Zelda's husband...wtf?
A wet, gross, aggressive man enters in your apartment and threatens your wife. What do you do?
Sit on the couch and wait it out.
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MovieChat Forums > The Shape of Water (2017) Discussion > Zelda's husband...wtf?
You realize that he lived in a time and place where defending his wife or standing up to a white man could have meant a horrific death at the hands of a lynch mob?
That's how people behave, in a climate of fear.
The movie is set in 1962 Baltimore (North-East of the USA) not in the 1860s or in the South. Racism was still strong for sure, but there's no way a black man would have been lynched for defending his wife in his own house.
shareHate-based murders still happened in the 1960s, but my point is not do much that this guy was in active danger of being lynched, but that he'd grown up in a climate of fear. Say he's in his forties, hd was a child during the KKK's heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, and he'd have heard of many horrific killings over the years, and he'd never know what trivial incident would bring on the next.
Of course people react differently to being terrorized, in 1962 I'm sure there were black men who'd react to a big hostile white guy busting to his living room by killing him and dumping the body near some hungry gators. But it's believable that one guy would react by making nice and hoping the asshole would go away.
Well, she did often complain how he was a good-for-nothing, worthless, lazy, jobless POS who never got off his butt to make a living for himself, relying solely on her for income. And then we find out when the bad guy comes to call, the husband is also a coward and will do anything to save his own skin. I'm amazed he didn't wet himself too.
shareIt was his sore back. No doubt he would have handled business if his back wasn't hurting.
But agree with others, it wasn't the time yet for that kind of confrontation, especially considering Shannon's character was a government employee.