I had just presented a paper on Jacques Cousteau's documentary The Silent World. For five nights I worked on this essay, thinking about how the use of silence in this film mediates our understanding of the underwater world. How do we come to know this aquatic environment? I kept rehearsing arguments by poking holes in my close analysis.
I was on a plane heading home. In the row ahead of me, to my left, screens glowed blue in the dimmed cabin. Waves lapped on rocks in one while sun streamed through water on the other. An old man watched The Shallows while next to him, an exhausted flight attendant from another airline watched Finding Dory. After spending a week thinking about the human-nature divide, debating what language we should use for the environment, and what a mostly obscure 1950s documentary means for the ocean today, here I was, thousands of feet in the air, confronted by the realization that nature is mediated in innumerable ways today.
In the summer of 2016, a film about a shark attack and a heart-wrenching animated family film both spoke to what we can encounter in the ocean. Both occur in liminal spaces—the coastal waves or a seaside research station—thus they focus heavily on the intersection of humans and the environment.
These weren't ocean enthusiasts or ecocritics watching films, however. They were random people, which lead me to wonder what place Jacques Cousteau has in today's world. Why study him?
A question of influence can be traced still. Adventure narratives in documentaries may have a clear lineage—if not origin—in the Palme d'Or winning film. In the intervening decades, other narratives arose. The killer shark in The Shallows has been done before (so often that it has become parodied; in Finding Nemo that trope is reversed with a vegetarian pack of sharks).
Interactions like this one on an airplane come by chance, but they contribute to my thinking on the subject. Why is it that we examine canonical films and not their legacy? Does Jaws matter in a world where The Shallows may be the first (and only) shark film you have time for? And how do we speak about films that trace heroes journeys but in animal form? That engage with contemporary debates about animal rights by showcasing a SeaWorld-esque park in a post-Blackfish world?
As I pursue further research, and my current research on Jean Painlevé, I am becoming increasingly aware of not just looking backwards to contextualize a work of art, but looking forwards to examine its influence. While the past has clear bearing on a product, the future that comes after it has more bearing on its impact, meaning, and ultimately importance. In the future, I hope to focus on this approach as a means of grounding contemporary experiences, particularly in ecocritical concerns.
I argue that one of the consequences of mediated nature in The Silent World is the tamed understanding of the ocean as people engage with the coast today. But to truly speak to that, I need to speak to The Shallows too. We do not exist in a 1950s vacuum where only Cousteau can penetrate the ocean's deep. Medieval monsters alongside his film alongside what plays at the cinema down the road all work together to create modern mythologies about the ocean. Only in the aggregate do we begin to truly study the effects of media on our understanding, a task to great for one person, a task I hope more and more academics take on.
(Image courtesy of Disney Movies Australia)