4 on the Floor: the lives aquatic

Playing With Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story - 2021, d. Sally Aitken - Disney+
Dave Not Coming Back - 2020, d. Jonah Malak - AmazonPrime
Becoming Cousteau - 2021, d. Liz Garbus - Disney+
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou - 2004, d. Wes Anderson - Disney+ 

I wish I had discovered a passion for oceanography when I was younger, but, as a middle class white kid with really no hardships, I settled quite easily into a life of leisure and culture and, let's face it, laziness.  Why learn, why adventure, why explore when others can do it for you and you can just sit back and consume it.  It's a fairly sad self-realization, and as I sit in my mid-forties I do feel only the smallest twinge of regret for a life unlived.  That said, I kind of live for the culture I experience, that's really my comfort zone and what both fuels and satisfies me, so I don't really regret years of watching film and television, reading comics and listening to music and podcasts, and writing about a lot of it.

Anyway, sitting down with a trio of documentaries recently, and a re-watch of Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic... I found myself transfixed, as I always do whenever I watch any ocean or sea-faring documentary.  In Becoming Cousteau -- which is a brisk but thorough traversing through the life of the most famous French ocean explorer (filmmaker/conservationist etc) Jacques Cousteau -- we learn about how the Captain found his love for the sea, and basically gave up so much else in his dedication to it.  He married Simone Melchior at 27, but it didn't seem for love.  Simone wanted to be on the sea, and she was willing to marry this "ugly" man (he had just had jaundice when she met him, she clarifies) and bear him two sons if she could just live on the boat.  It was her strongest, and, at least from the limited perspective of a documentary about her husband, only desire.  As much as Jacques loved being on his ship, the Calypso, it seemed that Simone loved it more.  Even faced with terminal illness, she still forged ahead with another voyage so strong was her desire to be at sea.  

I did not have that drive, I think, for anything. Jacques and Simone sacrificed their land lives for their adventures, as did the crew of the Calypso.  Everyone worked for free, all resources went into the boat and their exploration equipment.  It was noted that it seemed in each of them a desire to escape from land and just be surrounded by the unknown.  In the process of escaping and exploring, as young men in the 40's and 50's, they ignorantly just did stupid guy shit, like harassing whales and tortoises, blowing up coral reefs to count the fish, and slaughtering sharks preying upon a young whale.  As resources ran dry, they accepted help from big oil in the early 50's and started exploring the depths of the seas for oil on their behalf, directly responsible for Abu Dhabi's oil boom.  Less than a decade later Cousteau and crew became increasingly aware of the detrimental effects the industrialised world was having on our water systems.  A hard pivot into protectionism and conservation was his dedicated atonement for the rest of his life.

It's kind of the same pattern we see in Australian diver Valerie Taylor.  She started her diving career as a shark hunter, participating in spearfishing tournaments in the late 50's and early 60's.  Being a woman was obviously outside the norm for the sport and the documented footage of the time is eyerolling in its ogling gaze.  Valerie met her husband, Ron Taylor, in the sport, and together they they studied sharks, their behaviour and started making films.  Like Cousteau's Palm d'Or-winning film The Silent World  in 1953, the Taylors had a hit film in 1971 with Blue Water, White Death.  Of course, the Taylor's success could likely be directly linked to the global exposure Cousteau's adventure films and television series.  But they caught the attention of young Steven Spielberg who enlisted their help in bringing Peter Benchley's Jaws novel to life (the Taylors were largely responsible for directing all second unit shark footage).  The unfortunate side effect of Jaws' massive success, which the Taylors were partly responsible, was a dramatic increase in fear of the creatures.  The uneducated fear of sharks was something that the Taylors would strive to combat for the rest of their lives (Rod would pass away in 2012, but Valerie continues to run awareness campaigns globally), again an atonement for their earlier ignorance.  

In the grammatically frustrating Dave Not Coming Back there is also an atonement of sorts.  The whole purpose of the documentary is to basically find something to take away from Australian cave diver Dave Shaw's death during an attempted body recovery in the Boesmangat cave located in North Cape, South Africa.  In 2004, Shaw and cave diving partner, Don Shirley (no, not the Green Book one) were exploring the Boesmangat when they discovered the body of a young diver who disappeared there a decade earlier.  With the support of that young man's family, they mounted a recovery mission, which, given the severe depth of the cave (280 meters), would be extremely dangerous and time consuming.  Diving down 280 meters would take less than 20 minutes, resurfacing, however could take upwards of 20 hours.  People with replacement air tanks would have to be stationed at key stages to support the slow ascent.  All of this carefulness, all of the patience required, all of the preparation...it's definitely not something that appeals to me recreationally, but it's fascinating to watch and learn.

The documentary sets up the body recovery with the intricate detail of a heist.  There is a definite sense that they should not be doing this, but Dave most of all is determined.  The dangers are very up front and Dave explicitly states that if he doesn't make his first resurfacing mark on time that no one should come after him, nor wait for him.  The timing was precise and better to lose one life in this adventure than two.  As the title intones, things do not go well for Dave, and Don makes a spur of the moment decision to go after Dave which results in disaster.  The film's third act pivots from the "heist" to an intense rescue mission as the remaining crew have to do everything in their arsenal of skills and resources to get a suffering-from-the-bends Don to the surface before he dies but without further aggrivating his decompression sickness.  It's truly a nail biter.

In Becoming Cousteau, we are told of Jacques and partner Émile Gagnan developing the Aqua-Lung for deeper sea diving.  Its a breakthrough for underwater exploration, but a breakthrough that comes at a cost.  Having just watched Dave Not Coming Back prior to Becoming Cousteau one of the questions I was left with was how did we discover decompression sickness, and how did we learn how to moderate it? The Cousteau doc, in detailing the explorer's participation in evolving the Aqua-Lung also shows the horrifying side effects of not understanding what the effects of depths do on the human body, as one of Cousteau's colleagues dies during a prototype test.  Later on we find Cousteau's crew involved in deep-sea habitat tests, with two subjects living inside a submerged canister for a week, with no true ill effects but also noting a different mental space.

If there's a drawback to Becoming Cousteau it's that it has to move so quickly through everything the man has done.  There's no time for depth (not a pun), as there's just so much to cover (it even skips past the fact that Cousteau was in part responsible for the French Navy joining the Allies, and that his estranged brother (who they don't even talk about) was a Nazi collaborator and setenced to death in 1946 (though this was commuted and he was eventually released from prison).  But the thing is Cousteau was a filmmaker (he notes he would loathe to be called a documentarian, but that's truly what he was), having a camera with him most of his life and filming constantly.  He developed his own case for filming underwater and some of the pre-WWII footage included in this film, is stunningly unreal in black-and-white.  It's not something we're used to seeing.  The sheer volume of footage this documentary jumps through is boggling, but it's also kind of frenetic as a result.  It doesn't slow down much to breathe in any of what it shows.  That said there's hundreds of hours of Cousteau documentaries to partake in (I don't know if they can be enjoyed, per se, given the earlier ignorance and frat-boy brutishness of the filmmakers, and then the man's increasingly grim outlook on the moribund state of the world.)

Filming underwater was also a passion of Valerie Taylor, and it's a huge part of the draw of her film as well.  It's obviously narrowed into specifically a look at sharks, but they are endlessly fascinating creatures, intimidating with a grotesque beauty.  The behind-the-scenes footage of Jaws should be enough to draw in any cinephile, but there is definitely rewards beyond that.  If my excitement for Taylor's seems lacking in comparison, it's only because I watched it some time ago, as opposed to having seen Dave Not Coming Back and Becoming Cousteau in the past few days.

The underwater footage of Dave Not Coming Back is haunting and gorgeous.  There is archival footage from previous dives as well as recreation footage.  The film, mid-way through, makes it explicitly clear that Don Shirley is leading the re-creation filming efforts (showing some of the initial rehearsals), and the results are, as noted, breathtaking -- in some cases literally.  I found myself at times, during the re-creation action, holding my breath.  Don describing the effects of decompression sickness (the bends) coming on, I could sympathize, if only a little, having been experiencing bouts of severe vertigo in the past two months.  Beyond both the archive and re-creation footage there are some absolutely gorgeous vistas of North Cape and the ostensible hellmouth that is Boesmangat, an open wound in the surface of the otherwise flat desert.  It's ironic that, as the film intones, filming underwater was part of what lead to Dave's death.  Wearing a helmet with an encased camera led to an unfortunate tragedy of errors.  

All three of these documentaries are absolutely worthy watching, though Dave Not Coming Home being both the most intimate, beautiful and upsetting of the three, but also somehow the most rewarding.  The Talor documentary is cautiously uplifting, while the Cousteau documentary is a whirlwind that has many joys and just as many bummers.  

Now, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou doesn't have the same real-world, tangible attraction to the beauty, mystery, and danger of the natural world as these documentaries do.  If anything Life Aquatic lives in sort of the recesses of the juvenile mind of someone who absorbed the worlds of Valerie Taylor and Jacques Cousteau as a child, and is spitting that representation back out on the screen in intricate detail.

Zissou is clearly modeled after Cousteau, to the point that much of the appeal of Becoming Cousteau was in discovering just how much of the man's life Anderson and Noah Baumbach adopted for their script.  It's not direct lifting, but the parallels are easy enough to find, and one could see from Cousteau's personality, his ambitions and regrets, how Zissou was born as a fictional character, and how his world was built around him.

What I love about Life Acquatic is the exact opposite of what I love about the Cousteau doc, I love its artificiality.  I adore the cross-sectioned boat that we clearly see is a stage setting but when Anderson pans in to follow a character as they manoeuvre through its confines, it's such a tangible world we escape into.  The wardrobe, the facial hair, the physiques, the adventures are all a part of the ordeal, and it's all grounded by amazing performances from Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Kate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Angelica Houston and all the supporting character actors doing fine, fine work.  All of the underwater sequences are highly artistic and creative stop motion, which only deepens the film's artificiality.  It's a bold choice but it fits with this kind of glorified, adventurous, otherworldly, superheroic perspective that a child might have had watching Cousteau's adventures (and Cousteau demanded his film be called Adventures, not documentaries).

The music of Becoming Cousteau really sticks out, and I think it's because it feels in tune with Mark Mothersbough's score for Life Aquatic. There's catchy early digital tones in both and I have to wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg.

I had, as a child, a few Fisher Price Adventure Toys.  As I get older, and deeper into my childhood nostalgia, I continue to forget about just how great these toys were.  Whenever I watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I wish for a whole series of Zissou branded adventure toys.  Kind of like how The Mandalorian feels like Jon Favreau playing with his Star Wars action figures and vehicles, LIfe Aquaticfeels like Anderson playing with his Fisher Price Adventure heroes.

And now we see why I didn't ever get into diving into the ocean.  Everything with me comes back to sitting idly and playing with toys.