The ocean is fucking crazy. Love it or hate it, or be weirdly indifferent to it, there’s no denying this simple fact. I grew up amongst mountains and valleys, rolling farmland and barren swaths of former forest decimated by logging operations, over two hundred miles from the nearest coast. I’ve always been more of a creeks and rivers guy (lakes are too spooky), but the ocean has nevertheless held a mysterious, nearly mystical sway over my imagination. This is probably just a combination of its unimaginable vastness and my own unfamiliarity with it due to a lack of proximity, but anyone who grew up reading stories about unexplained disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle should at least understand my mixture of reverence and fear for that big blue geographical majority of our planet. Even my seashell-obsessed girlfriend, who spent a large part of her childhood near the ocean and is an enthusiastic “beach person,” gets pretty skeeved out at the thought of snorkeling. She doesn’t wanna know what’s going on down there!
As a teenager, my high school’s soccer program would periodically set up beach trips for both the Varsity and JV teams. These coed weekends would inevitably revolve around underage drinking, exploratory drug use (shout out to the old school head shops of Virginia Beach and “knowing how to ask”) and fumbling attempts at some manner of sex, with the crashing waves of the Atlantic and long stretches of flat sand eerily illuminated by the sparse placement of street lamps along the boardwalk serving as a portentous backdrop for misspent youth. Being a diehard dork, I didn’t participate in much of the misbehavior and would instead spend the hot sticky evenings cruising around the area on a skateboard I barely knew how to ride, pressing down the half-erections inspired by any local girls who looked “punk,” and staring out at the ocean so alien to me, letting my imagination run wild. I always had a small photo in my wallet (naturally attached to my shorts via chain) of Albert Camus, cut from some magazine, hair slicked back, hand-rolled cigarette in mouth and staring forlornly out at one of those gorgeous south of France seascapes. I suppose I was imagining myself as a kindred spirit, emotionally tormented over the state of the world and therefore unable to bask in the foolish pleasures offered by it, gazing out at the sea like some martyred prophet. But the truth is that I was just an unjustifiably pretentious dork who was terrified of women, too awkward to make friends and cursed with the inability to eke out more than the worst poetry ever written. I guess not much has changed!
Fast forward two decades and I still prefer reading a book on the beach to splashing around in the waves. I tell myself that literature is a gateway to knowledge and understanding; supposedly my empathy grows in accordance with the variety of stories devoured. But the truth is that I’m still a pretentious little shit sitting on the beach, self-isolating from the world that surrounds me, hidden behind the walls of some novel and basking in the idea that I’m smarter than the beach bums, the surfers, the Instagram models and obnoxious gaggles of the young and assumedly unconcerned. I judge them. I’m an asshole. Dismissive of their lived reality, ignorant of their concerns, their dreams, their successes and failures, the shared emotional ecosystems that make us more alike than different as we do our own things on the same shared stretch of sand. I’m still mystified and perplexed by the terrible power of the ocean that we’ve all gathered together to enjoy, and equally confounded by the incalculably smaller but equally unknowable little oceans that are the people who surround me. Roiled by their own currents, coral reefs constructed of memory and regret, their personalities just endless strands of seaweed and other assorted detritus floating around inside of them. Just like me. There we go: more bad poetry.
Another memory: I’m in my early twenties and somewhere in Virginia Beach again, renting a house with my roommates and their friends from high school, one of whom will later serve in the military and suffer PTSD and eventually paranoid schizophrenia. We have been smoking weed all day. Earlier I was sitting in the backseat of a car that drove slowly past a child’s birthday party in a yard. Children playing while an adult dressed in a Barney costume attempts to entertain them. My friend and I in the backseat, high out of our minds but the people in the front seat don’t know. We are mesmerized by the purple dinosaur. As the kids run inside the house, the dinosaur turns around and looks at the car, looks directly at us. It reaches up and removes its head. Just before the human face would be revealed, our vehicle turns a corner and it’s gone. My friend and I look at each other; did that really happen? Later we are at the beach. We are swimming in the ocean and are still completely stoned, even more so. We have swum into a dangerous riptide but don’t know it. Our friends on the beach are waving at us, equally oblivious to the danger we’re in. We wave back, attempt to swim back in, gradually realize that we can’t. So stoned. Becoming more and more frightened. We shout at each other, compare our difficulties. We are moving further and further away from the beach, away from our waving friends. I struggle so hard. My muscles are screaming, my breathing becomes more labored. We admit to each other that we don’t think we’ll make it. I give up. Stop swimming, stop struggling. The water seems to tug at me gently, almost friendly. I tell my friend I love him and accept death. Just like that. Some kind of freak wave hits us and we glide softly out of the riptide, swim to the beach and sit there staring out at our would-be aquatic tomb. We agree that we each accepted death and were weirdly calm about it. At peace. Later that night we laugh about it and make fun of ourselves. The ocean almost killed us; we will swim in it again the following day.
This week I watched two films that ostensibly involve the ocean. Although both could be forced under the blanket genre of Horror, they are vastly different in tone and approach. Both also plumb unexpected depths of meaning, ideas floating freely beneath their placid surfaces. Both are also a tough sell to anyone who might be sleepy. Let’s dive in… (sorry)
SMILEY FACE KILLERS (2020) dir. Tim Hunter
Weirdly enough, this film is “inspired by true events” that had nothing to do with the ocean. The so-called Smiley Face Killings were a series of drownings that took place across the Midwest from the late 1990s to the 2010s, the victims of which were all young men, reportedly popular, athletic and outgoing. “Jocks,” if you will. All 45 of these deaths have officially been deemed accidental drownings, taking place in various non-oceanic bodies of water across 11 different states, and have been chalked up to the inebriation of the collegiate dead. However, two retired detectives from New York City have posited and maintained a theory that these deaths were all connected murders committed by some unknown killer or killers, citing as evidence the common profile of the victims and the discovery of smiley face graffiti near the locations where they believe the bodies were dumped. It’s certainly a bit of a stretch, and I don’t think that the theory is super well-respected amongst law enforcement or the victims’ friends & families. But it’s a compelling yarn nonetheless and the exact kind of story that you could reconfigure into a generic Netflix-produced thriller in 2020. That, however, is exactly what this film is not.
Penned by the infamous (and insufferable) Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Tim Hunter, who legitimately transformed my generation’s culture and blew our collective minds with 1986’s River’s Edge before eventually becoming a reliably dark helmer for episodes of various cult television shows, Smiley Face Killers transposes the action to its creators’ native Los Angeles and replaces the murky bodies of water of the Midwest with the deceptive violence of the picturesque Pacific. But this is no coastal tour and honestly the film has very little to do with the ocean at all. A mythos is imposed upon our villains that combines some degree of ocean worship, medieval sectarianism and medically achieved bloodletting/vampirism, but this is never really explored and mostly just floats at the periphery to enhance the sense of rising dread that Ellis and Hunter cultivate throughout. What matters is that there is a genuine threat stalking our protagonist, Jake, who suffers from a bipolar disorder that he has become reluctant to treat with his prescribed medication. Portrayed with a convincing natural realism by IRL environmental activist (and actor) Ronen Rubinstein, Jake comes across as the kind of genuinely likable and hardworking athlete that would naturally become a popular and successful person without the benefit of any nepotism or malice, but you would’ve had a hard time explaining that to a narrow-minded, teenage punk like me. The characters in general do navigate an admittedly privileged world of upper-class southern Californian academia, but this is the world that Ellis knows best so the depiction feels legit. Jake’s struggle with mental illness can serve as either an entryway or a barrier to your connection with the character, depending on your own assumptions and prejudices.
Jake’s decision to disemploy his medication tragically coincides with his selection by our sea-worshipping cultists to torment, stalk and sacrifice him. Increasingly paranoid, he is followed by a white van and repeatedly receives text messages from an unknown number informing him that “THE WATER WANTS YOU.” We eventually learn that Jake has gone off his meds before, and as his concern over the texts becomes more urgent his friends are skeptical that anything is actually happening outside of his own head. We observe with increasing pity as the stress derails his superficially perfect life and death encroaches upon him. The entire scenario feels distressingly true to life, as anyone who has struggled with mental health issues can surely attest, and the lack of concern that our society holds for the mental well-being of its supposed uber-males reveals itself as the true villain, as many soldiers currently struggling with PTSD could testify. Jake allows himself to utter desperate pleas for patience and understanding, but never comes right out and demands the help that his friends should be willing to provide. We cringe as his behavior becomes more erratic, his irrational anger escalates and he increasingly alienates those around him. The strong performances are key to maintaining the stressful atmosphere as Hunter constructs the film around his characters to maximize the building of dread.
Visually this film plays out like a wet dream for a certain type of cineaste (namely: me). Shots are long and patient, the camera lingers over scenes and takes in the subtle details that quicker editing tends to disregard. There are multiple segments that simply follow Jake as he bicycles around town, visiting his girlfriend, going to soccer practice, attending parties, occasionally punctuated by casual synths and the creeping appearance of his stalkers’ white van. A lot of audiences will probably find it boring. The excision of any real slasher elements will frustrate horror fans looking for that lurid fix, although in the few scenes where violence does arrive it is positively gruesome. This lends actual weight to the bloodshed and serves to churn the stomach rather than reward the salacious urge. Jake himself is essentially the “final girl” so popular in the genre, but his fate is significantly more hopeless from the beginning (as the story’s basis in reality dictates). Rubinstein is a stud for sure, and the camera tends to linger on his physique at every opportunity. This objectification of the male—and resultant queering of the “male gaze” so openly accepted throughout the history of film studies—is refreshing in a genre more known for its dismissive ogling of women, but it never derails our empathy with Jake as a fully human character. It also sets up our expectations for his strength to save him in the end. But the film, like the crimes that inspired it, offers no such happy ending.
As the intensity of Jake’s mental and emotional breakdown ramped up, I kept thinking about a kid from my high school who took his own life just a year before we all graduated. He was also an athlete, a valuable member of the football team, and extremely popular. He was an extremely friendly guy who never seemed to participate in any of the cruelty enacted by his peers. Nevertheless I always wrote him off as just another jock, interchangeable with the letter jacket-clad human scenery that I couldn’t wait to leave behind. One morning of our junior year, during 1st period, he intentionally drove his brand new pickup truck full-speed into the side of the auditorium, dying instantly. The entire community was in a state of disbelief, as he had never exhibited any obvious signs of mental or emotional distress. He had seemed to have it all, and I guess he never felt comfortable enough to reach out for help. Phillip committed suicide, but my ignorant assumptions about his life—along with everybody else’s—were also a part of what killed him.
ÉVOLUTION (2015) dir. Lucile Hadzihalilovic
There are certain films that you just want to live in. For me, the top contenders would probably be Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971) and the third segment (look it up and attempt to judge me!) from Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1973), but for my girlfriend the ideal cinematic home is the world conjured by Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s second full-length feature Évolution. Any lover of the sea could probably understand why. Opening with absolutely gorgeous underwater photography of undulating coral, darting schools of shimmering fish and the impossibly vibrant punctuation of a red starfish, the film immediately hypnotizes and never lets go. Filmed on and around the island of Lanzarote, Spain, the aesthetic vibe is uniquely mesmerizing, somehow both vivid and drab in equal measure. The story that plays out in this environment is equally paradoxical in its telling, both understated and ghastly. This is a mermaid movie that hits like a philosophy lecture delivered entirely through images, with David Cronenberg at the podium (if he was capable of hitting the beach for a tan).
The film concerns a young boy named Nicolas who lives in a spartan seaside town populated entirely by other young boys and adult women. No girls, no men. As it progresses we come to realize along with him that the women are something other than human, and that the boys may be in danger. Essentially a silent film, the story—as it exists—is gradually revealed through quietly disturbing segments of worm-infused gruel, corpses on the seafloor, and the experimental chambers of a macabre hospital where the young boys are eventually kept. For all of the ostensible horrors of its images, the presentation remains striking in its simple beauty and the shots are never occluded with enough darkness to rob them of their vitality. Hadzihalilovic has an eye for framing and a knack for lighting that renders every single shot worthy of inclusion in some coffee-table photography book, and her ability to parse out a compelling narrative almost entirely through visuals and subtle shifts in the droning soundtrack that undergirds them makes for a singularly compelling and surprisingly emotional experience.
Stella, a nurse at the mysterious hospital, grows attached to Nicolas, fascinated by his drawings of the human life he lived and barely remembers before ending up on the island. Her interest in his previous existence and obvious discomfort with the detached nature of the facility hints at a growing curiosity towards and empathy with the “other,” this human boy whom she has been taught to artificially impregnate, harvest and dismiss—as with so many before him—with the cool indifference that we humans display towards any number of living species utilized and sacrificed for our own comfort and continuance. A scene of the mermaid nurses watching actual footage of a human caesarian birth is otherworldly and bizarre, effectively rendering alien this most basic moment of human existence and solidifying the seemingly impossible chasm of difference between distinct lifeforms. Thus Stella’s rebellion against the speciesist beliefs and practices of her own society in an effort to save Nicolas becomes a truly subversive rejection of the socially prescribed and perpetuated prejudices standing in the way of mutual existence. Her compassion and understanding outweigh the ethnocentric drive for survival.
But this is no fairy tale. The triumph of Nicolas’s escape is undercut by the revelation of the human world he has been delivered back to. A horizon cluttered and marred by the flaming columns of industry, the crashing metallic sounds of an artificial landscape echoing over the sea to the boat he is floating in. Stella has disappeared back into the water, and he takes a final look at the distant island he has just escaped, perched silently on the glassy ocean surface, a seemingly idyllic sentinel quietly observing the poisonous toxins that humankind’s towers belch into the atmosphere. A boy, who will become a man, back in his pernicious element. There exists no middle ground for the two characters to share, no ideal harmony of shared resources and compassionate coexistence. As the film closes, Nicolas remains perched at the edge of both worlds, temporarily suspended in a limbo between two extremes, contrasting in many ways but coldly similar in their consumption and destruction of resources. Perhaps another world will become possible, a third way imbibed with the spirit of connection shared so briefly by Nicolas and Stella. Maybe one day. Somewhere, beyond the sea…
*this track by Split Enz is definitely my favorite ocean-related song of all time, and the video is pretty chill despite the dated & problematic depiction of island dwellers. But on an entirely different wavelength, I also watched Godzilla vs. Kong three times this week and wanted to share some music that perfectly mashes up lizard brain riffage with the percussive charms of apelike fury. Leave it to fellow residents of Oceania, Miserable Creature, to perfectly deliver the goods. This is monster battle music and I love it.