The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick

by Mallory O'Meara

Corporations, movie studios, any kind of gigantic money-making entity will bend over backward to protect the predators and assholes who make them money and give them prestige.

It’s the same reason why all those dirtbag actors and producers and directors who sexually abuse women were able to stay under the radar for so long. Many, many of them are still under the radar. The bravery of the victims coming forward is the only reason the tide is slowly, slowly turning. Ultimately, the important thing to companies isn’t ethics. It’s money and power. For decades, they’ve been happily complicit in this bullshit system as long as money was being made. Men like Harvey Weinstein aren’t losing their careers because movie studios are growing spines and hearts. They’re losing careers because of the Everest-esque mountain of damning evidence stacked against them and that the public outcry might make those studios lose money.

The best monster films don’t just parade some sort of terrifying beast in front of your eyes. They pull at a hidden element of your mind, a part that feels ugly, or afraid, or lonely. They give it flesh and blood, and sometimes sharp teeth.

The power of a monster movie is in seeing that dark part of you running around on-screen. You get to watch it wreak the havoc and devastation you should never effect in real life. It’s cathartic to see what happens if you let that part of yourself loose instead of shunning it and banishing it to its own Black Lagoon.

At what point are women forgiven for not being supernaturally resilient Amazons who spend all their waking hours fighting injustice? Milicent was thirty-seven and had been working in and out of male-dominated artistic industries for fifteen years. She had a more successful and varied creative career than many people could dream of. My frustration with her was just a way of protecting my broken heart.

Belinda told me that if I went to the Los Angeles Mormon temple and offered them my personal information, I would be granted access to their extensive genealogical archives. In exchange for being a potential ghost bride to some lonely Mormon man, I would get to search through one of the best family databases in the world. For a short moment, I weighed the annoyance of an eternity of turning down advances by random dead dudes against finding Milicent. Hey, I was desperate. Don’t ever say I wasn’t dedicated to writing this book. I decided to do it.

Remember, depression is a mental health issue. When you have depression, you don’t need a specific trigger or thing to get depressed about. Depression takes care of that for you, finding worries in your life or inventing reasons to be depressed. You can be depressed during the times in your life when you should be happiest, whether because of work success or finding a great romantic partner or going on a wonderful trip.

One of the things I admire most about Milicent Patrick is her unwillingness to define her life based on anything but her own satisfaction. She dressed the way that she wanted to, did the work that she wanted to and dated the people that she wanted to. This fierce hold on her own desires is what is important.

I’m estranged from my own parents for similar reasons. My mother has spent a large amount of time obsessively following my career in the creative world on various social media platforms and she has spent absolutely no time supporting said career. Some people try to convince me that this means that she really cares. It doesn’t. It’s just weird. Knowing that she’s seeing everything I do but not acknowledging anything about it to me feels terrible. Whether it’s resentment or disapproval or jealousy or something else I can’t understand, I don’t know, but the Rossi family subjected Milicent to the same thing. It’s especially sad in Milicent’s case because she’s a much better person than I am, forgiving her family, reaching out again and again over the years. I just found a great therapist and adopted some cats.

“Darling, I’ll have another.” Milicent would say to Frank, and he’d pour the champagne. When he reached for the orange juice, she’d say, “Oh, no juice. No juice.” “Well, Milly,” he’d say. “That’s not a mimosa.” “That’s correct,” she’d agree.

Milicent Patrick’s final resting place is in every single Creature from the Black Lagoon T-shirt, every Metaluna Mutant toy, every VHS tape of Fantasia, every DVD of The Shape of Water. It’s on the desk of every female animator and in the pen of every woman doodling a monster in the margins of her notebook. It’s always been there. It’s just been hidden, purposely obfuscated.

The beauty of Milicent’s life and work was, like that of many other women, purposefully hidden to rob her of her power and her influence. Milicent Patrick is the lady from the black lagoon and she’s not alone. She’s raised out of it now, but there are so many other women—in every industry, living and dead—who are still in there. So many other stories are sunken in the depths of history and so many women are still shouldering the burden of harassment and abuse while trying to create. Thanks to technology and the bravery of countless women, the tides are finally changing.

Thousands and thousands of women are out there, feeling alone in their creative passions. Thousands more haven’t even entertained the idea of making art because they can’t imagine a place for themselves in that world. Milicent Patrick’s legacy isn’t just a body of influential work. It’s also an invitation.

Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.

Milicent’s life was shaped in part by real-life monsters and the obstacles put in her way by a patriarchal culture. But the lives of future artists and creators don’t have to be. It’s up to female filmmakers to keep making great art. It’s up to those who find success to hold the door open for aspiring female filmmakers. It’s up to male allies to call out their scumbag male colleagues and make spaces safer for women and marginalized voices. It’s up to actors to demand inclusion riders that require diversity on a film’s cast and crew with their contracts. It’s up to fans to demand films that are more inclusive, both in front of and behind the camera. Milicent Patrick was a woman before her time. That time is now.

One of the most iconic monsters of all time, created by Mary Shelley, the woman who invented the science fiction genre by publishing Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. She started writing the book in 1816 when she was only nineteen years old, making her the ultimate goth badass.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director in 2010, the first and only. Sixty women have been to space. It’s harder for women to get into Hollywood than it is for us to get to space.

If you’re into Die Hard, this counts as a holiday activity.

My standing for any length of time in heels is the most unlikely part of this fantasy.

could not find exactly how much money was offered to Luks, but I like to imagine Hearst opening a door and Luks diving into a room full of money, Scrooge McDuck–style.

Some books, usually the pro-Hearst ones, cite the beautiful white ocean waves breaking on the seaside rocks as reason for the name. It’s actually because those lovely rocks were white from all the seabird poop. Marketing!

Not to take away from the fact that a librarian popping out of a secret passageway to give me research help is one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me.

Aliens in other solar systems know who Walt Disney is.

My childhood fascination with this film probably explains why I grew up to be a goth.

Which sounds like a group of ghosts or maybe demons that lived in the studio and wielded bloody brushes. These artists specialized in painting shadows, if needed, onto the cels with a transparent grey solution. They might have also been ghosts or demons, but I think there is a separate union for that.

My best guess is that Paul Fitzpatrick Jr. has to do with Paul’s, well, Paul Jr., and I must posthumously congratulate Milicent on going that far for a dick joke.

I’m always curious as to how these monsters can tell, on sight, when someone is a virgin, a trick that nuns have been trying to master for centuries.