University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2015
The cinematic aquarium: a history of undersea film
Jonathan Christopher Crylen
University of Iowa
Copyright 2015 Jonathan Christopher Crylen
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1839
Recommended Citation
Crylen, Jonathan Christopher. "The cinematic aquarium: a history of undersea film." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of
Iowa, 2015.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1839.
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Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons
THE CINEMATIC AQUARIUM: A HISTORY OF UNDERSEA FILM
by
Jonathan Christopher Crylen
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Film Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2015
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Paula Amad
Copyright by
JONATHAN CHRISTOPHER CRYLEN
2015
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
PH.D. THESIS
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Jonathan Christopher Crylen
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the
thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Film Studies at the August 2015 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
Paula Amad, Thesis Supervisor
Rick Altman
Steve Choe
Corey Creekmur
Laura Rigal
David Wittenberg
And the strangels will take me down deep in their brine,
The mischievous braingels down into the endless blue wine.
Tom Waits
“The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have completed this project without the help of a Ballard and
Seashore dissertation fellowship. The unburdened time it afforded me from
September 2014 to May 2015 enabled me to write more than half of these pages
from scratch and to significantly revise them all. A University of Iowa Graduate
Student Senate travel award partially funded a January 2013 trip to the Library of
Congress’s Motion Picture and Television Reading Room, where Rosemary Haynes
arranged for me to view two films by John Ernest Williamson, both essential to
chapter one.
On my committee, most thanks go to Paula Amad, a model scholar, teacher,
and adviser who generously agreed to direct this project despite not sitting on any
of my previous committees and who provided thorough pointed comments on
multiple drafts of every chapter. Without her incisive feedback, this would be a
much poorer project, and the debt I owe her for her support so late in my graduate
career cannot easily be repaid. Laura Rigal, Steve Choe, and Dave Wittenberg read
earlier versions of chapters one, two, and four, respectively, which I hope they find
improved as a result of their comments. Corey Creekmur helpfully purchased the
complete series of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau for the Department of
Cinematic Arts’s teaching DVD collection; it proved an invaluable research tool for
chapter two. Finally, Rick Altman’s teaching and writing greatly shaped how I
think about sound and technology; his influence is present throughout this project.
Among my other colleagues, special thanks go to Luke Stadel and Kyle
Stine. Luke has been my most important interlocutor during graduate school; our
iii
daily conversations about scholarship, craft beer, death-match wrestling, action
movies, doll horror, the job market, neoliberalism, and sundry other topics sustained
me throughout the writing of this dissertation. Talking with Kyle about media
theory expanded my ideas about what film studies should be and encouraged me to
take intellectual risks. In addition, our regular meetings at Joe’s Place to drink
PseudoSue, watch the NBA, and hash out ideas maintained my sanity and kept me
intellectually engaged during the 2013–14 academic year. John Durham Peters and
Jason Livingston were important interlocutors at various stages of my writing;
Hannah Frank, Dimitrios Latsis, Oliver Gaycken, and Jay Beck generously (and, in
Hannah’s case, regularly) furnished me with research leads and resources; and Juho
Ahava and Josh Kierstead deserve thanks simply for the hours they spent listening
to me vent. Audiences at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Society for the
History of Technology, Chicago Film Seminar, and University of Iowa’s Cinema
and Comparative Literature Seminar heard and offered suggestions about different
parts of this manuscript.
Finally, I would not have written this dissertation without my parents, who
tolerated—perhaps nourished—childhood passions for sharks and whales and three
texts that no doubt sparked my enduring interest in ocean media: Disney’s 20,000
Leagues under the Sea (1954) and an audio-book version of the movie that I
perpetually renewed from the Schaumburg public library, as well as Pinocchio
(1940), for the last act in which Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket plunge to the bottom
of the sea and rescue Geppetto from Monstro the Whale. Although my parents may
not understand my precarious career choice, I’m grateful nonetheless for their
continual support and encouragement.
iv
ABSTRACT
This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present.
Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings
made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of
ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea
films cannot be extricated.
For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the
deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major
influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great
environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This
project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness
is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly
histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can
increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the
planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on
exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine
environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’
meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it
characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a
particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and
destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims
to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.
v
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present.
Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made
undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration,
conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated.
For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up
close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular
understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a
powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a
cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately
linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of
marine life we see in films can increase our sensitivity to the other forms of life with which
we share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on
exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment
economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their
conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of
environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen
worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments
coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental
cinema in general.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... viii
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
Project Summary and Literature Review ........................................................................... 2
Methodology ...................................................................................................................... 9
Chapter Summaries .......................................................................................................... 16
CHAPTER ONE: AQUARIUMS, NONREPRESENTATIONAL TECHNICS,
AND THE UNDERSEA FILMS OF JOHN ERNEST WILLIAMSON ............................ 21
Undersea Movies and Aquaria ......................................................................................... 27
Undersea Cinema’s Nonrepresentational Technologies .................................................. 49
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 60
CHAPTER TWO: LIVING IN A WORLD WITHOUT SUN: JACQUES
COUSTEAU, HOMO AQUATICUS, AND THE DREAM OF CONQUERING THE
DEEP .................................................................................................................................. 63
A Dazzling Aesthetic of Freedom Undersea ................................................................... 69
Undersea Vehicles: Scooters, the Soucoupe, and the Sea Fleas ...................................... 78
Daily Life Undersea ......................................................................................................... 84
Mechanical Perception Underwater ................................................................................. 89
Toward a Nontechnical Human Undersea ....................................................................... 96
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 100
CHAPTER THREE: HUMPBACK WHALE SONG RECORDINGS, SOUND
DESIGN, AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS .............................................................. 107
A Stereophonic Mind in the Waters (1967) ................................................................... 114
Stereo Headphones: Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970).......................................... 117
Surround Sound: Star Trek IV (1986) ............................................................................ 119
Whale Songs and the Underwater Soundscape.............................................................. 124
Reversing Course ........................................................................................................... 130
Rethinking Sonic Escapism ........................................................................................... 137
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 142
CHAPTER FOUR: EXPANDING OCEANS, EXPANDED SCREENS: DEEP-SEA
EXPLORATION AND IMAX MOVIES OF THE ABYSS ............................................ 146
Sublime Aesthetics ........................................................................................................ 151
Drawing Things Together .............................................................................................. 165
IMAX Oceans and Ecology ........................................................................................... 175
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 192
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 195
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 199
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
1.1. The Williamson photosphere. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the
Sea, 40. ................................................................................................................................ 24
1.2. Diagram of the photosphere attached to barge by the flexible caisson tube.
Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 32 ...................................................... 24
1.3. Starfish illustration by Philip Henry Gosse. Image in Gosse, The Aquarium:
An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, 2nd ed. (London: John Van Voorst,
1856), 58 ............................................................................................................................. 31
1.4. View from inside the photosphere. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under
the Sea, 312. ........................................................................................................................ 31
1.5. Captain Nemo and guests peer out the Nautilus’s “magic window” in 20,000
Leagues under the Sea (Stuart Paton, 1916). ...................................................................... 35
1.6. A diver duels with a shark in 30 Leagues under the Sea. Image in Williamson,
Twenty Years under the Sea, 68 .......................................................................................... 43
1.7. A Bahamian diver plays peek-a-boo with a diving helmet for Williamson’s
daughter. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 307. ................................... 43
1.8. Patent illustration of the Williamson submarine tube with operating chamber.
Image in Charles Williamson, apparatus for submarine work, US Patent 745,469,
filed March 13, 1903, and issued December 1, 1903 ......................................................... 51
2.1. Aqua-Lung divers descend by torchlight into the blue in The Silent World................ 70
2.2. Artificial light throws the hidden colors of a coral reef into brilliant relief in
The Silent World. ................................................................................................................ 73
2.3. First shots of the Soucoupe in World without Sun ....................................................... 82
2.4. Sonar images of the ocean bottom (left) and of the sea’s deep-scattering layer
(right) made using the Edgerton “pinger.” Stills from The Silent World ........................... 95
2.5. A Bruce Mozart underwater ballerina. Image in Monroe, Silver Springs, 49 ............. 99
3.1. Admiral Kirk’s time-travel head trip in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. ............... 123
3.2. Spectrograms with English and Japanese captions. Whale voices with noise
(left) and without (right). Image in Songs of the Humpback Whale,12–13 ...................... 133
3.3. A grinning humpback meets a rowboat. Image in Songs, 4–5 .................................. 133
3.4. How whales are killed: the modern factory ship, its predecessors, and a whale
for scale. Image in Songs, 18–19 ...................................................................................... 133
3.5. Twilight, the sloop aboard which Payne and McVay recorded whale songs.
Image in Songs, 10–11 ...................................................................................................... 134
viii
4.1. A technician affixes a high-definition camera to the DSV Alvin in Volcanoes
of the Deep Sea. ................................................................................................................ 161
4.2. James Cameron reaches the Challenger Deep in Deepsea Challenge ....................... 165
4.3. A bioluminescent collage in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea........................................... 168
4.4. “Discomedusae” by Ernst Haeckel. Image in Kunstformen der Natur (1904) .......... 168
4.5. Terminator vision in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea. ...................................................... 169
4.6. The formation of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea. ................. 172
4.7. To Europa and back in Aliens of the Deep................................................................. 172
4.8. Starfish swept up in the murky currents in Leviathan. .............................................. 185
4.9. A diver beneath the Antarctic ice in Encounters at the End of the World. ................ 191
ix
1
INTRODUCTION
Midway through the recent Netflix documentary Mission Blue (Robert Nixon and Fisher
Stevens, 2014), which follows the renowned marine biologist and conservationist Sylvia
Earle’s campaign to establish protected marine sanctuaries around the globe, the
narrator pauses to note an irony: the same industries that have for over half a century
exploited the ocean for oil and gas, wreaking environmental havoc, are also responsible
for the greatest technological advances in ocean exploration. These advances, moreover,
helped deepen scientific understanding of the ocean and of its ecological import. Ocean
conservation and conquest, it would seem, share a common origin.
This irony extends to making movies, including Mission Blue itself. We have, it
seems, come to understand the ocean, and develop ecological ideas about it, primarily
on account of films and the stunning images of marine life they contain. Like many
visually arresting images of a seemingly pure natural world “out there,” moving images
of the ocean’s dazzling colors and strange life forms and landscapes have long served a
conservationist discourse. Yet insofar as these images rely on technologies of
exploration—of conquest—for their creation, they are materially continuous with
projects that do violence to the environment.
My main goal in this project is to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of
wonder is, as a condition of its production, linked to histories of technology that are not
always environmentally friendly. The often dazzling images of marine life we see on
film may be able to revitalize the senses, renew our engagement with mundane reality
by exposing us to experientially remote aspects of the world we inhabit and thus making
that world unfamiliar, and increase our sensitivity to the other forms of life with which
2
we share that world. But producing these images has historically relied on technologies
that in some cases directly threaten the marine environment. This contradiction is not
limited to ocean films; rather, it defines environmental movies in general—if not all of
cinema. For if we account for all of the industrial underpinnings of cinematic production,
distribution, and exhibition—from the mines where the metals and minerals that make
cameras and projectors are extracted to the factories where this equipment is assembled,
from the reliance on aviation and trucking industries to distribute prints to the energy
consumed by movie theaters, computers, HDTVs, and other exhibition technologies—it
becomes clear that cinema is thoroughly entangled with the major industrial causes of
climate change.1 However, the gulf between a film’s effects and its industrial
underpinnings becomes especially pronounced when the film takes a strong
environmentalist stance. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen
worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments
coming together, I hope to illuminate a tension that in often less dramatic fashion
pervades other environmentally minded films.
Project Summary and Literature Review
This project investigates undersea filmmaking from origins in the 1910s to the
present. It focuses on films made using images and sounds actually recorded undersea,
among them documentaries, Hollywood features, and IMAX movies. It emphasizes
ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—
contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. The majority of my project
1. Kyle Stine recently made a similar argument in “Cinema as a Geological
Force, or: There Is No Carbon-Neutral Production” (paper presented at the annual
meeting for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
March 25–29, 2015).
3
concerns filmmaking and sound recording after World War II; this is because the
technological and scientific advances that filming undersea depends upon largely
resulted from a Cold War boom in state funding for oceanography, primarily within the
United States. Although this project is meant for an audience of film and media scholars,
I hope it also appeals to historians of technology, science, and the environment—
scholars whose work informs this project but who, by contrast, seldom make cinema a
sustained object of study.
With its focus on the ocean, this project is also the first sustained work of film
studies scholarship to attend exclusively to a single natural environment as it has been
represented onscreen. In this case, that environment is one of great ecological
significance, as the ocean today signifies the earth’s fragile chain of being. This was not
always the case. In the middle twentieth century, the “inner space” of the ocean, the
opposite pole of outer space during the space race, was widely thought a treasure chest
that the industrialized west could plunder. This belief steered oceanography to its rise.
As Sylvia Earle writes,
The idea that the ocean would hold steady, no matter what we took out of it—or
put into it—dominated attitudes and policies globally in the middle of the 20th
century. . . . The vision of a limitless ocean mesmerized policymakers,
encouraging practices that have accelerated the depletion of marine wildlife and
minerals; destroyed irreplaceable ocean species and ecosystems; and
simultaneously caused the ocean to be regarded as the ultimate Dumpster.2
That the technologies used to explore the ocean, from scuba gear to submersibles,
became widespread during the period when the idea of the ocean as infinitely
exploitable reigned is no coincidence; most were built to extend human reach
2. Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
(Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009), 24–25.
4
underwater so as to better utilize undersea space. For filmmakers to employ these
technologies ironically implicates the strange and beautiful images that have been used
to advocate for marine conservation in a myopic project of dominating the ocean
without fear of consequences. Importantly, these technologies shape the films’
aesthetics, setting the conditions for the kinds of views—and in some cases sounds—
undersea films offer spectators.
Somewhat by chance, the present work belongs to a growing body of scholarship
in environmental media studies. Between the time I began researching this project in the
summer of 2012 and completed it in May 2015, several key monographs and edited
collections related to media and the environment were published. In The Cinematic
Footprint (2012), Nadia Bozak argues that cinema is inextricably bound to a
hydrocarbon economy and therefore part of both the cause of the ecological crisis and
its solution. In Greening the Media (2012), Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell
systematically reveal how media production, consumption, and waste have contributed
to the ecological crisis while mapping a path toward sustainable practice. Adrian
Ivakhiv’s Ecologies of the Moving Image (2014) presents an “ecophilosophy” of cinema,
taking a “process-relational” approach to films that draws on, among other sources,
Whitehead’s process philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce’s trifold phenomenology of
experience, and Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies. Ecocinema Theory and Practice
(2013), edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, offers the most useful
overview of the varied sets of concerns that drive environmental media studies. EcoTrauma Cinema (2015), edited by Anil Narine, addresses films that engage with
ecological catastrophe, peoples traumatized by nature, and actors and social forces that
5
traumatize the natural world. And most recently, Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media
advances “a media history of matter,” which regards the chemicals, metals, minerals,
and other materials that constitute media technologies as essential to media studies.3
Though this dissertation has developed mostly in parallel with these works and bears
few signs of their direct influence, it shares with them a basic commitment to examining
relations between technical media and the environment, in this case an environment that
for most people has existed primarily in media. Also like this recent work, my project
came about in part as a response to the climate crisis. Even though it bears only
obliquely on much of this thesis’s content, catastrophic global warming should be
understood as the horizon against which the text unfolds.
Within the robust subfield of environmental media studies, scholarship on ocean
film and media consists of a growing but still fragmented body of articles, book chapters,
and academic theses. While studies of familiar individual films exist (e.g., Jaws [Steven
Spielberg, 1975] and Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea [Richard Fleischer, 1954]),
critics have rarely addressed ocean films together or thought about what it would mean
to do so. The most significant exceptions are Gregg Mitman’s chapter on dolphin
movies in Reel Nature, Elliott Doran Kennerson’s MFA thesis, Sean Cubitt’s chapter on
the BBC’s The Blue Planet (2001) in EcoMedia, and Nicole Starosielski’s essay
“Beyond Fluidity: Toward a Cultural History of Cinema under Water.” Mitman traces
the dolphin’s playful popular image, emblematized by the Flipper films and television
series, to its roots in science, military research, tourism, and the entertainment industry
between the late 1930s and early 1960s. Although animals are not my focus, I share
3. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2015), 25.
6
Mitman’s conviction that the ways nature gets represented on film says more about
complex and shifting attitudes toward the natural world than about nature itself. While
Kennerson reduces the ocean on film to an Eden–wilderness dichotomy that breaks
down too neatly along dolphin–shark lines, he admirably emphasizes ocean
filmmaking’s close ties to the technologically advanced science of oceanography—an
emphasis that squares with my own approach here. Cubitt, despite focusing on a single
TV series, also considers technology, arguing in broadly applicable fashion that the
ocean on screen is a heavily technologized image of innocence and wonder (his two
critical terms).4
The most helpful contribution to this corpus is Starosielski’s essay, an offshoot
of her research on undersea cables. It has served as both a guide and a foil to the current
project and marks a first step toward consolidated thinking about the ocean in media.
For Starosielski, who surveys underwater film and television through the early 1980s, “a
discursive shift—which redefined the undersea world as belonging to us (humans),
rather than them (coastal inhabitants who depend on ocean resources)—mediated a
broader cultural transition to an internationally governed ocean and the ascendance of
the United States as a dominant marine power, while setting into motion many of the
4. See Gregg Mitman, “A Ringside Seat in the Making of a Pet Star,” Reel
Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999) 157–79; Elliott Doran Kennerson, “Ocean Pictures: The
Construction of the Ocean on Film” (MFA Thesis, Montana State University, 2008);
and Sean Cubitt, “The Blue Planet: Virtual Nature and Natural Virtue,” in EcoMedia
(New York: Rodopi, 2005), 43–60.
7
tropes of modern aquatic ecocinema.”5 She divides ocean filmmaking into three periods
of activity: the exposure of the sea floor (1914–1932), “ocean exploitation” (1945–
1958), and the domestication of the sea (1960–1972). In the first period, defined by John
Ernest Williamson’s photosphere movies (the subject of my first chapter), the ocean is
the domain of an ethnic other that slips underwater to evade the reach of Western empire.
In postwar movies, Western scientific knowledge gains dominance over the sea,
obliterating its otherness, and paves the way for white humans to freely and safely
inhabit it. A cultural mirror argument, Starosielski’s treats ocean movies as reflections
of dominant contemporaneous attitudes Westerners held about marine space. Though I
agree that ocean movies reflect popular beliefs about the sea (as well as inform them)
and that the ocean therefore must be understood as a social space, I am less concerned
with how film content reflects social concerns than with the films’ material conditions
of possibility—the technology and science that get cameras underwater and the ends
that technology and science serve—as well as how ocean films speak or don’t speak to
these conditions. In addition, whereas Starosielski limits her examples to films and
television shows, I situate films of the sea within a broader representational mosaic that
includes aquariums, naturalist illustrations, sound recording, photography, sonar
imaging, and digital animation, as the range of examples in the ensuing chapters will
show.
Despite these works on marine cinema, the ocean retains a marginal place within
environmental media studies. Mitman aside, scholars of nature and wildlife films have
5. Nicole Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity: A Cultural History of Cinema under
Water,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean
Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 150.
8
said little about representations of marine life; while scholars of science cinema have
said more about subaquatic research films, their work has mostly concerned the
cinema’s first few decades.6 Among auteurists, Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s films have
only begun to attract serious scholarly interest; his Austrian contemporary Hans Hass
has passed mostly unnoticed.7 Genre critics have said little about “ocean movies,”
“undersea films,” or similar categories, whether historically or retroactively constituted,
and film technology historians have not much regarded them in terms of sound, screen
processes, or the problems posed by filming underwater.8 Although scholars of film
spectatorship, notably Alison Griffiths and Allison Whitney in their writings on IMAX,
have discussed several deep-sea films, they have not considered how immersive
experiences of undersea spectacles differ from those of terrestrial or aerial ones,
noteworthy contrasts given how differently we move, sense, and breathe underwater
6. Derek Bousé notes the need for a full study of marine life and cinema in his
land-oriented Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), xi.
On underwater science films, see Ralph Rugoff, “Fluid Mechanics,” in Science Is
Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, ed. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 48–57 and Hanna Rose Schell, “Things under
Water: Etienne-Jules Marey’s Aquarium Laboratory and Cinema’s Assembly,” in
Dingpolitik: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 326–32. Shell, also a filmmaker, has made her own
experimental science films available here:
http://web.mit.edu/~hrshell/www/experimentsonfilm/essay.html.
7. The 2012 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston featured
a panel on Cousteau’s films (“Regarding Jacques Cousteau, Regarding the World”)—
one of the first scholarly efforts to appraise them in the English-speaking world.
8. To cite but two admirable examples, neither John Belton’s Widescreen
Cinema nor Jay Beck’s dissertation on New Hollywood–era sound practices discusses
underwater screen or sound space, despite numerous relevant films in the periods they
cover and the comprehensiveness of their projects. See Belton, Widescreen Cinema
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Jay Shields Beck, “A Quiet
Revolution: Changes in American Film Sound Practices, 1967–1979” (PhD diss.,
University of Iowa, 2003).
9
versus while “embodied” in a space of illusion—a difference so great in degree that it is
worth asking whether the illusion of being enveloped in underwater space can ever be a
convincing one.9 This inattention to things aquatic owes in part, I think, to a terrestrial
bias in film studies. The generalizations we can make about land-based images and
production practices do not often hold underwater, and undersea films, which constitute
a small minority of the films produced at any given historical moment, may therefore
appear to warrant only marginal consideration. However, it is worth asking whether this
terrestrial bias does not merely reflect an anthropocentric worldview, one that holds that
life on land—namely human life—is the norm and all else is a deviation. To turn toward
the ocean, especially in a time of ecological crisis, means thinking about life as most of
it exists elsewhere on the planet and in radically different conditions than those that
govern our existence. To see and hear, if only in mediated fashion, a radical otherness
that normally remains out of sight and out of mind might help us better understand our
place within the web of life and the collective influence we exercise on it.
Methodology
Throughout this project I stress a set of tensions that generally characterize
undersea film: tensions between the real ocean “out there” and audiovisual
representations of it, science and aesthetics, and cinema and “technology writ large.”10
9. Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the
Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Allison Patricia
Whitney, “The Eye of Daedalus: A History and Theory of IMAX Cinema” (PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 2005).
10. I take the phrase “technology writ large” from Keith R. Benson, Helen M.
Rozwadowski, and David K. Van Keuren, “Introduction,” in The Machine in Neptune’s
Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment
(Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2004), xiii. The authors, who
10
The Oceans Onscreen and “Out There”
The “cinematic aquarium” of my title refers not only to bringing a distant reality
up close, but also to remaking it for display. Whether in an aquarium or on film, the
ocean never comes to us neutrally, as it really is “out there.” The ocean we see is rather
an idealized, visually transparent one. As Susan G. Davis writes, not only do public
aquaria
bring marine life to eye level (and more or less hold it there), but aquarium
technology clarifies the environment by settling, scrubbing, filtering, stabilizing,
and chemically purifying it. Manuals on aquarium building are handbooks in
perceptual play, covering how to keep water transparent, how to use light, the
absence of light, and perspective to create the illusion of more space.11
These words could analogously describe filmmaking. In its own way, film technology
also settles, scrubs, filters, stabilizes, and purifies the sea; the range of devices used as
well as the changing practices, institutions, and broad structures of knowledge and
representation associated with them all play a hand in remaking the sea for display.12
In addition, how the ocean looks and sounds on film owes to prior
representations as much as it does to reality. Existing films, literary descriptions,
lithographs, photographs, TV shows, sound recordings of marine life, and public aquaria
observe that “oceanography is in many ways technology writ large,” treat the various
marine sciences—biology, geology, physics, geography, and meteorology—as
inseparable from the advanced technologies that make them possible.
11. Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World
Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 100.
12. The analogy with aquaria is a matter not just of filmmaking practice but also
of spectatorship. Anne Friedberg, for instance, has argued that cinema is continuous
with such diverse sites of consumption and display as panoramas, dioramas, museums,
zoos, and shopping centers. To this list of locales we can surely add public aquaria. See
Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), which links cinema spectatorship to modern flânerie via what
its author dubs a “mobilized gaze.”
11
play as great a hand in the norms governing believable, realistic, and “natural” undersea
space as does Nature itself—all the more so because the undersea world has historically
been off-limits to nearly everyone except scientists, recreational divers, and the military.
Even though it would be foolish to deny an indexical relationship between reality and
filmic representation, this relationship is trumped by the thoroughly constructed nature
of recorded sounds and images. As Rick Altman puts it, “there is no such thing as direct
representation of the real; there is only representation of representation. Anything that
we would represent is always constructed as a representation by previous
representations.”13 Cinema’s debt to other forms of representation concerns me
throughout this project, and its debt to prior representational practices proves
particularly important in the first chapter’s discussion of Williamson’s films’ relation to
the discourse around aquariums.
In live-action filmmaking, the construction of undersea space is fraught with
difficulties uncommon to terrestrial filmmaking. Underwater, continuity editing breaks
down. The shortage of static spatial landmarks (coral reefs and sunken ships aside) and
limited visibility in the open sea conspire to make onscreen space extraordinarily
ambiguous. As seafloor and ocean surface seldom occupy the same shot, vertical depth
becomes virtually impossible for filmmakers to convey or viewers to discern. A
standard “beautiful” shot—sunlight rippling through the waves, backlighting a majestic
school of fish—might orient spectators in images of shallower depths, but such devices
prove useless where the sun’s rays cannot penetrate, including nearly everywhere
undersea at night. Additionally, ocean space looks generic. Without dialogue, narration,
13. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 17.
12
title cards, or other cues, it becomes difficult to tell where at sea—how far from land,
particularly—one is supposed to be once the camera penetrates the waves. Filmmakers
often exploit the sea’s nowhere–everywhere qualities for poetic effect; Jacques-Yves
Cousteau’s World without Sun, for instance, never identifies the location of the
underwater habitat the film depicts daily life inside of, and he even told reporters at the
film’s premiere, “As soon as you are specific, the poetry disappears.”14
As underwater visibility can be limited, sound often becomes a primary means of
defining undersea space. Music, of course, powerfully affects how we perceive film
images, and undersea musical scores prove fairly diverse. Sometimes the music is sparse
and dissonant, pointing up the deep sea’s strangeness as though it were another planet;
other times, the images play to sweeping Romantic melodies, synth pop, or
environmentalist ballads courtesy of left-leaning songwriters like Sting and Crosby,
Stills & Nash. By contrast, nonmusical sounds may be deceptively simple. Even a
casual viewer of undersea films could identify a mix of whooshes, bubbling noises, and
an absence of high frequencies as typical of undersea sound. More complex undersea
soundscapes that make extensive use of location sound are a fairly recent phenomenon,
one that I address in relation to humpback whale phonations in the third chapter.
Science and Aesthetics
Going back at least to Ernst Haeckel’s lithographs and autotypes of anemones,
medusae, and other sea creatures in his Kunstformen der Nature (1899–1904), the ocean,
like other areas of science, has been understood as a place where nature and art collide.
Moreover, it has often been men of science, like Haeckel, who bring these wondrous
14. Qtd. in Axel Madsen, Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography (New York:
Beaufort Books, 1986), 135.
13
images (and later sounds) to the public. The earliest underwater photographer, William
Thompson (1856), was an amateur naturalist, and the French zoologist Louis Boutan
(1893) produced the first undersea photographs by a diver. Physiologist Etienne-Jules
Marey (1890) published a chronophotographic study of aquatic motion in the popular
science magazine La Nature; his images, shot using a small aquarium, inspired Auguste
and Louis Lumière to make their L’Aquarium (a film of eels, fish, and frogs) and
inaugurated the motion studies of marine life that continue today.
15
Later, biologist
Jean Painlevé’s famously lyrical underwater films led André Bazin to wax ecstatic in a
1958 essay: “Here, at the farthest reaches of interested and practical research, where the
most absolute proscription of aesthetic intention as such reigns, cinematic beauty
unfolds like a supernatural grace”—“the miracle of the science film, and its
inexhaustible paradox.”16 Bazin’s words, which echo the sentiments of many an earlier
writer, could describe much of what followed: the popular documentaries and television
shows of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his Austrian contemporary Hans Hass; the subAntarctic footage in Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters at
the End of the World (2007); IMAX documentaries such as Deep Sea (Howard Hall,
2006) and Humpback Whales (Greg MacGillivray, 2015), created with the help of
oceanographic institutes and showcased in science museums; research videos that
stream on websites like National Geographic and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute; and countless fiction films about science and military expeditions.
15. Shell, “Things under Water,” 326.
16. André Bazin, “On Jean Painlevé,” What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard
(Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 21.
14
Cinema and “Technology Writ Large”
Given names like Marey, Painlevé, and Cousteau, it might be tempting to paint
aquatic cinema as an affair of individuals, of gentleman scientists who test the surf by
day and splice film by moonlight. Doing so, however, overlooks both the filmmakers’
ties to institutions as well as the scale of the science to which many sounds and images
of the sea owe their existence. Oceanography, after all, is Big Science—costlier and
more technology-heavy than most terrestrial sciences. It is not the domain of
independent men and women. No mere recreational diver could photograph the
anglerfish found in a coffee-table tome; the pressure would kill her before she got deep
enough. James Cameron could not make his deep-sea films without the wealth, fame,
connections, and scientific cachet his blockbusters have brought him. Even Cousteau
could not have made films without the millionaire who leased him the Calypso for a
symbolic one franc per year. The history of undersea cinema as we know it would be
unimaginable without an enormous amount of technology and capital to back it.
While I address some of the special equipment it takes to shoot and record sound
underwater—new devices, after all, open up and foreclose aesthetic possibilities that
bear on how ocean space gets constructed—a focus on film technology alone would be
inadequate. Not merely created by representational apparatus, ocean films are equally
the products of what I call enabling technologies: the ships, diving gear, underwater
habitats, and submersibles that make undersea filming possible. Choices about lighting
and camera placement become inseparable from not only nonfilmic practice (e.g., the
use of dive tables or the collective work required of any submersible expedition), but
also the resources (material, institutional, political, and economic) and agendas (state
15
and corporate) needed to develop and maintain the most sophisticated of these machines,
some of which, the movies sometimes tell us, are more advanced than spacecraft.
Given this much, it is clear these devices yoke marine cinema to ends that the
films themselves might oppose, such as offshore drilling, nuclear waste disposal, and
war—ends that can and do devastate human bodies, societies, and the environment. This
is not to argue that marine cinema is essentially or inescapably linked to worlddestroying projects; that a film camera cannot plunge two miles under the Atlantic
except aboard a submersible developed, say, to scour the sea floor for oil does not mean
that the resultant films are always-already ideologically compromised—destined,
despite the filmmakers’ best intentions, to produce complacent subjects wherever they
screen. But we should not miss these potential effects, especially given that the enabling
devices often appear in films, visually and sonically affecting spectators’ responses.
(Scuba divers, submersibles, and the aforementioned Calypso are staples of ocean film
scenery.) Again, how the meanings, histories, and uses of devices that appear in a given
film square with, even contradict, the same film’s most powerful effects—such as
spreading ecological consciousness, invigorating the senses, or rekindling a sense of
wonder—is the key motivating question for this project.
In respect to enabling technologies, this project goes against the grain of
dominant approaches to film technology scholarship. Generally speaking, film scholars
concerned with technology focus in isolation on sound, color, widescreen technologies,
cinematographic technologies, and digital versus analog. They bracket these cinematic
technologies from the broader technological landscape to which they belong. This is
necessary when the goal is to explain how, for instance, aesthetics, exhibition practices,
16
spectatorship, and cinema’s ontological relationship to the world have changed with
cinema’s audiovisual apparatus. But such bracketing becomes untenable when we
complicate cinema’s assumed terrestrial nature. Filming undersea requires diving
spheres, submersibles, scuba gear, and other technologies of exploration in addition to
specialized lighting rigs, distortion-correcting lenses, and waterproof camera casings.
Just as aerial filmmaking cannot be thought apart from the history of aviation, so
undersea filmmaking cannot be thought without the history of twentieth-century marine
exploration and oceanographic research. Thus, rather than situate cinema as its own
privileged sphere of activity, I place it within a broader technological system of science
and exploration, one that binds audiovisual production to histories of technology that
would seem to have little to do with cinema or other forms of representation.
Chapter Summaries
This dissertation is structured chronologically. Chapter one focuses on the
pioneering undersea filmmaker John Ernest Williamson, who shot a series of narrative
fiction films and documentaries in the Bahamas between 1914 and 1932. Whereas
earlier “undersea” films were shot on sets or through aquarium tanks, Williamson
created his using a pair of novel technologies: an underwater “photosphere” and a
flexible caisson tube that connected the sphere to the bottom of a ship, allowing
Williamson to place cameras and cameramen underwater while protecting them from
the elements. Though Williamson’s undersea films were a technical first, the views his
films offered of undersea space have particular affinities with the aquarium, then the
primary means the public would have had of seeing undersea phenomena. In the first
part of the chapter, I consider Williamson’s movies in light of popular nineteenth- and
17
early twentieth-century discourse around aquariums. In the second, I shift to a
consideration of Williamson’s technologies and their material origins, showing how the
design of these apparently simple devices links his undersea film practice to
technological histories far removed from filmmaking and visual representation, histories
that nonetheless set the conditions of possibility for these movies to be made.
In chapter two, I turn to the most emblematic ocean filmmaker and explorer of
the postwar years: Jacques Cousteau’s films and his early 1960s idea of Homo aquaticus,
a variant of Homo sapiens he forecast would evolve to live and work undersea. Homo
aquaticus, like Cousteau’s films of the fifties and sixties, appeared at a time when
Western nations regarded the sea as an infinitely exploitable resource—a treasure trove
of food and fuel as well as a landfill for nuclear waste. Homo aquaticus finds expression
in the aesthetics of Cousteau’s films and in the undersea life his movies depict—
particularly in World without Sun and Conshelf Adventure, his two documentaries about
his pioneering undersea habitats (Conshelf II and III, respectively). Additionally, as a
technically enhanced human body, Homo aquaticus is exemplified by the array of
technologies Cousteau depicts in his films and discusses in his books—technologies that
could extend man’s vision underwater and, by extension, his physical reach. These
technologies included his fleet of small submersibles, Conshelf habitats, Aqua-Lung
(the first commercially successful scuba apparatus), and remote-viewing technologies,
such as sonar, that could accurately image the sea at scales and over distances the naked
eye underwater cannot grasp.
Chapter three shifts from the image to sound. In it I address the circulation of socalled humpback whale “songs” in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when the concept of
18
sound design took hold in the recording and film industries. Examining the discourse
that enveloped whale songs in this era, I show that stereo headphones and surround
sound were seen as ways for listeners and audiences to enter into something like the
headspace of whales. (Cetaceans were revered in this period for being both more
intelligent and more benign than humans.) The futuristic qualities of sound technology,
which matched the seemingly futuristic minds of whales, became a means of enjoining
humans to not only end whaling but also turn back the clock on technological
modernity’s other ecologically destructive projects. The ultimate goal of those who
produced whale recordings was to foster more peaceable relations between humans and
the global environment. The key media examples in this chapter are the 1970 LP Songs
of the Humpback Whale and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986),
which present whale songs in stereo and surround sound, respectively.
In chapter four, I return to images to explore a three-fold question of scale. I
address the scale of the known ocean, the submersible technologies that have extended
humans’ reach into the depths, and the immersive, large-format cinematic technologies
that display the fruits of ocean exploration for the public. Taking Volcanoes of the Deep
Sea (Stephen Low, 2003), Aliens of the Deep (James Cameron and Steven Quale, 2005),
and Deepsea Challenge (John Bruno, Ray Quint, and Andrew Wight, 2014) as key case
studies, I argue that on an aesthetic register, large-format films of the deep sea mark a
fusion of sublime nature and sublime technology; and that on a scientific register, they
“draw things together” (Bruno Latour’s words)—technology, humans, hydrothermal
vents, marine life, distant planets—within the space of the frame. The interplay of these
two registers allows viewers to feel a sense of mastery over the seemingly infinite space
19
of the deep even as that space engulfs them. As a result, the films produce a kind of
ecological thinking, wherein viewers are invited to marvel at the vast interconnectedness
of things human and nonhuman as well as to rationally parse these connections. This
ecological thinking is limited, however, by the films’ lack of consideration of the longrange ends and effects of the present day’s large-scale technological endeavors in the
deep or of the ethics of such industrially dependent knowledge seeking. Attitudes
critical of ocean exploration, I contend, are more likely to be found in less
technologically intensive, smaller-format movies of the sea; the chapter concludes with
a discussion of three of these: Lucien-Castaing Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan
(2012) and Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters at the End of
the World (2007).
In the conclusion, I strike a more speculative note, turning to the possible futures
of the ocean and of ocean movies. In short, historical films of the ocean will
increasingly be seen as a sort of technical memory bank, a mausoleum of diverse forms
of life and distant ecologies that have gone extinct as a result of human activities—
whether whaling, overfishing, dumping nuclear waste, climate change, or ocean
acidification. As coral reefs, cetaceans, sea turtles, and fish die off, jellyfish will take
stage as the main animal protagonists of ocean movies. Jellies, which bloom seemingly
whenever and wherever ocean environments are destabilized, are a visual index of a
dying ocean.
Although the chronological scope of this project is comprehensive, the film
content I address is not. Important undersea filmmakers such as Jean Painlevé and Hans
Hass get short shrift; so do the many undersea movies made by the US Navy and the
20
countless deep-sea research films housed in institutions such as the Monterey Bay
Aquarium Research Institute, the Scripps Institution, and the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution. In addition, I have little to say about ocean movies filmed on
sets, in studio tanks, in aquariums, or in freshwater locales that double for the ocean;
animated movies, which constitute the majority of undersea films made before World
War II, are mentioned only in passing. Most of these omissions are practical ones,
casualties of a lack of resources to conduct in-depth archival research, certain films’
unavailability in English (most of Hass’s films and TV shows exist only in unsubtitled
German versions), and my decision to organize this project around the production
problem of actually recording images and sounds undersea. (Though Painlevé
occasionally waded in the shallows with his movie camera encased in waterproof box,
he actually shot most of his films of ocean life in front of aquarium tanks—including
The Sea Horse [1933], possibly the most famous of his marine movies.) Still, I hope the
reader finds that the arguments I make apply to a broader corpus of films than I
explicitly address in these pages.
21
CHAPTER ONE
AQUARIUMS, NONREPRESENTATIONAL TECHNICS, AND THE UNDERSEA
FILMS OF JOHN ERNEST WILLIAMSON
In his memoir Twenty Years under the Sea, the undersea filmmaking pioneer John
Ernest Williamson describes a near catastrophe that befell him when he and his crew
lowered his famous photosphere—essentially an underwater camera booth affixed to the
bottom of a barge by a watertight tube—among the coral reefs of the Bahamas:
Breathless with wonder at the weird beauty of the undersea life unfolding in
colourful panorama before us, we were gazing entranced when, like a flock of
frightened birds, a school of fish dashed past our window. The next instant the
great steel photosphere tipped and swayed as we were caught in an underseas
current. With a sickening, terrifying crash we were dashed against a great domeshaped mass of coral. The flexible tube bent and, together with everything
movable, we were tumbled head over heels. Yet in the terror and excitement of
that moment my mind fastened upon one vital thing—the big glass window! If
that went, if it were broken or even cracked, my experiments under the ocean
would be over.1
This passage captures a fundamental contradiction in ocean exploration and filmmaking:
a view onto wondrous and strange aquatic phenomena is undergirded by sometimes
precarious and unpredictable technical and environmental arrangements. The episode
was a stark reminder that Williamson and his men were “veritable tenderfeet at this
game. . . . The depths of the sea were not so tranquil and calm as we had imagined.
There were treacherous tides and currents below, as well as at the surface. . . . It
behoved us to be mighty careful in the future and to learn to navigate the depths and to
avoid underseas reefs [sic] as skilfully as the mariner pilots his ship through channels on
the surface.”2 Though Williamson does not specifically mention filmmaking in this
1. J. E. Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea (Boston: Ralph T. Hale &
Company, 1936), 54.
2. Ibid., 54–55.
22
passage, we can extrapolate from this lesson that when the camera was rolling,
cinematic techniques merged with those thought more proper to exploration. Learning to
navigate undersea space was, for Williamson and his crew, an essential precondition of
not only enjoying an entrancing view of but also recording images of it.
Between 1914 and 1932, Williamson shot the first live-action films made
beneath the waves. Among these movies were shorts, documentaries, and feature-length
fiction films, including the undersea portions of two Hollywood adaptations of Jules
Verne: Universal’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (Stuart Paton, 1916) and MGM’s The
Mysterious Island (Lucien Hubbard, 1929).3 As Williamson preferred shooting
independently from the studios when he could find the backing to do so, however, it is
perhaps fortuitous that his few surviving films include his three late nonfiction films.
These are the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History’s soundless Field Museum–
Williamson Undersea Expedition to the Bahamas (1929), which documents the work
Williamson and crew did to build the museum’s then-planned Hall of Fishes exhibit; his
autobiographical career capstone With Williamson beneath the Sea (1932), for which he
furnished a recorded narration; and a truncated recut of the latter for a 1955 episode of
3. Besides those films named in the text, Williamson’s credits, usually as a
scenarist, include Thirty Leagues under the Sea (Carl Louis Gregory, 1914), which
largely documented how the photosphere worked and climaxed with Williamson
fighting a shark; The Submarine Eye (J. Winthrop Kelly, 1917), in which a native diver
saves the inventor of an inverted periscope when the latter becomes trapped trying to
retrieve sunken treasure; the short A Deep-Sea Tragedy (1917); Girl of the Sea (Kelly,
1920), about a girl growing up on a desert island following a shipwreck; Wet Gold
(Ralph Ince, 1921), about a search for sunken treasure; Wonders of the Sea (Williamson,
1922), which involves Williamson’s search for a West Indies sea monster; and The
Uninvited Guest (Ince, 1924), which featured the first known underwater color footage,
shot in two-strip Technicolor. Besides half of Girl of the Sea, which the BFI holds, none
of these films is known to survive; all of Williamson’s negatives were destroyed in a
hurricane. See Brian Taves, “With Williamson beneath the Sea,” Journal of Film
Preservation 25, no. 52 (April 1996): 54–61.
23
the TV show I Search for Adventure, whose footage Williamson narrated live,
ostensibly off the cuff. Though these films include scenes from his entertainments—
adventure movies that abound with sunken treasure, shipwrecks, and encounters with
such “sea monsters” as moray eels and octopi—much of their interest lies in their
technological content, for the films deal as much with the marvels of the ocean as with
the behind-the-scenes machinery that allowed him to record them for a moviegoing
public.
Whereas earlier “underwater” movies were in actuality shot on sets or using
aquaria, Williamson’s were the result of two novel marine technologies. The first of
these was a flexible caisson tube that, attached to the bottom of a ship, was used for
salvaging work; it was invented and patented by Williamson’s father, a Virginia sea
captain. The second was the Williamson photosphere, which Williamson himself
devised. Once attached to the end of the tube, the sphere would hover on the seafloor,
enabling photos and films to be made (figures 1.1 and 1.2). For scholars who have
written about Williamson’s films—specifically, Nicole Starosielski, Krista Thompson,
and Brian Taves—these devices invariably compel discussion. But except for
Starosielski’s noting that their design derived from existing naval technologies, these
apparatuses have taken a back seat to discussions of the films’ content and broader
cultural implications, such that neither the ramifications of their deployment nor the full
technological context in which Williamson’s films were produced have received
adequate attention.4
4. Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity,” 153. Thompson’s concern is how
Williamson’s films helped domesticate the sea in the popular imagination, “rendering
the ocean picturesque and safe for tourist occupation.” See Krista A. Thompson, An Eye
24
Figure 1.1. The Williamson photosphere. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the
Sea, 40.
Figure 1.2. Diagram of the photosphere attached to barge by the flexible caisson tube.
Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 32.
Additionally, although Williamson’s films were the first shot undersea, they
belonged to an already established culture of visual representations of marine space.
While Thompson contends that Williamson’s films and photographs were “instrumental
in creating a visual vocabulary through which to represent the sea,” demystifying it by
visualizing it indexically, they were also bound up with other, earlier modes of
for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25.
25
representing marine life.5 The most important of these was the aquarium, a middle-class
technology of display that began to dot the European and American landscapes in the
middle nineteenth century and was itself framed in terms of other representational
practices that cinema resonated with in its early decades. More than many later films,
those shot from inside the photosphere prompt an analogy with aquaria. For one, the
frontal view of undersea phenomena replicated the view of a spectator before a tank.
Additionally, as a dry space insulated from the wet one onto which it granted a view, it
upheld a clear demarcation between inside and outside as well as separation of human
bodies from water in a manner consistent with standing before an aquarium. This view
would square oddly with the later dominant practice of divers taking cameras directly
into the water.6
In this chapter, therefore, my focus will be split. First, I will flesh out the broader
visual context of underwater representations in which Williamson’s films appeared,
taking the aquarium as my starting point. Here, I will sketch out general similarities
between undersea cinema and aquaria as well as specifics between aquaria and
Williamson’s films before delving into how those films also draw from some of the
same representational practices to which the aquarium in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries owed a debt.
Second, I will address the broader technological landscape into which
Williamson’s films emerged and on which their meanings—textual, cultural, and
ideological—ultimately depend. Here my focus will be the exploratory technologies
5. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 181–82.
6. Taves, “With Williamson beneath the Sea,” 58.
26
Williamson deployed, apparatus without which filming submarine space would have
been impossible. These apparatus were built to serve purposes other than simply making
films and photographs. Indeed, the main function of both the photosphere and diving
tube was simply to be watertight, guaranteeing the sphere’s inhabitants a dry space full
of breathable air from the surface. Failure to do so would render the sphere useless for
filmmaking or other kinds of observation, such as taking notes on the marine
landscape’s colors or making hand-drawn illustrations of it (both important for
Williamson’s museum work). Furthermore, the detachable, flexible tube was built to
facilitate a wide variety of different possible operations. These included obtaining
sponges, recovering lost treasure, mining, raising sunken ships, and repairing ship hulls;
indeed, the elder Williamson envisioned enough possible uses for the tube that patenting
all of them resulted in several years’ delay between his first tests of the tube and his
obtaining any practical results with it.7 Though the younger Williamson deployed the
tube in the service of filmmaking, its highly adaptable technical makeup ensured that
cinema would always be just one purpose it could serve among many. If anyone using it
so desired, the tube could at a moment’s notice be returned to the sundry activities for
which it was originally built—and just as quickly shuttle from those pursuits to making
motion pictures.
These apparatus link Williamson’s films to histories that usually fall outside the
purview of film scholarship—that is, to histories of ocean exploration and of the
7. Cleveland Moffett, “Motion Pictures Under the Sea,” The American Magazine
79 (January 1915): 11. Charles Williamson filed a patent for the submarine tube in 1903
and had it approved the same year; he filed patents for its various adaptations and got
them approved between 1909 and 1912. See US patents 745,469; 1,009,123; 1,016,808;
1,017,486; 1,010,558; 1,010,559; and1,023,541.
27
industrial, technological, and scientific activities that enable human beings to enter into
an inhospitable environment and endure for extended periods of time a lack of air. The
resulting films are therefore imbricated with these histories. So are interpretations of the
films—particularly those readings common to undersea movies that wax poetic about
the films’ ability to extend human perception or even to rejuvenate the senses by
presenting spectators with new realities. Even if interpretations ignore the long-range
material conditions for extending vision or revitalizing the senses in favor of the
phenomena revealed, they remain dependent on the former.8
Undersea Movies and Aquaria
In Williamson’s time, the public would have understood the ocean largely in
terms of noncinematic representations. Literary descriptions such as Jules Verne’s,
hand-drawn naturalist’s illustrations, paintings, theater, natural history displays, public
and home aquaria, and a smattering of photographs in the popular press informed the
discourse and iconography through which a public between the teens and thirties would
have understood undersea space.9 Before recreational diving took off in the postwar
8. I am thinking of film analyses in the vein of what Malcolm Turvey calls the
“revelationist tradition” of classical film theory. The best examples of such writing on
marine cinemas are André Bazin’s writing on Jean Painlevé and Rudolf Arnheim’s on
Cousteau. See Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008); André Bazin, “On Jean Painlevé,” in What Is
Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 21–23; and Rudolf
Arnheim, “Art Today and the Film,” Art Journal 25, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 242–44. I
discuss Arnheim’s essay in the next chapter.
9. Important precedents for underwater photography include the Englishman
William Thompson, who in 1856 photographed the floor of Weymouth Bay by lowering
a 5 × 4 inch plate camera in a box tethered to an eighteen-foot rope; and more famously,
Louis Boutan, who experimented with underwater photography throughout the 1890s
and produced several books about underwater photography. See Robert Deane,
28
years, it was rare for anyone but heroic adventurers, soldiers, and salvage men to
experience the world undersea directly—that is, with little more than the human sensory
apparatus to mediate it. As such, direct experience of submarine space would not have
significantly influenced public perception of Williamson’s films.
Although we should not discount the importance of other kinds of imagery, the
most important of undersea cinema’s cultural touchstones before World War II would
have been the aquarium. Although existing aquatic images may have been visually
accurate, their stillness was perceived as a representational limit. Indeed, the impression
of movement was understood as a vital aspect of naturalistic illustrations of undersea
space. (One of the most famous such illustrators, Else Bostelmann, who painted images
of deep-sea life for the naturalist William Beebe during his Bathysphere dives between
1930 and 1934, was hired precisely because she possessed this ability.10) Impressions of
movement notwithstanding, however, movies and aquaria were—until underwater
“Underwater Photography,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed.
John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1416–17.
There are a few early cinematic exceptions to my pre-Williamson rule if we
count the fish tanks and submarine sets Georges Méliès deployed. These films include
the topical reenactment Visite sous-marine du Maine (1898), one of many films that
year to exploit the USS Maine shipwreck; and such féeries as Le Voyage dans la lune
(1902), Le Royaume des fées (1903), La Voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), and La
sirène (1904). Pathé’s Un Drame au fond de la mer (1901), a reworking of a
contemporary British stage melodrama, also featured an undersea set. For a discussion
of these films and their undersea effects, see Richard Abel, “The Cinema of Attractions,
1896–1914,” The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), 59–101; Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (New York:
Manchester University Press, 2000); John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The
Films of Georges Méliès (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979); and Matthew Solomon, ed.,
Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).
10. Brad Matsen, Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss (New York:
Vintage, 2006), 64.
29
television entered into widespread use in the 1950s and made possible remote
viewing—the only two means by which people could observe ocean life in its natural
state of motion without going undersea themselves.
Public and home aquariums as well as popular aquarium writing were
commonplace in Europe and the United States by the time Williamson shot his first film
in 1914. The Fish House, the world’s first large public aquarium, opened at the London
Zoo in May 1853.11 The following year, English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse
published The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, an immensely
popular book that dealt mainly with saltwater aquariums and settled the name of the
apparatus for good. (Aquariums were until then known as “aqua vivariums,” underwater
versions of the “places of life” used to raise plants and animals for laboratory
observation.)12 Articles about England’s saltwater aquaria appeared in Germany by the
middle of the decade; the Viennese Aquarium Salon opened in 1860 (though it closed
after only four years); and in 1865 the Marine Aquarium Temple opened at Hamburg’s
Zoological Garden.13
In the United States, aquarium culture was largely concentrated in the Northeast,
with New York the center of activity. In 1856, P. T. Barnum, who had seen the Fish
House while lecturing in London, began to exhibit aquariums at his American Museum;
tanks appeared alongside such “wonders of the world” as a “real mermaid” and a “six-
11. Bernd Brunner, The Aquarium at Home, trans. Ashley Marc Slapp (London:
Reaktion Books, 2011), 105.
12. Ibid., 39.
13. Ibid., 113.
30
foot man-eating chicken.”14 In 1859, Henry D. Butler, co-owner of Barnum’s American
Museum and author of The Family Aquarium (1858), one of the first such books to
appear in the United States, teamed with James Ambrose Cutting to open the Aquarial
Gardens in Boston.15 The United States’s first permanent installation, the Great New
York Aquarium, opened in October 1876, and the New York Aquarium Journal
commenced publication that same year. In 1893, the first American aquarium society
was founded in the city; three years later, the New York Aquarium, now the oldest
continually operating aquarium in the nation, opened its doors. It was not until
Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium opened in 1930 that saltwater aquaria moved inland.
Specific characteristics of Williamson’s movies bolster the analogy with
aquariums. First of all, the frontal, eye-level view of the ocean from the photosphere,
which never penetrates forward or recedes backward in space but leaves the camera to
scan the outside space like a swiveling head, evokes not only the view into a tank but
also the typical manner in which aquarium scenes had been illustrated in popular writing
since Gosse published The Aquarium (figure 1.3). Additionally, scenes shot from inside
the photosphere often depict the frame of the window with internal spectators (usually
Williamson’s wife and daughter) gathered in front of it, suggesting the space before the
tank in a public aquarium, with the viewer one among several visitors positioned before
the tank (figure 1.4).
14. Ibid., 108.
15. Ibid., 109.
31
Figure 1.3. Starfish illustration by Philip Henry Gosse. Image in Gosse, The Aquarium:
An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, 2nd ed. (London: John Van Voorst, 1856),
58.
Figure 1.4. View from inside the photosphere. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years
under the Sea, 312.
Second, the clear Caribbean waters where Williamson shot his films resembled (and still
resemble) the pellucid contents of a tank. From the start, aquariums were carefully
managed to ensure that the waters were transparent—even if the real ocean is often
turbid and opaque. Similarly, films of the ocean have long favored transparent waters
for their images, and guides to underwater photography never fail to recommend
32
shooting in the clearest possible seas.16 Characteristically, Williamson chose to shoot
around Nassau because of the water’s transparency—“clear as crystal,” in his words.17
Finally, aquariums have shared with film and photography the potential to halt the
passage of time. As Bernd Brunner writes, “the inhabitants of the aquarium were
manifestations of a dream of overcoming time, since fish, jellyfish and other marine
creatures have existed for millions of years and hardly changed.”18 The notion that
before an aquarium a person bears witness to a world before humans walked the Earth
and gazes upon her evolutionary ancestors the fish—a common trope in aquarium
discourse—dovetails with the more modest ambitions of film to capture and store
passing time in a “technological memory bank.”19
In addition to their direct similarities, films and aquaria both drew on the
conventions of preexisting cultural forms of address. As many film and media scholars
have shown, cinema, especially in its first two decades, was understood by both its
makers and audiences in terms of a wide range of cultural phenomena, among them
panoramas, fairs, train rides, vaudeville shows, and shop windows; likewise, many of
the so-called classical film theorists situated the cinema against other, more established
arts to establish its specific identity in relation to them. Though less widely studied,
16. See, for instance, Dimitri Rebikoff and Paul Cherney, A Guide to
Underwater Photography (New York: Greenberg, 1955). The authors identify tropical
and Mediterranean waters as ideal locations, observing that “the transparency of water
in the Eastern Mediterranean . . . is equal to that of water twice distilled!” (75).
17. Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 43.
18. Brunner, The Ocean at Home, 140.
19. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), ix.
33
aquariums were also imbricated with other modes of viewing. In her important study of
home aquariums in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Judith Hamera singles out four “visual affinities” with the aquarium: the window, the
theater, the panorama, and the voyage.20 As her research demonstrates, analogies to
these practices dominated the early popular discourse around home aquaria. Viewers,
largely middle-class hobbyists, “came to the tank well versed in its multiple operations
for spectatorship.”21 Below, I situate Williamson’s movies along the lines of these four
affinities not only to better establish the parallel with early twentieth-century
understandings of the aquarium but also to sketch out the larger representational mesh to
which those movies belonged.
Undersea Windows
As a metaphor for cinema, the window has operated along multiple trajectories.
In an older reading of classical film theory, a realist notion of cinema as window
opposed a formalist idea of cinema as frame. In this antinomy, André Bazin and
Siegfried Kracauer stood to one side while Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and the
Soviets stood to the other. The former upheld cinema for its ability to record and
reproduce contingent, transient physical reality, while the latter concerned themselves
with cinema’s plastic qualities and with manipulating viewer perception. As great as the
metaphors’ respective differences, however, window and frame nevertheless are
conjoined. For Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, the two unite in the compound
“window frame.” This notion suggests an oscillation between two related but distinct
20. Judith Hamera, Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home
Aquarium, 1850–1970 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 24–49.
21. Ibid., 24.
34
modes of viewing: looking as if through a transparent pane of glass while losing sight of
the frame, such that the medium effaces itself; and looking at the frame, which draws
attention to the image’s artifice.22
This alternation finds an analogue in the aquarium. For Hamera, the aquarium,
conceived of as window—that is, as both aperture and frame—“reproduced one of the
paradoxes of modern spectatorship: greater visual access enabled by a medium [glass]
that was, itself, a source of anxiety.” (A wall separating viewers from the phenomena it
showcased, glass “introduc[ed] perceptual complications even as it seemed to solve
them”).23 A transparent barrier, the window offered viewers a glimpse of an “alien
world” seemingly continuous with the space that surrounded it while at the same time
pointing up the impossibility of transit between the two spaces and thus “underlin[ing]
the artifice of the entire apparatus.”24
The undersea scenes in Williamson’s movies constantly draw on this duality. In
With Williamson beneath the Sea, he refers to the photosphere as a “magic window”
onto the sea—as does Captain Nemo of the Nautilus’s window upon introducing his
guests to John Ernest’s marine footage in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. “Through
these crystal plates constructed to withstand the pressure of the water at this great depth,”
declares Nemo, “we gaze on scenes which you might think God never intended us to
see.” Not unlike the glass that houses an aquarium, the submarine window’s “magic”
has for Williamson and Nemo as much to do with the enchanting window view it offers
22. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through
the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 14–15.
23. Hamera, Parlor Ponds, 25.
24. Ibid.
35
those who peer through it as the mighty frame it erects between two physically
incongruous spaces (figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5. Captain Nemo and guests peer out the Nautilus’s “magic window” in 20,000
Leagues under the Sea (Stuart Paton, 1916).
That viewers of both aquariums and ocean movies must inevitably confront the
physical discontinuity between air and water on opposite sides of the “window” is
perhaps the most important aspect of the view’s fundamental artifice. To be fully
absorbed in the view in an aquarium would mean forgetting that to bring aquatic and
terrestrial environments face-to-face requires that one be contained. Likewise with a
movie: the contrast between environments—terrestrial in the theater, aquatic onscreen—
seems to elicit involvement of a different kind from what a viewer experiences when
watching a terrestrial scene. (A casual survey of friends I have watched ocean movies
with suggests that, when absorbed, one is less likely to feel the sensation of being in an
aquatic scene than in a scene that takes place above water, perhaps because a buoyant
and wet space where one cannot breathe naturally differs so radically from the space of
viewing.) This is to say nothing of the effect that seeing diving suits and submersibles
onscreen might have on spectators who have no clue what it is like to inhabit them. The
36
radical difference between the two types of space makes an absorbed viewer’s sense of
passage between them less fluid than it might otherwise be. As the biologist Todd
Newberry puts it, “The more we try to pretend that we are looking through a porthole in
Captain Nemo’s submarine, the more we see a fish tank.”25 The nature of the spatial
differences makes it all but impossible to ignore the fundamental artifice of the
ostensible window onto the sea.
Of course, the transparent view offered by the window would mean nothing if
not for the crystalline water, which extends the glass’s transparency beyond the pane.
Although it is unclear exactly how the cultural premium on clear water came to be
placed (particularly as regards water housed in glass), we might provisionally conclude
that glass demands that whatever it contains share its transparency. In other words,
aquarium water should aspire to the condition of glass, as should any water on the other
side of the cinematic window frame. Indeed, if modernity and transparency are
intertwined on account of glass—a connection particularly apparent in modern
architecture, which “dematerialized” urban space and rendered it less opaque—it may
be that glass’s limpidity becomes the standard to which the entire visible world should
aspire.26
If we situate the window analogy in the broader context of modernity rather than
limit it to the tanks and screens immediately in view, both aquariums and cinema serve
as extensions of the shop window—a link that With Williamson explicitly invokes.
25. Todd Newberry, “Aquariums,” The Threepenny Review 98 (Summer 2004):
33.
26. On glass as a “material of dematerialization,” see Anne Friedberg, The
Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 115–
23.
37
During an obviously staged sequence in which his wife asks one of the Bahamians to
fetch her a sea fan, pointing and motioning to the desired object through the
photosphere’s glass, Williamson quips: “Isn’t it just like a woman to start window
shopping?”
For Anne Friedberg, the storefront window was a “proscenium for visual
intoxication, the site of seduction for consumer desire,” particularly female consumer
desire.27 Additionally, as tied to consumerism, the window played a significant role in
the formation of the self:
From the middle of the nineteenth century, as if in a historical relay of looks, the
shop window succeeded the mirror as a site of identity construction, and then—
gradually—the shop window was displaced and incorporated by the cinema
screen. Cinematic spectation, a further instrumentalization of this consumer gaze,
produced paradoxical effects on the newfound social mobility of the flâneuse. . . .
“Window shopping” implies a mode of consumer contemplation; a
speculative regard to the mise-en-scène of the display window without the
commitment to enter the store or to make a purchase. Cinema spectatorship
relies on an equally distanced contemplation: a tableau, framed and inaccessible,
not behind glass, but on the screen.28
As Hamera notes, “If aquarium residents stood in for nature in the parlor, the
visual resonance with the shop window also enfolded them into a logic of consumption
and display within the home, with ‘every home a shop.’”29 We might further suggest
that a window onto the deep, such as Williamson’s, could extend the metaphorical
shop’s walls to encompass the entire sea, such that anything could be purchased and
domesticated insofar as it could be seen. Though the aquarium’s historical links to
consumption are unclear—for instance, whether aquariums were ever used as tools to
27. Friedberg, Window Shopping, 65.
28. Ibid., 66, 68.
29. Hamera, Parlor Ponds, 28.
38
heighten consumer desire for other products has not been documented—there are a
number of analogies between aquariums and shopping in the literature of Williamson’s
filmmaking years, particularly as regards the Parisian arcades. Walter Benjamin remarks
of the Passage des Panoramas in The Arcades Project, “It was, in the first moment, as
though you had entered an aquarium. Along the wall of the great darkened hall, broken
at intervals by narrow joints, it stretched like a ribbon of illuminated water behind glass.
The play of colors among deep-sea fauna cannot be more fiery.”30 In Paris Peasant,
Louis Aragon describes the arcades passages as “human aquariums” destined to vanish
in the wake of American-style urban planning—a passage Benjamin also cites.31 And
putting shopping on the opposite end of a continuum with cinema, Evelyn Waugh
makes a negative comparison in his travelogue Labels, dismissing the Musée
Océanographique in Monaco as “less like a cinema than the one in London, and more
like a fish-shop.”32
Undersea Theater
Both Williamson’s work and aquariums bore close affinities with the theatrical
style of performance that came to characterize popular scientific lectures in nineteenthcentury Britain and the twentieth-century United States. In this lecture format, scientists
and explorers showcased lantern slides, photographs, and films while putting dual
30 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 55.
31. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact
Change, 1994), 14; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 539.
32. Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (New York: Penguin,
1930), 38.
39
emphasis on teaching and entertaining, on “rational and moral amusement.”33 This was
a tradition in which Williamson participated.
For Rick Altman, the illustrated lecture, emblematized by the likes of John L.
Stoddard and E. Burton Holmes, was a signifying practice separate from cinema, one
“with its own rules and assumptions capable of influencing cinema’s signification
system.”34 Not only that, lecture practices anticipated the associational powers of
editing that Lev Kuleshov would demonstrate in the late 1910s and 1920s. “Instead of
simply repeating what the images say,” Altman argues, “the lecturer has the power to
make the audience perceive something other than what the images actually show. The
power of lecturers lies not so much in their ability to explain the visual, but in the power
to redefine the images according to an alternate set of values.”35
Williamson toured with his films and photographs, lecturing on his adventures
and undersea life to audiences in the United States, Ireland, and Great Britain from the
middle 1910s onward—even sharing a stage with famed naturalist William Beebe at the
1930 annual dinner for the Explorers Club, when he showed footage (which caught fire
during his lecture) from his Field Museum expedition.36 He would have known and
33. Hamera, 32.
34. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 56. See also Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to
1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 221–23.
35. Altman, Silent Film Sound, 71–72.
36. “UNDERSEA FILM AFIRE AT EXPLORERS’ DINNER,” New York Times,
January 19, 1930, 16. For background on the content of Williamson’s lectures, see
Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 181.
40
perfected the manner of not simply explaining but redefining images for his audiences, a
practice that recorded voiceover narrations would make commonplace.37
The narrational style of Williamson beneath the Sea (1932) offers clues into
Williamson’s turns on the lecture circuit and his identification with the practice Altman
explains. It is nearly identical to the live, unscripted narration with which he
accompanied a truncated version of that film twenty-three years later on an episode of
TV’s I Search for Adventure (1955); much of the narration of both also resembles
Williamson’s 1936 memoir, Twenty Years under the Sea.38 Though transcriptions of
Williamson’s lectures do not appear to exist, the similarities among his live TV
narration, a movie narration he recorded more than two decades before that, and his
published prose are consistent with the image of a lecturer who had long ago perfected a
mental script from which he could recite at will.
For Hamera, that aquariums were institutionally and publically imbricated with
the theater “encouraged viewers to read the tank as they would read the stage.”39 Not
merely aquatic landscapes, tanks were sites of action and drama, their inhabitants
players—a notion reinforced on the one hand by parlor tanks’ proscenium-like glass
37. Because Williamson began as a newspaperman—a photographer, artist, and
sometime reporter for Norfolk’s The Virginia Pilot—we should allow that the practice
of redefining rather than merely describing images for him also derived from creatively
captioning images.
38. I Search for Adventure, incidentally, was the brainchild of John D. Craig, a
deep-sea diver, World War II aerial combat photographer, and Hollywood stuntman.
Craig’s 1938 memoir, Daring Is My Business, much of which details his undersea
exploits as a performer and “ghost shooter” (234) for Hollywood in the 1930s, became
the template for the show. See John D. Craig, Daring Is My Business (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1938).
39. Hamera, 29.
41
fronts, solid backs, and sometimes ornate sides and on the other by the personification
of marine animals in public aquariums as well as home aquarium books and magazines.
When they specifically address animals, Williamson’s films turn to familiar
anthropomorphism, whether treating octopi as nefarious arch-villains of the deep or
speaking of a coral as a piscine domicile. (When Williamson’s Bahamian laborers hoist
a coral tree from the depths in With Williamson, he asks the viewer to contemplate the
event from the vantage point of the coral’s inhabitants: “Imagine the thoughts of the fish
in the fish world down below . . . All this activity in a place that has never before been
invaded by human beings . . . It’s just as if an airship nosed down out of the sky and tied
ropes onto your house, trying to carry it off . . . You would hope that something would
blast them away—and that might happen to us!”) In this sense they look forward to both
the family-friendly domestic descriptions of animals in Disney’s True-Life Adventures
and the more impish personifications of marine life in Jean Painlevé’s science films and
Jacques Cousteau’s films and television shows (though they hardly bear the surrealist
inflections of either Frenchman’s narrations).
We should also consider theatricality in another sense apropos the cinema—
specifically, the beholder-centered aesthetic that Michael Fried positioned against
absorption and that resonates with the “cinema of attractions” described most famously
by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault.40 In this mode, films “explicitly acknowledge
their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront,” arousing and satisfying viewer
40. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in
the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
42
curiosity “through a marked encounter, a direct stimulus, a succession of shocks.”41
Films in this mode aim to dazzle viewers without drawing them into a hermetically
sealed diegetic world; they are less concerned with storytelling than with the act of
looking and the pleasure the latter can produce.
Such outward-reaching, pleasurable, nonnarrative moments as concern Gunning
abound in Williamson’s movies, particularly when the camera moves undersea.
Crucially, many of these moments make a spectacle of nonwhite bodies for the pleasure
of a presumed white audience. Doubtless the most famous such scene in the Williamson
oeuvre is the knife fight he staged between a Bahamian diver and blue shark in his first
movie, 30 Leagues under the Sea (1914)— a scene that reappears in With Williamson
(figure 1.6). In other scenes compiled in With Williamson, Bahamians fetch coins from
the seafloor, entertain Williamson’s wife and daughter before the sphere’s magic
window, and simply do work, performing the labor of lifting corals and catching fish for
which Williamson employed them (figure 1.7). As Starosielski argues, in these instances
Williamson’s movies portray the sea “as the domain of an ethnic Other . . . dramatiz[ing]
the labor of ‘native’ bodies” while “contain[ing] their power through comparisons with
aquatic animals.”42
41. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the
(In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda
Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 123–24.
42. Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity,” 150.
43
Figure 1.6. A diver duels with a shark in 30 Leagues under the Sea. Image in
Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 68.
Figure 1.7. A Bahamian diver plays peek-a-boo with a diving helmet for Williamson’s
daughter. Image in Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 307.
When not showcasing the feats of his Bahamian employees, Williamson plays
up the ocean’s spectacular dangers. Titled “The Graveyard of Lost Ships,” the final reel
of With Williamson beneath the Sea depicts in sensational fashion the perils divers
might encounter while seeking booty from shipwrecks. A mechanical octopus (which
Williamson devised and patented for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) drags a diver down;
another diver gets trapped in quicksand (a title card reading “Quicksand!” dilates from
the screen’s center) but predictably gets saved. At another moment, the camera lingers
44
on a splayed-out human skeleton, illustrating that, at the bottom of the sea, “treasure and
tragedy go hand in hand.”
Finally, Williamson’s movies feature more tempered moments that simply
foreground the natural world, as in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, when Captain Nemo
first reveals the ocean to Professor Arronax and the other visitors aboard the Nautilus.
Here, for most of nine minutes, the narrative is suspended; we are treated to sundry
views of corals, fish, and above all the dazzling refraction of sunlight through the waves.
Nemo’s dialogue seems directed at spectators as much as at his guests as he tells them
(and us) what to look at: “Notice how brilliant is the reflection of the sun’s rays on these
coral beds, fathoms below the surface”; “See the blueheads, looking for the ‘sea eggs’
on which they feed”; and more informatively, “At the base is dead coral, formed by
skeletons of the little coral polyp—a marine animal.” Nemo’s dialogue throughout this
sequence closely resembles the text of an illustrated lecture. Identifying discrete
phenomena for viewers to focus on, he “teaches” spectators and their onscreen
surrogates about what they are seeing even as the images, so far outside the stream of
their beholders’ common experience, may deliver Gunning’s “succession of shocks.”
Ocean Panoramas and Dioramas
In addition to bearing an affinity with windows and theater, aquariums and
undersea movies drew on the visual logic of the panorama, one of the major forms of
“rational amusement” of the nineteenth century—specifically that of the moving kind,
which unwound steadily on rollers to give viewers the sense of movement through
45
space.43 Formally, the undersea sequences in Williamson’s surviving movies often
evoke the panorama—specifically, the lengthy views of reefs and marine creatures
uninterrupted by a human presence in the frame. In the aforementioned nine-minute
sequence from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, for instance, the shots imply neither a
coherent point of view nor even stable motion of the Nautilus. Sometimes the frame
appears still, as when the camera holds on a particular animal or event; more often, the
view often indicates steady, lateral movement, evoking both a panorama on rollers and
an ambulatory gaze before such a scene. The general effect is of an array of glances at
different parts of a massive, all-enveloping scene not containable within a discrete frame.
As Hamera notes, the panorama’s conventions often overlapped with those of
the diorama, which in the form of museum display becomes an important intertext with
Williamson’s work. Using identical footage, both Williamson’s Field Museum film and
autobiographical feature show much of the behind-the-scenes work in the Bahamas that
went toward constructing the Chicago Field Museum’s Hall of Fishes, which finally
opened in the summer of 1941.44 In these sequences, which depict the capture, killing,
and plaster casting of a wide range of fish as well as the hoisting up of a three-ton coral
tree with a raft cum makeshift winch, Williamson’s films collapses the usually clear
43. Hamera, Parlor Ponds, 35. For a superlative recent study of moving
panoramas, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving
Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
44. According to a Science Service notice on its opening in The Pittsburgh Press,
the hall depicted “three typical habitats”: “a coral reef in the Bahamas, the Gulf bottom
of the Texas coast, and a deep tide pool among the rocks of Maine. Special attention has
been paid to sharks.” See “Hall of Fishes Open to Public,” The Pittsburgh Press, July 27,
1941,
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=B04bAAAAIBAJ&sjid=bEwEAAAAIBAJ&p
g=6537%2C6052802.
46
distinctions between the ocean “out there” and natural-history displays of it.45 The film
reveals that what may appear to be only convincing models of marine life in a museum
often actually have an indexical relationship to the animals for which they stand in.
Fundamentally, aquaria depend on extirpating flora and fauna from their natural
habitats and installing them in artificial ones. Undersea cinema would seem to be free of
this problem and permit a more eco-friendly relation between those who seek to have
ocean life brought up close and the environment in which those creatures dwell.
Williamson, however, explicitly participated in ocean harvest, as the footage here attests.
Among other sights, we see a shark baited, caught, and hauled to shore, where it quakes
until one of the explorers slugs it on the nose. It is one of at least three dead sharks to
appear onscreen. A taxidermist hacks off its fins and dredges the torso in plaster as if
breading it, removing the mold once it has dried. In language that resonates with Bazin’s
descriptions of photographic indexicality, Williamson speaks of the mold as “a perfect
model or reproduction” that captures “the form and every detail of the man-eater. In
other words, we now have Mr. Shark thoroughly fingerprinted.”46
In this fascinating “fingerprinting” sequence, the ocean becomes a treasure trove
of materials that exist to serve the sea’s reproduction as institutional display. As
Williamson states, the Hall of Fishes exhibit will depend on multiple forms of
observation and representation, including color notes, photographs, and written
descriptions of marine life, to produce an accurate staging of undersea space: “with our
45. Over 190 species of fish and sharks were caught on the expedition.
Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 192.
46. “The existence of the photographed object . . . shares in the existence of the
model, like a fingerprint.” André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What
Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 9.
47
photographs and other records, the museum artist will reproduce a group of sharks at
home beneath the sea, at home in a setting of coral creations.” The photosphere was
crucial to collecting these records; not merely portraying it as a camera booth, the Field
Museum film depicts the sphere as a site of different modes of representing undersea
space meant to complement still and moving images. In addition, the movie gives a
sense of the huge amount of normally unseen labor involved in preparing an exhibit
such as the Hall of Fishes. Although the Bahamian scene would be only one of three
habitats displayed, Williamson’s film allows us to see that at least this part of the exhibit
depended on the participation (some paid, some probably not) of native peoples, on a
range of different technologies and techniques of extracting and preserving aspects of
the marine environment for display, on an array of diverse modes of visual
representation, and on international naval transit to get the objects displayed from one
location to another thousands of miles away.
Undersea Voyages
Finally, Williamson’s movies functioned as a means of vicarious travel while at
the same time playing into broader discourses of tourism and exploration, including
popular writing on ocean expeditions—notably Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the
Sea (1870); William Beebe’s Beneath Tropic Seas (1928), Half Mile Down (1934), and
his related National Geographic stories; and of course Williamson’s own eventual
books.47
47. In addition to Twenty Years under the Sea, Williamson cowrote a children’s
book about his daughter Sylvia’s photosphere adventures. See John Ernest Williamson
and Frances Jenkins Olcott, Child of the Deep (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1938).
48
Aquariums invited their beholders to travel in both space and time, to imagine
the experience of submarine exploration while also encountering the deep time of their
evolutionary forebears, largely because popular evolutionary discourse treated fish, the
world’s oldest vertebrates, as human ancestors. It permitted viewers a vicarious
experience of ocean exploration that removed them from its real dangers and
discomforts, weaving those to a thrilling adventure yarn full of moments along the
precipice.
Additionally, Williamson’s films were significantly bound up with the tourism
industry. In the 1930s, Williamson made a deal with the Nassau Development Board
that opened the photosphere to the public, allowing tourists, writers, artists,
photographers, scientists, and others to “venture physically where the magic glasses
[lorgnons] had only allowed their eyes to wander.”48 Williamson made his photographs
available to the Development Board so it could promote Nassau internationally—tying
into the work already being done by his films. Additionally, his public lectures focused
on Nassau, thus promoting the Bahamas wherever he spoke. Finally, the photosphere
itself was refashioned as an underwater post office.49 Not only could tourists who had
seen Williamson’s films visit the site where they were produced, seeing the ocean with
their own eyes; they could send postcards from the very underwater space the cards
pictured. As Thompson notes, the photosphere “enabl[ed] the production, consumption,
48. Thompson, 177.
49. It became a post office in 1939, but did not open to the public until 1941,
after it was used to shoot Technicolor scenes for Paramount’s Bahama Passage (Edward
H. Griffith, 1941). See Taves, “With Williamson beneath the Sea,” 58.
49
and dissemination of views of the dreamlike world beneath the sea, while allowing
tourists to inhabit the sea in ‘perfect comfort and safety.’”50
Undersea Cinema’s Nonrepresentational Technologies
The aquarium analogy with Williamson’s films has a number of limits. For one,
it privileges formal, presentational, and discursive-contextual likenesses as well as
spectatorial experience over the broader industrial-modern conditions that made possible
such filmmaking—namely the large-scale technics involved in the movies’ production
that connect the films to histories that would appear to have little to do with cinematic or
other kinds of representation.
Lest a discussion of nonrepresentational technologies that enable filmmaking
seem too far removed from the films themselves, we should suppose that Williamson’s
audiences were curious or even knowledgeable about these technical matters and
regarded them as an important part of making meaning. For the historian Neil Harris,
“how did they do that” debates about the nature of process constitute an “operational
aesthetic”—a phrase he coins in relation to P. T. Barnum’s efforts to stir up
controversies around his various hoaxes to maximize his profits.51 Though Williamson
was no huckster like Barnum, the how-to content of his films allows us to surmise that
audiences of his nonfiction films would have taken a similar interest in process. With
Williamson and the Field Museum film show (in identical footage) how the photosphere
and diving tube were assembled as well as the work of catching fish and raising corals
for a planned Field Museum exhibit. In addition, Williamson’s memoir is full of
50. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 179.
51. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1973), 61–89.
50
accounts of problem solving. Given similarities between some of the book text and the
narrations of With Williamson and his episode of I Search for Adventure, we might
suppose that these accounts would have been part of his lectures or discussions with
audiences, some of which consisted of fellow explorers (as when he spoke to the
Explorers Club in 1930).
In the interest of expanding on the behind-the-scenes technical matter depicted in
the films, below I discuss a pair of technologies Williamson used and showcased in his
films: the submarine tube and the photosphere. In addition, as a means of illustrating
some of the longer-range industrial processes that Williamson’s marine images are
entangled with on account of these enabling technologies, I consider some of conditions
of its manufacture—in part with reference to another diving sphere of the period,
William Beebe and Otis Barton’s Bathysphere. Doing so is also meant to serve the more
general purpose of showing the range of histories and techniques that can unexpectedly
converge in a seemingly simple technology and, consequently, in the images it enables
to be made.
The Williamson Submarine Tube
Invented by John Ernest’s father, the Scottish ship captain Charles Williamson,
the submarine tube was designed to facilitate submarine engineering and the salvaging
of wrecked ships. According to a 1913 Scientific American article devoted to it, the
apparatus consisted “of three parts: (1) a floating vessel of any suitable design; (2) a
submersible terminal operating chamber in which the work is carried out on the bottom
51
of the water, and (3) a collapsible flexible metallic tube connecting the vessel and the
terminal operating chamber” (figure 1.8).52
Figure 1.8. Patent illustration of the Williamson submarine tube with operating chamber.
Image in Charles Williamson, apparatus for submarine work, US Patent 745,469, filed
March 13, 1903, and issued December 1, 1903.
The operating chamber at the bottom was fitted with small “helmets”—that is,
protruding walls equipped with small observation windows into which the diver could
slip his head—and armholes that opened onto flexible sleeves; these allowing the diver
to manipulate things underwater from a safe distance. The chamber was completely
sealed except for where it connected to the tube, so that the diver could in theory climb
down naked, knowing he was fully protected from the elements. As for the tube, it was
“made up of a series of sections terminating in flanged rings, whereby the sections
[could] be bolted together. Each section consist[ed] of a flexible covering stretched over
a series of metal rings of I-shape cross section” that one could scale like a ladder. “By
52. “Photographing under Water,” Scientific American 109, no. 1 (July 5, 1913):
6.
52
means of the chain hoist connected with the top of the operating chamber, the apparatus
[could] be lifted up to the surface, collapsing the vertical shaft and permitting the
operating chamber to rise into a housing in the barge. As the apparatus [was] raised the
sections [would be] unbolted and stowed away.”53
The elder Williamson patented several variations on this device, basically
different kind of work chambers attached to the same tube that would allow a worker to
perform different kinds of operations; the tube could also be affixed to a buoy rather
than a barge. In addition, the device was not simply intended to replace the diving suit.
Within the world of geotechnical engineering, it represented an attempt to build a
flexible, more easily transportable and variable-length version of caissons—basically
watertight column structures—that allowed workers to construct bridges and dams,
repair ships, and perform other subaquatic activities. Because salvage, ship repair, and
construction firms thought the device too cumbersome to use or to replicate, however,
the tube was left to rust on a dock until the younger Williamson got the idea of using it
to produce photographs and films.
The Photosphere
A six-foot-by-ten-foot, four-ton steel globe with a long conical viewing chamber
attached, the photosphere was designed to accommodate four to five people. The globe
would seat the camera and cameraman; the cameraman would in turn receive orders
53. Ibid. An article on the photosphere from the same publication concludes with
speculation that “[a]side from its advantages for diving operations, the apparatus may be
used at amusement parks to furnish visitors with a view of under-water conditions or for
exploring the bottom of a river or other body of water.” See “A New Apparatus for
Submarine Operations,” Scientific American 98, no. 14 (April 4, 1908): 243.
53
from Williamson, who delivered them via a telephone in the sphere or simply by
shouting them down the tube—effectively directing scenes from the deck of his boat.
Though ostensibly a simple device, as popular historian Thomas N. Burgess
notes, “the projecting funnel was [in actuality] an involved piece of engineering that had
to solve many problems” including but not limited to image production. With a twoinch-thick, five-foot-diameter on the outer end and a lens port on the inner end, the
funnel was designed to both provide the camera with a wide field of view and prevent
reflections that would impede filming. (The cameraman could gauge his framing by way
of a separate viewing port five inches to the side.) More importantly, however, was
withstanding pressure, which the glass’s thickness alone was not enough to do. So that
the glass would not break and flood the chamber, the air pressure on the inside of the
funnel had to equal the water pressure on the outside. “This problem was solved by
making the funnel airtight . . . connecting to it a pipe that led from a hand pump
operated by the cameraman” and installing pressure gauges that would register the air
and water pressure. “This way, the air space between the large window and the little lens
port could be pressurized (or bled) at will according to the depth at which they were
shooting.”54
Though the sphere was sturdy and waterproof, shooting from inside it was not
without hazards. Strong currents might dash the sphere into corals or boulders, and in
such an event the large window would be a site of particular vulnerability—as the
episode discussed at the beginning of this chapter illustrates. Williamson credits the
bending of the caisson tube and pure luck with the glass not dashing against the reef;
54. Quotations are from Thomas N. Burgess, Take Me under the Sea: The
Dream Merchants of the Deep (Salem, OR: The Ocean Archives, 1994), 176–77.
54
however, for the sphere to flood may have proven more catastrophic than he lets on,
depending on the photosphere’s depth and the water pressure external to it. William
Beebe described such a nightmare scenario when he and his diving partner Otis Barton
installed a new window on their Bathysphere and the sphere sprouted a leak on an
unmanned test dive to 2,000 feet. Upon raising the sphere, they found that it had flooded
and that the water inside was under tremendous pressure. To give a palpable sense of
how much pressure, I cite the aftermath of Beebe’s attempt to unscrew the wing bolt on
the hatch and drain the water:
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the bolt was torn from our hands, and
the mass of heavy metal shot across the deck like the shell of a gun. The
trajectory was almost straight, and the brass bolt hurtled into the steel winch 30
feet away, shearing out a half-inch notch!
This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which slackened after a
while to a cataract, pouring out of the hole in the door, air mingling with the
water, looking like hot steam instead of compressed air shooting through icecold water. If I had been in the way I certainly should have been decapitated.55
While the photosphere could not descend to 2,000 feet, and a leak would therefore not
have pulverized the men (“crushed [them] into shapeless tissues,” per Beebe), the
pressure differential between the inside and outside of the sphere had the glass broken
would have caused the interior to rapidly flood, destroying the camera and threatening
to drown the inhabitants.56
Steel Mills and Other Origins of Undersea Film
Undersea filmmaking is inextricably linked to the noncinematic problem of
safely accessing an environment that the human body cannot long inhabit without
55. William Beebe, “A Half Mile Down: Strange Creatures, Beautiful and
Grotesque as Figments of Fancy, Reveal Themselves at Windows of the Bathysphere,”
National Geographic 66, no. 6 (December 1934): 670–71.
56. Ibid., 671.
55
significant technical support. But it is also linked to the broader industrial contexts
within which these supporting technologies were developed. Of particular importance
for Williamson’s films is the steel industry, which is hard to overlook when we consider
the photosphere’s sheer mass: at four tons, it weighed as much as a large wrecking ball.
It could only ever be the product of heavy industry. Thus, I want to trace this particular
device back to the “the Pennsylvania steel mills” of the early twentieth century, where
Williamson had the device cast and machined after he drew the blueprint for it.57
In an environmentalist vein, we would do well to consider the landscapes of
Pennsylvania steel towns and the factories therein—the polluted skies and waterways
outside, the blast furnaces inside, and the incredible heat and noise and otherwise
extraordinarily dangerous conditions with which steelworkers had to contend. For the
most trenchant American critic of technology of the period, Lewis Mumford, the steel
mills belonged to a period of technology he called paleotechnics. In this period, which
in the United States began in the 1850s and peaked at the start of the twentieth century,
centralized and hierarchical forms of heavy industry suborned human needs to the
machine.58 For him, paleotechnics marked not a regression toward but rather “an
upthrust into barbarism” aided by the same forces that had before the eighteenth century
served “the perfection of human culture.”59 Factories spewed toxins into the air and
waterways, and rivers became sewers for human excrement. Clean air and sunlight in
industrial areas were exceptions, not the rule. Coal and iron anchored an increasingly
57. Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea, 41.
58. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010 [1934]), 155.
59. Ibid., 154.
56
impoverished proletarian life, which was characterized by round-the-clock toil, a
deskilling and mechanization of labor, subsistence wages or worse, and squalid living
conditions. Human gains, if there were any, paled before the triumphs of industry.
In the years leading up to World War I, millworkers were still reeling from the
1892 Homestead Strike, an event that pitted the Amalgamated Association of Iron and
Steel Workers against Carnegie Steel and proved a catastrophic defeat for labor. Begun
in response to rapid increases in the volume and speed of steel production and the
attendant growth of an unskilled labor force, the strike was the union’s attempt to
preserve the historic position of its skilled, craft-oriented membership; however, the
results were the implementation of twelve-hour and sixty-hour work weeks for laborers;
an increase in Sunday work; and the rise of the “long turn”—the fortnightly twentyfour-hour shift when workers would switch from days to nights. The average annual
wage in the steel industry was $697 in 1910—about $17,000 in 2014 dollars.60 A
workplace safety movement did not begin in earnest until 1912, and labor reforms had
to wait till World War I.
Additionally, the steel mills were the birthplace of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
scientific management, which also took hold in the shipbuilding industry in the first
decades of the twentieth century (thus implicating the barges to which Williamson
attached the photosphere). Taylor worked for Midvale Steel during the 1890s and
Bethlehem Steel at the turn of the century; as historian Thomas J. Misa has shown in A
60. On wages, hours, and working conditions in the steel mills, see William T.
Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, Vol. 2
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1971), 444–54. I get the inflation numbers from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. The
earliest date available on the calculator is 1913, which I used instead of 1910. $697 in
1913 translates to $16,780.31 in 2014.
57
Nation of Steel, Taylor’s technical innovations to serve high-speed steel production in
these locales actually preceded scientific management. Taylor’s new technologies fueled
a managerial desire for top-down labor reform in the name of efficiency. Only when
management acted on this desire did the mechanization of human bodies for which
Taylorism has become shorthand come about. Given their large contracts with other
institutions, namely the US military, it likely that only high-speed steel production
allowed the mills to contract with Williamson for an affordable one-off project, which
would mean Williamson’s photosphere and the films he made with it were enabled in
part by the new Taylorist managerial system.
Here, I do not mean to condemn Williamson’s movies by association with
Taylorism or the dangerous and exploitative labor conditions in the steel mills. After all,
the conditions above are general ones, not specific circumstances with provable links to
the photosphere’s production. Indeed, Williamson’s memoir is not precise about where
and how the sphere was made.
61
Rather, I simply mean to point out the paradox of
industrial conditions that damaged the environment and dehumanized workers
underlying recorded images of a seemingly pristine, nontechnologized nature.
Williamson’s photosphere offers an extreme example of the environmentally destructive
and dangerous working conditions that may even persist in submersible construction
today (though it would be hard to say how without detailed studies of individual
submersibles’ manufacturing histories). And it is all the more important to play up these
conditions when they do not have a visual analogue onscreen. To a degree, the steel mill
61. Documents among Williamson’s papers in the Bahamas National Archives at
Nassau may shine more light on the photosphere’s origins, though I have been unable to
consult these myself.
58
landscape resonates with popular late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century ideas of
the sea as a “place of ill omen, death and mayhem . . . a cursed, dark world where
terrifying monsters lurked, devouring everything in sight”—ideas that Williamson
occasionally indulged in with the octopus attacks and quicksand traps in his adventure
movies.
62
But visually and sonically, very little about tropic seas evokes anything like
the dark, fiery, and deafening furnace floors of a mill. If the conditions of production of
the photosphere (and other steel submersibles) have an analogue onscreen in ocean
cinema, it would be the volcanic imagery of the deep sea. The scalding waters,
poisonous gases, and lava welling up from cracks in the seafloor found in much later
movies of the ocean, such as Stephen Low’s IMAX documentary Volcanoes of the Deep
Sea (2003) (discussed in chapter four), form a useful, though imperfect, analogy with
the working environment of the mills. Indeed, given the infernal imagery in these films,
it is as if the steel submersibles are descending not to a distant landscape but rather to
the site of their own construction.
Though the environmental and labor conditions of the mills that forged the
photosphere are important, so are the range of techniques that went into its construction.
Williamson is silent about these, possibly because he was too far removed from the
contracting (and subcontracting) of its construction to comment. However, the
construction of William Beebe’s Bathysphere offers hints at the techniques that may
have been involved in making the photosphere. A one-piece steel sphere similar in size
to Williamson’s, the Bathysphere was cast in a single pour using centuries-old
62. Brunner, The Ocean at Home, 11.
59
techniques adapted from the casting of church bells.63 This process entailed baking a
sand-and-clay mold of the sphere’s interior; steam-bending wood around the mold and
creating atop the wood another mold, which would be baked in two halves like a
clamshell; and finally, after removing the wood, filling the gap between the molds with
molten steel and chipping away the inner mold once the steel had cooled. Additionally,
given both submersibles’ considerable mass, it is possible that the winch cables used to
raise and lower them were made of the same high-strength materials and constructed
using similar techniques to prevent breakage. In the case of the Bathysphere, these
techniques were drawn from the making of elevator and suspension-bridge cables.
The point of this long-range technological journey is to show that even a
seemingly simple cinematic enabling technology like the photosphere is not merely
some discrete means to an end for image making but is itself the product of a wide range
of convergent forces. In the case of submersibles more complex in design, the number
of forces involved in their creation becomes exponentially greater; there are so many
components that go into the diving technologies Jacques Cousteau and later IMAX
filmmakers use that to unravel different threads of science and engineering that
converge in their design would be practically impossible. Even though these forces may
seem far removed from the images shown onscreen in a movie, the images would be
unthinkable without them. Just as the cultural discourse surrounding one noncinematic
63. I draw these details from Brad Matson’s lengthy account of the
Bathysphere’s construction in Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss (New York:
Vintage, 2005), 38–49. Though Beebe himself would speak of the “sheer simplicity” of
the Bathysphere’s construction, it was anything but simple. The sphere went through
three major incarnations, was constantly subject to adjustments, and resulted from a
complex subcontracting process that brought various industries, actors, and techniques
into the fold. William Beebe, Half Mile Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company,
1934), 65.
60
technology (aquariums) is important for understanding the valences of meaning of
Williamson’s undersea films, so the material dimensions of another (the photosphere) is
crucial for understanding the films’ conditions of possibility.
Conclusion
Among the few motion pictures made undersea prior to World War II and
certainly the most technologically intensive, Williamson’s photosphere movies are
rather singular examples of marine filmmaking from the cinema’s first half century.
Nevertheless, they anticipated developments in undersea filmmaking that would have to
wait several more decades. Although in the 1940s scuba gear introduced the freefloating, balletic views of undersea space that even today remains the dominant visual
aesthetic (discussed in the next chapter vis-à-vis Cousteau’s cinema), later films shot
from submersibles such Cousteau’s Soucoupe, the DSV Alvin, and the Soviet Mir I and
Mir II retain some of the formal characteristics of Williamson’s images. Despite these
subs’ mobility and ability to descend thousands of feet from the surface, the view they
authorize is a vertically upright drift through ocean space that, in cinema, the
photosphere was the first apparatus to purvey.
The various aspects of the aquarium analogy I have fleshed out in this chapter
persist beyond Williamson as well. The window metaphor crops up, for instance, in
Cousteau’s World without Sun (1964) when, as the narrator, he notes that he and the
other “oceanauts” “cannot remember whether we’re inside the aquarium [of the sea] or
outside it.” The theatrical style of narration with which Williamson accompanied his
films and that the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea invokes when Captain
Nemo shows his guests his “magic window” recurs in countless later underwater scenes
61
in documentaries and narrative films alike. Indeed, it is Nemo again who delivers showand-tell style narration that seems directed to the audience as much as to the other
characters in both the 1954 Disney adaptation of 20,000 Leagues and its British
successor, Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (James Hill, 1969). In addition,
panoramas and dioramas become important for understanding later IMAX movies of the
ocean. Not only do IMAX movies circulate in museum contexts where they share
building space with naturalistic exhibits akin to the ones Williamson helped create; the
giant screen also invites a spectatorial response of wonder akin to the one structured by
nineteenth century panoramas—what Alison Griffiths calls the “revered gaze.” And
virtually every undersea film becomes a voyage, enabling spectators to vicariously tour
the deep.
Importantly, however, Williamson’s films were reliant on the surface in a way
that later undersea filmmakers, most notably Cousteau, did not want to be. Tethered to a
surface ship by the flexible tube, Williamson’s photosphere was fundamentally an
extension of above-water exploration: it could not move through ocean space on its own.
As we will see in the next chapter, much of the early Cousteau’s ocean exploration
centered on the idea of making ocean-going man (almost always man) completely
independent from the surface—an unattainable vision emblematized by his early 1960s
idea of Homo aquaticus, a man who through surgical alteration, if not biological
evolution, would be able to breathe freely undersea. Not only scuba gear but a range of
untethered, battery-powered submersibles and underwater habitats were crucial to
paving the way for this vision. Importantly, this idea of freedom from the surface is
62
closely bound up with postwar efforts to colonize the deep to better exploit it
economically and military—efforts that would have destructive environmental effects.
In discussing the material origins of the photosphere, I noted a paradox: that
Williamson’s movies of pristine tropical waters and the dazzling life they contain in part
originated in America’s early twentieth-century steel mills, amid a landscape of coalblackened skies and poisoned rivers. In the postwar years, we might say that the gulf
between these extremes of pristine and devastate nature began to close. This is not
because destruction of the terrestrial environment, where the technologies for undersea
filmmaking are built, has halted (though that destruction has not continued apace with
the vivid aesthetics of belching smokestacks and sunless skies that Lewis Mumford
described when writing of the mills). Rather, even as filmmakers have continued to
depict the undersea world as stunning wilderness beyond human influence, the diving
technologies that enabled them to make films have been used in ways that, though
slowly and imperceptibly, have done lasting, even irreversible damage to the marine
environment. This idea runs through the next three chapters.
63
CHAPTER TWO
LIVING IN A WORLD WITHOUT SUN: JACQUES COUSTEAU, HOMO
AQUATICUS, AND THE DREAM OF CONQUERING THE DEEP
“I think there will be a conscious and deliberate evolution of Homo aquaticus, spurred
by human intelligence rather than the slow blind natural adaptation of species. We are
now moving toward an alteration of human anatomy to give man almost unlimited
freedom underwater.”1 So Jacques Cousteau told a baffled audience of ocean scientists
at the World Congress on Underwater Activities in London in 1963. Though Cousteau
had based his claim on American scientists’ research into surgically implantable
artificial gills that would allow divers, like fish, to regenerate the oxygen in their blood
without breathing air, his ultimate dream was of “future generations born in underwater
villages, finally adapting to the environment so that no surgery will be necessary to
permit them to live and breathe underwater”—the naturalization, it would seem, of what
hitherto would have been mere prostheses.2
Although Cousteau’s dream of a race of surgically enhanced water people who
live and work undersea remains unfulfilled, both his films and TV shows and the diving
technologies that enabled him to make them—his and Émile Gagnan’s Aqua-Lung as
well as his fleet of submersibles and undersea habitats along the continental shelf—were
instrumental in shaping popular ideas of what human life undersea might be like. Not
1. Qtd. in Brad Matsen, Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King (New York: Pantheon,
2009), 160–61.
2. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, “Ocean-Bottom Homes for Skin Divers,” Popular
Mechanics 120, no. 1 (July 1963): 183. Though a full transcript of Cousteau’s World
Congress address does not survive, his Popular Mechanics essay addresses Homo
aquaticus in similar terms as regards both its anticipated physiological evolution and its
“birth” in Cousteau’s first Conshelf habitat experiment, which placed men underwater
for a week.
64
only is “undersea film” synonymous with Cousteau; the aquatic life he emblematized in
his media work influenced countless subsequent films of ocean space, including both
documentaries and fiction films by the likes of James Cameron, Luc Besson, Al
Giddings (himself often billed as “the American Cousteau”), Wes Anderson, and
Cousteau’s own progeny, who continue to advance the late captain’s conservationist
attitudes toward the ocean.
An avatar more of conquest than of conservation, Homo aquaticus appeared at a
time when Western industrial nations increasingly turned to the ocean, the earth’s “inner
space,” to solve the problems posed by the terrestrial limits to growth. They viewed the
ocean as a potentially endless treasure trove of food and fuel and even as a submarine
landfill for nuclear waste. As John F. Kennedy put it in his March 29, 1961, letter to the
US Senate, “Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter curiosity. Our very survival
may hinge on it.”3 Noting the military necessity of mapping the seafloor to maintain
strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, the ability of the ocean’s bounty of food and
minerals to meet a growing population’s needs, and the possibility of predicting—even
controlling—weather and climate by studying the ocean’s influence on the atmosphere,
Kennedy expressed what would for another decade remain dominant sentiments
concerning the uses of the sea.
Cousteau, for his part, not only envisioned an alteration of the human body but
boldly predicted a full-fledged domestication of ocean space—and an absolute freedom
from the earth’s surface—that would radically transform human values. “In ten years,”
3. John F. Kennedy, “Letter to the President of the Senate on Increasing the
National Effort in Oceanography,” March 29, 1961,
http://www.jfklink.com/speeches/jfk/publicpapers/1961/jfk100_61.html.
65
he predicted, “there will be permanent homes and workshops at the bottom of the sea
where men can stay for three months at a time, mining, drilling for oil, coal, tin, other
materials, and farming seafood and raising sea cattle . . . More important than the huge
space and wealth, they will draw new thoughts and creativity from a whole new world.
And hopefully we may enter an era that deserves the title, civilization.”4 Indeed, when
Cousteau asked Conshelf I’s divers their impressions of life underwater, one responded
that “everything is moral down here”—a reply that Cousteau would invoke a quarter
century later, noting that his divers had traversed a “kind of moral gateway that made
them see national and tribal disputes as ridiculous, as something mankind must learn to
leave behind.”5 The permanent technical expansion of humans’ reach into the earth’s
final frontier would, Cousteau thought, bring about a veritable sea change in human
consciousness, albeit one that in the fifties and sixties did not include environmental
stewardship.
In this chapter, I treat Homo aquaticus not as a serious futurist concept but rather
as a general midcentury image of underwater life and work that Cousteau’s early movies
helped to shape.6 These include The Silent World (1956), World without Sun (JacquesYves Cousteau, 1964), and Conshelf Adventure (Philippe Cousteau, 1966), the latter two
documenting Cousteau’s Conshelf II and III underwater habitat experiments,
4. Qtd. in Axel Madsen, Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography (New York:
Beaufort Books, 1986), 127.
5. Qtd. in ibid., 128.
6. Though provocative, Homo aquaticus is too thin of a futurist concept to
warrant lengthy discussion as such, having yielded little in the way of practical scientific
achievements or cultural influence. This is not to say it has not persisted. I address some
examples of its endurance at the end of this chapter.
66
respectively. Homo aquaticus finds expression in the aesthetics of Cousteau’s films; in
the undersea life his movies depict; and, as a prosthetic, technically enhanced human
body, in the array of technologies depicted in his films and discussed in his writings.
These technologies extended man’s physical reach underwater by allowing him—almost
always him—to breathe at depth without being tethered to the surface. They included
the Aqua-Lung (the first commercially successful scuba apparatus) and a fleet of minisubmersibles that used the famous mother ship Calypso as a base: the SP-350, or
Soucoupe plongeante (diving saucer), and its smaller siblings, the SP-500 Sea Fleas.
They also included Cousteau’s underwater habitats along the continental shelf, bases
where saturation divers could live and work for potentially unlimited periods of time,
doing mining, farming, construction and repair, or scientific research in a range of fields.
Together these technologies conspired to create an image of freedom from the surface—
a freedom that per Cousteau would transform human values and bring about a more
utopic existence on planet earth (or Planet Ocean, as Arthur C. Clarke is reputed to have
called it). The paradox here is that this image of a new man, however poetically
conceived in Cousteau’s hands, was bound up with the period project of exploiting the
sea economically, such that whatever utopian transformations of the human Cousteau’s
movies either depict or allow viewers to experience vicariously are underwritten by
projects of ocean conquest that we now understand to be and to have been ecologically
destructive.
Additionally, and unsurprisingly given that ocean science of this period was
almost exclusively the province of white males, Homo aquaticus marks something of a
white male ideal, one that, furthermore, insofar as recreational diving became a major
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postwar leisure pursuit, fell primarily to the affluent. Indeed, like many a posthuman
figure, Homo aquaticus is perhaps best understood as an exclusionary one—a symbol of
an economically and socially elite minority of men who, loosed from their biological
shackles, could leave everyone else behind. (As critic Joel Dinerstein puts it, “the
posthuman is an escape from the panhuman.”)7 In visual culture of the 1950s and 1960s,
oceanauts—or aquanauts, or frogmen, or men-fish, other common names for
amphibious man—are almost always white males, and their technologically enhanced
bodies stand in stark contrast to the bodies of women and native others underwater. The
latter bodies are notably technology free—for instance, the Weeki Wachi mermaids of
Silver Springs, Florida, and the models in Bruce Mozert’s photographs, both of which I
discuss toward the end of this chapter. Unencumbered by technical supplements, these
women appear at one with the natural space of the sea. In this respect they seem to
signify an ideal, perhaps unattainable state of unity with aquatic space to which men can
only aspire.
By emphasizing Cousteau’s vanguard figure of underwater man, I depart from
the current scholarly tendency to frame Cousteau’s work in terms of his celebrity, his
conservationist stances and those stances’ limitations, and his representations and
treatment of wildlife. Nonetheless, various scholars’ claims inform my argument.
Graham Huggan, for instance, divides Cousteau’s career into three phases: scientific,
exploratory, and conservationist. I have limited myself primarily to this first phase,
which for Huggan lasts from the 1940s through the mid-1960s and relates to Cousteau’s
7. Joel Dinerstein, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the
Posthuman,” in Rewiring the ‘Nation’: The Place of Technology in American Studies, ed.
Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyanathan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007), 16.
68
efforts to colonize the seafloor. (The exploratory phase is roughly contemporaneous
with The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1976.
This slightly overlaps with his conservationist phase, which for Huggan encompasses
Cousteau’s television work from the early seventies until his death in 1997 as well as his
activities with the Cousteau Society, which he created with his two sons in 1973.)8 For
Cynthia Chris, The Undersea World affirms Western hegemony over the seas through
its episodes’ narratives of exploration and discovery, a charge that equally applies to the
three films discussed here. Chris also calls attention to the more objectionable activities
depicted in The Silent World: the Calypso crew’s dynamiting of a coral reef to collect
dead specimens and its “revenge” killing of a few sharks for feasting on a baby whale
that the ship’s propeller chopped up.9 While I say nothing about Cousteau’s
mistreatment of animals, I share her view (also Huggan’s) that the early Cousteau’s
movies are anything but environmentally friendly. Finally, Nicole Starosielski situates
Cousteau’s movies amid general cultural trends that configured the ocean in terms of
exploitable resources and domesticated it for its ideal inhabitants: the white American
family.10 While I agree with Starosielski that movies of the postwar period idealize the
sea as a place for whites, I take issue with a too-neat aesthetic distinction she makes
between ocean exploitation and ocean domestication movies. As I hope to show later in
8. Graham Huggan, Nature’s Saviors: Celebrity Conservationists in the
Television Age (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67–69.
9. Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006), 41–42 and 56–57.
10. Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity,” 159–63.
69
my discussion of Cousteau’s films and the vision of ocean-dwelling humans they
promulgate, exploitation and domestication are continuous projects.
A Dazzling Aesthetic of Freedom Undersea
Homo aquaticus finds visual expression in not only the activities of the camerawielding aquanauts or undersea habitat dwellers depicted onscreen in Cousteau’s
movies but also in the films’ visual aesthetics—the lyrical, free-floating, and seemingly
subjectless camera movements that penetrate aquatic space from inside it. The visual
contrasts that Williamson’s films formally uphold on account of his photosphere—
between inside and outside, air and water, movement and stasis (an ocean world in
constant flux versus a camera locked in one place)—all but vanish in Cousteau’s movies,
along with the detached, frontal, eye-level view that has more in common with a
spectator’s position before an aquarium. The general view here is no longer that of an
outsider gazing into a tank (or through glass or at a stage). Rather, it becomes the
perspective of a participant in the aquatic scene—a perspective that embodies
possibilities of spatial orientation and movement impossible on land, as in the images of
vertical descent down the water column that begin The Silent World (figure 2.1).
Cousteau’s roving undersea images, which move with a fluidity unusual for handheld
cameras, appear as dazzling invitations to viewers to imagine themselves, too,
inhabiting undersea space.
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Figure 2.1. Aqua-Lung divers descend by torchlight into the blue in The Silent World.
With no shortage of awe, Rudolf Arnheim highlighted the very qualities
described above in a 1966 essay on the state of film art:
Cousteau’s film creates fascination not simply as an extension of our visual
knowledge obtained by the documentary presentation of an unexplored area of
our earth. These most authentically realistic pictures reveal a world of profound
mystery, a darkness momentarily lifted by flashes of unnatural light, a complete
suspension of the familiar vertical and horizontal coordinates of space. Spatial
orientation is upset also by the weightlessness of these animals and dehumanized
humans, floating up and down without effort, emerging from nowhere and
disappearing into nothingness, constantly in motion without any recognizable
purpose, and totally indifferent to each other. There is an overwhelming display
of dazzling color and intricate motion, tied to no experience we ever had and
performed for the discernible benefit of nobody. There are innumerable
monstrous variations of faces and bodies as we know them, passing by with the
matter-of-factness of herring or perch, in a profound silence, most unnatural for
such visual commotion and rioting color, and interrupted only by noises nobody
ever heard.11
Arnheim’s agenda here is not to sing the wonders of a distant reality as World without
Sun reveals it to be. Typically, he praises aspects of the film that conform to a purely
aesthetic idea of what cinema should do—namely, “interpret the ghostliness of the
11. Rudolf Arnheim, “Art Today and the Film,” Art Journal 25, no. 3 (Spring
1966): 243–44.
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visible world by means of authentic appearances drawn directly from that world.”12
What stands out in this passage, however, is not only the wondrous groundlessness
Arnheim describes but also the apparent uselessness of the dazzling world on display,
the “motion without any recognizable purpose . . . performed for the discernible benefit
of nobody.” Such descriptions suggest a world defiantly at odds with the means–ends
nature of so much human activity. In this respect they cast the world of Homo aquaticus
as utopian, as a world where things are valued for more than their usefulness or the ways
they might be exploited (even if underwater man’s work was often exploitative).
As Arnheim indicates, splendorous colors were essential to the wonder
associated with Cousteau’s films—though in this respect they were hardly unique
among films of the period that showcased marine environs. (As scholars commonly
regard Arnheim as an enemy of sound and color, his praise for both in Cousteau’s films
is somewhat surprising.) Filmmakers had attempted to film the ocean in color as early as
The Uninvited Guest (Ralph Ince, 1924), the Williamson photosphere production that
included a two-strip Technicolor sequence. And although in cinema of the 1930s and
1940s a colorful ocean appears almost exclusively in animation—notably in a spate of
Disney’s Silly Symphonies culminating in Pinocchio (1940), when Pinocchio and
Jiminy Cricket search the ocean floor for Monstro the whale—the early fifties witnessed
several Technicolor features with sequences shot undersea, mostly in the clear waters of
the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.13
12. Ibid., 244.
13. The Silly Symphonies in question are King Neptune (Burt Gillett, 1932),
Water Babies (Wilfred Jackson, 1935), Merbabies (Rudolf Ising and Vernon Stallings,
1938), The Whalers (David Hand and Dick Heumer, 1938), and Sea Scouts (Dick Lundy,
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What’s significant is that many of the eye-popping color images of marine life in
Cousteau’s and other films of the period are actually false to their environs, showing the
world as not even marine animals can normally see it. The “overwhelming display of
dazzling . . . rioting color” that so delights Arnheim can be produced only by artificial
light. Without artificial illumination, everything undersea below a certain, very shallow
depth appears lost in a blue-green haze. This is because water absorbs longer
wavelengths (higher frequencies) of light, or the warmer colors of the visible spectrum,
at shallower depths than it does the shorter wavelengths, which penetrate farthest—blue
in particular. (The most transparent seawater appears blue from the surface because the
least-absorbed color is the one the water reflects.) Artificial white light becomes
necessary even a short distance below the surface to restore the warmer end of the
spectrum, and Cousteau plays with the effect of its limited range in a scene in The Silent
World when his divers descend to 247 feet with floodlights, illuminating parts of corals
but not others, such that the objects we see shifts briefly into dazzling, warm relief
before receding into the tranquil blue (figure 2.2). The transience of colors is further
emphasized in a later sequence that notes that the dazzling colors of fish taken as
specimens quickly fade at the surface. In the nighttime and Soucoupe deep-dive
sequences in World without Sun, these vibrant colors emerge from a perpetual night
where, Cousteau tells us, nonbioluminescent light has never before shone.
1939). The live-action color features that preceded The Silent World include 20th
Century Fox’s Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Robert D. Webb, 1953), Disney’s 20,000
Leagues under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954), RKO’s Underwater! (John Sturges,
1955) and The Sea around Us (Irwin Allen, 1953), and Hans Hass’s documentary
Unternehmen Xarifa [Under the Caribbean] (1954).
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Figure 2.2. Artificial light throws the hidden colors of a coral reef into brilliant relief in
The Silent World.
The use of artificial light is of more than mere aesthetic consequence. In addition
to lighting shots and conveying for viewers the spectacular environs that were a part of
underwater man’s stream of experience, artificial light was central to efforts to research
and plans to engineer the deep-ocean environment—the work of Homo aquaticus. World
without Sun shows the collection of specimens and nighttime and deep-water
observation of marine life with the help of floodlights—work that in the context of the
film appears to serve only disinterested scientific work of nebulous purpose. Artificial
light, however, would also be used in attempts to simulate photosynthesis in aphotic
(lightless) waters, work that Cousteau’s oceanauts attempted in Conshelf III to “boost
the food productivity of the sea.”14 Additionally, it would be essential to deep-water
construction and maintenance work. As Cousteau writes in Window in the Sea, “Even in
the dark waters beyond 300 feet, and with the aid of artificial light, vision was the
necessary factor in showing man could, for example, set up an oil-well head.”15 Indeed,
14. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Window in the Sea (New York: World Publishing
Company, 1973), 73.
15. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 43.
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the final section of Conshelf Adventure depicts the saturation divers engaged in a
wellhead repair exercise; the narrator tells us that oceanauts’ success would mark “a
giant leap forward in man’s economic occupation of the seafloor.” Dazzling aesthetic
effects become continuous with the scientific study and economic conquest of undersea
space. This point is lost on Arnheim, for whom the politics of ocean exploration take a
back seat to wonderment.
Although artificial light could illuminate the environs in which Homo aquaticus
lived and worked and mark the ocean as a place of overwhelming visual splendor in
Cousteau’s movies, the key technology for the aesthetic of freedom the movies indulge
in was the Aqua-Lung, which Cousteau invented with his compatriot Émile Gagnan in
1943 and which became the first commercially successful scuba apparatus. Indeed, the
prized idea of being freed from the surface—swimming and breathing without tethers—
seems unthinkable without scuba gear. And because scuba helped bring about the advent
of recreational diving in Europe and the United States, it also gave the aesthetics of
Cousteau’s movies a correlative with the direct human experience of undersea space.
The Aqua-Lung was the first widely used device that freed Homo aquaticus
from air hoses and safety lines, ensuring, per Cousteau, that his “safety was in
freedom.”16 Yet the diver–cinematographer (emblematized by Jacques’s son Philippe,
who shot most of Cousteau’s footage) not only had to be trained on how to properly and
safely use the scuba apparatus but also know how to contend with the potentially fatal
dangers associated with using it. Among others, these dangers included nitrogen
16. “Those Incredible Diving Machines,” The Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau, first broadcast March 10, 1970, by ABC, directed by Philippe Cousteau and
written by Marshall Flaum.
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narcosis and decompression sickness (“the bends”), both of which The Silent World
dramatizes. In an early sequence, one of Cousteau’s divers narrates a scene in which his
diving partner suffers from both of these maladies, first of all setting free the lobsters he
has just caught and twirling a piece of coral around his index finger before suddenly—
and perilously—removing his mouthpiece. This behavior, we learn, is the result of
nitrogen narcosis, a pleasant, drunken sensation caused by the increased solubility of
gases in bodily tissues under pressure. Its effects, which diving manuals tend to liken to
one strong alcoholic drink for the first 100 feet and another for every thirty-three feet (or
one atmosphere of pressure) thereafter, are easily reversed by ascent, but afflicted divers
may forget this and endanger themselves—just as the diver in the sequence does. Drunk
and low on oxygen, he ascends from a depth of 150 feet without decompressing, rising
to the surface with a pain in his knee. The result: the bends, which occurs when gases
dissolve into bodily tissues under pressure and reemerge as bubbles upon too-quick
depressurization and which gets its nickname because bending the joints can alleviate
localized joint pain, the most common symptom. Divers afflicted by the bends must
typically spend time in a recompression chamber—depicted in The Silent World as a
sort of coffin tube into which the claustrophobic diver reluctantly slips.
These twin dangers affect both the work we see depicted in Cousteau’s movies
as well as their visual aesthetic. Regarding “the rapture of the deep” (Cousteau’s phrase
for nitrogen narcosis), Cousteau imposed an absolute depth limit of 300 feet—and 250
feet on working dives—on his crew members after one of them lost consciousness and
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drowned at 396 feet.17 Cinematographically, this depth limit put a floor (rather than
ceiling) on the kinds of spaces that the cameramen among Cousteau’s crew could film in
a way that conveyed for viewers the experience of an ocean ballet. In addition, the
cameramen must incorporate the techniques for preventing the bends into their
cinematic practice. It is essential that they, like the other aquanauts, use dive tables to
prevent its onset, adhering to standardized limits on descent rate, exposure time at
deepest depth, and ascent rate, which may be continuous or staggered (including stops at
various specified depths along a diving shot line with the assistance of depth-gauge
wristwatches); they must also make sure they have a sufficient air supply to account for
both exposure time and all needed decompression stops. Consequently, the imagery that
conveys an impression of total freedom from the surface is actually rather limited, its
possibilities restricted by the diver’s overriding need to manage the risks associated with
the marine environment.
Because scuba views have become so prevalent, we might easily lose sight of
their novelty for film viewers in the 1950s—and an important part of their novelty
would have been operational. In the book version of The Silent World, Cousteau notes
that the Aqua-Lung—and implicitly what I am calling a visual aesthetic of freedom
from the surface—was like so many “successful” technologies built on a bedrock of
failed, even dangerous experiments. Previously, Cousteau tried diving with a makeshift
device consisting of a gas canister full of soda lime, a bottle of pure oxygen, and a
17. David M. Owen, A Manual for Free-Divers Using Compressed Air (New
York: Pergamon Press, 1955), 32–33. This text, which Owen revised for general
consumption from a technical report he wrote for the Office of Naval Research while
employed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is perhaps the authoritative
scuba-diving guide from the period.
77
motorbike inner tube. This apparatus twice induced oxygen poisoning, causing Cousteau
to convulse, lose consciousness, and nearly drown. Another apparatus, the Fernez,
consisted of a surface pump and a pipe through which it pumped a constant, pressurized
airflow, but the pipe broke, and had Cousteau not realized this and closed his glottis, he
would have breathed surface air, which at his depth of two atmospheres would have
caused the water pressure to collapse his lungs.18 Beyond these failed experiments, the
research and techniques that go into the Aqua-Lung place it—and the idea of free-diving
human—within a longer history of what the English diving technician Robert H. Davis,
a contemporary of Cousteau’s, called “breathing in irrespirable atmospheres.”19
Prosthetic breathing that extends humans’ reach underwater grows from the techniques
and materials deployed in other spaces—in mining, on battlefields, and at high altitudes.
Indeed, Cousteau, a failed pilot, sought a self-contained mechanism of a similar type as
“the demand system used in the oxygen masks of high-altitude fliers.”20 When he met
Gagnan, the latter was developing a demand valve to transfer cooking gas into
automobile motors to compensate for the lack of available petroleum during the war—a
problem he regarded as similar to Cousteau’s. We should therefore regard Cousteau’s
balletic imagery not simply as a product of scuba gear but also as a visual byproduct of
diverse efforts to enable the human to breathe—and therefore act—within spaces where
biology alone will not permit it.
18. J. Y. Cousteau with Frédéric Dumas, The Silent World (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1953), 16–19.
19. Robert H. Davis, Breathing in Irrespirable Atmospheres (London: Saint
Catherine Press, 1947).
20. Cousteau, The Silent World, 19.
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Undersea Vehicles: Scooters, the Soucoupe, and the Sea Fleas
Although the Aqua-Lung defines the Cousteau visual aesthetic of freedom and
offers spectators a corollary for Homo aquaticus’s experience of his environment, the
views it afforded were complemented by those a set of untethered and battery-powered
underwater vehicles provided. These vehicles were designed to extend divers’ reach
underwater without compromising the mobility and surface freedom the Aqua-Lung
offered; in Cousteau’s movies, they are both widely showcased onscreen and used
offscreen to shoot the footage we see. One technology that bore fruits in Cousteau’s
movies as far as views go a camera scooter on which sat a camera in a watertight tube
affixed to an anti-vibration mount; the device allowed cameramen to “slip and slide and
race about” after the denizens of the deep.21 Steering with their bodies, they could
create spectacular traveling shots that barrel through the aquatic medium at speeds and
with a range of mobility typically reserved for marine animals. The Silent World
showcases such views in several sequences, notably during a spectacular montage of
racing porpoises, which intercuts underwater views from among and alongside the
porpoises with surface shots from the deck of the Calypso and with aerial views from
the Calypso helicopter; as well as in a later sequence in which the camera, mounted on
the scooter, darts along the seafloor, through schools of fish, and along the edges of
reefs. (Dubiously, the space undersea becomes “a parking lot” where divers can park
their scooters and hitch rides on the back of sea turtles, as though they were amusement
park attractions and the ocean were an extension of an American suburb.)
21. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 58.
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Cousteau’s fleet of saucers promised freedom from the surface while eliminating
the environmental risks scuba divers faced (i.e., the bends and nitrogen narcosis). These
vehicles included the Soucoupe plongeante, which he debuted for audiences in World
without Sun, and its smaller companions, the Sea Fleas. Like the diving scooter, these
are best understood as technologies that would extend the reach of divers beyond depths,
distances, and diving time limitations permitted by skin diving, albeit without
sacrificing the Aqua-Lung user’s independence from the surface. And although they
were designed to preserve free-divers’ mobility, the views these submersibles offer are
less acrobatic than those created by the scooters and less balletic than those of scuba
divers. Gone is the scooter’s whizzing along dips and rises of the reefs and the seafloor,
and gone is the Aqua-Lung diver’s ability to languidly spin in space, his camera
upending the familiar terrestrial coordinates of up and down, left and right. But what
these apparatuses trade in terms of mobility and their visual interaction with space, they
gain in vertical movement, opening the world below the depth limit Cousteau imposed
on his divers to both Homo aquaticus and movie audiences.
The Soucoupe plongeante (diving saucer), later christened Denise, was designed
to reach depths as great as 1,000 feet, a limit to which Cousteau on multiple times
descended, including in the climax of World without Sun. (If the diving saucer’s exploits
in this sequence seem significant, they no doubt owe to Cousteau’s elision of other,
deeper dives, among them William Beebe and Otis Barton’s half-mile dives in the
Bathysphere and the Bathyscaph Trieste’s seven-mile plunge to the bottom of the
Mariana Trench in 1959.) Named because its disc shape resembled a comic book UFO,
this “strange crustacean” included swiveling twin propulsion jets on the bow that gave it
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a freer range of motion than propellers and rudders would, and it could travel at speeds
of up to two knots (about 2.3 miles per hour).22 Designed to house two divers, it could
sustain them for twenty-four hours with its CO2 scrubbers and rebreathing system; a
hand lever allowed the pilots to jettison ballast and ascend to the surface if the vessel
incurred damage. As if in keeping Cousteau’s project of domesticating the sea, the
Soucoupe featured a cushioned interior that made it a model of luxuriant decadence
compared to the cramped and unpadded submersibles of Williamson and Beebe and
gave it the familiarity of terrestrial transit: as MIT engineering professor Harold E.
Edgerton observed, “Being in the saucer is no different from being in an automobile,
except that we are more comfortable and loll on our mattresses like Romans at a
banquet.”23 (Edgerton’s comparison to an automobile anticipates the James Bond movie
The Spy Who Loved Me [Lewis Gilbert, 1977], in which Bond’s Lotus Esprit turns into a
submarine during a chase sequence.) A strobe camera and synchronized light were
mounted on struts extending from the bow along with a floodlight for the film camera,
which remained inside the saucer to allow for reloading. Clearly regarding these as the
craft’s sine qua nons, Cousteau describes Denise as “a giant undersea camera with men
inside,” one that “extends to them the privilege of seeing the marine underworld with
their own eyes and”—here referring to the craft’s hydraulic claw in a way that links
22. Narrator Rod Serling dubs the saucer a “strange crustacean” in “Those
Incredible Diving Machines.”
23. Qtd. in Matsen, Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King, 52.
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vision with more tactile manipulation—“even of plucking specimens from regions far
beyond reach of a diver’s hand.”24
World without Sun opts to poetically defamiliarize the Soucoupe and does not
make any of the vehicle’s capacities clear at the outset. In the first shot of the film, we
make the saucer out only as a strange shadow craft propelling itself toward the camera,
yellow smoke billowing behind it, and then sailing overhead like a manta ray. The
camera makes pursuit, rising above the craft, revealing the hatch, and hovering above it
in a constant position as the film’s title appears onscreen (figure 2.3). As the credits roll,
a montage ensues, cutting to shots of either side of the strange vessel, showing off the
jet nozzles, and finally drifting in on the portholes from the front before cutting to the
interior to reveal Cousteau, who flicks on the lights and checks the various gauges,
introducing us to the technology aboard. Only after the credits does Cousteau’s narration
enter, explaining what this device is and what it works for, as the diving saucer parks in
its garage—an onion-shaped, open-bottomed steel shell where technicians hoist the
saucer on a winch, place grates beneath it to hold it in place, and prepare it for the next
dive.
The Soucoupe’s possibilities for visualization only become clear in the film’s
final sequence: a nighttime plunge to 1,000 feet. The sequence showcases strange,
“never before seen” life forms that themselves may never have seen white light—
depicting the Frenchmen as no less alien to the world they inhabit than it is to them—
while also demonstrating the craft’s ability to withstand crushing pressure. Here, for the
24. Cousteau, World without Sun, 171.
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first time, Cousteau opens up the world below the 300-foot depth limit he imposed on
his Aqua-Lung divers to his viewers.
Figure 2.3. First shots of the Soucoupe in World without Sun.
However wondrous and strange, these deep views are not politically neutral ones.
Although designed for Cousteau’s independent explorations, the Soucoupe would end
up in military hands, where the views of and kind of engagement with the world it
offered its inhabitants and film spectators would take on a military cast. Thinking it
might fill a gap among the capabilities of its other undersea research vessels, the US
Naval Electronics Laboratory leased Denise from Cousteau, using it on twenty-one
dives between 1964 and 1965 to test its utility for biological, geological, and physical
oceanographic research.25 The NEL’s short film Ocean Research with the Cousteau
Diving Saucer (1965) surveys the navy’s uses for Denise, which largely overlapped with
25. The film can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/cus_00004.
83
Cousteau’s except that environmental study was put strictly in the service of gaining
strategic advantage over the “enemy”—in this case, the Soviet nemesis. Indeed, as the
movie’s opening narration makes clear, the success or failure of a given naval mission
depended largely on a commander’s knowledge of the particular qualities of the sea he
and his men occupied.
The demonstrations of these devices as well as footage shot from on board them
gives us a sense of the kinds of views they can offer on account of their velocity and
mobility, the power of their lighting rigs, their ability to get close to objects (the saucer
shape prevented snagging) and into tight quarters, and the depths to which they can
descend. Indeed, besides changes in underwater cinematographic technologies over the
past half century, such as the implementation of faster film stocks, IMAX film cameras,
high-ISO digital and HD video cameras, depth is arguably the major difference between
the cinematic views Cousteau’s and other manned submersibles provide of undersea
space (though for many viewers this is necessarily a trivial difference as it is difficult to
gauge depth from visual cues in sunlit images and all but impossible in aphotic ones).
But as the mentions of search and rescue and naval research above should indicate, the
same functional capacities that enabled Cousteau’s scooters and saucers to produce
smoothly gliding, seemingly unfettered cinematic views of an often stunning marine
environment were tied to scientific and military attempts to visualize that same
environment so as to better measure, calculate, and control it—to “handle” or “grasp” it,
as it were, as an extension of seeing it.
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Daily Life Undersea
Although the Aqua-Lung and Cousteau’s various submarine vehicles were
essential to conveying both an impression of life undersea—how one would move
through space and what one would see down there—actually living there only became
possible with Cousteau’s three undersea habitats along the continental shelf. Indeed, for
Cousteau, these dwellings marked Homo aquaticus’s proper birth. Conshelf I (1962),
stationed near Marseilles, placed two divers in a small, ten-meter-deep habitat (named
Diogenes) for a week. Conshelf II (1963), the subject of World without Sun, was more
of a hamlet. Established along the Roman Reef (Sha’ab Rumi) in the Red Sea near Port
Sudan, it consisted of two habitats—one at ten meters that housed five divers for four
weeks (the Starfish House) and another at thirty meters that two divers occupied for one
week (the Deep Cabin)—as well as a garage near the shallower one that housed the
Soucoupe. Conshelf III (1965), finally, submitted six divers to three weeks at 100 meters
in a habitat near Nice, where Cousteau’s surface crew observed them as they worked on
a mock-up oil well; Cousteau’s TV documentary Conshelf Adventure chronicles this
experiment. Placed to obviate the need for decompression when returning from extreme
depths, the Conshelf habitats enabled oceanauts to swim and work for longer periods of
time and at greater depth without the burden of having to surface. In other words, they
greatly extended the distances over which saturation divers could viably farm the seabed
and mine it for oil, gas, and other resources, and extended the periods of uninterrupted
time they could devote to these tasks.26
26. The habitats also enabled them to experience underwater space with greater
leisure. As oceanaut Albert Falco wrote in his diary during the Conshelf I experiment,
“This is the first time in 20 years of diving . . . that I have the time to see. The seaweeds,
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Along with demonstrating the nature of underwater work and portraying the
marine environment in lyrical fashion, Cousteau’s two habitat movies address the
mental and psychical changes men undergo in their submarine environment as well as
the everyday activities that occupy them in their underwater homes. Although as in
World without Sun oceanauts may chain-smoke Gauloises, drink copious amounts of
wine, and even keep a pet parrot, much as they might surface side, life undersea is
“upside down.” In World without Sun, for instance, Cousteau informs the viewer that
down in the Starfish House, wounds “heal almost overnight, but beards almost stop
growing.” Additionally, for the oceanauts, a general disorientation sets in. “One cannot
remember whether we’re inside the aquarium or outside it,” Cousteau remarks—a
thought reinforced by windows that offer the inhabitants picturesque views of divers and
fish.27.
What’s more, Cousteau reported, on day three the divers’ minds began to drift
away from surface concerns. They no longer read, watched TV, or listened to the radio,
and they began to develop an independent sense of time. As oceanaut Albert Falco
stated, “I don’t care what happens on the surface, nor does Claude. Time has no
for example, are absolutely fantastic, particularly at night if one takes a searchlight. The
bottom is alive with sea horses, sea anemones, shrimps and fish laying eggs. It is as
though we are really present at the birth of fish.” Qtd. in Cousteau, “Ocean-Bottom
Homes,” 182.
27. Starosielski, who distinguishes between ocean exploitation films and ocean
domestication movies, asserts that the former stress the “immersive and potentially
overwhelming aspects of underwater scenes” while the latter, emblematized by World
without Sun and sundry fiction films of the 1960s, “marked a return to the positioning of
a viewer in the Williamson films: one could view conflict safely from behind a glass
window.” World without Sun, however, blurs the distinction between exploitation and
domestication, both in terms of Conshelf II’s purpose and the copresence of immersive
views and views through a window. Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity,” 161.
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meaning. I know what day it is, because they tell me, but I could not care less.”
Frustrated with the surface crew’s management of underwater affairs, he added, “This
first experiment is too push-buttony. I visualize the next one differently. We must be
alone. They should give us air, replacement bottles, and say this to us: ‘There are fish
around you, get on with it.’ If we feel like seeing people we will call them.”28 World
without Sun repeats these sentiments, noting that intrusions from topside divers disturb
the oceanauts, who “have crossed to a new way of life. Their sense of time becomes
hazy. They neglect the clock and the calendar. They shut off the radio and select their
own tape recordings.” And so on. Their dependence on topside divers irritates them, but
Cousteau of course promises that future undersea stations will operate independent of
the surface (though without indicating exactly how a fully independent undersea station
could be achieved).
Finally, the man-fish would seem to possess greater mental acuity than his
earthbound cousin. A strange moment in Conshelf Adventure depicts the oceanauts
taking intelligence tests to measure whether pressure and the breathing mixture have
affected their cognitive abilities at 330 feet down. Mysteriously, they score higher IQs
than they did at the surface, a feat the project psychologist attributes to the “motivation
and total concentration” induced by the divers’ environment. Homo aquaticus, then, is
not a radically different, biologically altered kind of human being but rather one of
subtle environmental adaptations and obliviousness to life above the waves.
Contrary to Nicole Starosielski’s argument, life undersea in World without Sun is
no easy extension of domestic life above water in the postwar period—even if TV
28. Qtd. in Cousteau, “Ocean-Bottom Homes,” 183.
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shows of the period such as Sea Hunt (1958–61), Diver Dan (1960–63), Flipper (1964–
67), and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–68) did to a significant extent bring the
ocean into the home in family-friendly fashion. This is only in part because of the
strangeness of life undersea compared to life on land in Cousteau’s written and
cinematic accounts—the uncanny tension between the familiar and unfamiliar that one
does not find in much other undersea-themed media of the period. The highly
technologized nature of Cousteau’s undersea habitats inscribe daily life underwater
within a rigid, mostly preordained set of social arrangements. Undersea habitats require
oceanauts to live and work in a predictable, regulated fashion and under constant
monitoring to ensure that the operations undersea proceed smoothly and safely. Such
regulation and surveillance were particularly important given that these habitats were
experimental; truly self-sustaining undersea habitats were not (and are not) feasible.
In World without Sun, the hierarchical nature of life is illustrated by a diagram of
the habitat Cousteau doodles for the viewer early in the film; it depicts Calypso at the
surface, the Starfish House below it, and the Deep Cabin deeper below and implies
certain chains of dependence and command. Ships, as Winner notes, are classic
examples of the view that technologies mandate certain social arrangements, particularly
authoritarian ones; Plato, for instance, famously claims in The Republic that the state
should be run like ship, with the philosopher king presiding over his subjects like a
captain over an obedient crew.29 And in World without Sun, Calypso functions as an
implicit control center for all of the activities that occur in and about the habitats below.
The ship’s crew, commanded by Cousteau, dictates, monitors, and responds to the
29. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 32.
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actions of the oceanauts below, although in somewhat hands-off fashion (again, using
intermittent television and radio communication); its divers make contact with the
undersea dwellers mostly to bring Starfish House crockpots full of fresh supplies.
Likewise, the inhabitants of Starfish House monitor more closely the goings-on in Deep
Cabin and replenish their soda lime on a regular basis. It is perhaps telling of the
relations in the film that Cousteau, the leader of the Conshelf expedition and ship
captain, is also the only subject who traverses the full vertical distance from surface to
depth depicted in the film, spending most of the film offscreen aboard Calypso (the
superior position from which he presumably narrates the movie) but also riding the
Soucoupe down to 1,000 feet—much deeper than the Deep Cabin’s inhabitants ever
descend. If the undersea habitats have an analogue with ordinary life on land, it’s not a
suburban household in which the window unto the sea resembles the television screen.30
Rather, it resembles a company town, where all residents work for one employer that
underwrites and regulates their social and political lives.
Though World without Sun gives viewers enough of the hierarchical relations
that as a practical necessity govern undersea life, it also tends to efface technological
politics by poetically withholding context. The habitat seems pre-given; we see none of
the work of their construction and are given little sense of how they have come to
occupy the seafloor, how long they have been there, and how long they will remain
(even though we know Cousteau’s oceanauts are to spend one month and one week in
the Starfish House and Deep Cabin, respectively). Likewise, Conshelf II’s broader
economic and political implications are hard to come by in World without Sun. We learn
30. Starosielski makes this comparison in “Beyond Fluidity,” 160–61.
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the names of the scientists involved as well as some of the work they do but not that the
movie and habitat were in part funded by the French national petroleum industry to
locate suitable drilling sites nor the Sudanese location, which Cousteau conceals in the
interest of lyricism—eliding what might seem an unsavory connection to Europeans’
historical colonization and economic exploitation of the African continent (though in the
case of Sudan the link would have been to British rather than French colonialism).31
The closest the film comes to acknowledging a link between undersea conquest and
European colonialism is when Cousteau observes that the worldwide continental shelf is
larger than Africa—leading one to wonder about the ethics of dominating it. (Conshelf
Adventure is more direct about these arrangements. More akin to US Navy films about
the SEALAB experiments, it keeps poetics to a minimum and focuses on conveying
hard facts about the Conshelf III mission.)
Mechanical Perception Underwater
To this point I have focused on indexical views of undersea space, the
exploratory technologies that construct those views, and the image of submarine space
Cousteau’s films construct. For film spectators, movie cameras and the diving
technologies that could carry them were essential means of exposure to the undersea
world that oceanauts dwelled in, to the oceanauts’ activities there, and to the oceanauts’
visual experience of that world. Indeed, these were views spectators could imagine
themselves one day experiencing directly if, indeed, civilization were to move
undersea—a possibility explored in contemporary fiction films such as The Underwater
31. As Cousteau told reporters at the film’s December 1964 American premiere,
“we never even identify the locale as the Red Sea. As soon as you are specific, the
poetry disappears.” Qtd. in Matsen, Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography, 135.
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City (Frank McDonald, 1962), Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (James Hill,
1969), and Hello Down There (Jack Arnold and Ricou Browning, 1969). But for
Cousteau and undersea man generally, film cameras were one means of mechanical
perception and visualization among many, and not necessarily a privileged one. They
were means of extending the human ability to see and therefore map, measure, and
ultimately exploit an aquatic environment that, because of its physical inaccessibility
and nontransparency as well as the limits an aquatic medium imposes on biological sight,
resists easy intelligibility. Seawater absorbs, refracts, and scatters light, causing a
general fog undersea as particles of salt, sand, and minerals bounce light off one
another’s surfaces. Its general condition is turbidity, which varies only in intensity.
Physiologically, human eyes have not evolved to see underwater, and technical
compensations distort optical space. “Our eyes,” writes Cousteau in his book Window in
the Sea, using a technical metaphor to describe the organs of sight, “are complex
apparatuses which have been specifically engineered for the reception and interpretation
of light traveling through air.”32 When our corneas make contact with water, we see
poorly because our eyes refract light traveling through air quite differently onto the
retina than they do light traveling through air. Our eyeball fluid, which is similar in
density to seawater, makes it so our elliptical lenses can barely focus light transmitted
through water onto our retinas.33 Diving masks, at minimum, become necessary to
32. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 6.
33. Marine animals, in addition to being better equipped to sense their worlds
through echolocation, pressure, and smell, have spherical rather than elliptical lenses in
their eyes, allowing them to see clearly underwater. Some animals, such as sea otters,
even have adjustable lenses that change shape as needed, allowing them to see both
above and below the surface.
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create separation between our eyes and the water so that our lenses have the chance to
properly focus light through air—though these also warp the field of view. Placing a flat
surface between air and water magnifies everything we see by one-third, so that, like the
obverse of a side-view mirror, objects are farther than they appear; tunnel vision and
distortions in peripheral vision become other problems.34
Indirect vision becomes a necessary, though often imperfect, supplement to
human vision underwater. Most of the equipment must not only solve such optical
problems as registering intelligible images in low-light conditions and compensating for
the magnification caused by light’s refraction underwater but also endure extreme
pressures, remain watertight, and resist corrosion from the saltwater. For Cousteau, the
most important imaging supplements to moving pictures were underwater television,
specialized strobe photographic equipment, and a variety of sonar technologies, the
latter two of which the MIT electrical engineer Harold Edgerton designed with the aid
of colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Underwater television,
which had a range of uses, could be used along with a remote-operated film camera to
observe and record marine life independent of human observers—especially animals
that withdraw from humans or do not materialize at all in their presence. In World
without Sun, the oceanauts demonstrate such a setup, which would allow them to watch
the television monitors from their underwater base and trigger the camera to record
when anything of interest to them transpired. More importantly, underwater television
34. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 27. Cousteau notes that flat faceplates shrink
the field of peripheral vision from “more than 180° to less than 80°.” He further notes
that spherical lenses, such as those used in cameras to correct underwater refraction and
magnification, are not feasible in masks, as each eye would see a different image.
(Corrective masks were for Cousteau possible in theory but had not been realized.)
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was necessary to managing the habitats—allowing humans in one place to observe
humans from another at a distance—typically in conjunction with radio communication.
In World without Sun’s Conshelf II experiment, we see that the two members of the
Deep Cabin, the one-week habitat at thirty meters, were under constant televisual
observation from the main base, the ten-meter-deep Starfish House. In Conshelf III,
shown in Conshelf Adventure, underwater television was used to observe the oceanauts’
mock oilrig repair exercise from the surface and thus report on the efficiency of their
work at depth.
Edgerton’s main contributions to Cousteau’s explorations were to build
automatic electronic flashes and waterproof cameras that photographed the seafloor and
the ocean’s deep scattering layer (a focus of Cousteau’s interest in the early 1950s) as
well as sonar equipment that would allow them to measure the depth to which to lower
the camera equipment—work of definite scientific value.35 Recruited by the National
35. Besides his sonar innovations, Edgerton contributed to marine imaging in
two key ways. He developed a time-lapse system abetted by strobe lights so as to
capture the movements of marine animals that move too slowly for humans to normally
perceive. Additionally, he contributed to shadow photography in mid-1980s,
photographing tiny marine animals by placing them directly on the film’s emulsion and
exposing them with a small electronic flash, which revealed their interior structures.
Edgerton’s interest as a figure far exceeds his contributions to oceanographic
research. He designed a giant strobe for the army for aerial nighttime reconnaissance
photography in WWII, and the Atomic Energy Commission had him photograph atomic
bombs exploding. To compensate for the blinding light and speed of the nuclear reaction,
he designed a “rapatronic” (rapid action electronic) shutter that, opened and closed by
only a magnetic field, allowed for exposures of as little as two millionths of a second. In
addition, Edgerton contributed to high-speed photography (for instance, designing
cameras that could expose up to 15,000 frames per second to photograph phenomena
like bullets exploding through apples); multiflash photography; and the schlieren
interference technique of photography, which visualizes density variations in air and
other gases by deploying mirrors to refract the light. See Harold E. Edgerton and James
R. Killian, Jr., Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (Boston:
Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1939); Roger E. Bruce, ed., Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E.
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Geographic Society in 1952 to work for Cousteau, Edgerton worked with Cousteau
throughout the fifties, appearing in The Silent World in a segment that documents his
flash camera’s use, snapping flash pictures of the ocean’s deep scattering layer (DSL) at
fifteen-second intervals for three hours. (The DSL is essentially a false bottom
consisting of a range of marine animals that swim between 1,000 and 1,500 feet deep
during the day and rise at night to feed.) Cousteau notes that he and Edgerton had used it
to take over 25,000 pictures of various sea bottoms at that point; the film shows several
of their images of the DSL, which “resemble starry skies,” showing the occasional
bioluminescent fish. Edgerton also contributed two synchronized cameras and a strobe
to a self-righting, deep-sea camera sled Cousteau built called the Troika. Cousteau and
crew used the sled for photographing stereo images of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which in
1959 they presented at the First International Congress on Oceanography in New York.
One image, which depicted “pillows of lava newly extruded from the center of the earth,”
offered evidence for the then contentious theory of continental drift.36 Another revealed
that the sandy base of a 7,000-feet-deep seamount was rippled as if a desert,
demonstrating the strength of deep-sea currents. The Calypso crew also fitted the sled
with a movie camera containing 1,000 feet of 16mm film, shooting images as deep as
16,000 feet with the strobe’s help.37
Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House,
1994); James Elkins, “Harold Edgerton’s Rapatronic Photographs of Atomic Tests,”
History of Photography 28, no. 1 (2004): 74–81; and Gus Kayafas, ed., Stopping Time:
The Photographs of Harold Edgerton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987).
36. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 56.
37. Ibid., 54–57.
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Placing the cameras near the deep scattering layer required the use of sonar—a
sort of picturing with sound. Sonar works by sending a sound signal toward a surface
and measuring the time it takes for the sound to return to the source to calculate distance.
As a locating and mapping device, it substitutes for strictly visual technologies as a sort
of sonic prosthesis for the human eye—allowing humans to “see” and act on a space that
the light-scattering, absorbing, and refracting properties of seawater obscure. Edgerton
designed three such sounding technologies: a “pinger,” which measured the distance
from ocean surface to ocean floor; a “boomer,” which penetrated the bottom of the
seafloor to find things beneath it; and a “fish,” a side-scan device that could locate
objects protruding up from the seafloor.38 In The Silent World (1956), Cousteau
demonstrates the pinger at work as it produces a continuous, side-scrolling, “side view”
image of the ocean floor in real time, revealing also the deep scattering layer when
Cousteau cranks up the pinger’s sensitivity dial (figure 2.4). This technology enabled
Edgerton and Cousteau to picture un-imageable space to establish coordinates for
camera and lighting placement from afar and produce scientifically significant images of
the seafloor and the deep scattering layer.
38. Over 100 of Edgerton’s sonar images as well as technical writing about their
creation appear in Harold E. Edgerton, Sonar Images (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1986).
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Figure 2.4. Sonar images of the ocean bottom (left) and of the sea’s deep-scattering
layer (right) made using the Edgerton “pinger.” Stills from The Silent World.
Other technologies Cousteau used to supplement direct vision included
holography, which involved making 3-D movies and photographs using laser beams;
and an “owl-eye” photomultiplier attached to the Soucoupe that could take pictures
using as little as one photon of light, which it could multiply by as much as 80,000,
enabling Denise’s occupants to “see in the dark as if it were daylight.”39 In a
speculative vein, Cousteau suggests a “mirage photo system” “at the very edge of
modern possibilities”—an apparatus too costly to permit practical development.40 It
would illuminate objects up to forty meters away, compensating for light scattering and
allowing the camera to block out scattered light and isolate light reflected directly back
from the object photographed. Mounted on the Soucoupe, it would effectively allow the
divers to overcome environmental obstacles to visualization and allow them to
photograph objects and animals from a distance when getting up close would disturb the
animal, pose a hazard to the vessel, or simply be spatially unfeasible. Although
Cousteau remains silent about the longer-range effects of using these technologies to
39. Cousteau, Window in the Sea, 104.
40. Ibid., 107.
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visualize and therefore comprehend ocean space, they, like the other forms of indirect
vision above, open up new possibilities for hands-on mastery and manipulation of the
marine environment.
Toward a Nontechnical Human Undersea
Although I have to this point related some of the technological, perceptual, and
physiological ways that Homo aquaticus was constituted, I lastly want to address Homo
aquaticus in relation to race and gender. The world of oceanauts, explorers, frogmen,
and menfish is almost exclusively white and male. In both Cousteau’s films and other
popular undersea media of this period (and even into the present), the aquanauts at the
vanguard of ocean exploration are almost exclusively white men—as were their real-life
counterparts in oceanography and recreational diving. The only woman we see in
Cousteau’s films before The Undersea World is his wife Simone, who appears for a few
seconds on a two-way television screen in World without Sun. And these advanced
technically enhanced beings stand in stark contrast to women and nonwhite native
others whose bodies in popular American media of the period inhabit the sea with
evidently no technical help whatsoever—as though their bodies were naturally suited to
aquatic space. We seldom see women or nonwhites wearing scuba gear or even diving
masks in film and media of the postwar decades, and non-white-male oceanographers
were a rare breed in the United States and Europe, much as scientific professions have
historically excluded women and people of color.41 To be sure, gaunt Cousteau and his
pasty crew hardly project the rugged masculinity that is more characteristic of ocean
41. A significant exception is Lotte Hass, a mainstay in the films of her husband
Hans Hass, an Austrian contemporary of Cousteau’s whose films and undersea research
merit further investigation.
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explorers in postwar popular culture—for instance, Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt, Kirk
Douglas’s harpooner in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and the title character of the
children’s show Diver Dan (ITC, 1960–63). But their eccentric world is no less
exclusionary for not conforming to white-male adventurer archetypes.
Idealizations of nonwhites as more “of nature” than whites is a familiar trope in
undersea filmmaking, particularly in the decades prior to Cousteau. We see this notably
in John Ernest Williamson’s photosphere movies, with their displays of Bahamian
divers fetching coins, hoisting corals, and fighting sharks for the amusement of a white
audience both inside the photosphere and before the movie screen as if these activities
were second nature to them. By contrast, the white divers who appear in these movies
inevitably wear metal helmets and suits, as though they are strangers on a distant planet
habitable only to a mysterious other. In one scene of With Williamson beneath the Sea,
presumably recycled from an earlier film, the Bahamian nicknamed “Cinderella” takes a
diving helmet on and off underwater, at once playing peek-a-boo with Williamson’s
young daughter through the photosphere window and seeming to say he can do without
this strange device.42 Nicole Starosielski persuasively argues of the imperialist
dimension of such display that the ocean is not simply a natural domain of the racial
other but rather a fluid space where he or she “could evade established structures of
42. More recently, Terrence Malick has purveyed such imagery, idealizing the
bodies of racial others with the help of familiar European musical cues. The opening
sequence of The Thin Red Line (1998) depicts an AWOL American World War II
soldier living among Melanesians, who dive among corals to the strains of “In
Paradisum” from Fauré’s Requiem; a similar underwater montage of nude Native
American women swimming like Rhine maidens to Wagner’s Rheingold prelude opens
The New World (2005).
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colonial power.”43 That these others can freely navigate the seas without the technology
that white explorers from European and American imperial powers require testifies to
their independence from those powers. It also suggests that a freedom from advanced
technologies is what it would take for Western powers to seize the ocean realm. For
Cousteau to fantasize about a new man with total freedom from the surface and
eventually the biological capacity to live undersea is of a piece with taking the other’s
place, with making the ocean a complete extension of Western land bases and removing
all possible pockets of resistance to them.
If ethnic others’ apparent belonging to the sea marks Western nations’ lack of
mastery over it, women’s seemingly “natural” alignment with the underwater world is
more closely allied with the project of domesticating it. Indeed, much of the women-inwater imagery of the postwar decades suggests a future in which the aquatic realm has
already been tamed. Bruce Mozert’s 1950s underwater photographs from Silver Springs,
Florida, for instance, depict women engaged in middle-class leisure activities common
to the surface: ballet, archery, watching television, sunbathing, and, self-reflexively,
photography (figure 2.5).44 It is as if Mozert were imaging how suburban women would
spend their time underwater if Americans built suburbs or resort towns there.
43. Starosielski, “Beyond Fluidity,” 155.
44. Mozert’s photographs are collected in Gary Monroe, Silver Springs: The
Underwater Photography of Bruce Mozert (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1998).
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Figure 2.5. A Bruce Mozart underwater ballerina. Image in Monroe, Silver Springs, 49.
The pivotal figure here is the mermaid—understood as woman on the order of
competitive-swimmer-turned-leading-lady Esther Williams rather than the more familiar
half-fish with a female torso.45 Mixing traditional female beauty with remarkable
athletic prowess, the mermaid was best emblematized by the “aquabelles” at Weeki
Wachee Springs, whose underwater theater was arguably Florida’s premier tourist
attraction in the quarter century before Disney World opened in 1971.46
Crucial to the mermaid image is the apparent absence of diving technologies.
Esther Williams dons little other than her bathing suit; Mozert’s subjects typically dress
45. See Jennifer A. Kokai, “Weeki Wachee Girls and Buccaneer Boys: The
Evolution of Mermaids, Gender, and ‘Man versus Nature’ Tourism,” Theatre History
Studies 31 (2011): 69–71.
46. Weeki Wachee Springs was founded by Newt Perry, a Hollywood “human
fish” known for performing underwater tricks in newsreels. On the park, see Kokai,
“Weeki Wachee Girls” as well as Lu Vickers and Bonnie Georgiadis, Weeki Wachee
Mermaids: Thirty Years of Underwater Photography (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2012) and Maryann Pelland and Dan Pelland, Weeki Wachee Springs (Chicago:
Arcadia Publishing, 2006).
100
and pose as if in a terrestrial setting. At Weeki Wachee, whose shows took place entirely
underwater, the mermaids would sometimes breathe from concealed compressed air
hoses in between stunts. However, they also had to be able to hold their breath for long
periods of time—forty-five seconds at the very least—while doing their flips and dives
and bracing themselves against the frigid water. As Kokai writes, the shows were “about
the taming of nature, the ability for certain special kinds of humans to survive and thrive
in an inhospitable environment and for it to look ‘natural.’”47 In this sense, the
mermaids’ shows have much in common with Cousteau’s ideal of undersea exploration,
except that for Cousteau the fantastic endpoint would be for certain humans to tame the
ocean in a manner that not only looked natural but, as their biology overtook technology,
actually was.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have addressed Jacques Cousteau’s utopian notion of Homo
aquaticus in relation to his 1950s and 1960s documentaries, treating it not as a fully
elaborated posthumanist idea (it was not) but rather as a set of issues—of aesthetics,
technology, and perception—that arise when human bodies interact with the marine
environment. Technologies such as the Aqua-Lung, Cousteau’s fleet of mini subs, and
the Conshelf underwater habitats extended human reach into the ocean by allowing
humans not only to breathe and move freely underwater, without tethers to the surface.
They gave rise to new ways of perceiving and physically engaging with the world, as
reflected in the balletic visual aesthetic of the underwater sequences in Cousteau’s
movies—an aesthetic that relates ambivalently to the project of ocean conquest that his
47. Kokai, “Weeki Wachee Girls,” 78–79.
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exploratory technologies served. (The poetic aesthetic finds a further corollary in the
dramatic experiential changes Cousteau’s divers claimed to undergo while living
underwater, changes that included a transformed sense of time.) In addition, the AquaLung in particular gave rise to new techniques for filmmakers to learn. Producing
cinematic views became a problem not only of adequate lighting, transparent waters,
and waterproofing cameras (Williamson’s problems) but also of monitoring air supplies
and following strict procedures to prevent such potentially deadly maladies as
decompression sickness and nitrogen narcosis.
Machinery of indirect vision accompanied these exploratory technologies.
Underwater television, strobe cameras, and sonar imaging enabled Cousteau and crew to
overcome the limits the aquatic medium imposes on biological sight; in the case of
strobe cameras and sonar, they even allowed the crew to “see” farther than exploratory
technologies allowed them to travel. Being able to visualize ocean space over great
distances went hand in hand with gaining knowledge about it and consequently
controlling and exploiting it (whether that meant establishing stable undersea habitats or
drilling for oil). The purpose of these imaging technologies (as well as other more
speculative ones) was to render a turbid and mostly lightless environment completely
transparent and thus infinitely useful for human ends. For these technologies to open the
vast marine frontier to potentially boundless exploitation put Cousteau’s research
perfectly in line with prevailing postwar Western sentiments toward the sea—that it was
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an enormous treasure chest waiting to be plundered—and at odds with the marine
conservationism which Cousteau would eventually espouse.48
The political dimension of the technologies Cousteau deploys in this period is
not limited to their merely being placed in the service of ocean conquest (a politics of
use); there is also the matter of the social, economic, environmental, and other
arrangements inherent to them. In the first place, we must assume that the various visual
and exploratory technologies Cousteau uses—machinery that is extremely
sophisticated—are each made from a thick weave of interests, materials, techniques,
actors, forms of expertise, and flows of capital. The threads may be impossible to
untangle without heavy documentation concerning supply chains, but it is safe to say
they add up to political neutrality no more than those that converged in Williamson’s
comparably primitive photosphere did. Additionally, despite the rhetoric of “freedom”
with which Cousteau surrounds his technologies, some of them, such as the undersea
habitats, can only ever be deployed pragmatically within a fixed, centralized and
hierarchical social arrangement—even if such a top-down structure is loosely imposed.
The playful, poetic nature of Cousteau’s films obscures the hierarchical arrangements
within which the oceanauts live, just as it conceals the Conshelf mission’s purpose: to
plan undersea farms and prospect for oil.
48. Cousteau’s contradictory attitudes are perhaps best represented at the end of
“Those Incredible Diving Machines,” when his voiceover moves quickly from
exploitation to stewardship: “Soon, most of the mysteries of the sea will be revealed to
us, and we will see that the ocean is but an immense extension of man’s own world: a
province of our own environment. We will have to farm it, mine it, and harness its
energies.” And then: “But we must remember to protect its integrity and its harmony as
we make this great voyage of discovery into a once mysterious but still beautiful
world. . . . We must learn to protect and to love the sea for the sea sustains life. That is
our greatest resource and treasure.”
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Finally, the perceptual and technological changes described above implicitly
belong to white bodies alone—white male bodies in particular. Read against earlier
undersea imagery of native bodies underwater, Cousteau’s movies convey a sense of
what scholar Joel Dinerstein calls “an escape from the panhuman”: a sort of white flight
into cyborg bodies uncontaminated by racial difference.49 Born of an inability to come
to terms with the human as “a multiethnic, multicultural, multigenetic construction
created through centuries of contact and acculturation,” this escape from otherness
takes the paradoxical form of beating otherness at its own game: inhabiting the fluid
space of the sea more dexterously than could other bodies and thus convert it from a
space of difference to one of continuity with the industrialized West.50
Homo aquaticus as a figure of ocean habitation would disappear from the
Cousteau universe as Cousteau gave up the idea of ocean colonization in favor of
conservation. At the same time, the idea of a human being that might overcome his or
her biological limits persists in films and media clearly influenced by Cousteau.
Aesthetically, Luc Besson’s all-underwater documentary Atlantis (1991) takes up the
dizzying and kinetic camera movements we see throughout Cousteau’s as the
cameramen engage with marine life, exploring the possibilities of movement and
perception that the ocean realm opens up. Narratively, Homo aquaticus surfaces in
Besson’s The Big Blue (1988) and James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989). The former film
concerns a champion free diver (i.e., someone who dives without scuba) who, in the
fantastic conclusion, plunges to a record depth of 400 feet and swims away into the
49. Dinerstein, “Technology and Its Discontents,” 16.
50. Ibid., 37.
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darkness with a dolphin, convinced as he is that life is better undersea than on land. In
The Abyss, the protagonist played by Ed Harris plunges to the bottom of the sea
breathing a helmet full of liquid oxygen, which allows him to survive seven kilometers
of vertical pressure and disarm a sunken nuclear warhead. Though different from
Cousteau’s artificial gill, the liquid breathing apparatus is based on real experimental
technologies and offers an image of what a solo, nonsubmersible descent to the deep sea
might be like. Additionally, Homo aquaticus persists in prose fiction. Peter Watts’s
novel Starfish, for instance, concerns a group of deep-sea power-plant workers whose
bodies have been surgically altered to withstand their environment’s extremes.51 In a
dystopian twist, these workers are not vanguard figures of humanity’s ever-extending
planetary reach but social outcasts from the overpopulated world above. And Hugh
Nissenson’s The Song of the Earth features a character who explicitly invokes
Cousteau’s concept: “I could design humin [sic] beings to live under water: Homo
aquaticus. It’s not so far-fetched. I could give them gills and webbed hands and feet.
Tough, scaly skin. Why, they could visually communicate with each other under water
by changing their skin color at will, in individually colored patches all over their bodies,
like squid.”52 Although these examples may not all be consistent with Cousteau’s
precise vision of divers with surgically implanted gills and humans who biologically
51. Peter Watts, Starfish (New York: Tor Books, 1999).
52. Hugh Nissenson, The Song of the Earth (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books,
2001), 222.
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evolve to live and breathe underwater, they all speak to the core idea of human bodies
that can more fully inhabit the sea with a minimum of technical appurtenances.53
The next chapter persists with the posthuman, albeit in the form of humpback
whales and their so-called songs. By the late 1960s and early 1970s cetaceans came to
be seen as quasi-divine superintelligences of the deep; humpback whale recordings lent
perceptual support to this notion and became an important tool for environmental
activism. This marked an important cultural shift in attitudes toward the sea, from one
that favored domination to one that preached conservation. By turning fully toward
audio, we’ll also continue to explore the importance of sound technologies in rendering
a picture of the sea. The difference is that whereas sonar helped Cousteau visualize the
sea to better study it scientifically (giving his backers the ability to exploit it
economically), hydrophones and consumer audio would reveal the ocean’s vulnerability.
Furthermore, the use of sound technology will mark a shift from Cousteau’s early vision
of large-scale technological domination of the sea to the use of comparatively
“appropriate technologies”—environmentally sound technologies that, unlike the
Conshelf habitats, do not mandate centralized and hierarchical social arrangements.
Finally, the next chapter also takes up the idea of posthuman escape, which exists in
some tension with environmentalism. Whereas escapism manifests in this chapter in
Homo aquaticus’s generally white-male makeup and withdrawal from the panhuman, in
the next it takes the form of flight into stereophonic sound space that seems to improve
on ordinary reality. As much as the audio content serves as a call to eco-conscience, the
53. For speculation about Homo aquaticus in a more scientific vein, see Erik
Seedhouse, Ocean Outpost: The Future of Humans Living Underwater (New York:
Springer, 2011), particularly his chapter “Becoming homo aquaticus” (167–78).
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presentation flatters a desire to leave behind the mundane—a desire the aesthetics of
Cousteau’s films arguably also feed.
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CHAPTER THREE
HUMPBACK WHALE SONG RECORDINGS, SOUND DESIGN, AND
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
Midway through The Big Lebowski (Ethan and Joel Coen, 1998), we find the character
affectionately known as The Dude (Jeff Bridges) slouched in a bubble bath in the dark,
surrounded by candles, smoking a joint, and listening to a cassette tape titled Song of the
Whale: ULTIMATE RELAXATION. “Far out, man—far fucking out!” he says aloud to
nobody as he mimics the recording. Though Lebowski fans know the scene best for what
follows—three German nihilists break into The Dude’s apartment, throw a ferret into
the bathwater with him, and threaten to cut off his “Johnson” if he does not return them
a suitcase full of money—this moment serves as a clever primer on the incongruous past
and present meanings of whale songs. On the one hand, with its promise of “ultimate
relaxation,” the recording is quite in keeping with popular ideas of whale songs in The
Dude’s 1990s present. On the other, as the soundtrack for getting stoned, the tape
evokes the early seventies, the heyday of a man who “went to Woodstock and never
left”—a time of antiwar protests and environmental activism—and in so doing restores a
familiar pop phenomenon to something like its initial meaning.1
Humpback whale songs date in the popular imagination to the 1970 LP release
of Songs of the Humpback Whale, recorded by the marine biologist Roger Payne and the
naval hydrophonist Frank Watlington between 1967 and 1970 and released through the
New York Zoological Society. Shortly after that record’s release, whale songs and
imitations thereof proliferated on television and radio; cropped up in pop, jazz, classical,
and new-age music; and sparked discussion in a variety of print outlets: academic
1. Roger Ebert, “Great Movie: The Big Lebowski,” RogerEbert.com, March 10,
2010, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-big-lebowski-1998.
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science journals, popular nature and music magazines, and the nation’s major papers.2
(The classic study of whale song was a 1971 Science article written by Payne and the
conservationist Scott McVay.)3 In 1977, NASA’s Carl Sagan included whale sounds,
alongside Bach, Chuck Berry, and greetings to the universe in fifty-five tongues, on the
Voyager Golden Record, launching them into deep space aboard the Voyager 1 and 2
spacecraft. Whale music arguably peaked with the January 1979 issue of National
Geographic, all 10.5 million copies of which included a Soundsheet of crooning
humpbacks set to a hushed, explanatory narration by Payne.
While today it is easy to dismiss humpback whale songs as New Age kitsch, for
much of the 1970s and ’80s, they were the very heartbeat of the environmental
movement. The whales’ eerie growls, grunts, lows, squeaks, squeals, and shrieks, which
could repeat in ornate patterns lasting up to thirty minutes (Payne and McVay’s article
defined songs as “fixed patterns of sounds that are repeated”), offered compelling
evidence that whales were graceful, intelligent, and gentle beings that deserved nothing
better than for industrial nations to stop killing them (which in the middle twentieth
2. Alan Hovhaness’s And God Created Great Whales, an Orientalist composition
that mixed live orchestral performance with a tape recording of whale songs, was the
first of these; it debuted with the New York Philharmonic on June 11, 1970, mere
months after Songs hit shelves. Other examples include Judy Collins’s “Farewell to
Tarwathie,” an a cappella piece backed by a chorus of humpbacks from her 1970
Whales & Nightingales album; Kate Bush’s 1978 hit “Moving,” which opens with a
twenty-second whale solo; and Paul Winter’s 1987 New Age jazz record Whales Alive,
which Payne produced, Leonard Nimoy narrated, and humpbacks accompanied on every
track.
3. Roger S. Payne and Scott McVay, “Songs of Humpback Whales,” Science
173, no. 3997 (August 13, 1971): 585–97. The authors delayed publication for over a
year so that the article would be the August 13 issue’s cover story; this delay also
ensured that the pop phenomenon of whale songs would precede scientific discussion of
the phonations.
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century they did with brio, to the tune of forty and fifty thousand a year—a tally that
skyrockets if one includes dolphins).4 If people listened closely to the whales, they
might learn how to be less belligerent and more respectful of a natural world that
environmentalists were already saying humans had endangered to their peril.5
In this chapter, I consider the materiality of these sounds, namely how humpback
whale song recordings, rather than humpback songs, relate to the ethical discourse—of
respecting rather than ending whales’ lives—that surrounded them for the better part of
two decades. Nearly everyone who has discussed whale recordings since 1970 has
written or spoken of them as if the recorded sounds, played or heard in whatever media
context—TV, radios, home stereo systems, movie theaters—were somehow identical to
actual whale sounds “out there”—that is, as a whale or a human or another form of life
would actually hear them underwater, without technical mediation. In treating the two
kinds of sound events—that is, technically mediated and not—as equivalent,
commenters have routinely failed to address the significant material and perceptual
differences between them. Once one considers what Rick Altman calls recorded sound’s
“material heterogeneity,” these differences become more meaningful than any apparent
likenesses.6 In the case of whale recordings, some of these differences includes those
between the disparate acoustic media of air and water, that is, how sound operates
differently in each and how we hear differently in each; between the vast, cavernous,
4. Payne and McVay, “Songs of Humpback Whales,” 590.
5. As Pete Seeger put it in his unrecorded 1970 elegy “The Song of the World’s
Last Whale,” “If we can save our singers in the sea, perhaps there’s a chance to save you
and me.”
6. Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” Sound
Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–31.
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echo chambers of the sea, where actual whale songs unfold, and the controlled acoustic
environments (e.g., living room, movie theater) where we’re likely to hear recordings of
them; and, lastly, between human or cetacean ears and hydrophones. When dropped off
the back of a sailboat on hundred-foot-long cables to produce stereo recordings,
hydrophones offer listeners the amorphous perspective of a pair of nonselective and
disembodied mechanical ears, each drifting with the currents at fluctuating depths and
distances apart from one another and from the cetacean sound source.
Additionally, although hydrophones “hear” with greater precision than human
ears do underwater, refining our perception of an aquatic environment to which our
senses are not well suited, they also significantly remake the sounds of that environment,
rendering loud underwater sounds, like whales’, less haptic as they remediate them in air.
Our bodies are composed mostly of water, and water is a better conductor of low
frequencies than air is; underwater, consequently, loud low-end sounds like those of a
whale can make a human body palpably vibrate. In perhaps the earliest written account
of what humpbacks sound like underwater, the marine biologist Sylvia Earle described
the phonations as “so intense that we could feel the sound as the air spaces in our heads
and bodies resonated . . . all around eerie ‘wheeeeps’ and low rumbling sighs assailed
our ears, our whole bodies”; elsewhere, she called whale song “so powerful it almost
hurts.”7 For the photographer Al Giddings: “There is nothing like being at depth with a
singing humpback . . . the megaphonic sound is so intense that it literally vibrates the
tips of your fins, assaults . . . your sinus cavities . . . it is the most powerful sound I’ve
7. Sylvia A. Earle, “Humpbacks: The Gentle Whales,” National Geographic 155,
no. 1 (January 1979): 5; Dawn Stover, “Queen of the Deep,” Popular Science 246, no. 4
(April 1995): 72.
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ever heard . . . to be a hundred feet away was just overwhelming.”8 For Philippe
Cousteau: “It is as if one were right next to a set of huge organ pipes . . . For the human
ear underwater, it makes for rather painful listening.”9 And for the nature writer Diane
Ackerman, who finds in whale phonations more pleasure than pain: “[H]is eerie song
sent shivers down my back and made my ribs gently chime as it filled the waves with
waves of music. . . . I heard and felt the radiant booming again, and wished I could hold
my breath for hours, stay down and listen with the whole ocean cupped to my ear like a
single hand.”10
For commenters to consider such material and perceptual differences would be, I
think, to allow that a sound recording of whale phonations creates for listeners a largely
free-floating sound event that bears little more than a formal resemblance to its referent.
In turn, this would mean that whatever ethical response listeners had to “singing”
whales may have had less to do with the phonations of actual cetaceans than the subtle
artifices of sound technology—a problem, surely, for any ethos, since, in popular
discussions of representational media, ethics has long been bound up with ideas of
presence, transparency, and indexicality. (For example, if confronted with the photo of a
mangled genocide survivor or a war casualty toward whom we feel compassion,
empathy, or perhaps even some responsibility, we would probably be inclined to say the
8. Qtd. in Under the Sea with Al Giddings, DVD, directed by Al Giddings (New
York: PBS, 2009).
9. Qtd. in Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Yves Paccalet, Jacques Cousteau: Whales,
trans. I. Mark Paris (New York: Abrams, 1988), 237.
10. Diane Ackerman, “The Moon by Whale Light,” in The Moon by Whale Light
and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales (New York:
Random House, 1991), 140.
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image is that person rather than a mere illusion; and we would likely regard with
suspicion the intents of anyone who insists otherwise.) That this sort of thinking is
absent from popular commentary on whale songs is unsurprising, for to question the
whale-ness of whale recordings or to tell listeners that they are not actually hearing
whales but rather a complex illusion of their presence might render the whales’ plight
less urgent.
It is worth noting here, too, that the label “songs” is probably responsible for
perpetuating the idea that a recording that might be heard in any number of contexts is
identical to its source. Rick Altman discusses this matter in “The Material Heterogeneity
of Recorded Sound,” where he cautions scholars against using a musical vocabulary—
one rooted in pitch, rhythm, and timbre—to analyze recorded sounds. This “twodimensional” language, Altman argues, elides the “three-dimensional” acoustic
differences between the same strings of “notes” as they unfold in different contexts.11
To frame sounds as musical is to effectively rule out other ways of thinking about them.
In addition, the notion of singing possesses great ethical power that cannot be
overlooked. Whether birds, frogs, or hippopotamuses, animals tend to become more
sympathetic—more human—when they “sing.” Additionally, “song” always implies a
singing voice, and voice tends to figure prominently in ideas of ethics. As the
psychoanalytic theorist Mladen Dolar avers, “The very notion of responsibility has the
voice at its core; it is a response to a voice.”12 In the case of the whale LP, this voice is
11. Altman, “Material Heterogeneity,” 15–16.
12. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2006), 95.
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conveniently translated for the listener: “TURN BACK”—words that are printed around
the center of the physical record and that serve as the whales’ call to conscience.
Despite the problems with the notion that whale recording transparently and
indexically give voice to actual whales, the discourse around whale songs has also, quite
paradoxically, tended to prize the recordings’ constructedness, their presentational
rather than representational aspects. The discourse seems to value sound recording’s
ability to cocoon listeners in sonic worlds that are fuller, more complete, and more
perfect than lived reality—what James Lastra calls a “Wagnerian aspiration” that was in
full force in the recording and film industries when whale songs entered popular
consciousness.13 (Songs of the Humpback Whale came out the same year as Pink
Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother; the National Geographic pressing of whale songs was also
the year of Apocalypse Now, the film perhaps most synonymous with film sound design
and the first to credit a “sound designer”: Walter Murch.) Commenters often described
whale sounds using interstellar language that invites comparisons with the era’s socalled “space rock” and science-fiction films, arguably the key genre for the sort of
“Wagnerian” world making that Lastra has in mind. (Consider three quotations: “so
completely otherworldly that they might have been radioed back to the earth from the
Soviet space probe that landed on Venus,” “a beam of sound going off into infinite
space for an infinite time,” and “Cosmic sounds, electronic sounds, the music of the
13. James Lastra, “Film and the Wagnerian Aspiration: Thoughts on Sound
Design and the History of the Senses,” in Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film
Sound, eds. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007),
123–38. My ideas in this chapter are deeply indebted to both this essay and a pair of
related talks—about surround sound, headphones, and immersive prosthetic sensoria—
Lastra gave at the University of Iowa in May 2012 and the annual meeting of the
Society of Cinema and Media Studies in March 2013.
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spheres . . . sound that man should hear each morning to remind him of the morning of
the world.”)14 That this discourse would jell with the Wagnerian aspiration of the period
was wholly appropriate. The drive to develop better, more perfect, more crystalline
audio worlds by way of recorded sound in this period dovetailed with the then
widespread belief that cetaceans were possessed of better, more perfect—because more
intelligent and less warlike—minds than our own. To experience whale sounds as a
sonic head trip was, I argue, a way that listeners in the 1970s and 1980s could
imaginatively enter into the perceptual head space of a whale—hearing whale sounds as
a whale might (though not necessarily would) hear them—and as a consequence of
entering this mental space, imagine a better alternative to the present, one where humans
lived more harmoniously with nature. Below, I discuss three examples that help bear out
this idea: an early prose description from John Cunningham Lilly that likens the “whale
mind” to an advanced stereo system; the 1970 Songs of the Humpback Whale LP, which
was allegedly best experienced with stereo headphones; and the film Star Trek IV: The
Voyage Home, where whale songs were first mixed in surround sound.
A Stereophonic Mind in the Waters (1967)
Consider, first of all, John Cunningham Lilly’s 1967 book Mind of the Dolphin,
a book that was widely read by, and highly influential among, whale activists of this
period. Lilly was a psychoanalyst and neurologist who studied dolphins in the early
1960s and was, as science historian D. Graham Burnett demonstrates in The Sounding of
the Whale, the man most responsible for promoting the idea that cetaceans were
14. Joseph Morgenstern, “Whale Songs,” Newsweek (15 April 1971), 16–17;
Peter Matthiessen, Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark (New York:
Penguin, 1971), 11.
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majestic, alien minds in the waters—a notion that “set the conditions of possibility” for
whale “songs” to emerge.15 (Whale sounds had been recorded by Naval antisubmarine
sonar experts as early as 1952, but were like other animal sounds bracketed as “noise,”
worth identifying only so they would not interfere with the more substantial business of
listening for enemy submarines in the ocean’s deep sound channel.) In The Mind of the
Dolphin, Lilly proposed that mammalian brain size directly correlated with intelligence,
which meant that dolphins possessed mental powers roughly equal to humans’, and that
bigger-brained large whales were blessed with vastly greater minds than that. These
cetaceans’ “huge computers,” for Lilly, were largely devoted to creating pleasurable
“inner experiences beyond our present understanding”; he tried to capture the
complexity of these “inner experiences” by likening their brains to an advanced stereo
system that could record and replay with absolute perceptual accuracy not only a
whale’s hypothetical experience of a symphony performance, but also the whale’s
original emotional response to the music:
Probably that which would excite the most respect for the human species in a
sperm whale would be a full symphony orchestra playing a symphony . . . With
his huge computer the sperm whale could probably store the whole symphony
and play it back in his mind to himself at his leisure . . . The sperm whale’s recreations are probably complete. He can probably re-create this spatial
distribution of the sounds [and] also replay the complex interrelationship
between the sounds simultaneously in pitch, in space, in loudness. His
reproduction is probably in “high fidelity” coupled with the original feeling that
he had at the first play. This probably would be easy for any sperm whale . . .
15. See D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans
in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 622–645.
Alongside Lastra’s work, Burnett’s authoritative tome proves foundational to my
thinking in this chapter.
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Imagine being able to relive a full playing of . . . any of your favorite
symphonies without any apparatus or recordings outside your own brain!16
To call this wild speculation is putting it mildly—Lilly goes on to say that the whale
could probably also “modify the music and even further elaborate it beyond any human
conception of music”—but what the passage does is clear: it dreams up an image of
advanced whale cognition that is also a dream of a more complete, more “perfect,” and
wholly immersive sonic environment, one that is irreducible to mere fidelity to live
performance. (And this is not just because the whale modifies the symphony and
includes his past emotional responses as playback but because the baseline scenario—of
a whale listening to a live symphony—is absurd in practical terms. Would the whale
listen to the symphony above water? Would the orchestra somehow play below it?
Would the orchestra float on a barge and pipe its sounds underwater through a speaker
system, making the whale’s perfect reliving merely an exact copy of a technical
representation, not the orchestra itself?) This dual dream—advanced cognition meets
perfect audio—gets articulated a few years later in the discourse around humpback
sounds, and how they would sound to other whales: a song to another whale would be
analogous to an ideal consumer audio experience. Except rather than envisioning notyet-existing perfect audio in order to grasp the complexities of whale brains, the
discourse emphasized the latest and best audio technologies at hand as a way for
listeners to better enter into whale headspace.
16. John Cunningham Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), 56, 115–16. A version of the
block-quoted passage also appears in Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 624.
117
Stereo Headphones: Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970)
Let us now consider the 1970 LP release of Songs of the Humpback Whale, and
the text of the original liner notes, almost none of which, except for slightly abridged
track descriptions, were reprinted with reissues. The original LP came with a heavily
illustrated thirty-six–page booklet that, more than any other document, anchors whale
“songs” to the conservationist, anti-whaling discourse that would surround them
throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s. The book summarizes then current, and rather
threadbare, scientific knowledge about whales generally and humpbacks specifically; it
charts the brief history of humpback “songs” and their discovery; it then details, in its
most substantial section, the history of twentieth-century whaling—the business side,
the technology involved, and the various uses to which whales were put upon being
slaughtered—like making shoe polish, paint thinner, women’s cosmetics, and cat food;
and finally notes that cetacean stocks are so depleted that many of the world’s great
whales are bound to go extinct unless whaling comes to a swift halt (which would mean
an international ban—which was not implemented until 1986).
The first words one encounters upon opening the cover are, in huge letters,
“Listening Instructions,” and these unambiguously frame headphone listening as right
listening. “If possible,” the instructions tell us,
listen to the whale record through stereophonic headphones. Side II [a sixteenminute track called “Three Whale Trip”], in particular, becomes a totally
different experience when heard through headphones . . . Earphones seem
somehow to . . . [create] a pleasant sense of a vast echoey space—a mystical
feeling that is very hard to describe. For some reason, this effect is seldom
experienced fully with even the best loudspeakers.17
17. Liner notes, Songs of the Humpback Whale (Del Mar, CA:
Communication/Research/Machines, Inc., 1970, LP), inner left cover.
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Here it’s clear that the record’s makers, above all Roger Payne, wanted listeners
to experience whale phonations at least in part as if experiencing a head trip. (The very
title “Three Whale Trip” suggests an ecological high—a notion Payne bears out when he
pitches the track as “an extraordinary inner experience for anyone who lets [the sounds]
into his mind.”)18 It is not simply that headphones heighten the affective power of the
“singing” whales by bringing their voices as close as possible to listeners’ ears. Rather,
by supplanting the sounds of listeners’ more immediate environs, headphones—
particularly the noise-canceling kind—transport listeners, immersing them in a
seemingly infinite, quasi-cosmic space of crystal-clear stereophonic sound—
intensifying sonic qualities that render the recordings nonidentical to whale voices “out
there.” The composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer captured this feeling of
cosmic immersion best when, in the manner of a New Age Jungian, he wrote the
following:
In the head-space of earphone listening, the sounds not only circulate around the
listener, they literally seem to emanate from points in the cranium itself, as if the
archetypes of the unconscious were in conversation . . . when sound is conducted
directly through the skull of the headphone listener, he is no longer regarding
events on the acoustic horizon; no longer is he surrounded by a sphere of moving
elements. He is the sphere. He is the universe.19
Schafer’s description of immersive headphone listening in turn resonates with claims
Payne makes about it elsewhere, when he likens the experience of listening to
humpbacks to floating in the cosmos: “when you listen over a pair of headphones to
whales under perfect recording conditions in the deep ocean, it’s really as though you
18. Qtd. in Songs of the Humpback Whale, inner right cover.
19. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning
of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977), 119.
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were listening from within the Horsehead Nebula, or some galactic space that is
otherworldly, not part of anything you know, where the boat itself is floating.”20 Here,
sound forges an alliance between two kinds of “inner space”: that of the ocean and that
of the mind.
Yet however trippy or artificial this stereophonic headspace may be, the liner
notes repeatedly say things like, “this is the way the songs would sound to other whales,”
and, “[a]fter a few moments of listening . . . you will learn to hear as a whale probably
does”—lines that have less to do with perfect fidelity to whales “out there” than the
highly artificial, highly constructed experience of listening to the record.21 The
capacities of audio technology to create complex sound spaces that resemble none we
could ordinarily perceive make it analogous to the high-powered mental apparatus of a
whale, which humans might imaginatively or empathetically enter into by way of
immersive listening (and again, which might teach people in industrial nations to engage
in a less destructive—and ultimately self-destructive—relationship with a natural world
they had overexploited).
Surround Sound: Star Trek IV (1986)
If the immersive sonic experience of headphone listening approximates a
superhuman mind, so, perhaps, does the immersive audiovisual experience of watching
a film in surround sound. Here, there is no better example than Star Trek IV: The
Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), the first film released in Dolby SR and which
prominently features humpback whale songs, cribbed from the Roger Payne LP, on its
20. Qtd. in Ackerman, “The Moon by Whale Light,” 130.
21. Liner notes, Songs of the Humpback Whale, inner right cover.
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soundtrack. To summarize briefly: in this film, Admiral Kirk, Mr. Spock, and company
encounter a hostile “space probe” beaming strange signals that turn out to be humpback
whale songs into the blue planet’s oceans. Unless the probe gets a response, it will
scorch the atmosphere and vaporize the seas, destroying all life on Earth. Only a
humpback whale can respond; as luck would have it, however, whales are now long
extinct thanks to twentieth-century whaling. To solve this dilemma, the crew warps back
in time to 1986 San Francisco, where they save a pair of humpbacks from whalers, and
in the manner of Noah, they smuggle their great quarry into the future, where the whales
serenade the probe, save the Earth, and are set free to breed anew at sea, no longer beset
by human cruelty. The film’s narrative semi-nostalgically literalizes an early 1970s
environmentalist call to arms.
Two sequences in this film stand out with regard to issues of real and recorded
whale voices’ nonidentity and the creation of perfect perceptual space. First, take the
strange scene in which Kirk and Spock learn that the space probe has in fact been
transmitting fluent whale-speak. At Kirk’s request, Uhura, a female crewmember,
modifies a recording of the probe signal to account for “density, temperature, and
salinity factors.” She rewinds the signal—audibly, as a sound editor scrolling right to
left over an audio clip in Pro Tools might hear it—and after fiddling with the
recording’s speed and pitch via some elaborate button punching on her console, she
reveals the signal’s plaintive essence. “I think I have it,” she says. To which Kirk, with
Shatnerian profundity, responds, “And this is what it would sound like underwater.”
Read as self-reflexive, this sequence unravels film sound’s “design.” The
technician, a surrogate for the production’s own sound engineers, peels away the layers
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of sonic manipulation that conceal the source recording for the probe’s whines. She
takes an unusual noise, typical of a science-fiction universe, and demystifies it, restoring
it to the mundane soundscape of the late twentieth century where many viewers would
instantly recognize it. In this respect, the scene paints a fair picture of how film sound
design commonly works: molding the familiar to make it strange, forging a brand new
sonic world from the raw materials of our own. Yet despite its self-reflexivity, it wants
the viewer to believe, like the rest of the discourse around humpback sounds does, that a
manipulated audio recording (actually taken from Songs and here respatialized within a
surround soundtrack) is what a whale “would sound like underwater”—that is, as we
have seen, as it would sound to another whale. In offering viewers the sound event as it
would presumably sound underwater to another whale in Dolby surround, the scene
suggests that this technologically advanced hearing of humpback song better
approximates nonhuman perception than earlier, real-world stereo recordings of whales
did.
The second crucial scene is the time-travel sequence. The connection between
higher cetacean intelligence and immersive audio space is clarified during this passage,
an audiovisual phantasmagoria that plays out as sort of a straight-laced acid trip—not
least because it takes place in Admiral Kirk’s head. Over the speakers, a dense mix of
reverberating, disembodied voices and diegetically ambiguous sound effects coming
from left, right, and behind resolve into a few croons of whale song in the center
channel. The sequence exploits the now much remarked-on clarity of Dolby soundtracks,
specifically the “more perfect” sonic experience it can enable for film spectators—what
Walter Murch calls the “clear density” of surround sound, where we as spectators could
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simultaneously feel overwhelmed by the range of sounds bombarding our ears from all
directions but also be able to track individual sounds with ease, as if we could pluck
them out of the air.22 (As Michel Chion puts it, “Everything [in Dolby] today tends . . .
to separate sounds from each other: their dispersion across several tracks, their precision,
the differences in contrast and the gulfs of silence between them.”23) Similarly, the
visual accompaniment abounds with “trippy” computer-generated imagery that recalls
Lev Manovich’s claim that the unnaturally clean, grainless quality of CGI heralds a
more perfect perceptual future: pale, morphing heads of the Enterprise crew members,
rendered like busts from classical antiquity, tumbling towards the screen, and finally a
too slick digital likeness of a whale (figure 3.1).24 That this unnaturally pristine
audiovisual passage distills into a humpback image and sound places whales at the
center of the more “perfect” perception that spectators have just been immersed in—and
indeed, for spectators (via Admiral Kirk) to experience this mind-bending stretch of film
is to enter something like the inner world of a whale.25
22. See Walter Murch, “Dense Clarity—Clear Density,” The Transom Review
(April 2005), http://transom.org/?page_id=7006.
23. Michel Chion, “The Silence of the Loudspeakers, or Why With Dolby Sound
it is the Film That Listens To Us,” in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–
2001, ed. Larry Sider, Jerry Sider, and Diane Freeman (London: Wallflower, 2003), 153.
24. Lev Manovich, “The Synthetic Image and Its Subject,” in The Language of
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 180–84.
25. It is also a textbook example of what Chion sometimes finds in surroundsound cinema, a “vast sonic aquarium” where the image is but “one more layer” that is
“found swimming around just like another fish.” Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans.
Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 119.
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Figure 3.1. Admiral Kirk’s time-travel head trip in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Because the sequence helps activate Kirk’s own latent eco-consciousness, and
Kirk is viewers’ primary point of identification in this sequence, it also means to trigger
viewers’ environmentalist associations with whale songs. But because whale songs
would have been so familiar as a pop-culture phenomenon, the recordings’
environmentalist meaning would likely have been long eroded by their commodification.
Star Trek IV, in this respect, recuperates what whale songs once meant.26 Perfect
perception, in this case, becomes a futuristic means to a rediscovery of origins—origins
that, in the form of the 1970 Songs LP, themselves represent a longing to turn back the
clock on a modernity emblematized by whaling.
26. Here, I have in mind Thomas Elsaesser’s provocative suggestion that
Hollywood blockbusters are time machines that cash in on viewers’ desire to return to
their childhoods: “Between past and future, between childhood and parenthood,
mainstream cinema has found its cultural function as the world’s time machine, with the
blockbuster the ‘engine’ that simultaneously raises expectations, stirs memories, and
unites us with our previous selves. Across mythical stories of disaster and renewal,
trauma and survival, it thus reconciles us to our mortality.” Elsaesser, “The Blockbuster:
Everything Connects, but Not Everything Goes,” in The End of Cinema as We Know It:
American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press,
2001), 22.
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Whale Songs and the Underwater Soundscape
I will pursue the point about reversing course in the next section, but here we
should pause to consider other movies from the era that incorporate whale songs on their
soundtracks. Indeed, Star Trek IV was not the first to do so, and how it deploys them is
also uncharacteristic of the films that preceded it. These include the documentary Blue
Water, White Death (Peter Gimbel, 1971) and an episode of ABC’s The Undersea
World of Jacques Cousteau titled “The Singing Whale” (Philippe Cousteau, 1973).27
Both examples are characterized by monaural soundtracks, a lack of self-consciousness
about how sound gets mediated, and a tendency to mismatch the sounds with images of
cetaceans that do not sing—sperm whales and female humpbacks, respectively. (Though
marine biologists did not know so in 1973, only male humpbacks sing.) Yet in some
respect, the monaural soundtrack of these movies—and thus the monaural flattening of
stereophonic source recordings—better approximates how humans hear underwater than
do the more sophisticated sound equipment discussed above. Though these films no
better emulate the full-bodied experience of hearing a whale underwater than their
stereo counterparts, they are at least in keeping with our inability to sense sound’s
directionality underwater. What’s more, in both examples the humpback recordings
actually accompany underwater sequences—unlike Star Trek IV. In doing so they mark
an important shift in the norms governing underwater sound in general.
Until cetacean recordings entered popular culture, ocean movies tended to
adhere to Cousteau’s idea of a “silent world” at odds with what, because water is such a
27. A third movie that at first appears to feature whale phonations is the Jaws
knockoff Orca (Michael Anderson, 1977). However, these sounds are actually the voice
of the British ornithologist and radio personality Percy Edwards, a man famous for his
convincing imitations of birds and other animals.
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great conductor of sounds, is in actuality a very noisy space. Indeed, in films made
before whale songs entered popular culture, diegetic sound underwater tends to be
limited to the whooshing of fish past the camera and to sounds of human presence: the
bubbling and breathing effects that accompany images of scuba divers, the sounds of
submarine vehicles (e.g., the buzzing scooters in The Silent World), and the garbled
dialogue of aquanauts speaking to one another over their helmet radios—sounds
typically stripped of their high frequencies in the mix.28 (A subcategory of underwater
sound includes interior sounds, such as those that originate inside submersibles,
submarines, or underwater habitats and can only be heard there—for instance, the highpitched voices of helium-breathing divers in World without Sun and Conshelf
Adventure.)
Whale songs introduced a distinct, nonanthropocentric dimension to underwater
sound that can scarcely be said to exist in film before 1970. Indeed, with the exception
of dolphins, with their unique clicks and squeaks, it is rare for any film made before
Songs of the Humpback Whale’s release to represent the sounds marine animals make
underwater. This silence, understood from the present, seems to accord animals a lack of
agency for which evocative scoring and documentary narration attempt to compensate;
it seems unmistakable that the talking and singing animals in animated films seem less
passive and more fully alive than their live-action counterparts.
28. That underwater sounds are low-end phenomena is a fiction promulgated by
the movies. As sound recordist Darrin Blondin notes, “Films have taught us that
underwater sounds [are] muffled, echoing, and bubbly. In actuality water is alive with
high frequencies, but a bright recording tends to come off as less realistic.” Qtd. in
Helmreich, “Underwater Music,” 168–69.
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Whale songs are also the most mobile of underwater sounds. In movies, they
accompany above-water sequences as often as they do underwater ones while remaining
instantly identifiable as whale songs. Characters and documentary subjects can listen to
whales underwater or above water via hydrophone, and they can take the recordings
anywhere. Additionally, as songs, whale phonations blur the line between diegetic and
nondiegetic sound in a manner conventionally reserved for music. (Consider the typical
road-movie sequence when the hero cranks up the volume on his car radio and, as the
music continues over a montage, finds himself in the next time zone by the end of the
second chorus.) Mostly, however, it has to do with the dynamics of listening to them.
The songs also function ambiguously as ambient ocean sound, voice (on- or off-screen,
embodied or disembodied), and as music—confounding usual distinctions between
voice, music, and sound effects.
Blue Water, White Death, a documentary about director Peter Gimbel’s sixmonth quest to find and film a great white shark, deploys the Payne and Watlington
humpback recordings throughout several lengthy underwater sequences that depict
sharks feasting on sperm whale carcasses.29 Remarkably, the film never once mentions
29. Blue Water, White Death was a major inspiration for Jaws (Steven Spielberg,
1975), especially in its scenes of divers observing sharks from aluminum cages, whose
flimsy bars Gimbel believed would make for more suspenseful viewing than sturdier,
safer cages would. (Based on a terrifying late scene in which a great white nearly rips
one of the cages to pieces with a diver inside—a scene that Jaws lifts wholesale—we
can say Gimbel was certainly right.) In addition, Blue Water was the first feature-length
cinéma vérité film shot in 35mm, a major reason cinematographer Jim Lipscomb signed
on to make it. “It’s never been done . . . The Endless Summer [Bruce Brown, 1966] was
shot with a wild camera and a narration dubbed in later. Don’t Look Back [D. A.
Pennebaker, 1967] and Monterey Pop [Pennebaker, 1968] were both shot sixteen
millimeter and blown up. This film offered a fantastic opportunity because there was
enough money available to develop a thirty-five-millimeter camera that could be carried
on the shoulder [a forty-pound Arriflex].” Qtd. in Matthiessen, Blue Meridian, 35. Peter
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the songs or their provenance; their value in the film is largely atmospheric, and their
use motivated only by a loose species affinity between dead sperm whales and
humpbacks, which are never seen or discussed. (For those viewers who were unfamiliar
with whale sounds, one imagines these sonic passages would have been completely
abstract, perhaps resembling the more trippy passages in progressive rock.) Additionally,
the humpback recordings are never heard in isolation. Always, they fuse with the eerie
Moog score provided by the synthesizer pioneer Walter Sear (whose other film credits
include Midnight Cowboy [John Schlesinger, 1969] and a bevy of z-grade horror flicks
from the seventies and eighties). The synth work is subtle enough that it’s impossible to
fully distinguish between the Moog and humpbacks, sounds that seem to emanate from
one another. Indeed, because of their sonic resemblance, the lapping waves and ocean
ambience, which in actuality belong to the humpback recordings (sampled from Songs),
register as separate sound effects. These noises, in turn, blend with those recorded
undersea for the film (“direct sound” captured by hydrophones mounted on the various
crewmembers’ cameras). The result is a strange mix of two disparate sorts of “location”
sound, from different times and places, which the mono mix flattens together like sonic
pancakes. This confuses the waters off the coasts of Dunbar, South Africa and
Dangerous Reef, Australia, two locations where the footage accompanying the whale
songs was shot, with Bermuda, where Payne and Watlington recorded their whale songs.
The effect of this mix is often hypnotic, particularly during the opening titles—a
hallucinatory passage in which the camera drifts forward through a series of enormous
Matthiessen, the novelist and nature writer, appears in the film as the “expedition
historian”; his book Blue Meridian chronicles the picture’s making and offers a valuable
account of the difficulties posed by filming undersea.
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scarlet blood clouds detonating beneath the waterline, luring a pair of negative-image
process-shot sharks through the frame. In a later, similarly mesmeric sequence, Valerie
Taylor, one of the film’s diver-photographers, stuns a white-tip shark with an explosive
prod and the wounded, waggling fish spirals into the abyss, the camera depicting the
circle. Although the whale sounds are motivated by the presence of dead whales, they
have the added effect of rendering ocean space strange and otherworldly; moreover, the
uncanny quality of the whale song underscores the seemingly lifeless movement of the
sharks. (One may think of the great white’s “lifeless eyes . . . doll’s eyes,” as Robert
Shaw’s Captain Quint memorably describes them in Jaws.)
Far from merely aestheticizing the sea with humpback songs, Cousteau’s “The
Singing Whale,” which aired on March 12, 1973, plays out much like a telefilm
adaptation of Songs in its conservationist concern. However, in deploying the whale
recordings, the episode is most notable for disregarding what Altman calls sound’s
“spatial signature,” possibly for TV-specific reasons.30 One quickly notices that
regardless of where or by what technical means the songs play in the diegesis, they
sound exactly the same. Whether Cousteau and company listen to “live” humpback
songs from the deck of their ship or to a tape recording indoors, whether they listen with
headphones or over a speaker system, or whether the sounds accompany above-water or
underwater images, the voice of the titular whale maintains an identical spatial signature.
(When the camera goes underwater, the other ambient sounds change to reflect the
environmental shift, but the whale crooning remains the same.) Obviously, a single
source recording was used for the entire episode; as singing whales are the episode’s
30. Altman, “Material Heterogeneity,” 24.
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main attraction, the recording may have been left unmanipulated in the mix to be
maximally intelligible, ensuring that TV viewers could easily hear it from other rooms
and over other household noises and be drawn back to their sets whenever it played.
Rick Altman argues that the soundtrack mediates between “programming flow” and
“household flow,” hailing viewers back to the screen at pivotal moments in a broadcast;
it creates the impression that “the TV image is manufactured and broadcast just for me,
at precisely the time that I need it.”31 In keeping with this idea, the instances of
humpback songs littered throughout “The Singing Whale” might have abetted such “just
for me” moments, providing distracted viewers with the spectacular image of a whale
“at precisely the time that I need it.”
In addition to its “for me”–ness, the fixed spatial signature of the whale
recording in the episode allows it to easily traverse the formal boundary between
diegetic and nondiegetic sound. A key sequence in this regard finds Cousteau in a lab at
the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in San Diego, where a bioacoustics expert plays
whale song over a speaker system, stopping the tape mid-croon. Once he hits play again,
the phonations assume the role of a score, initiating and lending continuity to an aerial
montage of swimming humpbacks, which intercuts with Cousteau’s ongoing
conversation with the bioacoustician. Like Blue Water, White Death, the episode
sometimes mixes the humpback recordings with its score, an orchestral one written by
the show’s usual composer, Walter Scharf. Causing the viewer none of the trouble Blue
Water does of distinguishing the whale song from a vanguard electronic instrument, the
31. Rick Altman, “Television/Sound,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 51.
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combination of orchestra and humpback has more in common with Hovhaness’s And
God Created Great Whales or the various pop and jazz songs of the era, treating the
whale phonations as an exotic voice that stands out from the conventional musical
arrangement into which it is integrated.
“The Singing Whale” marks something of an about-face for the oceanconquering Cousteau discussed in the previous chapter. Although Cousteau quite
typically never mentions Payne, McVay, or the Songs of the Humpback Whale LP (the
Cousteau universe is a closed one), the whale songs in this episode symbolize the need
for understanding and even companionship rather than mass murder. Whales, he avers,
are “playful, easygoing giants . . . our ever-traveling, ever-singing big brothers in the
sea,” and he hopes one day science will allow humans to grow closer to them. The
episode ends with an explicit call to stewardship, with Cousteau noting the threat
whalers pose to the humpbacks’ existence. “Soon,” he says in his concluding voiceover,
there may be too few singing whales to find each other and to reproduce in
sufficient number to overcome their death rate. What a sad song would be that of
the last whale beneath the sea, singing for a mate, when there is not another
whale to hear. Let us all rally to the call. Let us see that the song is answered in
expanding numbers and that for many years to come, the songs of the whale be
heard throughout the sea.
Reversing Course
Here, I wish to first return to the liner notes of the original Songs LP and
examine the broader technological context in which they arose. These notes—in terms
of their content, presentation, and accompanying illustrations—make a strong case for a
new, eco-friendly image of cetacean science, which was then in the midst of distancing
itself from the whaling industry. This changing image arguably relates to then more
widespread anxieties about technological “progress”—related above all to the atomic
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bomb and Vietnam War—that spawned the so-called appropriate technologies
movement, which advocated, in the words of E. F. Schumacher, “technology with a
human face”: inexpensive technology used on a local scale where it would serve rather
than subsume human needs.32
The original LP’s accompanying book is notable for half-Japanese, half-English
text—two columns of each per page—that lends an Orientalist cast to the record’s
implicit critique of mid-twentieth century modernity, which everything about the record
associates with whaling. Though it would be easy to read these notes as indictment of
the Japanese whaling industry—the year Songs appeared, Japan would hunt 42 percent
of the world’s whale stock, second only to the Soviet Union’s 43 percent—the dramatic
juxtaposition of Oriental and Occidental scripts engages a dialectic of sameness and
difference that extends beyond cultural and across species lines.33 (This benevolent
exoticism is, I think, borne out by the fact that McVay toured Japan the summer of its
release—as well as by the fact that Japan and the United States were Cold War allies
engaged in cordial talks on many fronts.)34 In this view, the Japanese script serves to
conjure images of a traditional, preindustrial culture; it would encourage readers to
32. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
33. These statistics appear in Scott McVay, “Can Leviathan Long Endure So
Wide a Chase?” Natural History 80, no. 1 (January 1971): 36, 40.
34. McVay went to Japan armed with a dozen copies of the LP, which he shared
with leading scientists, politicians, whaling industry representatives, and artists. Among
these luminaries were novelist Kenzaburo Ōe, composer Toru Takemitsu, and, per
McVay himself, the lead strategist of whaling at Taiyo fisheries, who was “amazed as
any one [sic] at the intricacy of the songs.” David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song:
Whale Music in a Sea of Sound (New York: Basic Books), 20–21; Scott McVay, “Re:
Songs of the Humpback Whale questions,” email to author, 3 January 2013.
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picture something like a craft-oriented alternative to the modernity they knew. This
alternative present, presumably abounding with kimonos, bamboo homes, rice dinners,
and Zen Buddhism (plus whatever other “exotic” tokens of the simple life spring to the
reader’s mind) amounts to a world where whales—and their songs—might thrive. (The
record’s sleeve contains many hand-drawn whale voice notations that evoke the brushstrokes of calligraphy; the association with things hand-made suggests a slower, more
contemplative time, attuned to Mother Nature, a mode of living that is rather
stereotypically, and groundlessly, linked to East Asian culture.)35 (Figure 2.) This
ambimodern outlook is further hinted at by the scalar contrasts that populate the book’s
illustrations: a huge, grinning humpback that dwarfs the man rowing alongside it; a
gargantuan factory ship that eclipses a sperm whale and the whaling boats of yore; and
between that hyper-modern ship and the more modest schooner from which Payne and
McVay taped the whales (figures 3.2–3.5). Rather than marvel at the sublimity of
whales, these images seem to say, humans have overwhelmed their splendor with
35. There is a communicative element at work in the liner notes, too. Although
the Japanese text underscores the phonations’ otherness by likening them to a decidedly
alien (for many English readers) script, the more familiar English invites readers to
regard humpback sounds as a third, potentially decipherable tongue alongside the two
human languages present in the text. This suggestion is borne out by the sleeve’s
spectrogram imagery, which not only offers visual evidence of “repeating patterns” that
make the phonations “songs” but functions, like the Japanese text, as an exotic but
potentially legible script—one that, if deciphered, might yield the secret of what
humpbacks say to one another across hundreds of miles of ocean and perhaps also teach
humans how to communicate with them. The linguistic mélange promises a utopic
community that includes species as well as other cultures, inviting the reader to picture a
future where humans peacefully coexist with their fellow creatures rather than rub them
out.
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enormous technological pursuits, unmooring themselves from a truer, more authentic
mode of being they might recover by turning eastward.36
Figure 3.2. Spectrograms with English and Japanese captions. Whale voices with noise
(left) and without (right). Image in Songs of the Humpback Whale,12–13.
Figure 3.3. A grinning humpback meets a rowboat. Image in Songs, 4–5.
Figure 3.4. How whales are killed: the modern factory ship, its predecessors, and a
whale for scale. Image in Songs, 18–19.
36. This Orientalist romanticism dovetails with how whales were often depicted
in the postwar imagination: as noble savages. In this respect, the unanswered song of the
vanishing whale is akin to the endangered tongue of the “vanishing native” much
fetishized by the West. For a superlative discussion of cetaceans as noble savages, see
Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology,
Animals and the Sacred (New York: Zed Books, 2000).
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Figure 3.5. Twilight, the sloop aboard which Payne and McVay recorded whale songs.
Image in Songs, 10–11.
Such a longing for a better modernity is not merely rhetorical; it finds expression
in the technologies and nonintrusive observational techniques that made the recording
and its dissemination possible—practices and devices that together oppose the apparatus
of whaling. These “good” technologies include hydrophones, schooners and rafts
(relatively quiet boats that do not bombard marine animals with noise), reel-to-reel tape
recorders, and off-the-shelf “Vibralyzers” that allowed the recordings to be analyzed,
visually, for patterns. While these apparatus are of course very much the technological
products of the mid-twentieth century, they seem positively quaint compared to the
technologies of whaling, whose brute efficiency the LP booklet’s authors take pains to
describe.37
37. The “innovations” that enabled this mass slaughter were many, and in a
subsection titled “How Whales are Killed,” the book’s authors recount what to those
who have plunged into the history of whaling must regard as a familiar litany: the rise of
shore stations and pelagic expeditions, the use of helicopters to spot whales and sonar to
stun them (that sonar was refined through the study of cetaceans should not pass
unnoticed here), explosive harpoons shot from cannons, compressed air tanks to inflate
their corpses, and flensers. Though not without grisly details, the book gives readers
little indication of the highly celebratory popular discourse of whaling that Songs
bucked up against. Popular writing on whaling could glorify, as in Ivan T. Sanderson’s
Follow the Whale, the “gruesomely efficient” network (manned by “blubberboys” and
“superbutchers”) of pulleys, cables, hooks, claws, harpoons, boilers, pressure cookers,
power saws, centrifuges, and “whirring choppers, which make a mighty pudding of the
blubber” that characterized the typical whaling ship at midcentury. Any proper
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The technology of the LP itself is particularly important here. More than merely
setting listeners spatially adrift in a seemingly limitless sea of whale song, the record’s
materiality also emphasizes the temporal dimension of whale songs. To hear whales
singing is to gain access to a slow, contemplative time that contemporary life has largely
rendered obsolete—a time in keeping with a vanishing natural world whose history
engulfs our own (and which makes more palpable the record’s ambi-modern critique).
As Payne observes, “Everything the whales do is so slow, so deliberate, outside the
normal sense of time of the human world.” These “great, gentle cloudlike beings,” he
says, “teach us a new sense of time”—although this new time is nothing new at all, but
the deep time of the earth, against which the whole of human existence is but a few ticks
of the clock.38 And yet the window for accessing this new time seems to be closing.
This is because of the injunction to “turn back,” which both discursively and materially,
infuses the LP with a degree of poignancy that is not palpable on subsequent CD or mp3
versions of the album. Whirling clockwise into a blur as the record plays, the cri de
coeur printed round the center (“TURN BACK TURN BACK TURN . . .”) equates the
sound’s inexorable forward temporal trajectory with a reversal of time—as if by
listening humans could repair the traumas they visited upon some of the most
magnificent animals ever to roam the earth, and restore these creatures to their earlier
abundance. (We might imagine, as the sounds flood our ears, a film in reverse:
thousands of dead whales pieced back together, reanimated, and placed at sea by pelagic
appreciation of whale songs in popular culture must acknowledge that the wonder that
quickly enveloped the songs had once surrounded whaling. See Ivan T. Sanderson,
Follow the Whale (New York: Bramhall House, 1956), 343–44. I owe the Sanderson
reference to Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 523.
38. Qtd. in Ackerman, “The Moon by Whale Light,” 130–31.
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ships that are disassembled as soon as they return to port.) And yet, vinyl is a frail
medium that audibly bears the traces of its age; to play a record, like a film, is to
accelerate its decay.39 Every hearing of the LP gives lie to the very prospect, held out
by the record, of upending time’s arrow. On a badly worn copy of Songs, hisses and
pops would efface the whales’ call to conscience as though it were never there. Such a
record might produce for those who heard it an experience that rhymed with the era’s
rampant fantasy of the world’s last whale: the humpback’s final, unanswered “mrooo”
vanishing forever in a sea of noise.40 This prospect—that these preserves of lost time
too will perish—links the fragility of the storage medium to the precarious existence of
endangered whales to whose lives the medium offers listeners access.
It should be stressed that neither the record nor any of the major subsequent
iterations of whale songs served an anti-anthropocentric agenda. Rather, the goal of
saving whales by disseminating their songs was closely related to cetaceans’ perceived
value to humans. As Payne tells the reader, “What I want to ensure is not merely the
existence but the significance of whales. They must exist in significant numbers so that
they are available forever as a resource [my emphasis] . . . for everything from cat
39. On this point in relation to film, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of
Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001).
40. The major example is Pete Seeger’s “The Song of the World’s Last Whale,”
which I mentioned earlier. Kenzaburo Ōe penned a short story titled “The Day the
Whale Becomes Extinct.” And in 1979, Roger Payne introduced ten and a half million
readers of National Geographic to humpback songs as follows: “If we ignore the
dangers of tanker spills, industrial contamination, and simple human carelessness, then
nothing can save the whales. If that day ever comes, the exquisite songs you hear on this
sound sheet will be voices not from the sea, but from the past.” Qtd. in “Symphony of
the Deep: ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale,’” National Geographic 155, no. 1 (January
1979): 24.
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food . . . to musical inspiration.”41 As for science, “It would be sad indeed . . . if their
numbers were so reduced that we could not learn more about them.”42 I do not wish to
trivialize Payne or other conservationists’ commitment to ensuring that whales—at least
those whales who did end up as cat food—continued to live for their own sake. (Payne
in his later work appears opposed to killing whales at all.) In the scientific world,
however, whales were important less in and of themselves than for spurring the growth
of a discipline, much as they ensured the growth of the whaling industry. From the
vantage point of producing new knowledge, these supposedly superior forms of life
nevertheless served as mere means to an end. Ultimately, the agenda for “turning back”
was a plea for a better, more sustainable management of ocean life, to allow the sea’s
most marvelous creatures to benefit a wider, less destructive range of human activities
than whaling alone. To protect cetaceans meant maximizing their value for potentially
all humans, not just those who reaped benefits of killing them.
Rethinking Sonic Escapism
Thus far I have argued that in the discourse surrounding humpback whale songs
in the seventies and eighties, and beginning with John Lilly’s writing in the late sixties,
the cocoons of “perfect,” artificial sensory experience that the era’s best audio—and
audiovisual—technologies could create were a way that listeners might imaginatively
enter into the superior mind space of whales, which were then being imagined as wiser,
41. Qtd. in Songs of the Humpback Whale, 24–25.
42. Qtd. in Songs of the Humpback Whale, 15. For his part, Scott McVay, the
codiscoverer of whale songs looked forward to the day “when you can take your kids on
a photographic safari underwater to follow a pod of whales”—in short, a new kind of
tourism. Qtd. in David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of
Sound (New York: Basic Books), 20.
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more benign, and more intelligent creatures than humans were. As these recordings
were disseminated to champion whales and rally listeners to their cause, the purpose of
entering into that mind space would be to better value—know, identify with, pity,
respect, and admire—a nonhuman form of life and thus protect its right to exist. By
making this claim, I hope to suggest that immersing oneself in prosthetic sensory worlds,
which so often translates into hollow escapism from an imperfect present—an attempt to
replace the real world with “a better, more consoling, and more oblivious one”—need
not be ideologically suspect.43 Rather, even at its most ostensibly escapist it can forge
an ethics.
Lastra’s suspicion of “more perfect” artificial worlds partly comes from Theodor
Adorno’s psychoanytically inflected writing on Wagner. For Adorno, the dense and
immersive sound worlds of Wagner’s operas amount to a “consoling phantasmagoria”
and “a form of oceanic regression.”44 They “prepare the listener for the amorphous bliss
of a pre-individual condition”—inviting him or her to flee the complex present into an
idealized past.45 Given some of the above-discussed descriptions of the trippy, egodissolving quality of whale songs and headphone listening, it would be tempting to
regard those otherworldly sounding whale recordings as escapist sounds in the extreme.
However, the whale mind in the popular discourse I have addressed is a
supremely calm, unalienated space—a site not of flight from the world but of utopian
imagining. We find this attitude throughout John C. Lilly’s speculations about whale
43. Lastra, “Film and the Wagnerian Aspiration,” 136.
44. Qtd. in ibid., 130.
45. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New
York: Verso, 2005), 109.
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psychology; Lilly’s influence is also felt in the popular writing of Roger Payne, who
nearly half a century after he codiscovered whale songs remains perhaps the most
esteemed of all whale biologists. Like Lilly’s books, Payne’s Among Whales includes
significant speculation about whale being, provocatively framing the theories he relays
as shared hunches that scientists discuss over dinner or drinks but that are too
speculative to make it into peer-reviewed studies.46 Significantly for the “oceanic
feeling” that both whale-song and headphone discourse seem to uncritically embrace
(Schafer writes that headphone listening approximates “the ocean-womb of our first
ancestors”), Payne devotes a couple of long passages to the differences between
cetaceans and humans in utero.47 In one, he considers the similarities between amniotic
fluid and seawater and the psychological ramifications of this continuity for whales in a
clearly psychoanalytic vein:
The amniotic fluid of all mammals is remarkably similar to seawater; both fluids
contain the same salts in almost exactly the same proportions. Amniotic fluid
mimics the seas that nourished our ancient ancestors. Mammalian mothers
reconfect it in their bodies in order to brew for their embryos the best conditions
to foster life. It is this ancestral sea that is lost when a pregnant woman’s waters
burst shortly before the birth of her child. At birth, we humans reenact life’s
transition from water to land as we are born from the ancient seas of our
mother’s amnion to the dry land of our terrestrial existence. A school of
psychology professes that much of human anguish has its genesis in the sense of
loss that comes with leaving the womb. Over such a loss a whale need not mourn,
for it is born out of the amnion of its mother into the amnion of the sea.48
For whales, in Payne’s telling, this continuity between inside and outside is also
acoustically inflected, such that the barrier separating the two spaces is sonically
transparent. Like human bodies, whales’ are 65 percent water, which makes them
46. Roger Payne, Among Whales (New York: Delta, 1995), 15–16.
47. Schafer, The Soundscape, 118.
48. Payne, Among Whales, 56.
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excellent conductors of sound underwater. A human fetus can hear its mother’s voice
and heartbeat in the womb; but because of the imprecision of human hearing in water,
these maternal indices may only provide the child with a vague sense of comfort. For a
sonically oriented mammal like a whale, by contrast, Payne supposes the mother’s voice
must register with greater precision: “Whenever the mother whale makes a sound, it
must be for her fetus roughly the same experience a human fetus would have if we
shone a light in its face.”49 Unlike a human, however, a whale hears not only its mother.
Because of the liquid continuity among bodies and seawater and whales’ excellent sense
of hearing,
an unborn calf should hear not only its mother’s voice but everything else going
on in the water around it: the noisier fish and snapping shrimp living in its
neighborhood, its uncles and aunts quarreling, its cousins calling back and
forth—in effect inviting it out to play. If it’s a dolphin, its relatives may even
take a peek at it with their sonar while it is still inside its mother’s body . . . If it
had the mental development to learn while still in utero (we have no idea
whether it does), an animal like a whale with a gestation period longer than ours
might have an excellent potential for learning as it awaits its transition to the
slightly noisier world outside its mother’s dark, internal ocean, where, for the
first time, it will be able to see with its eyes and be responsible for taking its own
breath.50
Payne’s domestic, familial language here—his talk of neighborhoods, family quarrels,
and frolicking cousins—serves to make the decidedly strange acoustic experience he
ponders accessible to his readers’ imaginations. Here is a world without strict audible
distinctions between inside and outside, one where the cozy world of the womb loses
some of the protective, insular quality we associate with it, functioning instead as an
49. Ibid., 206.
50. Ibid.
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inner pocket within the larger “sonorous envelope” of the sea.51 This womb is not a
mythic site of pre-individual bliss whose fuzzy embrace one longs to return to but rather
is always already a bridge to—and even a training ground for—the larger, noisier womb
of the sea.
The collapse of interior and exterior Payne describes above has an analogy in the
recording. It is not just the sonorous envelope of a magisterial whale voice listeners hear;
because of water’s powerful ability to conduct sound and the noisiness of the ocean,
hydrophone recordings of whales are inevitably shot through with other ocean noise. As
the Songs liner notes indicate, many of these noises are caused by “waves, earth tremors,
distant breakers, rain, grinding ice, stones tumbled by the tide, passing ships, various
shrimp, fish, seals, and whales themselves. The sea in most places is alive with
sound.”52 Like the movements of the whales being recorded, these sounds are
uncontrollable; they lend the recordings a spontaneous, accidental quality at odds with
audio’s frequent artifice and constructedness. While the casual hydrophone operator
cannot control them, other noises on the record are less given to chance, namely the
manmade industrial ones, which are also the most prominent: “The noises that most
interfere with the humpback whale songs are the low-pitched ones, and in recent years
ship traffic noise has become a constant roar of low-pitched noise in the ocean, even far
51. I take the phrase “sonorous envelope” from Kaja Silverman, who discusses
the cultural fantasy of an all-enveloping maternal voice at length in The Acoustic Mirror:
The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988), 72–140.
52. Songs of the Humpback Whale, inner front cover.
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from shipping lanes.”53 Though the point is not made explicitly, the mention of noise
pollution (which can disorient, deafen, and even kill acoustically dependent animals
such as cetaceans) implies that noise, rather than merely interfering with pure song,
actually contributes to how and what a singing whale articulates. The copresence of
whale phonations with the manmade noises that may even affect the song collapses any
easy distinctions between the “far out” whale world over there and the human world
over here of which the whale’s trippy songs may seem independent. It asks listeners to
ponder the ways industrial activity has damaged marine life, effects that bear the very
experience of listening to whale songs. A sonic head trip that Adorno dismiss as “a
consoling phantasmagoria,” the immersive experience of whale song may be something
other than regressive listening—an intimate experience of strange, seemingly
otherworldly sound whose nature is nevertheless audibly continuous with, even
conditioned by, a reality that is more immediate and mundane to us.
Conclusion
In an influential article on Martin Heidegger’s technology writings, Hubert
Dreyfus argues, “The essence of modern technology [for Heidegger] is to seek more and
more flexibility and efficiency simply for its own sake. . . . That is, our only goal is
optimization.”54 An understanding of technology that opposed a mere drive for
efficiency—that embraced what Heidegger calls technology’s saving power rather than
its danger—would, in Dreyfus’s reading, embrace marginal cultural practices “such as
53. Ibid.
54. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology,”
in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair
Hannay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 99.
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friendship, backpacking into the local wilderness, or drinking the local wine with
friends. . . . practices [that] are marginal precisely because they are not efficient.”55
Furthermore, for Dreyfus, an event or artifact that grounded a nonefficient relation to
technology is what Heidegger had in mind with his cryptic late-life declaration that
“only a god can save us.”
What might this god look like? Dreyfus suggests the music of the 1960s. During
this time, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and other groups “became for many the articulation
of [a] new understanding of what really mattered.” This understanding came to a head at
Woodstock. At the festival,
people actually lived for a few days in an understanding of being in which
mainline contemporary concern with rationality, sobriety, willful activity, and
flexible, efficient control were made marginal and subservient to Greek virtues
such as openness, enjoyment of nature, dancing, and Dionysian ecstasy along
with a neglected Christian concern with peace, tolerance, and love of one’s
neighbor without desire and exclusivity. Technology was not smashed or
denigrated but all the power of electronic media was put at the service of the
music [that] focused all the above concerns.56
Woodstock was for Dreyfus a great could-have-been moment, one that in another
iteration of the past might have inaugurated “a new cultural paradigm.” If we substitute
object for event, however, and perhaps The Dude for Hubert Dreyfus (to return us to the
sequence with which this chapter opened—and I challenge the reader not to imagine Jeff
Bridges reading the passage above), many of these words could well describe humpback
whale song recordings. Indeed, the discourse surrounding these recordings often treated
whales as god-like animals that, if people listened to their songs, could save them from
the dangers of technological modernity and usher in a new mode of being. As I have
55. Ibid., 105.
56. Ibid., 106.
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tried to show, listening to whale songs in immersive fashion was framed as a means to
imaginatively enter into the mental world of a whale, to momentarily partake in the
“inner experiences beyond our present understanding” John C. Lilly believed them
capable of. To listen over headphones or via surround sound could activate the listener’s
latent eco-consciousness; writ large, this listening experience promised to transform
humans’ relationship to the natural world along the lines of the Greek virtues and
Christian concern Dreyfus names above.
As whale songs gradually lost the political and ethical significance attached to
them early on, it would be hard to say they fulfilled the promise of transforming human
values that whale advocates seemed to find in them. That is not to deny their lasting
significance. The discovery of whale song was important to shifting how cetacean
science went about its business; it showed that knowledge about whales could more
fruitfully be gained by passive observation—by eavesdropping on them—than by
studying their corpses. In this respect both scientific knowledge of the ocean and ocean
media (the recordings and their circulation) distanced themselves from the project of
ocean conquest that grounded, for instance, Cousteau’s Conshelf experiments and the
films he made of them. Used in movies and TV shows of the ocean, moreover, whale
songs shifted the soundscape away from human activity to marine life, underpinning an
increased public curiosity about the nonhuman undersea that surmounted interest in how
people and their technologies could better master the ocean frontier. But if one looks to
policy decisions, whatever eco-consciousness they spawned barely appears to be felt.
Even if commercial whaling has been banned internationally since 1986, cetaceans
remain threatened by the US Navy’s deafening sonar apparatuses. Overfishing of other
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marine species and deep-water drilling, moreover, continue apace, both proof that
economic exploitation trumps environmental ethics when it comes to the sea, even when
such activities have proven catastrophic.
While an environmentalist concern with shifting human priorities—specifically
in industrialized nations—to better accommodate the natural world persists in ocean
films and television shows today, my concern in the next chapter is with films that
retreat from these concerns. In particular, I focus on immersive IMAX movies of the
deep sea, which is typically framed as a great, timeless unknown filled with spectacular,
unimaginably strange forms of life, a place where life continues as it did millions of
years ago and exists outside the reach of human influence. Projected on a massive
screen, these movies aestheticize the deep sea as a place of the sublime, where
overwhelming technological and natural wonders converge; at the same time, these
films ultimately allow viewers a sense of vicarious mastery over the phenomena that
initially overwhelm them. Lost in these movies are critical attitudes regarding human
interaction with the ocean, attitudes that are particularly important given that ocean
exploration is such a large-scale technological endeavor. At a time when it is well
known that industrial activity has warmed the planet and acidified the seas to the point
of threatening many species’ baseline conditions of existence, critical attitudes about
what the products of heavy industry allow people to do and—importantly for cinema—
what they allow us to see and hear become imperative. If whale songs can teach us
anything about marine media in the present, it is that to cultivate a sense of wonder is
not enough; with wonder must come responsibility.
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CHAPTER FOUR
EXPANDING OCEANS, EXPANDED SCREENS: DEEP-SEA EXPLORATION
AND IMAX MOVIES OF THE ABYSS
The two of us, my pilot and I, descend through the deepening blue in our little
humming bubble of air and light, and the pounds per square inch build up
outside. Soon the noonday sun of the surface world has faded, leaving a deep
ultramarine twilight. It is the most beautiful color I have ever seen. In some ways
it is my favorite moment of the dive, suspended between worlds, saying goodbye to all you’ve ever known, and surrounded by infinite blue. It’s a hue that not
only suggests the ocean’s vast scale but beckons the mind to a transcendent
state—a sense of cosmic unity with the ocean, with ancient time and the history
of life, back to the first organisms.1
So the deep-sea explorer and filmmaker James Cameron describes a typical submersible
descent in the book companion to his film Aliens of the Deep (James Cameron and
Steven Quale, 2005), the second of three 3-D IMAX documentaries he has made about
undersea exploration.2 His account is not unique. Comparing underwater descent to a
passage between worlds is a familiar trope of first-person accounts of ocean exploration,
as is the purportedly transformative nature of the experience, which awakens a feeling
of oneness with the cosmos.3 But in the context of IMAX, the details of this passage
1. James Cameron, Introduction to James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep, ed.
Joseph MacInnis (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2004), 9–10.
2. The others are Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), his film of the Titanic shipwreck;
and Deepsea Challenge (John Bruno, Ray Quint, and Andrew Wight, 2014), which I
discuss here. Cameron also directed a TV documentary about the wreck of the German
battleship Bismark titled Expedition: Bismarck (James Cameron and Gary Johnstone,
2002). Undersea exploration recurs throughout his fiction films, notably in Piranha II:
The Spawning (1981), The Abyss (1989), and the present-day frame narrative of Titanic
(1997).
3. Claire Nouvian offers a particularly dramatic description of divers’ sense of
oneness with the universe: “It is impossible not to experience profound, primitive
emotions that surprise the senses and stimulate the mind and touch a fragile zone within,
at once infantile and animal. Anyone who has had the chance to spend time in the nether
realm of darkness has expressed, in one way or another, this shock that carries us back
to our aquatic origins . . . once immersed several hundred meters below the surface, face
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suggest an “experience” (the IMAX Experience is a trademark) that viewers might
ideally undergo while engulfed in a rich, high-resolution image and a sea of crisp digital
surround sound—seemingly present among the explorers onscreen. Just as the fading of
the light conjures for Cameron a sense of transport to a world independent of the surface,
so the dimming of the houselights signals for movie viewers a moment of transit into
another world by proxy, transforming the theater into its own “humming bubble of air
and light” and offering a view onto a simulated sea. Enveloped in the “ultramarine
twilight” on a screen that exceeds one’s field of vision, one may appreciate the seeming
infinity of the sea as if one were in it, and even experience the same sense of unity with
life in its origins that Cameron reports, so that when the lights rise, one may leave the
theater feeling a blissful affinity with the greater chain of being.
We encountered similar rhetoric in the last chapter in relation to humpback
whale songs. There, however, it was bound up with not only explicit calls for people to
end whaling but also an ambi-modern critique, one that advocated a turn to small-scale
technologies from the large-scale, destructive apparatus of midcentury whaling. This
chapter returns to large-scale matters: the deep sea, the technologies that explore it, and
the cinema’s immersive, large-format depictions of it. Though it is a commonplace at
least a half-century old that the ocean remains largely unexplored, submersible
technologies have in the past few decades greatly expanded the scale of the known
ocean for researchers. Similarly, large-format movies of the deep ocean display this
to face with raw, untamed life, a truly primal emotion seizes hold of us. . . . A deep dive
allows one to understand this on a level deeper than the intellectual. It’s an experience
that should be offered to every human being, a baptism as an adult that lets us renew our
intimate connections with the chain of the living.” Claire Nouvian, The Deep: The
Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26.
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expanding sea, for a curious public, on a visual scale that aims to evoke the cosmic
vastness of the earth’s so-called “inner space.”
My key touchstones in this chapter are Volcanoes of the Deep (Stephen Low,
2003), Aliens of the Deep (James Cameron and Steven Quale, 2005), and Deepsea
Challenge (John Bruno, Ray Quint, and Andrew Wight, 2014). The former two deal
mostly with deep-sea life along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; the last documents James
Cameron’s March 2012 solo dive to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the
deepest part of the world’s oceans. Though other large-format movies of the deep sea,
such as Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), might merit discussion here, I have chosen these
three films because they are tied to the world of scientific research and, in addition to
showcasing the wonders of the deep sea, double as introductions to major concerns in
oceanography. Moreover, besides Cameron, the films’ subjects are nearly all universityor government-employed scientists—a difference from most of the films discussed in
the previous chapters—and their research agendas ultimately justify the explorations. In
Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, this agenda is to learn more about the origins of life by way
of chemosynthetic (rather than photosynthetic) hyperthermophiles, in this case
tubeworms and microbes that thrive in the extreme heat along hydrothermal vents (the
titular volcanoes). In Aliens, the dominant research agenda is the hunt for life elsewhere
in the solar system—particularly beneath the icy surface of Europa, Jupiter’s fourthlargest moon, which is widely believed to house an ocean larger than all of the earth’s
seas combined—and the possibility that it would most closely resemble the
extremophiles in the earth’s deep seas. And in Deepsea Challenge, the stated scientific
goals include learning more about the geology of deep trenches via soil samples and
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whether life can exist at pressures as extreme as those in the Mariana Trench. Even
though Cameron’s Challenger Deep gambit has an undeniable stunt quality to it, the
film argues for the expedition as a scientific one and for the potential benefits of
additional deep-sea exploration.
This chapter has three parts. The first part focuses on the aesthetics of largeformat ocean cinema, considering the relationship between the technological and natural
sublimes. Here I propose that large-format films of the deep sea negotiate the seemingly
opposed poles of nature and technology—so that the natural and technological sublimes
become mutually constituting. The natural sublime resonates with the remarkable
creatures and landscapes that IMAX films of the ocean reveal with seemingly crystalline
clarity. The technological sublime links to both representational and nonrepresentational
technologies. One the one hand are the cinematic apparatuses that illuminate the depths,
record it, and blow it up to a scale that overwhelms spectators, immersing them in a
seemingly limitless visual space. On the other are the deep-sea submersibles that set the
conditions of possibility for image making and, when shown onscreen, are treated as
entities as awesome as the deep sea. The films offer views of spectacular nature that at
each moment testify to the technological prowess that produced them and vice versa.
Second, I address scale on a more rationalist register, drawing on the argument
that sociologist Bruno Latour advances in his essay “Drawing Things Together.” For
Latour, scientific research is about producing inscriptions—combinable and
superimposable figures and diagrams that render a great many things “presentable all at
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once.”4 In stand-alone shots throughout them, deep-sea giant-screen films function
analogously, bringing together a diverse range of phenomena—macroscopic and
microscopic, near (surface) and far (abyssal), oceanic and cosmic, human and
nonhuman—in one enormous frame that enables viewers to scrutinize every detail—to
engage rationally with what also elicits awe. However heterogeneous the things depicted
or their relative scale, the film frame provides an “optical consistency” that levels all
differences in visual content.5 By drawing things together in the same visual space,
these films allow viewers to ruminate on the ties that bind disparate and
spatiotemporally distant phenomena—and to revise their assumptions about these
phenomena in relation to the others as they are brought into contact. In sum, largeformat films of the deep sea allow viewers a feeling of mastery over the seemingly
infinite space of the abyss even while that space threatens to engulf them, a mastery that
coincides with the scientific pursuits documented in the films.
One of the results of this oscillation between mastery and a lack of it is that
viewers are invited to marvel at the vast interconnectedness of things human and
nonhuman as well as to rationally parse these connections. This invitation to what we
might, following Timothy Morton, call “ecological thought” is of a piece with the popscientific discourse around oceans, which importantly appears in museums where IMAX
movies of the deep sometimes show.6 (Consider, for instance, the Sant Ocean Hall at
4. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific
Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 26.
5. Ibid., 27.
6. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
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the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Displays throughout the exhibit
teem with pronouncements about the ocean’s dynamic ecology and importance to life
generally: “Active,” “Complex,” and “Ever-changing,” they read. “The global ocean is a
complex, ever-changing system essential to all life.”) In IMAX movies of the ocean, this
thinking is limited by the films’ lack of consideration of the long-range ends and effects
of the present day’s large-scale technological endeavors in the deep or of the ethics of
knowledge seeking that so relies on products of heavy industry, which in the era now
popularly called the Anthropocene (a term popularized in 2000 by the Nobel Prize–
winning chemist Paul Crutzen) we know to be responsible for climate change and ocean
acidification. Because of these films’ reliance on large-scale industrial engineering,
critical attitudes toward ocean exploration are more likely to be found in less
technologically intensive, lower-budget, smaller-format movies of the ocean. The last
part of this chapter explores this question and concludes with a discussion of three such
films: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) and Werner
Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007),
all of which engage with the sublime but in a more ecocritical fashion than do their
large-format cousins.
Sublime Aesthetics
As Allison Whitney argues, “viewers’ and critics’ responses to IMAX films, as
well as their prescriptive models for what IMAX ought to be, correspond to pre-existing
frameworks for understanding extreme experience, including wonder and the sublime.”7
7. Allison Patricia Whitney, “The Eye of Daedalus: A History and Theory of
IMAX Cinema” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 13.
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For her, the classical ideas of the sublime elaborated by Edmund Burke and Immanuel
Kant and David E. Nye’s work on the technological sublime in American culture help
explain the viewing response IMAX constructs through its exhibition practices, theater
architecture, and audiovisual conventions. I follow Whitney in using Burke, Kant, and
Nye here, albeit not to explain the sublime experience IMAX generally constructs but
rather to address what in deep-sea IMAX movies appears as an oscillation between
technological and natural phenomena that both elicit a sublime response.8
Here, I do not mean to suggest that the ocean or film images of it are sublime
but to indicate that the sublime is an important touchstone for the sort of spectatorial
response that these films—as large-format spectacles, in their narrations, in the relation
of their subjects (surrogate spectators) to the ocean—and popular discourse about them
establish as appropriate regarding images of the deep ocean. Whether viewers respond
this way is another matter, though I would contend that large screen size is the critical
component in promoting this response. Indeed, watching these movies as I have—on
decidedly small screens, on DVD, Blu-ray, and illegal Internet streams—can be a
tedious, even mind-numbing way to spend forty-five minutes (or twice that if one
watches the films’ extended cuts). Whatever “sublime” experience one has is a
thoroughly constructed one.
8. Along the lines of wonder, Alison Griffiths argues that IMAX films, like
planetariums, medieval cathedrals, and panoramas, promote what she identifies as a
transhistorical “revered gaze,” “a way of encountering and making sense of images
intended to be spectacular in form and content and that heighten the [feeling of]
religious experience for the onlooker.” This response to images is “marked as much by
recognition of the labor and effort involved in creating the spectacle as [by] the
spectacle itself.” Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the
Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 16, 286.
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The two most important figures for the natural sublime—mainly because things
“out there” in nature, far away from human civilization and not yet affected by human
activity, characterize all the examples in their texts—are Edmund Burke and Immanuel
Kant. For both, the sublime relates to that which overwhelms human perception and
sense making. For Burke, the sublime is a property of the real phenomena that induce an
experience of horror, and stems from qualities such as darkness, vastness, power,
obscurity, seeming infinity, and loudness. These are all physical and discursive
characteristics of the deep sea. For Kant, by contrast, the human mind is the locus of the
sublime, and the point is the eventual, if only partial, triumph of reason after its initial
failure. Subjects in Kant pass “through humiliation and awe to a heightened awareness
of reason” because they are mentally able to “conceive something larger and more
powerful than the senses can grasp.”9
Opposed to the natural sublime is the technological sublime, which David Nye
has most fully elaborated. Taking his cues from Burke and Kant and historicizing their
ideas within an American context, Nye describes this sublime as the aspect of
technology—or of the mental experience of it—that wows, terrifies, or bewilders
subjects not only on account of qualities that diminish the human but also because these
technologies seem to conquer a “nature” once thought unmasterable. To count as
sublime, technology for Nye must pass a basic test: it must strike or at some point in
9. David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994), 6–7.
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time have figuratively struck people “dumb with amazement”—often in a manner bound
up with American imperial power and nationalist sentiments.10
Historically, the ocean has often been written about in terms that suggest an
experience of the sublime—explicitly so in Burke and Kant. For Burke, who associates
it with feelings of fear, “the ocean is an object of no small terror.”11 Kant similarly
identifies “the boundless ocean set into a rage” alongside thunderclouds, cliffs,
waterfalls, and volcanoes as a thing capable of arousing feelings of terror at a safe
distance from the subject, characteristics of what he calls the dynamic sublime.12 Many
of the quotations by explorers that litter this dissertation suggest the impossibility of
comprehending the ocean’s vastness and apparent timelessness, though it is arguable
that today the deep sea, far more than the more familiar sunlit waters, evokes responses
akin to the sublime. In these responses, however, fear typically gives way to awe at both
the ocean’s vastness and the seemingly incomprehensible number and diversity of its
species. As Claire Nouvian likes to note, the ocean makes up 99 percent of the Earth’s
habitable space; scientists’ rapidly advancing knowledge of the deep, moreover, remains
extremely partial. A mere 5 percent of the sea floor has been mapped in detail, and new
species are still being discovered at a staggering rate—roughly one per fortnight.
10. Ibid., 16.
11. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful (Adelaide, AU: eBooks@Adelaide, 2014),
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burke/edmund/sublime/complete.html.
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144. Kant’s stance as
regards the ocean’s sublimity is contradictory; earlier in the same text he avers that “the
wide ocean, enraged by storms, cannot be called sublime” (129).
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Estimates as to the number of ocean species still unknown range between 10 and 30
million, compared to the mere 1.4 million of all species (air, water, and land) biologists
have already identified.13 Appropriately, popular discourse has for more than threequarters of a century placed the deep sea along a continuum with deep space, uniting the
two as timeless and eternal unknowns. Space–sea comparisons date to at least William
Beebe, who, writing of his deep flights in the Bathysphere, remarked that “there is only
one experience left which can transcend that of living for a time under sea—and that is a
trip to Mars.”14 It is as if “inner space” were so unfathomable that the differences
between the ocean and the whole of the stellar universe ceased to matter.
Aliens, Volcanoes, and Deepsea Challenge all adhere to the tropes of the ocean
as wonder emporium and a great, timeless unknown, tropes in keeping with the
sublime’s ability to overwhelm cognition. Everything we see, the films’ narrators and
subjects tell us, is little explored, little known, and full of surprises. New sights, the
films tell us, await viewers on each dive. Aliens of the Deep, in particular, plays up the
novelty of the unknown deep by recruiting for its cast of deep-sea divers a bunch of
first-time ocean explorers—among them graduate students whose excitement about
diving the film makes palpable throughout. Lots of their dialogue consists of phrases
like, “Wow,” “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” and “Look at that!” As the
anthropologist Stefan Helmreich observes in his discussion of the film, they have
trouble speaking in the present tense; they seem to feel transported into the past or
13. Nouvian, The Deep, 18.
14. William Beebe, Half Mile Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company,
1934), 7.
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future.15 Even in Volcanoes, whose primary subject is a senior scientist researching
extremophiles, the researchers are given numerous reaction shots that suggest a whole
lifetime of abyssal dives cannot abate a sense of wonder (though here they are less
slack-jawed in communicating it). The evocations of a timeless, quasi-cosmic world
abound as well. Not only does the narration teem with language like “impossible to
comprehend,” “truly extraordinary,” “the harshest place on earth,” and “a place without
seasons, without rest, without time” (all examples from Volcanoes). They are present in
the films’ electronic scores, whose occasionally eerie, dissonant qualities emphasize the
strangeness of the deep-ocean phenomena, both large and small, that the films depict:
medusas, dumbo octopi, towering volcanic chimneys, and the tubeworms and
microscopic hyperthermophiles that improbably thrive along the hydrothermal vents.
Even reviews of the films adopt these evocations. Writing of Deepsea Challenge, for
instance, Scott Foundas concludes, “it’s the trench imagery itself that’s the primary
attraction here, and it proves more than worth the wait: not the irradiant, ‘Avatar’-like
flora and fauna of higher ocean depths, but rather a vast, cosmic nothingness that
suggests a world where time has yet to begin.”16
As for awe-inducing technologies, there are first of all IMAX’s representational
and presentational technologies: a giant, curved screen of up to seventy feet that seems
to engulf the spectator and a surround-sound system that, at least in this moviegoer’s
experience, tends to be cranked up a bit louder than in a non-IMAX auditorium.
15. Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 274–75.
16. Scott Foundas, “Film Review: ‘Deepsea Challenge,’” Variety,
http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-deepsea-challenge-1201272529.
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Together, IMAX promotional discourse would have us believe, sound and image
conspire to give spectators the illusion of being in the image, of actually being
transported to another, typically spectacular place—believing they are there (the
company’s motto is “IMAX is believing”) as opposed to merely seeing and hearing it.
The IMAX website credits what it calls its distinctive “theatre geometry” for this effect:
Most movie auditoriums are long and narrow, to get the most people in, with the
screen way off at the far end. The distinctive shape of an IMAX theatre is
designed to bring the audience not only closer to the screen, but better-positioned
in relation to it. The result is an image that’s wider and higher than your field of
view; a picture that’s immersive because you’re not aware of where it ends. And
that, in turn, is what gives you the feeling that you’re part of the action, out
among the stars, not just peeking into a scene.17
It is not just that spectators may feel small before the audiovisual world that swallows
them up, though; the alternation between panoramic shots of “big things” and
magnification of “small things” is a typical dynamic in all IMAX films. Taking note of
this alternation, Whitney argues that giant-screen movies conventionally aspire to “bring
the everyday subject into the realm of experience, often by manipulating the spectator’s
personal sense of scale, both by making one feel alternately large and small, and by
encouraging the intellectual and imaginary leaps of scale that can provoke responses of
wonder and the sublime.”18 The viewer’s personal sense of scale, she notes, is
emphasized by a mix of conventional framing and unusual screen placement: the focal
point of an image is usually its lower third, and the low-to-the-ground screen ensures
that spectators cannot escape the sight of the heads of viewers sitting in front of them.
17. “Theatre Geometry,” IMAX Corporation, accessed September 30, 2013,
https://www.imax.com/oo/esquire-imax/about/experience/geometry.
18. Whitney, “The Eye of Daedalus,” 167.
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Though IMAX movies aspire to give viewers the sense of being transported to
another place, in some ways the illusion seems to improve on reality, allowing viewers
to see what they could not see with their own eyes if they traveled to the deep sea. In
this respect, IMAX ocean movies mark a fully audiovisual continuation of the “better
than real” artificial sensoria I discussed in relation to humpback whale recordings in the
previous chapter. Stephen Low, the director of Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, boasts that
because IMAX cameras deliver viewers “huge amounts of information . . . When
scientists see this on the big screen, they think it’s a fantastic look at the deep ocean
which they have never seen. And which I have never seen, even though I have spent
hundreds of hours on a submarine. You sit in an IMAX theatre, and with the camera
under-cranked you see better than you do in a submarine, for sure.”19 This account
squares with the account of astronauts at a screening of Destiny in Space (Ben Burtt,
Phyllis Ferguson, James Neihouse, Gail Singer, 1994), who said the viewing experience
supplanted their memories of what space had really been like and even improved on that
experience as their view was unrestricted by helmets.20 This seemingly superior view in
these films owes to the mix of illumination—4,400 watts are hooked up to the Alvin in
Volcanoes—and specialized cinematographic technologies developed by Woods Hole’s
Advance Imaging and Visualization Lab, which develops the majority of cameras,
19. Qtd. in Bruce Feld, “The Last Frontier: Stephen Low Dives Two Miles for
Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” Film Journal International, September 1, 2003,
http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/esearch/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10
00692756.
20. Lauren Rabinovitz, “More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual
Culture through Hale’s Tours, Imax, and Motion Simulation Rides,” in Memory Bytes:
History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 114.
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lenses, film stocks, and other visual technologies used to make underwater movies and
television programs. Cutting-edge imaging technologies, in this respect, foster the
illusion of coming into even closer contact with the timeless world of the deep—and, as
the Cameron quote I began with suggested, one’s evolutionary ancestors—than one
could get if actually undersea.
As should be a familiar theme by now, film technology alone cannot render the
deep sea. Getting to the bottom of the ocean requires the assistance of submersible
technologies that can sustain incredible pressures, withstand extreme cold (especially
important so riders of manned submersibles don’t freeze); navigate the darkness (with
its high-wattage lamps); fight strong currents with their propellers; provide their
passengers with enough oxygen for descents and ascents that can last several hours each;
and obviate the need for long-term, post-dive decompression. The films’ narration and
human subjects consistently make us aware of these facts; whenever the submersibles
become the focus of the image, they function as reminders of all of the problems that
must be solved before the deep-sea images we see can be produced. By depicting and
discussing these technologies, the films point to their own conditions of possibility in
such a way that conveys the difficulty (for Burke, one of the key traits the sublime) of
going underwater, a testament to the power of both ocean and the technology that
overcomes the elements.
In Volcanoes, the submersible that convey’s the ocean’s power is the deepsubmergence vehicle (DSV) Alvin, owned by the US Navy and housed and operated by
Woods Hole since 1964 (figure 4.1). Weighing seventeen tons and able to dive to 4,500
meters, it is the most storied of all deep-sea submersibles. As the narration apprises us,
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Alvin “has spent more hours in the deep sea than all of the world’s submersibles
combined” and been instrumental in collecting data for some 2,000 scientific articles.
Instrumental in proving the theory of plate tectonics in the early 1970s, Alvin was also
the submersible to discover hydrothermal vents along the Galapagos Rift (in 1975) as
well as the “black smokers” depicted in the film (1978–79).21 In presenting the
hydrothermal vents from Alvin’s perspective, Volcanoes amounts to something of a
throwback to a significant moment of discovery three decades before the film’s release.
Aliens, by contrast, pairs old and new. Early on it confronts the viewer with two sleek
Deep Rover submersibles armed with 3-D HD cameras and equipped with giant acrylic
domes rather than the tiny portholes of the Alvin. These bubble-like subs offer their
riders a 320-degree panoramic view of the deep that mirrors the movie spectator’s visual
relationship to the screen—particularly in an IMAX Dome (formerly OMNIMAX)
theater, where images are projected onto a dome above the audience’s heads, filling a
horizontal field of view of 180 degrees and a vertical one of about 125 degrees (enough
to occupy one’s entire field of vision).22 The acrylic spheres, however, cannot withstand
the extreme pressures Alvin can. As a result, the film’s scientists avail themselves of the
Soviet Mir 1 and 2 submersibles, which were designed in the late 1980s to reach depths
as great as 6,000 meters, a depth as great as the vast majority of the ocean ever gets.
Watching these on a giant screen lets viewers see them as the gargantuan things they are
21. Michael S. Reidy, Gary Kroll, and Erik M. Conway, Exploration and
Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Denver: ABC–CLIO, 2007), 213.
22. Whitney, “The Eye of Daedalus,” 70–71. For Whitney, who notes the strong
association between flight, space, and underwater films and Dome exhibition, Dome
projection offers spectators a sense of being suspended in space that corresponds with
profilmic weightlessness in space movies and buoyancy in submarine ones (77).
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in life; indeed, seen in certain museums, images of them may be continuous in size and
apparent heft with the ships and submersibles displayed in exhibition halls.23
Figure 4.1. A technician affixes a high-definition camera to the DSV Alvin in Volcanoes
of the Deep Sea.
The enormous physical stature of these technologies as they appear on a seventy-foot
screen impresses on viewers the sheer techno-scientific prowess that allows them to
enter the deep sea—and even then, the films insist, only precariously. This is
particularly true in Aliens of the Deep and Deepsea Challenge, which chronicle the
troubles Cameron and crew have merely getting the colossally heavy submersibles into
the water with a crane; on rough seas they will swing out of control like wrecking balls
and destroy the ship deck. Both films also document their crews’ efforts to plan for
23. Between May and October 2015, for instance, Deepsea Challenge will play
in 3-D at the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Virginia, coinciding with
an exhibit called EXTREME DEEP that allows visitors to “step inside a full scale mockup of the interior of Alvin and use a joystick to explore a worm colony; operate Alvin’s
robotic arm to pick up lava rocks and clams from the sea floor; examine other-worldly
creatures; and so much more.” “EXTREME DEEP: Mission to the Abyss,” Mariners’
Museum and Park, http://www.marinersmuseum.org/extremedeep. In some cases, the
submersibles onscreen can become continuous with spacecraft on display, continuing
the parallel between inner and outer space. Aliens of the Deep, for instance, played in
the IMAX Dome at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas,
during September 2010.
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every imaginable contingency. We are assured that things will go wrong, and the films,
especially Deepsea Challenge, spend considerable time on the crew’s safety drills and
efforts to troubleshoot seemingly dozens of technical failures. To be sure, their
difficulties testify to technology’s precariousness before the overwhelming forces of
nature. But once these obstacles are overcome, the technological feats appear even more
impressive, becoming emblems of a collective ingenuity and will to power.
In Deepsea Challenge the engineering of submersible technology, a process
rarely depicted in ocean films, further bolsters the impression of a technological sublime.
No extant submersibles, the film tells us, would have been capable of traveling so deep
without imploding; the singular nature of the dive—Cameron’s plunge to Challenger
Deep was only the second manned dive to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, and
for research purposes he needed to spend significant time on the bottom—calls for a
singular submarine.24 In an unusual instance of the infrastructural imaginary in these
movies, we see a steel diving sphere (the bottom part of the submersible where the diver
sits) being forged and heat treated to withstand the pressure imposed by seven vertical
miles of seawater—about 16,000 pounds per square inch, what Cameron likens to
“having two Humvees stacked on your thumbnail.” The “wow” power of the
submersible also speaks to nature in its very design, seeming to prove a dictum Cameron
attributes to the physicist Freeman Dyson: “Nature’s imagination is so much richer than
24. The other ship to reach the ocean floor, the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960,
spent over eight hours between descent and ascent and a mere twenty minutes on the
seafloor. Deepsea Challenger spent merely two-and-a-half hours on descent and three
hours filming and collecting samples from the bottom.
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our own.”25 The strange-looking device, a “vertical torpedo” designed to minimize
descent time and maximize time spent at depth, is partly modeled on razorfish, which
swim vertically with their heads pointed downward and offer a biological precedent for
the seemingly counterintuitive idea of an upright submersible.
Although these deep dives are cinematically continuous with those of Cousteau,
and might even be viewed as spiritual successors to the Soucoupe’s climactic, 1,000foot descent at the end of World without Sun, the sheer scale of the technology and its
reliance on so many autonomous computational processes makes it difficult to speak, as
Cousteau did, of an underwater human merely supplemented by technology.
Technology is the whole show. To regard submersibles as McLuhanian “extensions of
man” may be possible with relatively small subs, such as Cousteau’s Soucoupe,
designed specifically to retain a scuba diver’s mobility. But here, the scale of the
technology so overwhelms the human figure that it is difficult to see the latter at the
center of the expedition, despite the continued rhetoric about the importance of seeing
the ocean floor with one’s own eyes—an idea Deepsea Challenge gives lie to. Indeed,
for most of his time underwater, Cameron watches the ocean not through the porthole
but on a computer screen that blocks it; a video feed from the external HD cameras
gives him a more panoramic view than could the window. Only when he touches bottom
does he move the screen and look around with his own eyes, a token gesture toward the
importance of direct vision. These films’ emphasis on manned descents, moreover,
represents an older wave of oceanographic research. As Stefan Helmreich writes, “In an
age of remotely operated robots [and] Internet ocean observatories . . . presence in ‘the
25. Cameron, Aliens of the Deep, 10.
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field’ is increasingly simultaneously partial, fractionated, and prosthetic; it is not just
distributed across spaces—multisited—but cobbled together from different genres of
experience, apprehension, and data collection. It is multimodal.”26 Cameron’s claims
for the importance of physical presence at the bottom of the sea are overstated and have
more to do with a conservative impulse to preserve the human’s place at the site of
research at a time when ROVs, AUVs, and other technologies of remote sensing have
rendered it increasingly superfluous.
Cameron’s reliance on computer screens also points to the rationalist register of
vision on which the explorers in these movies rely. For them, the experience of the deep
sea is not one of consistent wonder but rather a negotiation between awe at the sights of
the deep sea and careful monitoring of the external environment. In this respect, the
films ask viewers to engage, like explorers and scientists, in a similar navigation of awe
and analysis. At one moment late in Deepsea Challenge, Cameron declares of the
Mariana Trench, “Unbelievable. Like the moon.” Yet as he says this, his is not an
expansive view of the ocean; rather, we see him surrounded by monitors, with the teninch screen directly before him offering the only full view of the exterior space. The
other screens include an external view of the submersible, a 180-degree sonar readout,
and information about depth, pressure, temperature, heading, and other data; a
touchscreen allows Cameron to manipulate the submersible’s external arms so he can
collect core samples (figure 4.2). The screens in Cameron’s field of vision—and most of
what is in ours during interior shots of the diver’s sphere—help reduce the sea to useful
information that makes mathematical sense of the external space (both in terms of the
26. Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 233.
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displayed data and the digital video displays with their underlying ones and zeroes) and
allows the diver to act on it. This register of viewing is reserved not only for the
explorers but also the film’s spectators; as we will see in the next section, these films
adopt visual strategies that allow viewers to engage analytically with ocean phenomena.
Figure 4.2. James Cameron reaches the Challenger Deep in Deepsea Challenge.
Drawing Things Together
In addition to overwhelming spectators, IMAX films of the ocean also ask
viewers to engage rationally with those sounds, images, and technologies that elicit awe,
much in the way the scientists and explorers work analytically with what they see and
hear. Indeed, the films seem to use this oscillation between reason and astonishment to
advertise the pursuit of science—particularly to younger viewers, to whom IMAX
movies are often addressed. In this section, I propose that the films help rationalize the
sublime wonders of the deep sea in the way they “draw things together” (to quote Bruno
Latour) like scientific inscriptions—in particular, during stand-alone shots that yoke a
range of spatiotemporally disparate phenomena together in the space between cuts.
For Latour, all scientific work is ultimately about producing visual inscriptions.
These inscriptions—figures, diagrams, plates, periodic tables, and other visuals that
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render a great many things “presentable all at once”—have greater rhetorical force than
mere facts and findings do. Inscriptions, he argues, have such power because they
enable scientists to make and mobilize allies in their fields; inscriptions give their
findings currency enough that other scientists will take them up. The “advantages” of
these inscriptions are ninefold. Inscriptions are mobile, immutable, flat; reproducible,
recombinable, and superimposable; can be modified in scale and made part of a written
text; and merge with geometry; for Latour, the history of science is the history of
innovations that possess these characteristics.27
Although Latour is concerned with still images, many of the advantages he
identifies in inscriptions have clear analogues in film. Indeed, many of the terms as
Latour defines them clearly relate to cinematic qualities we take for granted. Film
images are mobile; that is, they travel far and wide and bring fixed phenomena (such as
deep-sea chimneys) up close to viewers wherever they are exhibited. They are
immutable in that the picture allows spectators in different places and times to see the
same image, albeit with perhaps varying degrees of wear. They are flat in that they are
two dimensional; modifiable in scale both in that framing can alter the apparent size of
objects and in that they can fill different-sized screens without any change in their inner
proportions; and, in the editing room, superimposable, with images able to be layered
upon one another. Finally, while film images cannot easily become part of a written text,
they can substantiate a spoken one, whether a lecture accompaniment or a recorded
narration. We might therefore say that films can function as Latourian inscriptions in
27. Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” 44–47.
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motion, an analogy that becomes particularly salient during individual shots that, like
diagrams, quickly relay a large volume of disparate information to viewers.
Perhaps the best illustration of making things “presentable all at once” in these
films is when, in Volcanoes, we see a collage of deep-sea medusae swimming against a
background of marine snow (i.e., organic detritus falling from shallower waters)—an
image further complicated when it becomes superimposed on their ostensible reverse
shot, of a scientist peering at one of the animals from the Alvin (figure 4.3). Here the
narration informs us that most deep-sea creatures are “like phantoms of the sea”: they
will never leave behind a fossil record for scientists to study, even though they may
have been around for billions of years. In this moment, Low assembles images of a
range of animals filmed at different places and times; the snowfall creates a sense of
temporal and spatial unity among these diverse phenomena. Pinning these floating
phantoms against the reverse shot of the scientist enhances their ghostly quality while
also juxtaposing them with what the film seems to suggest is the appropriate response to
them: the scientist’s analytic curiosity. The scientist’s expression, moreover, is not
meant to register as one moment in time but rather to encapsulate the whole of a long,
fascinated descent—somewhat akin to a city-lights montage in which neon signs swirl
around a protagonist’s awestruck face, but also suggesting one of Ernst Haeckel’s
naturalist drawings come to life (figure 4.4). Here the image, though vast in scale, does
not overwhelm; it instead offers viewers a way to conceive of things things separated in
space and time as a single unit.
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Figure 4.3. A bioluminescent collage in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea.
Figure 4.4. “Discomedusae” by Ernst Haeckel. Image in Kunstformen der Natur (1904).
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In another characteristic shot from the same film, the Alvin’s camera zooms in
on a gathering of tubeworms, and as if activating computer vision, seems to “scan” them.
It not only aggregates caption-like facts about the vent which the tubeworms are
gathered—namely, depth, pressure, and external and internal water temperatures; it also
invokes thermal imaging, gesturing toward the larger mosaic of modes of scientifically
representing the ocean, among which film is just one of many (figure 4.5). In part, the
image suggests the point-of-view shots of movie cyborgs such as Robocop and the
Terminator, whose computerized eyes scan, analyze, and assess the people and things
that populate the field of view, complete with beeps and bloops as the computer text
unfurls onscreen. Unlike these fiction films, however, Volcanoes gives us machine
vision without a subject—a depersonalized (or, rather, disembodied) array of
measurements and imaging modes that contextualize, and thus make comprehensible, an
object that initially overwhelms.
Figure 4.5. Terminator vision in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea.
If these digitally edited, live-action images function like Latourian inscriptions in
motion, so do the CGI sequence “shots” throughout the films. These unbroken images
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serve to bring a range of things together that could not be visualized photographically,
affording viewers a sense of rational mastery over phenomena greater in intricacy and
spatiotemporal scale than what can be filmed and photographed. These illustrations
substantiate the narration and give viewers both a sense of the larger context and
relevance of wondrous imagery and a way to make rational connections among utterly
disparate images. What is more, CGI objects in these films (e.g., the earth seen from
space) tend to be unusually clean—smoother and less densely detailed than their
photographic counterparts. This lack of detail serves two important functions. It renders
what might in a photorealistic image amount to an information glut into something more
easily grasped; it also allow viewers to better distinguish between indexical and
animated images and their respective evidentiary uses. It also has an important effect
that is less reducible to functionality. To borrow Lev Manovich’s insight, this
smoothness also seems to herald a purer, yet unattained future vision that could
encompass things that exist on spatial and temporal scales so large they defy human
comprehension, to say nothing of our current ability to visualize them.28
Illustrative CGI sequences are preponderant in these films, and in every instance
they allow for a quick traversal of spatiotemporal gulfs that cannot be negotiated
photographically. In the first such sequence in Volcanoes, the “camera” begins on the
ocean floor and then vaults into space to show us how long the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is in
relation to the continents. The earth rotates to reveal a cutout view of the magma and
volcanic activity beneath the earth’s crust, then we plunge back into the ocean to the sea
floor, where we suddenly find ourselves billions of years ago, watching as the ridge is
28. Manovich, “The Synthetic Image,”180–84.
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formed (figure 4.6). A later CGI sequence purports to explain the origins of tubeworms
and chemosynthetic life (as distinguished from photosynthetic life) by explaining the
origins of the solar system. A star explodes; part of it collides with the earth, the earth as
we know it forms thanks to this contact; and the view of roiling magma, which dissolves
into a tubeworm-covered chimney, lets us know that these “embers of a dying star” were
life’s initial spark. Aliens of the Deep contains several similar, albeit more elaborate
computer-generated sequences. In perhaps the most baroque, we move from the earth’s
oceans to Europa (Jupiter’s sixth-largest moon) and back in the space of about two
minutes (figure 4.7). The sequence plays up the ocean’s affinities with the cosmos as
well as earth’s with another world to suggest that studying microbial life here may be
the key to understanding life elsewhere. At the start, a diver plunges underwater and
swims toward the camera, hovering in place as the blue beyond him fades into the
darkness of outer space. As he fades out, a spacecraft drifts in from the right, and the
“camera” follows it toward Jupiter before whizzing past it, taking a million-mile-anhour tour of the planet’s moons. It zeroes in on Europa, which, as the narration informs
us, likely houses an ocean larger than all of earth’s combined. As the CGI image
dissolves, we find ourselves back in the ocean at home, watching one of the Mirs search
for life along the hydrothermal vents—an edit that also projects an imaginary future
when manned probes can explore Europa.
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Figure 4.6. The formation of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea.
Figure 4.7. To Europa and back in Aliens of the Deep.
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In drawing together a range of things in a manner that would be impossible to
achieve photographically, these computer-animation sequences conform to what Mark P.
Wolf calls a “subjunctive documentary” style. As Wolf argues, “computer imaging and
simulation are concerned with what could be, would be, or might have been” and
become ways of rendering things beyond the range of human vision (natural or
mechanically extended) and of a conceptual nature into visual analogues.29 Like falsecolor Hubble Space Telescope images of deep space or brain scans in which different
colors indicate different levels of synaptic activity, these CGI sequences are “not a
record of how the subject appears to the observer, but rather how it might appear.”30
The danger of such sequences is that although they helpfully present a range of discrete
phenomena holistically in a manner not possible photographically, it is difficult to tell
how much of the imagery we see is purely speculative, rendered without any empirical
scientific bases.
Significantly, the organizing principle of all of these examples is a virtual
version of IMAX’s “signature phantom ride shot”: that propulsive, inexorable push
forward into the space of the frame.31 In this case, that track both penetrates space as if
in flight and zooms, radically magnifying things with a forward push. This way, a range
29. Mark J. P. Wolf, “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and
Simulation,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 274.
30. Ibid., 277. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Kessler writes that Hubble “appear to
present the universe as one might see it, thus previewing what we imagine space
explorers and tourists may experience when manned space travel extends humanity’s
reach beyond the earth’s orbit.” Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble
Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012), 4.
31. Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine, 286.
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of phenomena, both microscopic and macroscopic and separated by vast gulfs of time
and space, are drawn together in Latourian fashion within not only the same field of
view but also what purports to be a single shot.
Additionally, the improbable speeds of the “camera” that draws together all of
the digitally rendered phenomena is characteristic of what Chris Tong calls “the age of
the world zoom,” wherein imaging technologies are of a piece not only with planetary
consciousness but also with war and surveillance.32 The rapid zooms from deep space
to the ocean floor or across the solar system, even across entire geological epochs,
suggest a world in which monitoring assumes a scope unlimited by time or space. In
regard to the ocean, the zooms—which plunge from surface to depth at the same speed
as they move among planets—also posit a future when water can be as open to
movement as the vacuum of outer space and when the messy, protean qualities of
seawater can be abolished so the ocean can be more easily ordered. To be sure, this
nonprotean quality is characteristic of not only these three films, in which it abets the
construction of inscriptions in motion, but of digital animation of the ocean generally.
As Melody Jue argues, digital seawater typically behaves as “a passive medium of
frictionless navigation without any of the chemical properties that make it such a
powerful agent of transfiguration in life and in the imagination.”33 Though digital seas
may be eminently navigable, in these IMAX films they nonetheless remain opaque.
Unlike other digital oceans that do away with not only the ocean’s fluidity but also its
32. Chris Tong, “Ecology without Scale: Unthinking the World Zoom,”
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2 (2014): 196–211.
33. Melody Jue, “Proteus and the Digital: Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s
Materiality in Ocean Animations,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2
(2014): 246–47.
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opacity and all of the life forms with it, those in Volcanoes, Aliens, and Deepsea
Challenge give the impression of a sea that their live-action portions purvey: one that
remains largely uncharted, unknown, and fully surprising discoveries.34 Even as their
frictionless quality abets the construction of single-shot diagrams that bring many
spatially and temporally disparate elements together at once, then, these digital seas still
refer back to the mysterious, sublime qualities of the deep ocean, qualities with which
the rationalizing function of digital imagery would seem to be at odds.
IMAX Oceans and Ecology
That even the digital oceans that serve to illustrate scientific ideas for a popular
audience manage to visually uphold the idea of an unknown, mysterious deep allows us
to turn to another matter: that the films permit only a partial consideration of ecology—
that deep, complex interconnectedness of things. With their rhetorical insistence on the
unknown and never before seen, these deep-sea films present the deep ocean as an
untouched wilderness—“the last great wilderness on earth,” in Stephen Low’s words—
and thereby minimize the reach of influence human activity has had on the planet.35
They ignore, for instance, deep-sea trawling, the history of dumping nuclear waste
undersea, and, most urgently, the effects of anthropogenic climate change and ocean
acidification. IMAX movies of the shallows occasionally refer to ways industrial
activity has threatened coral reefs, and when the bleached reefs are shown on a large
34. By “other digital oceans” I primarily mean Google Ocean, which for Stefan
Helmreich realizes a cultural fantasy of making the ocean totally transparent: “This is
not the dark deep,” he writes, “but a clear fishbowl—though with no fish; sea life does
not swim in this space.” Helmreich, “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary
Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures,” social research 78, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 1226.
35. Qtd. in Feld, “The Last Frontier.”
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screen, they may elicit not awe for their natural splendor but perhaps horror at what
humans have wrought. (I say “may” because, in the case of Coral Reef Adventure [Greg
MacGillivray, 2003], the overbearing anthropomorphism, mickey-mousing sound
effects, and upbeat Crosby, Stills, & Nash score trivialize the reefs’ plight. Rather than
indices of humans’ ability to annihilate the planet, the film presents reefs as endangered
households that we must protect.) The same is not true of the deep sea, however, which
continues to be framed as an untouched wild. There is no consideration of whether the
ecosystems found along hydrothermal vents have not already been affected by human
activity and therefore exist in a state of less than absolute otherness to their discoverers,
even if we might not have known about them until now.
All of these films, importantly, belong to the era of the Anthropocene—that is,
of the idea of the Anthropocene—yet despite their ecological focus they scarcely relate
to anxieties about the Anthropocene that have become ever more widespread over the
past decade. Coined by the biologist Eugene Stoermer in the early 1980s, the Nobel
Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized it in 2000 when he
proposed that Anthropocene succeed the Holocene as the name for the present
geological epoch. Though the Anthropocene’s periodization and meaning are contested
in philosophical and scientific circles, Crutzen’s influential definition names it as the
period when humans have become the major influence on the Earth’s ecosystems—a
period coextensive with Western industrialism, synonymous with anthropogenic climate
change, and beginning specifically with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine.36
36. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry
35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 209.
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In popular writing, the Anthropocene has come to signal a fundamental break in
both human and ecological history. As Joshua Clover argues in a recent essay, the
popular view of the Anthropocene is that humans (particularly under capitalism) have
effectively set in motion a gargantuan, world-destroying machinery that they are
powerless to stop: “In previous epochs, the flora and fauna of the planet were part of a
rolling equilibrium. Now anthropos has leapt from its limited role to give the entire
ecosystem one direction. The changes set in motion are at the point of becoming selfreproducing, of proceeding on their own no matter what we do. The direction is toward
complete destruction of the planetary equilibrium. We’re taking it all down with us.”37
In regard to known animal species, this point is inarguable. As the World Wildlife
Foundation recently reported, the global wildlife population has decreased by 50 percent
in the past forty years as a result of human activities.38 And as regards the ocean,
marine biologists warn that marine life faces the threat of mass extinction due to
converging factors such as acidification, fish farming, deep-sea trawling, and seabed
mining.39
To treat the deep sea as wild nature, as these films mostly do, is problematic in
the present moment. At a time when rapid action is needed to mitigate the effects of
37. Joshua Clover, “Extinction Pop,” The Nation, September 30, 2014,
http://www.thenation.com/article/181809/extinction-pop.
38. Damian Carrington, “Earth has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years, says
WWF,” The Guardian, September 30, 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40years-wwf.
39. Carl Zimmer, “Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says,” The
New York Times, January 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/science/earth/study-raises-alarm-for-health-ofocean-life.html.
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anthropogenic climate change, to speak of realms beyond human influence is imprudent,
even if in certain cases it may be tempting. When we are shown millions of shrimp
darting between the extremes of inhospitable hot and cold along the vents in Aliens, for
instance, it is difficult not to share Cameron’s enthusiasm: “This is the most insane
amount of biomass I ever saw in my life. . . . That party’s been going on down there in
the dark for the last billion years, and it’s gonna be going on for the next billion years.
They’re just doing their thing, it’s got nothing to do with us, the sun could go out
tomorrow and they wouldn’t know and they wouldn’t care.” But such a response finally
trivializes the magnitude of the current crisis—as if anthropogenic changes were hardly
worth fretting over—and downplays the catastrophic effects that climate change and
ocean acidification may yet have on distant ecosystems, whose importance to the
planetary picture we barely comprehend. It also flies in the face of current science. In
recent years, oceanographers have demonstrated that climate variations do in fact affect
the deep sea, noting that human activity may harm deep-sea ecosystems long thought
stable because of their remoteness.40 It is still unclear how changes to deep-sea
ecosystems affect those closer to the surface or may ramify on human life, but we might
reasonably assume that the possibility of their doing so is an unstated reason why
40. For instance, the authors of a 2014 paper about benthic ecosystems during
prior eras of climate change conclude that rapid climate change may have “pervasive
control” over deep-sea species diversity; they also warn of “pervasive, synchronous, and
sudden” changes to deep-sea ecosystems as a result of human activity. Moriaki
Yasuhara, Hisayo Okahashi, Thomas M. Cronin, Tine L. Rasmussen, and Gene Hunt,
“Response of deep-sea biodiversity to abrupt deglacial and Holocene climate changes in
the North Atlantic Ocean,” abstract, Global Ecology and Biogeography 23 (2014),
doi:10.1111/geb.12178. Another paper warns that anthropogenic climate change “may
have more adverse consequences than expected” on those ecosystems because of their
sensitivity to temperature changes. Moriaki Yasuhara and Roberto Danovaro,
“Temperature impacts on deep-sea biodiversity,” abstract, Biological Reviews (2014),
doi:10.1111/brv.12169.
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researchers voice concern about anthropogenic effects. The belief that in the deep sea
life goes on independent of surface affairs reflects an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind
mentality [that] needs to be reversed,” and for all their sense of biological connectedness,
deep-sea films still adhere to this here–there spilt.41
I do not wish to imply that deep-sea IMAX cinema is not at all ecologically
minded. The films discussed above are insofar as they attend to the surprising and
intimate connections between humans and species that in nearly every respect could be
nothing more unlike us. In this respect, they partly overcome the opposition between
nature and its others (technology, culture, human civilization) that the rhetoric of
sublimity tends to enforce.42 In Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, these include the
tubeworms and microbes that thrive on the titular vents. The tubeworms, the film
informs us, get their red color from hemoglobin, which means they share our blood, a
powerful symbol of kinship. The microbes, on the other hand, share “the language of
human DNA.” As the film informs us in another of the CGI sequences, this one a zoom
in on a dancing microbe’s insides that reveals a DNA helix, “There is a good chance that
this is where life began on earth” and that the microbes’ extreme environment “is where
41. The authors of a 2009 study as quoted in “Climate variability impacts the
deep sea,” EurekAlert!, November 2, 2009,
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/nocs-cvi110209.php.
42. As Timothy Morton argues, the very concept of nature occludes ecological
thinking. Nature “allows us to maintain an aesthetic distance between us and them, us
and it, us and ‘over there,’” such that the interconnectedness and interdependence of all
things drop out of view. See Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 204.
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we began our journey, five billion years ago.” The idea of interconnectedness presented
here carries with it a tacit secular moral imperative.43 As Helmreich puts it,
To an audience familiar with paternity tests and adopted children’s search for
their biological parents, Volcanoes advances the claim that genetic classification
will acknowledge our true ancestors and press us to acknowledge our long-lost
cousins, today’s hyperthermophiles. It delivers a moral demand right out of
Dickens to accept our connections to the lowliest branches on our family tree,
and it summons us to this responsibility through painting the deep sea as a
motherly matrix and nursery for life on earth.44
It should be stressed that the film’s story that hyperthermophiles sit at the root of
evolutionary biology’s tree of life reflects only one position among marine
microbiologists. The other, more radical line of thought holds that those microbes are so
genetically heterogeneous as to upend the tree of life and demand a new model for life’s
origins—one that also is less friendly to moral claims for accepting our connections
between high and low forms of life.45
43. Not necessarily a religious one, however; Christian fundamentalists
prevented the film from screening in several venues throughout the South on account of
its blasphemous evolutionary message. Cornelia Dean, “A New Test for IMAX: It’s the
Bible vs. the Volcano,” The New York Times, March 19, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/national/19imax.html.
44. Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 72.
45. Ibid., 68. Aliens of the Deep points to the need for such a model in two ways.
First, it suggests that life on earth may have originated on Mars. In another CGI
sequence, the movie illustrates this point with a hypothetical, water-laden, life-bearing
Mars getting hit by an asteroid; a fragment from the impact travels to earth with
extremophiles on board, landing in the ocean. “We might all be Martians,” the narrator
tells us. By planting the tree of life elsewhere in the solar system, the film implies that
we may never be able to follow it to its roots. Aliens also spends considerable time on a
point that in Volcanoes goes unmentioned: that in contemporary astrobiology,
researchers regard extreme environments as likely analogues for extraterrestrial
ecologies and the extremophiles that dwell there as the most likely candidates among
earth species to resemble organisms elsewhere. These organisms might be living at
present, have lived long ago, or not exist for another billion years; if they have no direct
connection to life on earth, they also make it necessary to speak of trees of life.
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This curiosity about interspecies connections and life’s (or rather our) origins
aside, the films tend to play like advertisements for the human impulse to explore. As a
young marine biologist puts it at the end of Aliens, “Who knows what’s out there? So
we have to go.” The films do not question the political implications of that impulse or
even attempt to give exploration much substantial social justification. Deepsea
Challenge offers some social justification when Cameron explains that studying deep
trenches may allow scientists to better predict tsunamis and volcanic eruptions (which
result when tectonic plates grind against one another at depth, a process called
subduction), thus potentially saving lives in advance of natural disasters. But such
cataclysms occur outside the stream of ordinary existence; it seems more productive to
imagine the enormous funds for such research being used to improve people’s everyday
lives.
More pressingly, however, the films never consider ocean exploration from a
perspective other than human self-interest, whether that self-interest lies in economic
exploitation, mitigating natural disasters, or the pursuit of science for its own sake. They
do not think about what it means to subordinate the world to a human frame of reference,
or in Heideggerean terms, to set it up as a “standing reserve”—if not for deep-water
drilling or seabed mining, then for human knowledge and inspiration.46 (Recall marine
biologist Roger Payne’s statement in Songs of the Humpback Whale’s original liner
notes that whales should be “available forever as a resource . . . for everything from cat
food . . . to musical inspiration.”) A problematic strand in conservationist writing holds
46. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1977), 3–35.
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that the so-called natural world should be protected not for its own sake but because
doing so maximizes nature’s value for humans in ways that economically exploiting it
alone does not.
One solution to such anthropocentrism would be to invite viewers to imagine the
ocean from the vantage points of its nonhuman denizens in a way that minimally
compromised their alterity, without projecting, in Disney-like fashion, human emotions
and American values upon them. Rachel Carson attempted as much in her first book
about the ocean, Under the Sea Wind (1941), narrating the story of the seas in the third
person—over the shoulder, as it were, of various marine animals. In more surrealist
fashion, Jean Painlevé did the same in his short films of aquatic life, asking viewers to
“reconcile the irreconcilable: the utterly strange appearance of such creatures [as crabs,
octopi, and seahorses] with our own familiar mannerisms.”47 And as I tried to show in
the last chapter, the discourse around cetaceans and humpback whale songs regarded the
best consumer audio technologies as approximations of the mental world of whales,
which one could enter vicariously by listening to whale songs in stereo with a good pair
of headphones. All of these projects entail thought experiments about what it might be
like to inhabit a radically different body and experiential frame of reference. Although
such experiments are necessarily limited—we can only imagine what it is like to be a
vampire squid, not actually experience it—they importantly challenge the human as a
47. Ralph Rugoff, “Fluid Mechanics,” in Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean
Painlevé, ed. Andy Masaki Bellows and Maria McDougall with Brigitte Berg
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 51.
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privileged frame for perceiving and knowing the world.48 Moreover, they destabilize
“nature” by insisting on that category’s internal incongruities. The seemingly impossible
range of different life forms that populate the natural world and their equally diverse
modes of perceiving and being bodily within it upset any clean us-and-them distinctions
that we might wish to make between the human and nonhuman, between our social
world and nature “out there”; all are different frames of reference among many within a
shared ecology. To be sure, simply by showing the strange denizens of the abyss, the
films may prompt viewers to explore, on an affective level, what it’s like to be these
creatures; as Stefan Helmreich relates, one biologist’s lab engaged in “microbe dancing”
after seeing Volcanoes, an anecdote that suggests playfully feeling out the possibilities
of microbe being (at least as the film’s CGI depicts it).49 Inviting viewers to imagine
what it is like to be these animals rather than to simply gawk at them might also lead
them to question what Melody Jue identifies as the terrestrial biases of our thought—to
consider how living in an aquatic environment would structure knowledge differently
than life on land does.50 Although what might be an ideal film in this respect does not
48. That we can only imagine, not actually experience, what it is like to be
another animal is a point Thomas Nagel makes in his famous essay, “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974), 435–50. On vampire
squid being, see Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Maltez
Novaes (New York: Atropos Press, 2011); and Melody Jue, “Vampire Squid Media,”
Grey Room 57 (Fall 2014): 82–105.
49. Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 71. This response resembles one Colette described
in her review of a time-lapse film of plant growth: “At the revelation of the plant’s
purposive, intelligent movement I saw children get up and imitate the prodigious ascent
of a plant climbing in a spiral, circumventing an obstacle, groping at its stake.” Qtd. in
Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la
Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 244.
50. Jue, “Vampire Squid Media,” 85.
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and may never exist, below I discuss a few films that offer worldviews counter to the
human impulse to explore and that allow us to think more critically of ocean ecology.
A product of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and
Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan offers a startling counter-aesthetic to smoothly gliding
“flight” shots and immaculate 65mm imagery of the IMAX deep-sea films, even though
the technology it uses necessarily limits its images to shallow waters. Shot entirely with
consumer-grade GoPro cameras (now an all-purpose staple of YouTube videos but at
the time of the film’s release mostly associated with extreme sports), the film takes
place aboard a deep-sea trawler off the New England coast. The cameras are attached to
virtually every part of the ship: the masts, the rigging, the fishing gear, and the
fishermen themselves, offering a dizzying “view from everywhere”; waterproof, they
frequently plunge underwater with the trawl net and by other means that seem to defy
possibility.51 This underwater imagery upends the norms that govern “good” undersea
footage. Images are neither beautiful nor balletic; the waters are turbid and appear to be
composed of sickly browns and greens; the camera moves in so disorienting a fashion
that it is impossible to discern directionality or even, if one plugs one’s ears during one
late nighttime sequence, whether it is above the waterline or below it (figure 4.8).52 (As
all of the sound in the film was recorded in camera, one’s ears are overwhelmed by a
sucking noise anytime the camera dips below the waves.) “The sea,” as critic Calum
51. Matthew Battles, “Technology at Sea: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna
Paravel, Leviathan,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 2 (April 2014): 481.
52. According to the filmmakers, this loss of bearings is typical of being on a
ship at night: “if the sea is rough and you’re out on deck, half the time you don’t know
up from down, or sea from sky.” Qtd. in Scott MacDonald, Avant-Doc: Intersections of
Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),
409.
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Marsh writes, “has simply never been depicted in this fashion, the deep blues and greens
of seawater have never seemed so dark or impenetrable, the tangle of iron and steel of a
ship has never torn through the dark so unnervingly.”53 In its underwater passages,
Leviathan importantly assaults the cultural fantasy that the ocean should be transparent;
its obscure imagery and disorienting, unstable compositions, and lack of contextualizing
narration preclude any spectatorial feelings of mastery over what one is seeing, any
sense that the film is constructed with the viewer’s pleasure in mind. In these respects its
aesthetic is resolutely anti-Disney, anti-BBC, anti–National Geographic, and anti-IMAX
as well as the inverse of the balletic, Aqua-Lung aesthetic that makes human presence
undersea appear so attractive in Cousteau’s movies. Wholly singular among filmic
representations of undersea space, Leviathan depicts the submarine world in a manner
that upends what have for a century been the dominant modes of representing it on film.
Figure 4.8. Starfish swept up in the murky currents in Leviathan.
Despite this achievement, it can be difficult to discern what Leviathan is up to,
particularly in its posthumanist stance. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that Castaing-
53. Calum Marsh, “Film Review: Leviathan,” Slant, October 5, 2012,
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/leviathan.
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Taylor and Paravel “value sensation over any unified form of coherence,” a critique that
rings true of their attempt to flatten human and nonhuman subjects.54 As even the
filmmakers put it, “we had a kind of posthumanist ambition to relativize the human in a
larger physical and metaphysical domain . . . in which humans, fish, birds, machines,
and the elements would have a kind of restless ontological parity . . . but we did struggle
with how to structure [our images].”55 In the end credits, the filmmakers list the
fisherman alongside the other animal species shown onscreen, but their mode of
categorization is largely alphabetical; beneath the name Captain Brian Jannelle is an A–
Z joint listing of the other crew members (alphabetized by first name) and the various
crustaceans, fish, and fowl we have seen (alphabetized by binomen). Although it would
be difficult to think of another film that collapses humans and nonhumans in its cast, the
strategy strangely implies that each human is like a species (hence alphabetizing by first
rather than last name) at the same time as it obscures animal referents for even
biologically astute viewers who are more familiar with common names. Moreover, the
film’s attempt to flatten human and nonhuman subjects merely alphabetically offers
viewers no framework for understanding the greater agency the film’s human subjects
exert as technological beings. As a critique of human industrial presence at sea,
Leviathan operates mainly on affective and aesthetic registers; it relies on sensations of
disorientation and motion sickness as well as a visual ugliness (by conventional ocean
54. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Room 237 (and a Few Other Encounters) at the
Toronto International Film Festival, 2012,” Jonathan Rosenbaum, September 18, 2012,
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2012/09/room-237-and-a-few-other-encounters-atthe-toronto-international-film-festival-2012.
55. Qtd. in MacDonald, Avant-Doc, 408.
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movie standards) to convey the ecological violence of commercial fishing. Concrete
ideas about the nature of this violence, however, are not to be found in the film.
Regarding exploration, Werner Herzog’s typically antihumanist The Wild Blue
Yonder and Encounters at the End of the World prove both more coherent than
Leviathan and more skeptical than the above-discussed IMAX movies, even if Herzog’s
images outwardly conform to the normative idea that the ocean should be transparent.
For one, both The Wild Blue Yonder and Encounters feature lengthy undersea sequences
shot beneath the Antarctic ice, but Herzog never goes underwater himself nor expresses
any interest in seeing ocean space with his own eyes. Indeed, all of the underwater
footage in these films was shot by Henry Kaiser, a diver–filmmaker stationed at
McMurdo, a US research base on the southernmost continent.56 Herzog seems more
interested in relating the visual records of others while maintaining an ironic detachment
from the exploratory activities they depict—activities that are for him closely bound up
with imperialism and environmental destruction. In Encounters, Herzog mocks “the
obsession to be the first one to set foot on the South Pole” and other regions, which he
equates with absurd quests for personal and imperial glory. At the same time, he mourns
the lack of “white spots on our maps,” referring explicitly to places that have been
untouched by civilization—locations such as the South Pole and Mount Everest for him
should have “been left in peace in their dignity”—as well as implicitly to the snow- and
ice-covered regions that are melting because of climate change (which itself is linked to
the same civilizational expansion that has colored in those white spots). Indeed, the
56. The Encounters Blu-ray features a longer reel of Kaiser’s footage titled
“Under the Ice,” which is set to Kaiser’s own ethereal, free-time electric guitar
improvisations.
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prospect of ecological catastrophe suffuses the film. The McMurdo scientists speak of
melting Antarctic ice sheets, and Herzog muses about human extinction:
Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical
civilization makes us particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific
community about climate change. Many of them agree: the end of human life on
this earth is assured. Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the
demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next. And
when we are gone, what will happen thousands of years from now in the future?
Taken in the context of the Anthropocene, Herzog’s words suggest that the very
dimension of human civilization—its advanced technology—that has made it a
geological force will become its Achilles heel as climate change accelerates. This
position stands at odds with Cameron’s in Deepsea Challenge that science and
technology, if sufficiently funded, can mitigate natural cataclysms, and it flies in the
face of the popular faith in geoengineering to offset anthropogenic climate change. For
Herzog, technology brings no salvation; the fruits of human ingenuity cannot master the
chaotic natural order of the universe. But the meat of this passage is the thought
experiment of the future. Herzog proceeds to imagine what “alien archaeologists” might
find long after humans cease to exist, what they will make of the world we have left in
our wake. Thanks to such speculation, Herzog’s images take on a dual temporality,
doubling as documents of the present and records from an imagined future.
This dual sense of time is not peculiar to Encounters or The Wild Blue Yonder
but rather a general trait of Herzog’s cinema, which returns again and again to images of
ruins, wastelands, and abandoned spaces of human civilization that suggest both a now
and a time after. For Eric Ames, such images belong to an aesthetic sensibility indebted
to the seventeenth-century baroque, one that “imagines the world and its dissolution
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simultaneously.”57 The very title of Encounters at the End of the World evokes this
doubling, referring to both the film’s bottom-of-the-world setting and ecological
catastrophe. As regards the ocean, The Wild Blue Yonder is more specific about
planetary dissolution; the title of its first chapter, “Requiem for a dying planet,” invites
viewers to both marvel at its sub-Antarctic marine imagery and regard it as if from the
point of view of its annihilation. (As Brad Prager puts it, Herzog “is interested in finding
a standpoint that looks at a world filtered entirely through death.”58) Here, the world
beneath the ice shelves, which was also memorably shot in Cousteau’s Voyage to the
Edge of the World (Philippe Cousteau, 1976), becomes the watery home of humanoid
extraterrestrials who flee for earth once they have rendered their own planet
uninhabitable. Rather than signify exciting new frontiers to explore as they do in the
IMAX spectacles discussed above, the images of undersea space here become indices of
a world hostile to life.
Perhaps because the ocean is endangered, it becomes the figure of a sacred space
that should be cordoned off and protected—an earth that returns to the “white spots”
described in Encounters. At the end of The Wild Blue Yonder, a NASA interview
subject (likely scripted by Herzog) envisions a future where humans live and work on
other planets and even asteroids, “taking care of their resources” (i.e., mining them)
while the earth becomes “a protected national park” where displaced earthlings can go
on vacation. A closing montage of helicopter shots purports to show the earth 820 years
57. Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 262.
58. Brad Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 153.
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in the future as it has effectively been decolonized by humans, as the narrator (an
“extraterrestrial” played by Brad Dourif) indicates that “there were no more airfields, no
towns, no bridges, no dams, no money, no time, and no breath. It had returned to its
pristine beauty.” In Encounters, it is the ocean rather than the whole earth that becomes
a sacred space; the scientists, as Herzog describes them before the second of the film’s
three undersea sequences, enter the icy waters as if clergymen performing a ritual: “I
noticed that the divers, in their routine, were not speaking at all. To me, they were like
priests preparing for mass. Under the ice, the divers find themselves in a separate reality,
where space and time acquire a strange new dimension. Those few who have
experienced the world under the frozen sky often speak of it as going down into the
cathedral.” A haunting Hungarian folk song plays, transforming the icy space into a
submerged Eastern Orthodox Church, the eerie blues and greens of the roof suggesting
stained glass, where the divers drift among jellyfish and over a seafloor littered with
clams—sightless animals unable to perceive the splendors to which these divers alone
have unmediated access (figure 4.9). The music gives this space an elegiac cast, as
though we were bearing witness to the end of time, an end that would also entail the
disappearance of the whole range of nonhuman life forms we see onscreen.
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Figure 4.9. A diver beneath the Antarctic ice in Encounters at the End of the World.
As for these lives, Encounters asks us to ponder their likeness to the human not,
as in Volcanoes, in terms of biological affinities (again, blood and DNA) but in how
they interact with their environments. The crucial scene in this regard involves protointelligent, single-celled organisms called tree foraminifera, which we see through a
microscope. These organisms, Herzog and one of the McMurdo biologists inform us,
branch out in tree-like shapes that give off pseudopodia that assemble protective shells
from nearby grains of sand. They are “beautiful masons” capable of making
aesthetically pleasing shells; and it is this ability to construct dwellings, rather than any
innate biological characteristics, that makes them interesting—their ability to treat, as
humans do, objects in their environment as extensions of themselves. The philosopher
Bernard Stiegler argues that humans are essentially prosthetic beings, our identities
constituted by the tools we use. Encounters offers the tree foraminifera as similarly
prosthetic creatures that, despite consisting of but one cell and lacking what we might
call consciousness, also possess what we might call a sense of artistry.
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The importance of tree foraminifera for Herzog owes to how their prosthetic
nature and artisanal talents give the lie to human exceptionalism. If the seemingly
simplest of creatures can use environments in a manner we can both identify with and
perhaps admire, they remove any special claim we might have to explore and exploit
every place within our reach, a reach that industrial technologies have greatly extended.
Instead, these spaces belong to other beings that use them much as we do. Rather than
indulge as IMAX movies of the deep do in fantasies of an innate, specifically human
impulse to explore for the sake of some species-wide self-interest, Herzog instead
suggests that the world is not ours alone to do with as we please.
Conclusion
Despite the popular discourse that the deep ocean largely remains unexplored,
submersible technologies have in the past few decades greatly expanded the scale of the
known ocean for researchers. Similarly, IMAX movies of the deep ocean—such
as Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, Aliens of the Deep, and Deepsea Challenge—put these
new discoveries on display for a curious public on a visual scale that mirrors the scope
of “inner space.” On an aesthetic register, these movies are largely structured according
to mutually constituting ideas of sublime technology and sublime nature. The natural
world in these films always testifies to the advanced technologies (cinematic and
oceanographic) that reveal it, while the technologies, as dramatized in both the films and
peripheral discourse, speak to the overwhelming forces of nature they must master. On a
more rationalist register, the films often function analogously to scientific illustrations.
Just as science aims to produce combinable and superimposable figures and diagrams
that render, in Bruno Latour’s words, a great many things “presentable all at once,” so
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these IMAX deep-sea documentaries often function as scientific inscriptions in motion.
They bring together a diverse range of phenomena—macroscopic and microscopic,
oceanic and cosmic, human and nonhuman—in one enormous frame, asking viewers to
engage rationally with what also overwhelms them—to redefine disparate and opposed
phenomena in relation to one another.
Although these IMAX films to a degree engage in ecological thinking, inviting
viewers to mull over the interconnectedness of marine phenomena on a large scale, this
thinking is limited by a discursive opposition between “nature” out there and its others
(technology, society). This opposition establishes the deep sea as a wilderness beyond
human influence—a problematic notion in this the Anthropocene. For more critical
views of ocean exploration and more complex ideas of ecology, we must turn to
smaller-format films of the sea. Though imperfect counterpoints to deep-sea IMAX
movies—their budgets effectively preclude the recording of deep-sea imagery—
Leviathan and Werner Herzog’s undersea diptych of The Wild Blue Yonder and
Encounters at the End of the World offer visions of the sea that are less amenable to
illusions of human mastery over the abyss. Leviathan’s disorienting aesthetic, “view
from everywhere,” and dark and murky waters posit the ocean as inscrutable and
nauseating, a far cry from the IMAX films’ hyperreal, crystalline waters and
construction of a relatively stable, centered spectatorial position from which knowledge
of a world that initially overwhelms can safely be obtained. Herzog’s films cast
suspicion on the exploratory impulse that deep-sea IMAX films celebrate, linking the
intensive technoscientific project of exploration to planetary destruction. Provocatively,
his films plead for the opposite of what today’s ocean researchers encourage: that we
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leave the places we have not seen alone, “at peace in their dignity,” that we cordon them
off as sacred spaces.
This notion of sacred spaces has a corollary in conservationist efforts, such as
Sylvia Earle’s to establish internationally protected marine sanctuaries where fishing
and deepwater drilling would be outlawed. Yet these are places that have already been
explored and visualized; if they had not, they would not be endangered. Herzog’s
association of the unseen and unexplored with places that might still remain beyond
human influence would therefore seem to err on the wrong side of a safe assumption:
that human influence on the farthest reaches of the planet probably exceeds our current
understanding of it—that there can be no leaving the world alone, as it has already been
deeply affected in ways that are not yet apparent to science.
However, with his example of tree foraminifera, Herzog raises another
possibility: that the world cannot possibly be left alone. Even without a human presence
to influence it, even the seemingly lowest forms of life share with humans the ability to
actively shape and manipulate their environments. The suggestion of cordoning off
sacred spaces, then, is less about preserving the world’s last remaining untouched zones
(which we can hardly say exist) than accepting the fact that they are already, and
perhaps inevitably, dying spaces. By making them temples we can at least belatedly
honor the “dignity” of the other living beings that inhabit them as they—and we—
obsolesce.
195
CONCLUSION
Writing of the BBC’s The Blue Planet, Sean Cubitt identifies a key attraction of
surface water’s contingency: “We consider recordings to be records of the past, but the
experience of watching water is of a now that extends indefinitely. The precise
configuration of light in the frames that pass by is irreplaceable, but another, infinitely
or infinitesimally different, will always supersede it, so that its timelessness is not that
of the philosophical absolute but of an endlessly differentiating repetition.”1
There is cruel irony in that the sea’s apparent timelessness (in Cubitt’s reading)
on the surface conceals the drastic changes unfolding underwater. Coral reefs are dying;
fish stocks are plummeting; and the seas’ temperatures, pH levels, and currents are all
changing as a result of human industrial activity on the earth’s surface. As the narrator
comments late in Mission Blue, the film with which I opened, “The ocean could be
empty and it would still look the same . . . as the ocean is dying, the surface looks the
same, the waves look the same.” The hypnotic experience of the “endlessly
differentiating repetition” of light on water is at odds with the likely irreversible
destruction of marine ecologies happening undersea.
Today, when we watch movies of the sea, particularly those from decades past,
we would do well to linger not on the sea’s apparent timelessness but rather its
evanescence, to regard the images as records not of an infinite now but rather of what
the ocean once was—as a memory bank of the life the marine world once contained. In
this respect, we might think of undersea cinema as a vast mausoleum of disappearing
“nature,” grim proof of Akira Lippit’s thesis that in the age of electrical media, animals
1. Cubitt, EcoMedia, 49.
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have receded from the human world and been supplanted by time-based, audiovisual
representations of them.2 Today, human influence registers virtually everywhere on the
planet, and countless species have quietly gone extinct as a result of the ecological
disruptions this influence has wrought. The ever-extending reach of technology has not
only coincided with other species disappearance but actually brought it about, albeit in
the sort of slow-burn fashion that lacks the immediacy of spectacle and therefore goes
unnoticed.3
If movies of the sea can become the ocean’s amber, preserving, for a time, the
life forms that have vanished, films and videos of the animals that will likely endure
allow us to imagine a distressing future. Which creatures will survive? In all likelihood,
jellyfish. Fittingly for the cinema, jellies are arguably the visual index of an ocean in its
death throes, standing in for a whole range of crises from which their sheer numbers
benefit. As the biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin warns, “major global ecological changes are
occurring in our oceans today—and jellyfish blooms are one of the few things they have
in common as an outcome. Indeed, jellyfish blooms are visual evidence of failing
ecosystems, and, in many cases, the drivers of further decline.”4 As the ocean acidifies,
the climate changes, pollution increases, and fish stocks get depleted, jellyfish
populations explode. They swarm in coastal waters and the open sea. They can thrive in
2. See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
3. On the problem of visualizing the “slow violence” of environmental
catastrophes, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
4. Lisa-ann Gershwin, Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 25.
197
temperatures hostile to most other forms of life. They have been around for nearly 600
million years, and some 30,000 species populate the oceans. One species, Turritopsis
dohrnii, is even biologically immortal, able to revert from a mature medusa to a polyp
state through a process known as transdifferentiation—the only animal on earth that can
do so. Their “boundary parameters for existence,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty might say, are
far wider than those of most other life forms.5 “As the seas become distressed,”
Gershwin writes, “the jellyfish are there, like an eagle to an injured lamb or golden staph
to a postoperative patient—more than just symptoms of weakness, more like the angel
of death.”6
Whether sensationalist Discovery Channel specials such as Attack of the Giant
Jellyfish (2010) or more sober and informative documentaries on the order of Vicious
Beauties: The Secret World of Jellyfish (Sigurd Tesche, 2013), jellyfish movies of the
present help us envision what marine cinema may become in coming decades—that is,
jellyfish centered. They allow us to imagine how the seas might look if and when such
“low” life forms as brainless, sightless jellyfish inherit the earth from “higher” species
driven to the brink of extinction, species that include us. That is not all, however. Today,
“cinema in general appears to co-constitute climate change in general.”7 Insofar as
cinema is bound up with larger industrial projects that in contributing to climate change
and ocean acidification have destroyed marine and other ecologies, the same movies that
5. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 218. His phrase is “boundary
parameters of human existence.”
6. Gershwin, Stung!, 2.
7. Stine, “Cinema as a Geological Force.”
198
allow us to imagine the ocean’s future and our own are part and parcel with ensuring
those futures comes to pass.
Michel Foucault famously concluded The Order of Things, “man is an invention
of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” For were the arrangements of
knowledge that gave rise to the concept of the human to vanish, “if some event of which
we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility . . . were to cause them to
crumble . . . then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea.”8 We would do well to rethink Foucault’s formulation. Not
only is the concept of the human threatened today, but the human’s very material and
cultural existence is something we can no longer take for granted as a feature of life on
earth. As climate change threatens human presence by pushing environmental
conditions beyond what human life can withstand, it also threatens the very construct
the human has produced of itself. This construct cannot persist without us, though what
the human has made and wrought certainly shall. Should the ebb and flow of the tides
erase the human face in the sand, perhaps a jellyfish—or a film—will wash ashore to
take its place.
8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 387.
199
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