Issue 132: To The Sea Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

In The Life Aquatic, Anderson preserves the eccentricity that audiences came to expect from Cousteau’s documentaries and retains Cousteau’s essential “being,” the wild nature that led him to be an explorer. He also preserves the selfishness and peculiarities that lead Zissou to be described as a “selfish maniac” and “showboat” by his crewmates.

All Alone in a Wide, Wide Sea

Kai Broach·

Issue 132: To The Sea

Geographies of Solitude uses this microtextural palette to expose what it means to be an individual subject in an unindividuated world, changed and changing in waves whose depths and breadths are beyond our reckoning.

Slapstick on Water: Man vs. Sea in Buster Keaton’s The Navigator

Harris Wheless·

Issue 132: To The Sea

The Navigator is a symphony of rich, complex harmonics: light and dark not merely accentuating each other, but becoming part of the other’s essential substance.

Our Secret, Forever

Arleigh Rodgers·

Issue 132: To The Sea

The animation of When Marnie Was There, released ten years ago this month, feels like essential Studio Ghibli: languid settings that burst with unusual color and intricate details; characters with soft expressions and round, curious eyes; glossy plates of seafood and steaming cups of rice.

The Madness of Work in The Lighthouse

Michelle Krasovitski·

Issue 132: To The Sea

Released in 2019 and set in 1890s New England, Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse is a feverish parable of labor and obsession, taking as much from Greek mythology as it does from Marxist thought.

Liquid World

Xiao Yue Shan·

Issue 132: To The Sea

Even the real sea is not the sea that we know—the sea that is Darwazah’s liberty, Varda’s heart, and Hopinka’s custodian. What has been given to us through the oceanic message is an inviolable museum of images, and that is why filmmakers—those makers, founders, and interrogators of images—will always come to seek its profundity, its point of contact between worlds.

No, Captain, My Captain: Crimson Tide and the Perils of Mutiny

Bryan Miller·

Issue 132: To The Sea

The apotheosis of mutiny movies also happens to be the rip-roaring coolest of the bunch, a piece of pure pop entertainment that—much like its director, Tony Scott—is due for reconsideration.

Oceans of Possibility: Permission, Disability, Control, and Finding Nemo

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Issue 132: To The Sea

Finding Nemo is a mood piece, an expression of fear, joy, adventure, and inner turmoil. And what better metaphor for the terrifying possibilities presented by the wider world than the heaving depths of the open ocean?