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Living in a World without Sun: Jacques Cousteau, Homo aquaticus, and the Dream of Dwelling Undersea

2018; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2018.0068

2578-4919

Jon Crylen,

History of Science and Natural History

This article examines Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s 1960s concept of Homo aquaticus in relation to three documentaries. A utopian variant of Homo sapiens that Cousteau forecast would evolve to live and work undersea, Homo aquaticus also appeared at a time when Western nations regarded the sea primarily as an exploitable resource. Cousteau’s films give expression to this idea aesthetically, in the undersea life they depict and in the array of diving technologies and underwater habitats they showcase, apparatuses that extended human reach underwater. By emphasizing Cousteau’s vanguard figure of the underwater man, this article shifts scholarly focus from Cousteau’s celebrity, his conservationist stances, and his films’ representations of wildlife to a central paradox of his early films: a poetic vision of freedom from the surface that is bound to a project of ocean domination.