James Cameron, Jacques Cousteau, & the Undersea

[sus]

Really enjoyed watching the opening episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Been getting into diving, deep-sea environments, and James Cameron films all at once, thought I'd spin up a thread.

Not sure if anyone's seen The Abyss, it's a wild ride of a movie with some emotional punches early in the last act. One of the overarching thematic-conceptual ideas is to connect the undersea with space exploration. The subs are like the alien spacecraft in Close Encounters, coming over the hill in the night, except it's the blue darkness of undersea, and the terrain is thousands of feet below the surface. We get hydronaut suits, air locks, the way they walk across the sea floor like it’s the moon. The emphasis, in the sound mixing, on the assisted respiration, the oxygen tanks. And of course the aliens or "NTIs"—non-terrestrial intelligences.

Also happy to talk about Aliens, Life Aquatic, Avatar: Way of Water, and Steinbeck's The Pearl, or anything about pearl-diving, the bends, and deep sea work in general.

 

[sus]

This was an interesting read as well, about how extreme an occupation deep-sea diving can be: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-saturation-diver

Hovey and his fellow divers spent that six-week assignment working at the relatively shallow (but still quite deadly) depth of 250 feet, and living in a shipboard capsule pressurized to the same level. Pressure can be measured in atmospheres (atm) or pounds per square inch (psi). Pressure at sea level is 1 atm, or 14.7 psi. Inside a bicycle tire is about 65 psi. Hovey was living at over 110 psi. An ocean-and-a-half away, diver Steve Tweddle was making his way through a 28-day job in “storage,” as they call it, for work at a depth of 426 feet (190 psi) in the North Sea.

Saturation divers breathe heliox for the entire time they are in storage. And this brings us back to those final family phone calls. Helium is about seven times lighter than air, and sound waves travel much more quickly through it. The result is that buff, often ex-military men performing deadly serious jobs end up sounding like cartoon characters—and not just for a few moments, but for weeks on end. In the unfortunately named BBC series Real Men, a saturation diver in storage calls his son to wish him a happy birthday. “It’s hard to understand my dad because he talks in a duck language,” the boy says later, “and I don’t speak duck.”

 

[version]

There's some great trivia on the Abyss IMDB page.

Ed Harris reportedly punched James Cameron in the face after he kept filming while he was nearly drowning.

Ed Harris had such a traumatic experience making the film that he refused to go into detail about it for years. One of the few things he said about it was "Asking me how I was treated on The Abyss is like asking a soldier how he was treated in Vietnam."

Ed Harris had to pull over his car at one time while driving home, because he burst into spontaneous crying.

 

[sus]

doesn't surprise me at all, that film is fucking intense and none of the water shots are CGI'd and given what we've heard about e.g. Kate Winslet setting the breath-holding record for a Hollywood film (something nuts like 6 or 7 minutes?)

 

[version]

 

[version]

Have you seen a Kristen Stewart film called Underwater? It's a fairly standard Alien retread until the last twenty minutes or so when it goes full Lovecraft.




@linebaugh and I were discussing submechanophobia the other day. There are online communities based around it where people swap photos of oil rig struts and stuff.

Submechanophobia (from Latin sub 'under'; and from Ancient Greek μηχανή (mechané) 'machine' and φόβος (phóbos) 'fear') is a fear of submerged human-made objects, either partially or entirely underwater. These objects could be shipwrecks, statues, animatronics as seen in theme parks, or old buildings, but also more mundane items such as buoys and miscellaneous debris.

r/submechanophobia

r/submechanophobia: http://redd.it/1476ioa

www.reddit.com

 

[Clinamenic]

Cool thread!

 

[catalog]

I watched the abyss after seeing avatar 2. Must admit I nodded off a bit in the boring middle big but I thought it picked up at the end.

Totally agree about the water as space analogy. When they go deep down it definitely looks like outer space and you can see he was pushing that angle.

Not much else to add apart from that urbanomic snippet from a while back about freuds disciple firenczi and the idea of sea as primal mother.

Moynihan, in the spinal catastrophism book, says ballard almost definitely would have read up on one of the recapitulation theories as advanced by a guy called Firenczi (might have spelt that wrong), who was a student of Freuds, but took some of Freuds ideas further eg he said our pleasure in baths and water is not about being back in the mothers womb, but more about our going back further and wanting to be in the fucking sea

 

[IdleRich]

doesn't surprise me at all, that film is fucking intense and none of the water shots are CGI'd and given what we've heard about e.g. Kate Winslet setting the breath-holding record for a Hollywood film (something nuts like 6 or 7 minutes?)

The world record is almost twenty-five minutes, how can that be possible? It's so far beyond normal capacity it's like reading someone can run 100m in three seconds or can jump 50m in the air.

 

[sufi]

who's got their PADI (not me)

 

[Murphy]

The Abyss, hands down, is the worst film ever made. It was the only film available on long coach ride which had an actual video player and I’ve hated it ever since

Ed whatshisface’s big bald head, drowning clips aren’t remotely impactful, even Donnie Darko stole its watery tentacles. The Deep (77) trumps it and even that only has one moment with a conga eel snagging a diver’s hand to add any chutzpah

 

[luka]

“Avatar” Connection with Snow Raven

www.youtube.com

 

[luka]

 

[luka]

 

[luka]

 

[luka]

 

[sus]

“Avatar” Connection with Snow Raven

www.youtube.com

Oh my ✨💛✨ I need more people like you in my life. Soul connection ⭐️ Just beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

 

[sus]

"I think hurricanes should be named after women, don't you?" Just then, Virgil's sister Linsey comes into the office, the open door letting in stormwinds that blow papers off the table, drive the office into disorder.

 

[sus]

The Abyss is like slant-rhyme of the Scott's Alien. The first thing we hear is the ping of sonar. The first thing we see is an endless, undifferentiated sea of blue. Then the slow shape of a submarine, like Kubrick’s black-slab monolith.

A military sub. Nothing more terrifying than being in a submarine, a tin can underwater. A single breach of airlock—well, it’s just like outer space. That’s the first clue. Alien, underwater. We’ve mapped more of the lunar surface than we have our own ocean depths. We see the monolith go down, punctured by an unknown. That “science fiction but underwater” theme is all over the film. The suits, the air locks, the way they walk across the sea floor like it’s the moon. The emphasis, in the sound mixing, on assisted respiration.

Next, a buncha working class oil workers get promised a big company bonus if they answer the sunken sub’s distress call. Corporations and militaries collude with a callous disregard for Joe Sixpack’s life. Ed Harris’s aptly named Virgil “Bud” Brigman is a shepherd of his people, who—like Ripley enforcing quarantine protocols—courageously faces down authority and the implicit threat of pecking order for the good of his guys. “When it comes to the safety of these people, there's me and then there's God, understand? If things get dicey I'm pulling the plug.” There’s a search among ruins for signs of life, and the growing realization that something terrible has happened at the site. They send down search subs that look like the spacecraft from Close Encounters, coming over the hill in the night. Then it happens to them too. Like walking onto a murder scene, the killer waiting in the shadows. Like finding a charred skull near your camp. And the killer, in some sense, is always hubris. All the way down to the bottom, sometimes. Military hubris, nuclear hubris, corporate hubris, human hubris. The complexity stacks, becomes unmanageable. Little fault lines emerge in the structure, in the assumptions baked into the structure: unnoticed, they grow and merge; the precarity compounds; pretty soon the structure that keeps you alive is tearing apart, letting in the abyss that surrounds you.

 

[sus]

The damaged, DeepCore drilling platform is a metaphor for Lindsey and Virgil's marriage. “If we can’t get out of it, may as well get into it.” Down to hidden depths. And all that work, all that intricate structure of a relationship—dented, damaged, springing leaks, flooding. Putting the fires out. Sealing off hatches, partitioning and compartmentalizing and preventing the water's spread. The storm, the power outages, the severing of communications. The collapse of the crane that tethers them to the surface, to the rest of the world. Their undersea home being pulled—via umbilical, natch—by the anchor-like weight of the crane, plummeting, pulling them into the abyss. The crane that was supposed to lift them up.

We get all these shots of Virgil and Lindsey with flashlights and tools and circuit breakers, you know—very mechanical, work that's hands on but still quite technical and complex. Which you see popping up a lot in sci-fi, e.g. Farscape and Alien. A cousin of this trope is bomb-defusal scenes; see the Bond and Marvel films. I think this stuff is popular because it lets you externalize and represent processes of troubleshooting, fiddling with, fixing up interpersonal problems that are otherwise hard to visualize. The couple gets to be a team, an economic unit, which is lindy actually—go to the Met, check out the papyrus tapestries in the Egyptian wing and you'll see all the old Egyptian couples farming, catching fish, hunting birds, together. Many traditional marriages are defined by this ongoing coordination, this shared project that is both economic and familial, a vertically integrated metabolic factory, and nowadays? The main realm this remains somewhat true for is kids. The economic stuff is all cut up, the unity of couples atomized. Husband and wife belong to the corporation—more accurately, to two different corporations, a house divided a la Mr. and Mrs. Smith.