In which famed aqua-documentary man Steve Zissou (Bill Murry) goes to find the “jaguar-shark” that ate his friend; joining him is his possible son (neither of them is sure either way it seems) Ned Plimptom (Own Wilson), amongst many notable others.
Steve Zissou: I was hopin’ to go out in a flash of blazes, but I’ll probably just end up goin’ home.
Whilst Anderson’s visual tics are always recognisable, this film, more so than his previous instalments, has a peculiar surreal edge. To my mind this peculiarity, as it were, emerges from the contrasting realities of the world of Zissou and Plimpton and the world of their documentary. Visually, questionable veracity arises through the movie in two main (general) forms: the special-effects that appear to be part of Zissou’s documentary (e.g. the introduction to the vessel, and which breaks the fourth-wall of the ship) and those which appear to be part of the real-world (e.g. the fantastical presentation of the fish, which is presented to Zissou by Klaus’ son). The important, and qualifying, aspect of the latter, is that it is fantastical not because we the viewers know that it must be artificial, but because it is presented so that we cannot help but feel that it is somehow out of place – Anderson makes no effort to present (or trick us to believe that) those strange aquatic creatures as real. To the obvious examples of the really-fake fish can be added the faux-nature of fight-scenes, which are presented as if they were for a film.
Many films try to merge our sense of reality and fiction by showing that their fiction has its own gradients of fiction. For example, in The Matrix, the characters break out of a fiction (viz. the matrix) into a reality, or for example, in District 9 we are shown a (fictional) documentary (which by tautology is of a reality). In both these cases, the movie points to something more real than itself to draw in the viewer. In The Life Aquatic Anderson achieves a similar end by flipping this method around. Instead of showing how real the characters life is (e.g. by showing that it is as real as a documentary), Anderson shows us how fake their experiences are, namely, as fake as a documentary!
Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature.Jorge L. Borges (Avatars of the Tortoise)
Anderson employs a Borgesian paradox[I], and proves the reality of his fiction by showing us that reality and fiction share a mutual ideality.
[1] See Jorge Luis Borges’ “A New Refutation of Time” where he asserts that “the continuity of time is an illusion, that time exists without succession and each moment contains all eternity, which negates the very notion of “new.”” For further details see the “A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence“
