(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
“Towards an Appreciation of the Ridiculous Jaguar Shark”
Others have covered this film well enough, so I only offer a passing remark. All the while reveling in a battery of self-references lining the interior of Anderson’s script, The Life Aquatic also seems bent on taking on a life of its own in the hyper-active literary imaginations of its viewers. Around it swirls a constellation of tropes, figures, and visual cues that flirt with comparison to other, more grounded points of reference (such as the allusions to 8 1/2that open the film).
Jaques Cousteau is at the helm of these references, on a quest with overtones of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea motivated by undertones of Moby Dick. Sure there is more, and at times these intratextual transparencies are as improbable as Portuguese covers of David Bowie tracks. But the film is at is best when this madcap parallelomania rests at its lowest ebb. The final discovery of the Jaguar Shark (ostensibly the point of the whole film), for example, is as unexpectedly touching as it is original. The shark himself is such an artificial, referenceless intrusion into the script that he seemed to have left the special effects studio intentionally overblown, cartoonish, and sublimely ridiculous. Yet the crew sits beneath the sea in their sub gazing at this shark as if it is the realest and most profound thing they have ever seen. Over the course of the film they have battled real pirates, dealt with serious paternity issues, and wrestled with the past. And here they are swooning over a totally fakey shark.
But I think this ironical appreciation of the ridiculous Jaguar Shark is what it is all about. For most of the crew aboard the SS Wes Anderson, a bona fide sea change occurs during the course of the film. We can see it in their gaze at the very end as this shark is sweeping past the portals of the sub. Immersed in the grandeur of the deep, the boundaries of their world are increased by something that doesn’t actually belong in it. It is a sign that by any standards is as profound as a still from The Little Mermaid, but yet is rendered gently poetic by Anderson’s direction. This could be read as a moment of clarity for Anderson, or at least for his fans. On the surface it is one of his most disconnected and arbitrary images, but beneath its pixilated skin breathes something beautiful and real. Though it is a moment of obscene artifice, it sure is a holy one.