Film Notes: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

In a recent interview with Variety, filmmaker David Cronenberg compared cinema to a cemetery. “It’s so interesting because I’m often watching movies in order to see dead people,” he said. “I want to see them again, I want to hear them.” He spoke then in relation to his upcoming picture The Shrouds, but 20 years ago this subject was already mined. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a work by Texas-born Wes Anderson, explores why filmmakers are so often drawn to dig cinematic graves – places to revisit the ones we love long after their last curtain call.

The film’s inciting incident happens before its start: the death of the titular Steve Zissou’s best friend, Esteban du Plantier, to the jaws of the newly discovered “jaguar shark.” Zissou wears his grief as a noose and allows himself to be dragged along by its rope through the film’s narrative. What makes up the noose are thousands of unresolved threads – relationships Zissou can’t bring himself to acknowledge as important all twisted around until they form the rope pulling him down. Chief among those relationships is du Plantier, whose death has so wounded Zissou.

Zissou was in love with du Plantier. Whether this was a romantic love or simply the deep love two friends can share, I cannot say. I wasn’t on the Belafonte during its many well-documented voyages. Zissou was, however, and he molders in those feelings while slurping down a highball glass full of Campari. 

To that end, it makes sense for Zissou to not only pursue the making of a second film where he will kill the jaguar shark, but also to have forever captured du Plantier’s last moments in the as-yet unmade movie’s part one. He is making a cemetery-for-one in that film – a way to revisit his friend, tell him he loves him, hear his voice, even though du Plantier lays digesting somewhere beneath the sea. 

Before more pointed works like Asteroid City, The Life Aquatic was Anderson’s most “movie about a movie” work – in particular, how the filmmaking process is plagued by struggles. In both the real and the fictional, budget woes ranked high among issues. For Zissou, his financial struggles represent the largest obstacle to his making the documentary at all. It puts him direct danger not just in straining his personal relationships but with the law, as he frequently steals equipment to cut costs. In an interview with Criterion, Anderson bemoans the production going eight million over budget, which he claims would never happen now. His scene partner in the video, Jeff Goldblum, counters: “Is there any shortcut to learning the things that you’ve learned without having done that?” 

“We did our movie,” is Anderson’s simple reply. So did Zissou. His documentaries exist, both representing lives, loves, and sea creatures lost to our dimension. Now, like du Plantier, they live in the moving image, in the cemetery of cinema, for Zissou and us viewers to revisit whenever we want to see and hear them again. 

A note to those more interested in sea creatures than grief: In 2012, a catshark species discovered off the Galápagos Islands was named after the fictional shark in The Life Aquatic – the jaguar catshark, or Bythaelurus giddingsi.

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