Category: film

And so, just to continue the tradition of everything I’ve ever promised about Steve Zissou Saturdays being a lie, disregard what I said a few posts ago about the series returning in November. It actually returned in October. I am the master of suspense.

And before we get to the analysis, don’t forget to read this and vote on whatever television show you’d like me to review in its entirety next. Even if you’re reading this like 20 years in the future. I assure you, I’ll still be reviewing crappy TV somewhere.

For any newcomers to this blog who don’t remember this series, the first Saturday of every month will see me working through the entirety of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, examining every scene, in sequence, all the way through the film. So far I’ve covered about a half-hour’s worth. We’ll be at this for a while.

The scene opens on what is most likely Jane’s first full day in the Zissou Compound, and — very interestingly — each scene that we’re going to cover, leading right up through nightfall, consists of one-on-one interactions. While Anderson has a massive cast at his disposal, he’s content to stick them off in the periphery while a small number of individuals get to know each other one at a time.

I find this interesting. In fact, the pattern began the previous night, which we covered last time, with a scene between Steve and Eleanor, followed by one between Ned and Jane. This time we get Steve and Jane, Ned and Klaus, and then Steve and Ned. In each case it’s one of the male Zissous, and it all culminates at nightfall with a dialogue between both of them.

It’s structured enough to be pretty clearly deliberate, and I love the way Steve and Ned are introduced but then spend so long orbiting around each other, and I especially love the fact that it barely registers. It doesn’t feel like Steve and Ned go an entire day without interacting directly, but there you go. And when we finally do get to their discussion, it becomes clear why Steve might not want to approach Ned head-on, and why he’d prefer instead to keep him as a comforting presence nearby rather than any kind of direct equal.

We open with a short, comic moment that sees Steve unpacking a box of Zissou-branded sneakers. While it’s not explicitly mentioned, the tell-tale three-stripe design gives the company away as Adidas.

Once we see these shoes in close up it’s impossible not to notice that everyone on Team Zissou wears them. As we see, Steve’s in possession of large numbers of unsold product. Adidas terminated his sponsorship, and Steve — always quick to surround himself with reminders of better days — probably bought up a good deal of the remaining stock. They’re now in storage somewhere in the compound, keeping Team Zissou in comfortable — but diminishing — footwear. They’re available…but once again for a limited time only.

It’s also impossible not to notice that Ned* gladly replaces his black dress shoes with a pair of these sneakers, just as he will eventually replace his Air Kentucky garb with a Team Zissou speed suit. Piece by piece, he’s becoming a Zissou…which begins here as he literally puts himself in his father’s shoes, and is then made very evident by the scene coming up in which he receives his correspondence stock.

Jane’s presence — and the presence of her tape recorder — at this unboxing suggests it was part of the interview that spurred Jane’s visit to Pescespada Island in the first place, and our next scene confirms it: Steve and Jane are in a lab, where the interview becomes much more formalized.

Formalized, and stylized. Anderson here uses an interesting visual effect** that warps the image outward from its subject. Whether that’s a visual manifestation of Steve’s off-putting nature or simply a directorial flourish to add some visual flair to an otherwise static scene, I’m not sure, but it’s the same for the shots of Jane we get here as well.

It’s here that we learn how willfully detached from reality Steve Zissou really is. With his last film a failure (by no means his first), his finances a mess and his equipment in shambles, he still expects that Jane is assembling a “puff piece.” A softball, celebratory, promotional article for Grand Adventurer Steve Zissou. This is why he showed off so cartoonishly with his sneakers and bit swaggeringly into that apple. The moment Jane asks her first real question, his confidence falls, and so does his willingness to proceed.

She asks him what he thinks went wrong. To us in the audience, and to Jane, this is a totally fair question. After all, this is probably something we’d like to hear at this point in the film. We’ve heard about his success, and we’ve seen evidence of his success, but what we see now, here, today, is totally different.

We like Steve. Jane may not. But either way, we all want to know what happened.

Steve, however, bristles at the mere suggestion that anything has changed. He’s willfully convinced that it hasn’t, and also that Jane is out of line to mention any such thing.

The interview continues, but Steve’s defeated, as evidenced by his setting down the apple, never to be finished.

This actually — though I’m sure not deliberately — reminds me of one of my favorite small moments in The Royal Tenenbaums, when Murray’s character finds out that Margot isn’t coming home. He raises a cookie to his mouth, holds it there…and then just sets it down.

There’s something inherently fatalistic about watching somebody decide not to eat.

Steve suggests that they start out with some “stock dialogue,” and even provides a few questions and answers for her. “Favorite color, blue. Favorite food, sardines.”

It’s all part of Steve’s desire to inhabit an image. An image — like the famous photograph of him pointing into the distance — endures. Man, eventually, fails. Steve doesn’t want to be a man. He doesn’t want to grow, and learn, and least of all does he want to change. He just wants to be his own image…and the last thing he wants to hear is that he’s further tarnishing his own legend every day that he’s alive. Somebody in a healthier state of mind might take that as a wake-up call and make an effort to live up to his own name again. Steve, on the other hand, just wishes to retreat, to hide behind cliche, and to bar the door against intrusion.

As we’ve discussed before, both Steve and Jane seek to structure the world in ways that make them comfortable. For Steve it’s shielding himself behind the image he’s constructed, and for Jane it’s breaking complicated situations down into a rigid set of questions and answers. Last night Ned punctured Jane’s structure, and today Jane is puncturing Steve’s.

When she asks instead about what Steve thinks of his most recent film, our hero realizes there’s no hope for the interview. He turns the question back on her, and she responds that she felt that aspects of it seemed slightly fake.

Steve asks Wolodarsky to leave, and he does…taking the cat with him. Wolodarsky tells Steve to take five, but he mutters it as he’s already leaving. He knows — correctly — that Steve won’t listen. He’s been through this before. He knows it’s a losing battle.

It’s here that two very, very interesting things happen. The most memorable, perhaps, is captured in the screen grab that opens this article: Steve Zissou, who can’t fathom why anyone might feel that he isn’t the great man he once was, points a loaded handgun at a pregnant woman.

I’m not sure there’s anything I could add to what should already be coming to mind when you think about it yourself.

The other thing is that Anderson is directly calling attention to artificiality. The sea creatures that we see throughout the film are not designed with any eye toward looking realistic, and Steve himself seems to inhabit a fantasy land in which the crumbling empire that we see is a healthy and thriving one when he looks at it.

But beyond that, Anderson asks us a few times throughout the course of the film to consider reality…and, each time, he undercuts it himself. Steve’s “Does this seem fake?” speech takes place while an orca does tricks in the background. The framing of the scene keeps the killer whale fixed right in the center, where we can’t miss it, performing for us. While Steve is posing the very question of whether or not this seems fake, the movie itself positively wants us to scream “Yes! It does!”

Later in the film Steve and Ned discuss the reality of their situation while they walk through the obviously fake Belafonte set. When these characters want to convince us that they’re real, they unintentionally betray the fact that they’re not. It’s all just an image they’re trying to inhabit.

Steve also, as we’ve mentioned before, asks if it looked fake when his friend was bitten in half in front of him. Of course, Jane couldn’t possibly know…there was no footage of that moment; Steve dropped the camera. I’m not sure what to make of this. It could just be Steve getting wrapped up on his question without thinking too hard about what he’s asking, it could be Steve confusing reality (in which he did see that happen) with the film (in which nobody could see it) which in turn speaks to the greater difficulties Steve has with this throughout The Life Aquatic, or it could just be Steve playing an aggressive sympathy card, whether or not it makes logical sense.

Any other thoughts? I, for whatever reason, find this to be one of the more interesting questions in the entire film.

Steve pulling out his gun frazzles Jane enough that she actually uses profanity, and then hits Steve with another belt of reality: the article was her idea. Nobody else at Oceanographic Explorer cared enough about him to want to cover it.

He correctly guesses, however, that she’s “taking something out” on him, and once again her Q&A structure fails her. She switches off her tape recorder…but then says nothing. She’s afraid that it might catch something beyond words, and she knows that it’s something she won’t want to face later. So she switches the recording device off…exactly what Steve — who loves recording devices because they allow him to re-shape what they’ve captured to better suit his expectations — chided Klaus for doing in the last installment.

We’ll get a sense of what, exactly, is eating Jane later on, but for now it’s worth reflecting on something we didn’t cover last time around: Steve may be an obvious father figure for Ned, but something that’s not as immediately obvious is that Jane serves as his mother figure. Things get muddy a bit — or outright weird — when you consider that their courtship is not entirely chaste, but it’s important to keep in mind anyway. Ned’s lost a mother, and Jane’s about to give birth. He needs a mother, and she’s about to have a son.

As the movie progresses we’ll discuss this more, I’m sure, but it’s probably good to think ahead a bit to the end of the film, when Jane’s newborn is seen wearing Ned’s cap. It’s important because Steve doesn’t just captain a crew of misfits…he reigns as Papa Steve to an eminently fucked up family.

This is emphasized in the next scene, which segues from Jane’s sarcastic “I’m sure you’ll make a terrific father,” into a scene of his two sons bickering.

Of course, they’re not quite sons. Ned “probably” is, and Klaus just looks up to Steve (and formerly Esteban) as a father. But it’s clear what Klaus feels is happening here; the prodigal son has returned, and Klaus’s role as the favorite (whether or not he actually is) is at stake.

Something similar happened in Fantastic Mr. Fox, and father-envy is by no means a rare thing in Anderson’s work. Here it’s particularly interesting, because Ned may well actually be Steve’s progeny, and there’s no chance Klaus is. Yet Klaus was here from the beginning. He’s seen Steve through his worst times, and he’s stood beside him in his darkest hours. Ned — whether or not he contains any actual Zissou blood — is the interloper here; not Klaus. Klaus has earned his rightful place…Ned just wandered in.

It has to be doubly painful for Klaus — which gives his otherwise comic character a strong through-line of tragedy — because on their last voyage he lost one of his father figures, and on this one, he already suspects, he’s losing the other. Klaus goes from having two fathers to having none. Ned is just another Jaguar Shark.

Even Klaus’ disparaging nickname for Ned (“Sonny”) is as heartbreakingly telling as it is rude.

There’s another minor detail here that I’ve never noticed before doing this series; during this conversation, Ned is holding two garbage bags. Earlier in the day, we saw him sweeping up behind Jane and Steve while they dug out the Zissou sneakers. This suggests that Ned has been cleaning up all day. That’s what Steve does with the son he’s never seen before; he has him clean up the compound! He doesn’t spend quality time with him, and he barely gives him a tour. Instead he gets a broom and some empty trash bags.

Klaus chastises the newcomer with a slap, and a reminder that “It’s the Steve Zissou Show. Not the Ned Show.”

Ned threatens him, but no further action is taken. At least, not yet. Ned isn’t yet at the point that he’ll pay physical interference back in kind, but he will be. The first seed of it is planted here.

After a long day of cleaning Steve’s things, Ned returns to his room to clean his own things. And after a long day of not-bonding with his son, Steve enters the room and immediately tells Ned that they need to watch themselves around “this Jane character.”

None of this is about their relationship, which — one might think — should be at the forefront of both men’s minds. Instead, as usual, it’s about Steve, and his perceived sleights. In Steve’s mind, his problems are everybody’s problems.

Additionally, Steve is proactively explaining away Jane’s lack of sexual interest in him by referring to her as a bull-dyke. When Ned questions this due to her pregnancy, Steve replies with a masterfully cruel — and totally unfounded — dismissal: “Bull-dykes can get pregnant.”

Steve manages to be both correct, and a massive dick.

Our hero gets up to leave without any words of comfort, support or acknowledgement for his son, but Ned calls him back. He asks how long Steve has known about him, and Steve says that he’s known for about five years, and that he read it in an article about himself.***

Like Steve dropping the camera, this is later contradicted. However, in this case, we know which statement is false: it’s this one. Steve’s always known about Ned. We even find out why Steve never attempted to contact Ned: it’s because he hates fathers, and he never wanted to be one.

What a massively encompassing statement “I hate fathers” is. It seems to scream so loudly for closer examination…for a followup question. For a Jane Winslett-Richardson style “So what happened?”

But we know how that goes.

Once again, we see where we are. We are given a tantalizing suggestion of a past. But we are not allowed to go further. We’ve seen what happens when we try. Steve will be evasive. He will be condescending. And if that fails, he will pull a gun and then describe that as only trying to defend himself.

The past is under tight guard. Whatever Steve went through with his father, it’s enough to put him off fathers for good. Deep Search is the name of Steve’s sub, but he won’t allow it to be ours.

Steve’s departure thus leaves behind some pretty dark clouds, but he returns with good news: Ned’s correspondence stock has arrived:

Step by step, Ned’s becoming a Zissou…and Steve is asserting the same control over him that he attempts to assert over everybody else. Jane resists…but Steve knows that Ned will not. It’s part of why he likes him. In spite of everything and anything, Steve figures, Ned will continue to look up to him.

Once again, Ned is too gentle to return a slap in the face.

Pele plays “Lady Stardust” to score a short scene of Jane on the phone, mirroring the one with Ned last night. Like Ned, she is attempting to sort out some business at home. In the absence of another party, however, she’s lost. While leaving a message she can’t rely on her standard questions and answers…and she flails, vacillating between depression, hopefulness, playfulness, and meandering sentences she can’t resolve.

She ends the phone call with a dark, oblique reference to abortion which, coming on the heels of Steve’s recent comments to Ned sounds even worse than it might otherwise. Lots of absent fathers…lots of lost sons. And we still haven’t left shore.

Next: Steve’s going to fight it, but he’ll let it live.

—–
* Jane, by contrast, retains her black Chuck Taylors, and does not wear the Zissou sneakers. I’m not sure if this suggests that Steve never offered her a pair, or that he did offer her a pair and she refused. Either, I think, is a fair reading, and it leads to some great mirror imagery later on: looking down from the hot air balloon, we see Steve’s feet and Jane’s feet, in their separate, particular footwear. It’s no coincidence that this scene involves some verbal conflict between them. Then, later, we look down from the chopper to see Steve’s feet and Ned’s feet…wearing the exact same sneakers, after a moment of father-son bonding.

** I know the type of lens that causes this effect has a name. Someone smarter than me, please pipe up in the comments.

*** “It was in the paper. I assume they check their facts.” I just wanted to quote that. Because it’s such a perfect, distant, unconvincing, fragile line that could only work this well in a Wes Anderson film. I positively adore that moment, and the only reason I didn’t mention it above is that…well…what could I possibly say that wouldn’t detract from it?

A (relatively) short and quiet entry this time around, as our segment here picks up exactly where the last one left off. Jane Winslett-Richardson has been shown to her room, Klaus has been meaninglessly cautioned against trying to sleep with her, and Steve entrusts tonight’s footage of the rubber tide to Vikram, who knows from past experience that he is to “print everything.”

From there, our male Zissous split and pair off: old-hand Steve with his wife, and newcomer Ned with even-newer-comer Jane.

First we follow Steve and Eleanor through a conversation that only lasts about a minute, but manages to be both tense and desperate at the same time. In a gorgeous piece of blocking — though it’s easy to miss this in favor of listening to what’s being said — the two of them stare off at the docked Belafonte, which is lit beautifully…but ultimately needlessly. None of Team Zissou is aboard the ship, and there are no plans for it to go anywhere. It is illuminated for the sake of being illuminated, and even we in the audience can’t appreciate it very much, as the camera doesn’t bring us anywhere near the boat. It is, instead, a tantalizing glimpse of brilliance — double meaning, there — from which we are kept at bay — there, too.

It reminds me of the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums in which Pagoda informs Royal that Etheline intends to remarry. The blocking in that scene positions Pagoda directly in front of the Statue of Liberty, so that it cannot be seen in the final film at all. There’s an anecdote about filming that scene, which I only remember vaguely, as Anderson was questioned about why he’d bother to film his scene there if he wasn’t going to let the audience see the Statue of Liberty. It’s a valid question, but the answer is obvious to me…just as obvious as the Statue of Liberty was in that scene, without it ever being on camera: it’s an act of directorial negative space. Its absence is what gives it presence.

I’m sure that just about anyone watching that scene would recognize that the Statue of Liberty is supposed to be there. We’ve seen enough films and television shows shot in exactly that place that our minds fill in the missing detail. It’s never on film in The Royal Tenenbaums, and yet there it is.

Here that negative space keeps us distanced from the Belafonte. It’s there, and we can see it, but it’s kept deliberately away from us. Lit up gloriously, another aquatic beacon like Lady Liberty, but beyond our grasp. Our minds must fill in the detail.

Personally I like to think that there was another short circuit on the ship, which turned all the lights out, and failing to fix it everyone just returned to the island to worry about it in the morning. Some time after that, the power snapped back on, and nobody’s on board to see it, or shut it off for the night. But that’s just me.

The above image also mirrors that of Steve gazing out toward his wife — and beyond her his ship — from earlier in the film, after his embarrassment at Loquasto.

…which makes it all the more resonant when Eleanor leaves him, alone by the window with his ship in the distance. A reversal of the Loquasto scene, in which it was Eleanor who was alone.

She leaves him here — though not for good, that’s still to come — because she finds out that Steve invited Ned to join them on their mission of revenge. I won’t go into it again, because I think I’ve brought it up at least twice, but, again, this casts some confusion on the earlier scene in which Steve and Eleanor discussed Ned’s joining them. What did she mean then? Why was she receptive to it at that time, but not now?

Once again Steve lapses into aquatic cliche when defending his position, tossing off two watery metaphors meant to explain his reasoning. “We’re going to put him on the map.” And “We’re going to throw him a life preserver.” This latter statement is particularly loaded in light of Ned’s eventual demise…and it’s just one node in an entire web of dark foreshadowing, forecasting the young man’s fate.

Eleanor doesn’t engage with this line of reasoning, as she’s certainly been through it before, but she does ask a question that manages to be both fair and loaded at once: when Steve says he believes in Ned, Eleanor asks him, simply, “Why?”

Steve’s answer provides a complete summary of his entire character. It’s self-centered, hopeful, nostalgic, desperate, and hurt. He says, “Because he looks up to me.”

Steve is nothing without adoration. That’s both despicable and heart-breaking. And we’ll leave the good captain here to ponder that dichotomy.

We cut from one Zissou male standing rigid in his company pajamas to the other, standing rigid in his company pajamas. As Steve is feeling abandoned and worthless, Ned is instead optimistic and full of hope. Steve is standing rigid because he’s been wounded — by his own words, tellingly — and Ned is standing rigid because…that’s who he is. With nobody else in the corridor, he still retains proper posture. It’s simply how he was raised…Ned isn’t polite because he wants to be seen as a polite man…he is polite because he is polite. He’s internalized this type of behavior not because he wishes to have good manners, but because this is who he is. And Owen Wilson sells it. Try to find an instance in The Life Aquatic of Wilson slouching or behaving in any kind of physically unbecoming way. I’ll wait. It’s an air-tight performance from an actor who’s far, far from known for any such thing.

Ned is coordinating time off with his employer, Air Kentucky. In fact, before phoning his superior he’s spoken with his colleagues, and worked with them to reorganize the schedule so that the airline will have adequate staffing and complete coverage. That’s just the kind of guy Ned is…he won’t even take personal time without being sure everything will run smoothly for everybody else in his absence.

His boss asks him, though we can’t hear it, something about the voyage he’s about to take. It’s fitting that we don’t hear the question, because Ned’s not quite sure how to answer it. Just like his father before him, his honesty betrays more about his situation than he meant to express: “Well, I just feel I need to see this thing through, sir.”

Ned doesn’t know what’s coming.

He can’t know.

But whatever it is…he needs it.

He believes that this trip, this act of animal revenge, aboard a decaying ship with a financially-troubled captain who is also the father he just met, is something he needs to see through.

Had Ned not been able to arrange coverage with his colleagues, he’d still be alive today.

Had Ned thought twice about any aspect of this trip, or not chosen to finance it himself when Team Zissou went broke, he’d still be alive today.

And the moment he says it, a light is flicked off behind him in the hallway. Another omen unseen.

Ned sacrificed himself…but not for a cause. He sacrificed himself because he needed to know. Whatever it was to know.

And whatever it was he did learn, he took it with him to the bottom of the sea.

It’s a quiet, lost moment in a loud and adventurous film…and it’s one that sticks with me the most.

One thing I’m not sure I ever noticed before this is that it’s raining in the background. There’s a gentle, soothing, watery tapping just on the edge of the soundtrack, and it sets a fantastic mood.

Of course what Ned hears, just after retiring to his own room, is the sound of classical music and Jane’s voice. He follows it down the hallway, and as he does so does the camera, which gives us a glimpse of a pitch-perfect Zissou Compound detail: the sailor’s knots lampshade in Ned’s room.

Another thing I’ve never noticed before. God I love this film.

He finds Jane reading to her unborn British child from Swann’s Way, the first volume of either In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past depending upon the translation. Either title would have clear resonance for the eternally backward-facing Steve, though both go unspoken throughout the film. It’s a detail for those who recognize the book (or its text) to pick up on and appreciate for themselves. Like nearly everything else in this film, Anderson refuses to spell it out. To borrow Ned’s phrase, that leaves us pretty strongly adrift in these strange surroundings — just as Ned and Jane are, which I’m sure is deliberate — and it’s up to us to “catch as catch can.”

It’s worth talking about what’s commonly perceived here as a continuity error in the film. Ned asks if Jane is reading poetry, and she replies, “No, it’s a six volume novel,” while gesturing at the pile of books beside her. However there are six books on the chair, and the one she’s reading from would make seven.

However while I know Anderson isn’t exempt from human error, I know even more that he, of all people, isn’t likely to be careless when it comes to details of set design. So it’s either a mis-spoken line that wasn’t caught in the edit (In Search of Lost Time is actually a seven volume novel), a mistake on the part of the character (though I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that based on anything else Jane says or does in the film), or simply a marriage on our part of two disparate facts (Jane’s edition of In Search of Lost Time does indeed come in six volumes, which is actually the case when two of the shorter volumes are bound together, and the pile of books next to her are just books…not necessarily the ones to which she is referring). Whatever it is I won’t say that it’s important, but it does seem to distract some other folks that I’ve seen write about the film, so there you go.

Jane is reading the book aloud and playing classical music for her unborn child’s benefit…the same reason she’s giving up cursing and smoking. Unsurprisingly, the conversation turns quickly to the question of whether or not Steve is Ned’s father, but her questioning hits Ned hard, as his answers are tied up in his mother’s recent sickness and suicide. Jane, perceiving this, backs off.

As much similarity as we’ve seen, and will see, between Ned and Steve, this is one often overlooked similarity between Jane and Steve: both of them seek to structure the world in formats with which they are comfortable. For Steve it’s heavily-edited documentary, and for Jane it’s one-on-one interviewing, in which questions are rattled off and answers returned in easily-publishable capsules. In both cases, Ned doesn’t quite fit their expected molds…though Jane, unlike Steve, has the good grace to back off — which then, interestingly, leaves her as the one outside of her element.

A final great — and easily missable — joke here is how quickly Jane has trashed her cabin. She literally just arrived, but bags are half unpacked, laundry is everywhere, and popcorn is scattered all over the bed. It’s an interesting character touch, and lest you think that she was just too tired to get organized on her first night in the compound, a later scene reveals that she’s done the same to her cabin aboard the Belafonte, where she’s been a resident for a much longer period.

It’s a great, minor, charming quirk for a character who seeks very hard to present herself in a particular way. Open the door and peer inside, and you end up seeing something quite different from what she’d like to project.

Perhaps Steve has an illegitimate daughter, too.

Ned asks if he can listen to Jane read, and she offers to catch him up on the story. Ned, still hopeful, says that he’s sure he’ll be able to figure it out.

Once again, Ned has no idea what he’s getting himself into.

Next: It’s the Steve Zissou show.

In this section we (and Ned) get not one but two introductions to the current state of Team Zissou, one of which is an elaborately staged — literally, as well as figuratively — tour curated by Steve himself. The other, of course, is one over which he cannot exert such control. As a result we end up with two important perspectives regarding our hero: how he looks to himself, and how he looks to others.

By complete coincidence, I’m currently reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the first time, and as I write this entry Captain Nemo has just finished giving his own new intake — one of which, amusingly, is also named Ned — a tour of the Nautilus. Whether Steve’s tour of the Belafonte is a deliberate comical undermining of that classic scene is beside the point; either way it serves as a humorous echo of that deeper, more knowledgeable and overall more impressive explanation of the wondrous workings of the vessel around them.

Both Nemo and Steve are willful isolates, and both of them use their ships not primarily to explore the world but to hide from it. But whereas Nemo is prideful and passively enthusiastic about his private accomplishments, Steve can no longer muster up excitement, not even for probably-his-son, and he handwaves equally both any impressive equipment aboard the ship and the state of its disrepair.

Unsurprisingly at this point he also dotes more on his production equipment than his scientific instruments, but even that seems to have lost its luster for him. After all, he has a crew to handle that stuff, and can afford to — interestingly — cameo in his own tour of the ship, fishing idly and remaining totally unengaged with even his own words.

But first, some fantastic film making from Anderson here needs to be addressed. We cut immediately from a quiet, naturalistic scene aboard the dark Belafonte to this clearly artificial and colorful sequence in which Steve Zissou addresses the camera — or is that Ned? More on that shortly… — holding the same model of the ship we saw on his desk earlier, in the film he debuted at Loquasto.

Behind him is an enormous mural of this same ship, and that mural is then backlit, revealing the inner rooms and workings of the Belafonte, and then rises to reveal that those inner rooms and workings are a life-sized, brilliantly constructed dollhouse of a set. The fact that this opaque mural and tellingly exposed set overlap so perfectly that the illusion goes almost unnoticed during the reveal is fantastic.

It can take several viewings to realize what even happened, but once you see it the logistics involved with pulling off a moment like that — physically, without the aid of CGI — will never escape your mind. It’s still, to my mind, Anderson’s most impressive shot, making it his low-key, sombre equivalent of the crop duster swooping down on Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Hitchcock liked to have people being chased…Anderson liked to have people retreating. Both directors lay the artistic groundwork at each of these poles that others could only hope to one day approach.

We get a brief mention of the Belafonte‘s origin (it was a long-range sub hunter during World War II) and how much Steve paid for it ($900,000), but we still don’t have any insight into why he wanted a boat or to become an oceanographer (or documentarian) to begin with. Steve sounds bored, as though he’s more of a tour guide than a team leader and he’s given this superficial spiel dozens of times to increasingly restless school children.

The music here is a reversal of melody from Mark Mothersbaugh’s own “Scrapping and Yelling” theme from The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s reworked slightly, of course, but its origin is clear, and there’s a great feature on the Life Aquatic DVD that has Mothersbaugh playing them side by side. (I can recreate it for you, if you simply click here and then here.)

There’s not much I can do with that information in terms of finding unique insight, but I do think it’s a fun detail, made all the more impressive by the fact that a reversal of Mothersbaugh’s melodies can be just as beautiful as his original compositions. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, losing Mothersbaugh, however it happened, was a genuine blow to Anderson’s films.

We then get a still shot of a framed photograph of Lord Mandrake, who Steve says was his mentor. Steve also says that he’s dead now, and we hear the same sound we’ll later hear when Ned mistakes a sludge tanker for some singing jack-whales.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition, and one it’s impossible to notice the first time through…you need the later point of comparison to understand. The laughter of life, and the deep bellow of death. Ned confuses the two, but what we see here is that it’s not really confusion at all; each applies to all of us equally. First one, and then the other. Both are true. Lord Mandrake is posing for a photograph in his prime, Lord Mandrake is a lost and distant memory. They apply to him equally, and they apply equally to Ned, whose own sludge tanker is somewhere out there already, calling him home.

From the picture of Lord Mandrake the room-by-room tour begins, and in the first room we see that very same picture of Mandrake on the wall. Did you notice that before now? I sure didn’t…it’s just one reason I’m glad I’m doing this series. There’s so much detail layered gorgeously into the film that I might never catch it all if I watched it a thousand more times.

The fact that the same photo is on the wall makes it feel as though Steve is walking Ned through these scenes, pointing things out as he goes. And yet he isn’t. As mentioned earlier, we later see him fishing, apart from and disinterested in his own narration.

This is one of Anderson’s tricks in The Life Aquatic, with which he blurs the line between the film being fiction, and events within the film being fiction. Here the set is clearly false and Steve is addressing the camera, which would seem to suggest that this has been staged for our benefit, rather than for the benefit of any characters in the film. Yet later on Ned and Steve will walk through this very same — and still obviously false — set having an argument, meaning it is real within their world. The subject of the argument? Well, among other things, fiction vs. reality.

Anderson is very clearly toying with our preconceived notions about how films work, here taking his most overtly artificial construction and letting it stand on its own, then later integrating that into the larger world and insisting that it’s real. It lends that later moment a bizarre sense of importance and weight, and raises for us larger questions about the world we’re watching, just as Ned has questions about his own world raised for him. Extra-cinematic tonal resonance.

It’s a pretty great film. Have I said that already?

The only thing we hear about in the first room is the picture of Lord Mandrake, so Steve brings us immediately on to the sauna. The imperfect blue tiling suggests a lack of uniformity — or clarity of vision? — that we’ll see elsewhere on the Belafonte and Pescespada Island…the sense that things have been cobbled together at various points in the team’s history, with little or no attention paid to cohesiveness. It’s a sharp contrast to what we’ll see later with Operation Hennessey.

Very oddly, Steve mentions that he keeps a Swedish masseuse on staff, yet we never see her again in the film. She’s here on camera now, so either she leaves Team Zissou before we actually set sail, or Steve is lying in order to make the ship sound more luxurious than it really is, and her physical appearance here is just another example of why we can’t trust what we see.

It’s also possible that Steve is “reading” from outdated Team Zissou promotional literature, which would also likely have the condensed information about the Belafonte‘s history and wouldn’t have room to get more deeply into it. In other words, Steve’s sales pitch is outdated, and he’s detached enough from reality that he doesn’t even realize it.

We then move on to a room — unidentified — in which Steve claims he does his science projects and experiments and so on. The fact that he can’t identify what they are or where he is says something…the fact that this room is the only one that goes totally unstaffed says even more.

Again we get a shot glimpse of the technology behind Team Zissou, with outdated computers lining one wall. As mentioned in a previous entry, this is all detail that, in another film, could be used to orient us to the time period in which our adventure takes place. In The Life Aquatic, however, it’s used to highlight just how far behind the times Team Zissou is, and that’s something else we’ll have confirmed when we make it to Hennessey’s sealab.

Also note the chemicals bubbling over with nobody in attendance. More ammunition for Team Zissou’s criminal negligence suit against their captain.

We then move on to the kitchen, which contains probably the most technologically advanced equipment on the ship. Vladimir Wolodarsky, the team’s physicist (though we’ll later learn that his experience is limited to the fact that he was a substitute teacher), frosts a birthday cake instead of working in the lab we just saw. We also get an idea of just how much wine Steve needs to feel at home. It’s money that could have been spent stocking — and updating — the lab below.

The research library was assembled by Eleanor, who is the only member of Team Zissou we’ll meet on this tour to keep her back to the camera, perfectly in keeping with the woman who, in our last entry, occupied herself in a roomful of colleagues by playing Solitaire.

Steve gives special notice to his complete first-edition set of The Life Aquatic Companion Series. I can’t be alone in wanting those, but there’s something quite sad about Steve treasuring books that he ostensibly wrote himself. Of course, since we’ll later catch him consulting the volume on Trawlers, Junks and Dinghies in order to identify a far-off ship, I doubt he had much of a hand at all in preparing them.

Also of note is the volume on The Arctic Night-Lights, which is a phenomenon we’ll encounter later in the film, with another nod to Lord Mandrake.

On a personal note, I genuinely wish I could read Tragedy of the Red Octopus. That looks like a good’un.

The only room in which actual work gets done is the editing suite, which Steve mentions exists so they can cut together footage on the fly. We also, however, see cameraman Vikram Ray being instructed on how to deliver an ADR line…keep this in mind, as we hear many times about how Team Zissou simply films what’s really happening, yet we keep catching glimpses of second takes and details being touched up or otherwise altered after the fact. With our fiction vs. reality theme already strongly in mind, it’s going to be important to keep an eye out for that.

Also I do want to say that this scene would be a great time to write a small piece about each member of Steve Zissou’s crew, and I fully intended to do so, but this is already turning out to be a pretty long entry so I’ll have to get to that later.

The observation bubble, which Steve with an uncharacteristic flavor of pride mentions he thought up in a dream, is in use by Bobby Ogata, the team’s frogman. Humorously he’s actually watching another diver* frolicking with a pair of albino dolphins that swim with the ship.

True to its nocturnal origins, the observation bubble is lined with blankets and pillows. In fact, it seems almost designed not for observation, but for returning to that “dream.” It’s cozy, dark, and requires one to lie down. Sleep, or at least relaxation, is strongly suggested as its main intent, and certainly a man whose star has fallen quite as much as Steve’s had would take any opportunity he had to recapture a dream…however hazy it might be by this point.

The engine room is glossed over, as is the fact that the unpaid interns are responsible for repairing it. Steve mentions that he can’t afford to fix the bearing cases. Nor can he afford to fix the ship’s electrical problems. Nor can he afford to finance his own films anymore. Money is another film-long theme, with Steve keen to brush it aside quickly — which both he and the camera do here — as though his problems will solve themselves in time.

We’ll see how well that works out for him.

We end the tour on deck, with Steve briefly identifying his submarine, in which the film’s climax will take place, and helicopter, whose disrepair will ultimately kill the man he is currently speaking to.

The submarine is appropriately named Deep Search, with its previous monicker Jacqueline crossed out above it. (I guess Steve can’t afford yellow paint, either.) Ned’s voice asks what happened to Jacqueline, and Steve replies that she didn’t really love him. The submarine was named after a woman in Steve’s life who is no longer in the picture, and we’ll discuss the payoff the name-change later on, when Steve shows off his similarly altered tattoo.

So that’s Eleanor, Mandeeza, Catherine Plimpton and now Jacqueline, and we’re only sixteen minutes into the film. We’ll shortly learn about a 15 year old girl Steve hit on at a French disco. Captain Zissou’s had a busy love life, and, it’s important to note, none of it actually lasts.

It’s also worth noting that Jacqueline is the feminine form of Jacques, as in Jacques Cousteau, an obvious influence for Steve both in and outside of the reality of the film.

Darkness falls on Steve’s fantasy tour — at precisely the moment Steve acknowledges a darkness of his own — and we find ourselves back in reality. We are at the Explorers Club, and in sharp contrast to the Team Zissou uniform Steve was wearing in the previous scene, we see that he’s actually still wearing his suit from last night, wrinkled and disheveled with an undone bowtie around his neck, making it clear that he never changed out of it when he went to bed. Ned, on the other hand, is neatly pressed and presentable. It’s obvious that one of them sees this experience as more of an honor than the other.

Ned also respectfully removes his hat when indoors. Steve, unsurprisingly by this point, does not.

Both men find themselves staring at paintings of their father figures, another passive mirroring that I think reinforces the idea that they are, in fact, father and son. Steve stares at a painting of Lord Mandrake, and Ned lingers on a painting of Steve, which he calls “very lifelike,” despite the fact that the graceful demeanor of the man in the painting is nothing at all like the unwound and directionless man beside him.

When Ned says it’s “very lifelike,” it means two things: it’s life-like, in the sense that it’s like the real thing but perhaps not quite accurate, and also that it’s true to his image of Steve, the one he grew up with, the one he watched on television and read about in books and wrote letters to. The real Steve has yet to supplant this ideal in Ned’s mind, however clear the disparity might be to us.

This is why Ned functions as Steve’s Ghost of Christmas Past. He remembers Steve as he once was…in his prime, in his youth, in his glory. He brings with him visions of happier times, of success and adoration.

When Eleanor asks Steve later why he wants Ned to join the crew, Steve replies, “Because he looks up to me.” This implies, I think correctly, that nobody else does. Ned is a precious resource, and Steve cannot afford to lose that. He’s his last tie — a living tie — to the past…to a seed sown when he was at his best.

It’s his last chance to harvest something he can be proud of, and it’s why he so immediately becomes concerned with Ned and Jane mingling, as Jane is his Ghost of Christmas Present, and the last thing he needs is his idealistic past being tarnished by an intrusion from present-day disappointment.

Also, Steve’s red cap and white beard make him look kinda like Santa. Happy December, everybody!

We then pass a model of Operation Hennessey’s sleeker, cleaner ship, and arrive at a painting of Steve’s nemesis. We don’t learn much about Captain Hennessey here that we didn’t know, but it’s interesting to note that we will later see this man dressed in the same way and draped across the same couch, as though this painting really did capture him for who he is. While we see Steve in his diving gear later as well, we never see him in such a calm, easy state of mind. It shows how much he’s drifted, perhaps, from when it was painted, and may indicate why he’s so uncomfortable looking at that reflected echo of his old self.

Steve then discusses with Ned the possibility of a name change: Ned Plimpton, if he would like, can change his name to Ned Zissou. Unless he also wants to change his first name to Kingsley, which is what Steve would have chosen for him.

As we’ve seen earlier in Steve’s introduction to himself and his ship, and in other cases as well, Captain Zissou needs to be in control. Here, on the first morning after meeting his son, he’s already assuming that control. While the name change begins as a suggestion, and Steve seems to accept Ned’s polite refusal, it later becomes forced on the boy, when the correspondence stock arrives we see that Steve made it out to Kingsley Zissou. Our good captain also demands that the waiter pour the wine for him to sample, as Ned “doesn’t know anything about wine.”

We’ll get into Steve’s insistent need for control later, but for now I want to draw attention to an interesting jump cut here. We go from the waiter pouring wine to Steve downing a glass, with a few seconds of footage snipped out.

I don’t know what to call these cuts, but I love them, and Anderson’s used them a few other times. In The Royal Tenenbaums we cut from Royal insisting to see Richie in the hospital to turning around and leaving because the porter has turned up to throw him out. In The Darjeeling Limited we cut from Peter producing a painkiller to slamming it back immediately. And later in this very film we’ll cut from Ned taking the hand of a fallen Steve to Steve being instantly back on his feet.

I like these. By trimming just a second or two of dead space Anderson creates an impact for moments that might not seem as urgent otherwise.

Steve then overhears some other members of the club discussing his failures, and this is the second introduction to Team Zissou for Ned…and also the one Steve doesn’t have control over. This is his present seeping into and poisoning his past, and he doesn’t like it. For now Ned has the strength to overcome these influences, and even to fight back against them, but as the film progresses and Steve dismantles piece by piece all of the respect the boy still has for him, Ned will become aware of the reality at play here, and cease to see Steve as an idol.

I also want to talk a bit, perhaps oddly, about the astronaut in the background here. Or, rather, the astronaut is reminding me to talk about The Life Aquatic as a work of passive science fiction. Perhaps I’ll be able to say more about that in a future piece, but I find it interesting that Anderson seems to conjure up images of outer space when building out his movie about aquatic exploration.

After all, his choices of Bowie songs lean heavily toward science-fiction conceits: “Starman,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Life on Mars?” and, of course, “Space Oddity.” We also have “30 Century Man” by Scott Walker used at a pivotal point on the soundtrack, and now the astronaut here is given an association with oceanographic explorers. Deep space and the deep sea…aliens and mythical sea creatures…above and below. Each unknowable and treacherous in its own way, each requiring safety gear and breathing apparatae, each, essentially, an escape from our own element.

It’s interesting.

This is the first time Steve responds to a criticism about his wardrobe by removing the object being ridiculed. Here, it is his earring. Later it will be his red cap, after Jane refers to it as “contrived.” Public perception of his persona is of paramount importance for Steve, but rather than live up to his image, he’s sought instead to shut it out and isolate from it. The moment outside words reach his ears — whether following the debut of his latest film, here in the Explorers Club, or later in an article about himself, it cuts to the quick. Steve doesn’t know how to handle criticism…he only knows how to hide from it.

As before, Steve’s response to this criticism is to flee to safety. After Loquasto, he fled to his ship. Now he will flee to his compound on Pescespada Island, and he wants Ned to come along. After all, Ned just picked him up when he was feeling down…but perhaps more importantly, Ned took his side. Steve threw something away, and Ned picked it up for him. Steve fell apart, and Ned put him back together.

That’s exactly what Steve wants for Team Zissou.

However, this leads to I think a pretty valid question. Earlier, we arrived midway through a conversation between Steve and Eleanor. Steve was making a case for Ned joining them, which Eleanor ultimately accepted.

But in what sense were they discussing Ned joining them? Here Steve invites him to Pescespada Island for the first time, and there are some logistics to work out suggesting that the topic has not been raised before. And later Eleanor tries to dissuade Steve from letting Ned come aboard for their next journey.

So what, exactly, were Steve and Eleanor talking about earlier?

It’s just one question that remains unanswered as Steve acts on yet another opportunity to isolate from the cruel people who speak honestly about the things he’s actually said and done. Only this time he’s taking something with him: physical proof that at one time, he created somebody — biologically or otherwise — who could look up to him.

What’s more, Ned speaking about the mother he lost overlaps with Steve speaking about his dead best friend. Each of them have an opening in their lives. For better or for worse, they choose to fill it with each other.

Next: A God damned tearjerker.

—–
* Another thing I only noticed while putting this essay together: every current member of Team Zissou is accounted for during the ship’s tour, and each of them are clearly visible going about their duties. So who is this helmeted diver? By process of elimination, it’s Esteban. This is something I was only able to determine after the scene ended, and once you realize this is an unspoken cameo by Steve’s departed friend — swimming silently in the water that is now his grave — it’s actually a quite chilling touch. It also, of course, speaks once more to this “footage” being outdated. Better days. Only slightly, but already behind him…