12 Days of Monsters: Day 3
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Charybdis
from the 1997 miniseries THE ODYSSEY
Personal Context
I grew up loving monsters, and loving Greek mythology - and so, I grew up loving The Odyssey, with its mythological hero-king fighting through a slew of different supernatural beasties over 10 long years before finally making it back home. I didn't read the actual poem by Homer until...well, never, honestly; but as a kid I read a ton of different books retelling the events of these myths.
I only read the ones with pictures, though, because what I really wanted was to see the monsters. This led me to also seek out any TV show or movie that depicted these creatures - which eventually led to me seeing the 1997 miniseries THE ODYSSEY. (I think I remember getting my parents to rent it on VHS, rather than seeing it live on TV.)
I fucking loved this thing. I haven't rewatched it in decades, so I have no clue if it holds up, but I loved it so much that for a while I basically thought of it as the definitive telling of the myth...so much so that I was confused when I would read retellings of it later on that went differently from the miniseries.
And my favorite part of the miniseries was the part with Scylla and Charybdis, the most monstrous monsters in The Odyssey.
The Set-up
What are Scylla and Charybdis?
Myth is a slippery thing and there's no single "official" canon for a lot of this stuff, but the essence goes like this: Scylla and Charybdis were a pair of sea monsters that lived on either side of a perilous strait, one which was so narrow that sailors couldn't cross it without getting too close to at least one of the two monsters.
Scylla had 6 heads that ate people. (There's a lot more about her visual depiction, but this post ain't about her. Look her up, though.) If you sailed near her, each head would snatch a member of your crew - so you would guaranteed lose 6 lives if you went past her.
Charybdis lived at the bottom of the sea, which is convenient because she drank sea water - but Charybdis was the more dangerous of the two: Three times a day, Charybdis would swallow so much sea water that she would create a great whirlpool, sucking any ship caught in it to a watery doom. So if you pass by Charybdis, you might lose nothing - or you might lose everything.
Scylla and Charybdis feature in a variety of myths and mythological depictions, both separately and together, but their most famous depiction is in The Odyssey by Homer. During his voyage, Odysseus has to sail through the straight that is straddled by the two monsters, and needs to choose whether he will guarantee that 6 of his crew die by passing Scylla, or risk all of them dying by passing Charybdis.
In the poem, he passes by Scylla.
In the miniseries, there is no choice - he meets both Scylla and Charybdis, making this one of the rare media where we actually get a good look at the latter.
The Miniseries
I Know That Smile
In the miniseries, Charybdis is shown as an utterly titanic creature, whose true size and shape is never shown - just a maw that is many, many times larger than our hero’s entire ship.
Charybdis' mouth is an irregular, asymmetrical thing with at least 5-6 "lobes" or "jaws" on the outer-most part, frilled with long teeth, beyond which are several fleshy protrusions from which even more teeth jut out. (Overall, these protrusions are less like pharyngeal or inner jaws, and more like the additional teeth-like spikes in the mouths of sea turtles.)
Charybdis as it appears in the 1997 miniseries THE ODYSSEY.
I love this design. It's huge, so as a little kid I thought it was awesome right off the bat. But it's also just totally fucking weird and monstrous.
The basic design elements of Charybdis' mouth in this miniseries is, in some senses, fairly generic among fictional monsters - at least, by now it is. If you're into fantasy or sci-fi monsters, you've probably seen this sort of design a lot. For me, I saw it most in the "wurms" from Magic: The Gathering. For others, it may have been in Shai Hulud, the giant worm creatures from the Dune books. There's tons of other examples (some of which aren't worms, too!) I think it's interesting to speculate about why this design is so common - and what sorts of elements make it up.
Let’s take little jaunt into some real-world biology, mostly led by wild speculation about human psychology.
Inside the mouth of a leatherback sea turtle. Those mean-looking spikes are just for snagging slippery jellyfish. Photo by Tom Doyle
A typical depiction of “wurms” in Magic circa 2001. Art by Christopher Moeller, for the card “Crush of Wurms”
The giant sand-worm Shai Hulud, as it appears in the 1984 film DUNE. Note the combination of a more-than-two-part mouth with many inner teeth.
The Visual Design
How to Build a Mouth Wrong
The most basic element of this type of mouth is that it has "too many jaws". Adding extra copies of some anatomic feature is a common way to create a fantastical creature design. And at the end of the day, most people will only really encounter one basic layout for a mouth: It has a top part (the maxilla) and a bottom part (the mandible). Of course there's still a huge amount of variety in mouth anatomy - for instance, many types of snake have two mandibles rather than one, which they can move independently from each other (and some even have a second entirely separate set of jaws inside their mouth, like the creature from the 1979 film ALIEN) - but most people still perceive that as being your basic two-part mouth, just with a little twist.
The “face” of a wolf spider. Where is its “mouth”? Photo by Anthony Bannister
To think of mouths that really deviate from that basic maxilla/mandible layout, most people gotta go small - i.e. to invertebrates, usually arthropods. (Yes, giant squids are the largest invertebrates and are quite larger than most mammals - but their mouths are a simple two-part beak.) Even your friends who aren't entomologists will generally have some awareness that, say, the mouth of a spider has like a billion goddamn parts that all move in weird ways.
But even that is not an entirely accurate representation of those animals, ultimately - if you showed someone a close-up picture of a spider's face and asked them to point out all the parts of the mouth, chances are good that everything they point to is not actually part of its mouth. All the little moving bits - stuff like chelicerae (where the fangs attach) and pedipalps (the little not-legs next to the chelicerae) - are appendages that manipulate food and get it to the right place, which is the spider's actual mouth - which is essentially just a little hole behind all that. We think of a spider’s fangs as being roughly analogous to teeth, but their fangs aren’t inside or even on their mouths at all. They’re more like fingers that come out of the face.
At the end of the day, which parts we call the "mouth parts" is somewhat arbitrary, and the fact remains that a lot of arthropods do have an arrangement of stuff around their feeding hole that is just a bunch weirder than anything else most people encounter in day-to-day life. And since the things with mouths like that don't really get too big in the modern day, putting the mouth plan from a really tiny thing onto a really big thing instantly makes for an attention-getting monster design.
The other element of this weird mouth trope is, I think, its roundness. As I said above, the vast majority of mouths that people can think of have two distinct parts - and a lot of the time, when trying to make more "insectoid mouths", people will just rotate the two parts 90 degrees, like the only major different between your mouth and a bug's mouth is that one of them is sideways. But a more circular mouth has to open and close totally differently - which, again, makes it more strange-looking. Sure, lots of mouths can look round when they open, usually thanks to lips - but a mouth where the actual parts form a radially-symmetrical circle are much rarer and weirder.
The oral disc of a sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) - full of teeth, all of which are outside the animal’s actual mouth. Photo by T. Lawrence
One of the few animals with what most people would recognize as a "round mouth" is a lamprey - and, like my example with the spider, that mostly relies on the fuzziness around what we actually decide to define as the "mouth". Lampreys don't have jaws, but they do have things that look like teeth all around their mouth-holes. Those teeth are used to hold onto their food source, similar to how a lot of jawed creatures use their teeth, but in a very different way. The lamprey also can't fully "close" that round disc with all the "teeth" in it, which makes the intuitive visual distinction between "mouth" and "face" trickier here. (Anatomically, the area with the teeth is known as the “oral disc”, which is distinct from the animal’s actual mouth.)
At the end of the day, the "big round multi-part mouth" trope of monster design seems to have a lot going for it that might explain its persistence. In essence, it's clearly alien/unusual (especially compared with most people's experience), but also it's easy to intuit how it "works" - and therefore it's easy for most people to interpret/understand the design.
Reflections
Hungry as the Sea
One last interesting note here is about the depiction of Charybdis in general. Unlike Scylla, Charybdis is never visually described in Homer's original poem.
When I tried to search for historical depictions of the creature, the oldest depictions I can find simply show it as a whirlpool - as in, you don't see any of the creature's anatomy at all.
However, many modern depictions of Charybdis do converge on the same basic elements that appear in the 1997 miniseries - that round, multi-part mouth. The 2013 film PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS features Charybdis prominently in one scene, and also depicts a mouth very similar to the miniseries I mentioned, for instance. Despite a ton of variation in how the rest of the creature's body is designed, this type of mouth seems to be one of the more consistent and prominent elements across depictions.
Charybdis as it appears in the 2013 film PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS
On one hand, this makes a lot of intuitive sense: The creature was first identified in myth as living at the base of whirlpools, i.e. something big and round, and thus if you want to make the creature's anatomy fit into the general shape of a whirlpool you will probably want a big round mouth.
On the other hand, it does still show a somewhat interesting shift in how this creature is depicted - specifically, as a maneater, like Scylla. In Homer's initial depiction, Charybdis only consumes water - the sailors she kills are just collateral damage in her feeding process. (This is also tied to her creation myth, as far as I can tell: One version has her as a child of the sea-god Poseidon, who served her father by sinking islands. As punishment, the chief god Zeus turned her into a monster with an insatiable appetite to swallow the sea.) Obviously, it's not that big a leap to go from "she makes whirlpools while feeding, which accidentally sink ships" to "she makes whirlpools while feeding, to catch and eat ships" - but still.
And indeed, you can see that shift reflected in the anatomy of her modern depictions. For instance, consider the image of the giant maw at the bottom of the sea, several times bigger than a boat, and ask yourself the question from my previous post in this series:
Why does it have teeth?
A mouth that big can swallow any living prey whole, easily. The teeth are sharp and pointy, so they're not really designed for chewing or otherwise breaking the prey apart (if it even could chew). So why have teeth at all?
In this case, there is no reason in the fiction of this miniseries for her to have teeth - but there's a good reason for the designer of this monster to give her teeth:
As huge and strange as she is, the teeth make it clear that this enormous pit opening up beneath the sea is, in fact, a mouth.
