Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
2004 · Wes Anderson · The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera travel through the cutaway ship in one move. (staging)
Friedberg built a multi-level cutaway of the Belafonte so the camera could glide past engine room, lab, sauna, editing suite, and bunks, each with its crew member at his station.
Payoff: Anderson spent the money building a set so that he could show you it was built. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls the ship a crystal: a boat and the image of a boat fused into one thing.
Watch how often actors face the camera dead center. (camera)
Yeoman shoots anamorphic with rigorous symmetry, flattened backgrounds, lateral tracking, whip pans, and slow motion timed to music. People address the lens as though posed for it.
Payoff: The framing keeps announcing that this is an arrangement rather than a place you have wandered into.
Look at the uniforms, the sneakers, the red caps, the branded gear. (setting)
Canonero and Friedberg build a complete identity for Team Zissou down to the ring and the equipment. Even the sea creatures are handmade, in Henry Selick's stop motion.
Payoff: Nothing in this world pretends to be found rather than made, the animals included. In the reading: the saturated/perfect crystal. The reading calls this a perfect crystal: a sealed world of mirrors with no outside weather able to get in.
Listen for Bowie songs sung in Portuguese out on deck. (sound)
Seu Jorge plays the crew member Pele and performs acoustic covers of Rebel Rebel, Life on Mars, and Ziggy Stardust, strumming inside the scene rather than over it.
Payoff: The songs belong to the ship's daily routine, which turns pop standards into something closer to weather on board.
Watch Murray's face when Zissou is not being filmed. (performance)
Murray plays vanity, grief, and used-up charisma in Anderson's flat affect. The funding is drying up, the films do not sell, and the presenting continues anyway.
Payoff: The design is immaculate and the man inside it is running out. You can see both at the same time.
Once you have seen it
Track which scenes Zissou is shooting for his own documentary. (structure)
He narrates the expedition into legend while living it, so you are watching a film about the making of a film. Whether the adventures are staged never gets settled.
Payoff: Truth stops being the interesting question, and what remains is a man telling his own life as an expedition log. In the reading: the forger (le faussaire). The reading calls him a forger: someone who manufactures truth rather than finding it, legending himself as he goes.
Watch how worn the Belafonte and its equipment actually are. (setting)
Underneath the perfect design the operation is failing: money gone, crew unpaid, a better-funded rival in the water, and the wife who ran the enterprise no longer aboard.
Payoff: The dollhouse is in decline, and the immaculate design starts working like embalming rather than decoration.
Watch what Zissou does when the jaguar shark finally appears. (performance)
The revenge plan stops. He sits in the submersible with the crew packed around him, looks at the animal, and wonders aloud whether it remembers him. Sigur Ros plays.
Payoff: The film's engine switches off and leaves a man who can only look, which is where the feeling finally arrives plainly.
Count how many sequences are cut to a piece of music. (cutting)
Moritz builds the film out of held tableaux broken by sudden movement, with set pieces synchronized to Mothersbaugh's toy synthesizers or to a song already being played on deck.
Payoff: The rhythm is musical rather than dramatic, which is why losses and triumphs land at the same temperature.
Carry this in: Watch the seams. Anderson shows you the built set, the handmade fish, and the feeling running under both.