The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Spine #300: Wes Ander­son­’s The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou.

I don’t like Wes Ander­son films for the same rea­son I don’t like Quentin Taran­ti­no films and the same rea­son I don’t like most of my poet­ry. It is all too ref­er­en­tial. Yet, The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou was enjoy­able enough, main­ly because many of the ref­er­ences were actu­al­ly things I knew about [doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing, David Bowie]. I still don’t get his appeal though. I’ll try to dis­miss my loathing for self-reflex­ive-oblig­a­tory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony long enough to point out what I found effec­tive in the film.

Steve Zis­sou is an oceano­graph­ic explor­er who makes doc­u­men­tary films of his adven­tures, a la Cousteau. He is pos­tur­ing, arro­gant, self­ish and emo­tion­al­ly dis­tant. His entire life has con­sist­ed of craft­ing and main­tain­ing a celebri­ty image; result­ing in a man who has for­got­ten who he is in favor of chas­ing after the man he watch­es on screen. We con­stant­ly see the film­ing of his doc­u­men­taries; which are just as chore­o­graphed as Zis­sou’s pri­vate life. In fact, Zis­sou has been in front of the lens for so long, he has for­got­ten that the cam­era isn’t always rolling. His desire for dra­ma is born from an extend­ed slump in the recep­tion of his doc­u­men­taries.

It should be not­ed, how­ev­er, that while The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou [the movie with­in the movie] is a rather obvi­ous send-up of real­i­ty tele­vi­sion, in its essen­tials it does­n’t dif­fer from true doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing at all. Real doc­u­men­taries are not the objec­tive tes­ti­mo­ni­als that we instinc­tive­ly believe them to be. Things are shot and not shot, things that were shot are left out, com­men­tary is added in, the edit­ing gives the film some sort of syn­tax, and often turns it into a nar­ra­tive.

The use of Kodachrome [at least, that’s what it looks like to me] for the film with­in a film clips was nice, since I’ve always liked how the warm col­ors pop out with that stock, and though the awk­ward fram­ing and dis­con­cert­ing cuts made me a lit­tle sea­sick, they did seem to strength­en Ander­son­’s por­trait of Zis­sou as a man alien­at­ed from him­self. The Bowie trans­lat­ed to Por­tuguese is anoth­er inspired choice in this regard.

Yet with all of this stag­ing, the most impor­tant parts of Zis­sou’s sto­ry nev­er get filmed. [That is, if we’re watch­ing with a stan­dard view of spec­ta­tor­ship and assum­ing that the 4th wall still exists and that TLAwSZ was made by Wes Ander­son and not Steve Zis­sou mak­ing TLAwSZ about mak­ing TLAwSZ]. When he meets his son, when he fights off pirates, when he saves his neme­sis from pirates, when his son is killed in a heli­copter crash…no cam­eras.

These con­stant blows, cou­pled with the dif­fi­cul­ties of financ­ing the film, even­tu­al­ly force Zis­sou to make peace with his inner demons, sym­bol­ized tan­gi­bly by the jaguar shark.

If we watch the film in House of Leaves mode and pre­tend that Wes Ander­son did­n’t direct it and that Steve Zis­sou made a film called The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou about mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary called The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou, then noth­ing that we see in the film can be con­sid­ered non-fic­tion. Espe­cial­ly since his dead part­ner Este­ban and dead son Ned both appear on screen after their deaths.

Ulti­mate­ly I think this movie [and most Wes Ander­son films] would suc­ceed a bit bet­ter if there were less attempts to say some­thing about every­thing as intri­cate­ly and oblique­ly as pos­si­ble. To delib­er­ate­ly mix some metaphors in a self-reflex­ive-oblig­a­tory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony way, I think the mul­ti­ple paths of mean­ing both drown the oth­ers out and are weak­ened by their profli­ga­cy.

• DVDTalk Review of the film and the Cri­te­ri­on DVD
• New York Mag­a­zine sto­ry on Wes Ander­son
• Cousteau.org