdered and the stupid fall into the murky Patapsco regularly. If they emerge, it’s for a short ride to the morgue.
At the end of “The Shape of Water,” the heroine and her be-finned lover (saviors to one another) jump from a concrete pier into the harbor for fates I will not reveal.
Rafael Alvarez lives in Greektown. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
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