The Shape Of Water may have cleaned up at the Academy Awards earlier this year, but the only thing everyone will remember from the movie is that unsettling yet weirdly sweet sex scene between Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and the hunky fish man. I’ve seen the movie three times and that’s still the only thing I remember, which probably speaks more about me than the film.
Turns out that the movie’s aquatic mating dance may have been its saving grace in a plagiarism suit.
Back in February, playwright Paul Zindel filed a lawsuit claiming that Guillermo Del Toro’s script about a mute female janitor who falls in love with a sexy fish man was a blatant rip-off of his own play, which is titled Let Me Hear You Whisper and revolves around a female janitor who bonds with a dolphin before ultimately trying to save it from a secret lab.
Fox Searchlight quickly shot down those plagiarism claims, stating that both works completely different because The Shape Of Water is “a decidedly adult meld of genres” that includes a romantic and sexual relationship between Elisa and the humanoid amphibian.
That’s right, the main defence mounted by The Shape Of Water is that the main character porked the sexy fish man.
Since The Shape Of Water had Elisa go the full home run with the fish man while Let Me Hear You Whisper didn’t even let the protagonist hold hands with the dolphin, Fox Searchlight were able to argue that the play was more about the treatment of the dolphin than trying to sleep with it and is therefore completely different to Del Toro’s film.
The judge ultimately ruled that Zindel’s idea of a relationship between a person and animal (or non-human being) isn’t exactly a new idea, with movies like Free Willy and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial having tackled similar themes, and threw out the plagiarism lawsuit. I guess the ruling also counts as a win in human-fish relations .
That’s great news for Fox Searchlight and Del Toro, who emphatically defended The Shape Of Water against all the plagiarism claims when they were first brought up, but the judge’s decision does make me slightly worried.
I’m no lawyer but if “having sex with a fish man” is now a legal defence against plagiarism claims, then there’s a possibility that we’ll be seeing a lot more similar-looking movies featuring weird sex scenes between a person and anything that’s alive and humanoid.
Turns out sex can do more than just sell in Hollywood.