Wasp (Andrea Arnold, 2003)
Narrative Structure
Wasp follows a terrible mother who drags her kids to a pub and makes them sit outside all evening while she tries to impress a man she claims looks like David Beckham. It opens with the mother wandering the streets barefoot with her dirty looking children and her naked baby. She confronts another mother about a dispute and they have a fight in the street. Then a man the mother used to know asks her on a date and she goes home to get ready. The mother can’t find anyone to babysit her kids and so drags her kids to the pub with her and makes them sit outside. The mother brings out her kids a glass of coke and a packet of crisps and then goes back into the pub, spending the last of her money on the coke and crisps along with a drink for herself and the new man. The children get very hungry and eat some ribs off the floor, which attracts a wasp into the youngest boys mouth. The mother comes out screaming and tries to get the wasp out. The man then drives the kids to get chips and all seems to be well. Throughout the film, the mother is consistently told that her kids should be taken off her, and initially we feel bad for her. But by the end of the we really hang on, her kids absolutely should be taken off her.
The film is told in a fairly linear fashion, but uses parallel editing throughout a large part of the film. The film usually does this to highlight how the mother is neglecting her children. For example, the film shows the mother in the car about to hook up with the man, and uses parallel editing to show the baby with the was crawling into his mouth. Or the film will show us the mother buying drinks, and then the children outside complaining that they’re hungry.
Cinematic Influences
The main bit of context needed for Wasp is the state of UK council estates in the early 2000’s. During rough periods in britain’s history people needed cheap housing and in order to achieve this, chunks of land were bought and developed by councils into council estates where people could enjoy low rent. Over time these estates became extremely rough, with crime becoming rampant and the people living there often ending up with little to no real education. This leads to people like the main mother in wasp. While she genuinely is a terrible mother, we get the feel that she is more a product of her surroundings rather than her own intuition. This is especially sad once we realise that the children she is mistreating are pretty much bound to go down the exact same path thanks to their surroundings.
Creating Meaning and Effect
The film represents the bad mother very well throughout its runtime. It makes it very clear that she is a terrible mother who is horribly mistreating her children (even feeding them pure sugar) but we are always still made to feel a little bad for her. It’s terrible that she spends her only bit of money in the pub rather than on her children, but it’s also terrible that she has ended up with that little money. It goes on like this until the end of the film, when it takes a wasp crawling into her child’s mouth for the mother to finally run to them and actually make sure they’re okay.
The film also does a very good job aesthetically. It feels very real and exactly how one of these council estates would. This is partly due to the directors skill and the way colour and the camera are used but is also largely due to the fact that everything was filmed on location in a real council estate.