Water Blog

The Creature climbs out of the primordial waters to catch a quick peek at the man he would one day become if he only played his evolutionary cards right. Look at em there, dancing and laughing, without a care in the world. Tugging along in a rickety old steam boat, navigating the Amazonian river in search of a rogue military Colonial, or perhaps they’re looking for a mythical anaconda, or maybe they’re hauling some dynamite, with the intention of blowing up a Nazi warship.

After surviving waterfalls, slings and arrows, leeches and vampire bats, we are eventually deposited into the ocean. The biggest, most challenging body of water on earth; deep, resonant, and powerful. The ocean works hand in hand with the moon to determine the tides, shaping and sculpting sand, stone and shell. The ocean has it’s own gravity: pulling us back, luring us in, tempting us, to come back, to return to the place that spawned us.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1958) is a quiet, introspective movie based on the quiet, introspective novel of the same name written by Ernest Hemingway. The film was scripted by Peter Viertel and directed by John Sturges. The cinematography by Floyd Crosby andJames Wong Howe is richly saturated in Oranges and Reds, painting a portrait of the sleepy little fishing village in Cuba where Spencer Tracy, the old man, lives. With precious little dialogue, mostly in narration, Spencer Tracy plays the old man with weary integrity, reflecting on the adventurous life he’s led, as he tirelessly pursues the one giant catch that would feed him, body and soul, and allow him to at long last, rest.

Bodies of Water may have become permanent symbolic metaphors within the realm of American Popular Culture in1884 when Mark Twain published THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN: Huck, the wily young racist scamp, grows more and more mature and increasingly sensitive to the pain of others, in particular his traveling companion, a runaway slave named Jim, the further down river he goes. Followed by Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS in 1902: Marlow, the wily young racist Englishman, becomes more and more like Kurtz, the rogue agent he’s sent to capture.

In DELIVERANCE (1972), four city-slickers roll into the backwoods of Georgia determined to canoe down the most treacherous, unyielding river in the state. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by James Dickey, DELIVERANCE takes essentially the same route as Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS. But, rather than using the trip up river (or down river) to symbolize man’s inhumanity to man, Dickey chose to show what can happen when the Modern Urban Civilized Man goes slumming, and discovers how animalistic the human animal truly is.

The fact is, rather than attempting to conquer the unstoppable flow of rivers and tides, it’s best to just hop on and ride it to the end.

There’s the classic, slipshot doc ENDLESS SUMMER (1966); John Milius’ masterful coming of age drama BIG WEDNESDAY (1978); the best action movie ever made about surfing bank robbers, POINT BREAK (1991); and the maddeningly, disturbingly, criminally overlooked documentary RIDING GIANTS (2004).

-M.G. Wood

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