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‘This is an adventure’: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and the spectacle of nature documentary

2011; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2012.629883

1740-7923

David O’Grady,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Director Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) appropriates the life and work of ocean explorer and documentary filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau to fashion the story of an adventure filmmaker adrift in his life and art. In drawing on a real, external referent in Cousteau's documentary legacy, Anderson's reflexivity reaches out of its normally hermetic shell to dramatize – and problematize – the production and reception of the nature documentary. The Life Aquatic's fiction can productively be read as a literal and metaphorical exploration of issues related to documentary as co-constituted by viewer consciousness, and as a commentary on our own expectations and desires in looking at animals through nature documentary.