The Life Aquatic

I saw Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou over the weekend and it was great. It’s pretty silly and it’s got a strange sense of humor, but I really enjoyed the message I took away from it.

Bill Murray plays Steve Zissou, a once renowned aquatic adventurer/filmographer, now a middle-aged has-been laughing-stock. The movie starts with a viewing of Part 1 of the title film in which Steve’s best friend is eaten by an undocumented type of shark (all off camera). The audience is skeptical, they ask “Why didn’t you film the shark?” and “Who are you going to kill off in part 2?” They suspect that his films are fake because they are so unbelievable. And frankly, so do we.

The world’s response to his recent work weighs on him and his men. Steve wonders aloud, “What happened to me? Did I lose my talent?” His crew watches an old film of theirs and remarks “That’s how good it USED to be.”

But as the movie develops, we discover that his films actually are real. He’s not faking this stuff, it’s just that the stuff he films looks fake. The undersea world is so bizarre to us that it seems far-fetched. I don’t think Steve’s waning popularity had anything to do with a diminishing quality of his work (the old film his crew watched was just as cheesy and unrealistic as his newer films). His downturn in popularity was thanks to the world’s ever increasing skeptical nature. No one believes in magic anymore. Everyone is afraid of being hoodwinked, so we reject anything that can’t be objectively nailed down with science.

Maybe that’s the way we have to be now, but it seems like the world would be a much more exciting and mysterious place if we weren’t so skeptical. At least Steve Zissou seemed to be enjoying himself...