The sound of silence

The Spectator, May 2021

The sound of silence

While a few went to the Moon, Jacques Cousteau was opening the oceans to all.

For a few years in my youth, I tried to be a scuba diver. In the deep pool of the 63rd Street Y, I learned how to clean my goggles and clear my air regulators. In a lake in upstate New York, I earned my certification by swimming around a junked car in 40 feet of murky water. I went on to dive to some cold wrecks in Rhode Island and to swim among the warm sea life of Key Largo. But it wasn’t for me. The bobbing boats and the heavy equipment caused much discomfort. In one dive I banged my head against the tank of my divemate and nearly got knocked out. It was all less elegant, and quite a bit more involved, than I had expected.

My inspiration, of course, had been Jacques Cousteau. The French underwater explorer dived the world’s oceans a generation ago as both celebrity and icon. His ubiquity then is now only matched by his cultural absence today. Since his passing in 1997 his reputation has sunk, much like his beloved ship Calypso.

There was always more beneath that red knit cap. For those of us brought up on the compressed air of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, his primetime series broadcast from 1966 through 1976, and The Cousteau Odyssey, its PBS follow-up of 1977-82, the gaseous emissions of these environmental ‘reality’ shows can cut against the true reality of a philandering adventurer who found his share of trouble both under the surface and under the covers.

The Silent World — Le Monde du silence — Cousteau’s early landmark film of 1956, presents an artful submersion into his lasting achievements. Codirected by the 23-year- old Louis Malle, who went on to give us My Dinner With André and Au revoir les enfants, the film won an Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes — the only documentary to receive both honors.

With Malle behind the lens, The Silent World revels in the abstractions of the depths. Created at the dawn of the space age, the film shows us an alternative space, equally mysterious, more sensual, far more palatable, with the tricolore fluttering from the mast of Calypso hundreds of feet above. In its accented voice and imagery, The Silent World has become so iconic, so repeated, even so parodied that it is all the more remarkable to view its scenes in their original presentation. Unlike Cousteau’s later television work, the film is now widely available online. Sixty-five years on, it deserves a deeper dive.

The Silent World opens with a pop. A balloon covering an underwater flare inflates and explodes. The divers of Calypso descend holding their burning red torches. Perrier-sized bubbles of noxious gases rise to the surface like rocket exhaust.

‘These divers, wearing the compressed air aqualung, are true space men, swimming free as fish,’ begins the narration. ‘These are the divers of the Calypso, the research ship of the undersea explorer, Captain Cousteau.’ The cameras, the lights and the mobile air regulation were all as new as moon suits. Much of it had been developed and refined by Cousteau himself since World War Two, when Lieutenant Cousteau and the engineer Émile Gagnan tested their first aqualungs, the early scuba design that freed divers from the copper suits, leaden feet and heavy lines then required to pump air down from the surface.

Like its namesake nymph who detained Odysseus, Calypso captivated Cousteau just as it transported a world audience. The malt magnate Thomas Loel Guinness bought the American-made minesweeper from a ferry company in 1950 and leased it to Cousteau for a franc a year. The arrangement was not revealed until after Cousteau’s death, all on the understanding that Cousteau would never ask Guinness to fund his adventures. Instead, bankrolled and maintained by Simone Melchior, his beleaguered wife who sailed on every voyage but never appeared onscreen, the ship received a viewing pod riveted to its prow and oceanographic and videographic equipment outfitted bow to stern.

Cousteau was a promiscuous fundraiser as much as he was a precocious adulterer. Before the launch of his environmentalist Cousteau Society in 1974, his major funders were oil companies out to develop deep-sea drilling. His ‘Conshelf’ undersea pods of the 1960s were prototype saturation platforms, allowing divers to live and drill for oil at depth without the dangers of decompression. In the 1950s, British Petroleum and the Compagnie française des pétroles sent Cousteau to the Trucial Coast, where some tiny sheikdoms were about to taste the Texas tea lapping beneath their Arabian sands. It was this exploratory voyage, through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, that provided the two years of footage used to create The Silent World.

A flâneur of the fishy realm, Cousteau would as soon eat, pickle, lacerate, cage, torture or blow up his discoveries as protect them. In The Silent World, he manages to document each one of these achievements. In one scene, he and his crew dive for spiny lobsters to make a shipboard feast. As it turns out, most of the lobsters were purchased at a market in Marseille. Meanwhile a related plot device regarding nitrogen narcosis was made up out of thin air. In another scene, flying fish land on the Calypso’s deck. ‘In the morning,’ Cousteau explains, ‘we simply pick them up for breakfast. They are very tasty.’

For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life. In The Silent World, he and the crew hitch rides on sea turtles and stand on giant tortoises. He locks up an annoying grouper he nicknames Ulysses in a shark cage.

‘In order to take back a brief sampling of the reef,’ he says, ‘we must unfortunately cause some damage.’ What that means here is the use of underwater dynamite. ‘For the purpose of scientific study, it is the only method for taking a census of all of the varieties in an area,’ he says, detonating an explosive that shatters all the fish in the area.

‘For every 10 fish killed, only one or two float to the surface. The rest sink with injured air bladders, and only divers can collect them all. At the bottom we swim into a tragic scene.’ The tragedy ends as a gasping puffer fish, filled with water, disgorges its final gulp. ‘When this puffer fish is in danger, he inflates himself with water so the enemy can’t swallow him. But the trick does not work against dynamite,’ Cousteau concludes.

The most startling scene of The Silent World concerns the crew’s encounter with a large pod of sperm whales. One of his crew-members, Cousteau explains, wants to fulfill his dream of harpooning a whale. The Calypso then steers too close to the pod and rams one of the creatures with its underwater observation room. ‘We’ve crashed into a whale. I listen to its cries of distress,’ says Cousteau. ‘Then just before our eyes the drama becomes a tragedy.’ In ‘childish carelessness’ a whale calf falls behind the pack and is lacerated by Calypso’s propeller. ‘We speed up to harpoon him. We must put the whale out of its misery. The little whale fights bravely to keep up with his parents. The baby cannot be saved. We all feel very bad about the baby whale. Dumas gets his rifle and makes a merciful end to his suffering.’

But that’s not all the drama. As the whale’s blood spills through the water, dozens of sharks begin to circle the fresh carcass. The first bite ‘is the signal for the orgy to begin,’ says Cousteau. ‘Every seaman hates the shark. After what we have seen, the divers can’t be held back. They get anything they can to avenge the whale.’ After killing the whale, the Cousteau crew then hauls the sharks on board to bludgeon them with the blunt ends of their axes. In a final, comic scene, a diver sticks a suckerfish to the back of another seaman.

In 2004, Wes Anderson released The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that tanked at the box office despite an all-star cast and lavish budget. One reason the film may have failed to find its audience is that this send-up of Cousteau, played by a dyspeptic, thin-skinned, money-grubbing Bill Murray, seemed so unlike the beloved Cousteau we thought we knew. As it turns out, the film portrayed Cousteau more honestly than Cousteau did himself.

The ownership of Calypso was not the only secret the diver maintained in life. He also kept a secret family and married his much younger mistress upon Melchior’s death in 1990. As his philandering has come to the surface, the dysfunction exhibited between the two sides of the family has divided the Cousteau legacy and kept Calypso rotting in dry dock after it was sunk and salvaged in the port of Singapore in 1996. A 2016 French biopic called L’odyssée took even more air out of Cousteau’s reputation, focusing on the troubled relationship he maintained with his sons — leading up to the death in 1979 of Philippe Cousteau, who died while piloting the Calypso II, the PBY Catalina flying boat that featured in the opening credits of the television series.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans. He explored the seas as a post-Napoleonic savant. He told its story as a latter-day Jules Verne. He was not, as it turns out, a saint in life. But nor should he be seen as a sinner in death. Cast aside our Anglo morality, our enviro-puritanism, and the Cousteau who bubbles up is, simply put, French.

Snowbound at City Ballet

THE NEW CRITERION

Snowbound at City Ballet

On Kyle Abraham’s When We Fell, performed by New York City Ballet.

Video killed the ballet star. At least that’s the impression we got watching the many attempts over the past year at translating the ballet stage to the computer screen. Iced out of the David H. Koch Theater, last fall New York City Ballet tried to turn up the heat for the final week of its digital fall season with five video premieres. To its credit, the pre-recorded programs gratefully brought ballet out onto the streets. Coming home from the office one evening, I happened to see one of the works in production, with the principal dancer Taylor Stanley moving fluidly, then spastically, as if suddenly possessed, as he stood up from a bench in Riverside Park.

The joy of seeing live dance—even just a few seconds of it set to recorded music—seemed far removed from the treacly, overedited final product that ensued. Created by Justin Peck, with Jody Lee Lipes as the director of photography, that sneaker ballet became just another Nike ad, in this case set to Chris Thile’s earworm of a tune called “Thank You, New York.” Really, no thanks. Another reason to pack up and move to Texas.

Despite the talent of their choreographers and dancers, the other four works fared little better. The problem was the overly redolent filmmaking by Ezra Hurwitz and cinematography by Jon Chema. In Andrea Miller’s “new song,” set to music by the executed Chilean singer Víctor Jara, the perfume was at its fullest, and was in fact quite evocative. But ballet does not need quick cuts, smokey closeups, and lens flares. Just let dancers dance.

With its new spring initiative, City Ballet has learned from the mistakes of last fall. The mandate to let dancers dance is what makes choreographer Kyle Abraham’s latest video premiere, called When We Fell, so compelling. Developed with eight City Ballet dancers during a three week residency—“COVID-compliant,” we are assured—at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York, the ballet offers a haunting return to form. Co-directed by Abraham and the cinematographer Ryan Marie Helfant, When We Fell captures the performers in 16-millimeter black-and-white film as they move across the Koch Theater stage and, even more affectingly, Philip Johnson’s mezzanine. Now the cameras are static, often fitted with a fisheye lens, so that the point of view resembles surveillance footage switching intermittently among feeds. In the otherwise empty theater—empty of all of us for far too long—the work feels like “night at the ballet,” or day at the ballet, with the ghosts of dance filling the shadows.

But of course, the Koch theater has not been entirely vacant this past year. Those colossal marble statues, enlarged by Lincoln Kirstein from tiny figurines by Elie Nadelman, have kept watch over the hall. With bodysuit costumes by Marc Happel, in When We Fell the dancers arrive as marble halfway made flesh. In her pantomime poses, the soloist Claire Kretzschmar enters the scene as a Nadelman sculpture herself, at times come to life, at others returning to the cold stone of the space.

Captured at various angles, this ballet, which remains available for streaming through Thursday, makes the most of the rigid geometries of the mezzanine’s architecture. The dancers move like chess pieces across the gridded marble floor. They watch one another. Then they freeze in position, as when the corps dancer India Bradley pauses in penché. Taylor Stanley is most adroit at incorporating Abraham’s liquid breakdancing flow with the Balanchine technique—two dance traditions that are not so far removed as one might imagine. Done right, the hip-hop dancing looks like ballet in reverse, with movement made strange, popping and melting down. The opening music of “Piece for Four Pianos,” by Morton Feldman, adds to the odd emptiness as it seemingly reverberates through the vacant theater.

We should not expect such ballet, at moments like this, to resolve into the Nutcracker Suite. And indeed, as Abraham’s sixteen-minute work continues, it shifts from the mezzanine to the Koch Theater stage, with dancers now overanimated by the cacophony of Jason Moran’s “All Hammers and Chains,” which sounds as advertised. As the performers dance past one another, an abundance of cabriole leaps and fouetté turns by the apprentice KJ Takahashi resolves into a pas de deux. Now the lighting designer Dan Scully shines a backlight on the principals Lauren Lovette and Taylor Stanley and it seems as if we observe them from offstage. Nico Muhly supplies the music, titled “Falling Berceuse,” for this elegiac coda. Finally the camera zooms out to reveal dapples of light that turn out to be the faceted lamps of the Koch auditorium, so well known, but here become strange. Created during a snowy residency in upstate New York, When We Fell captures that eerie, snowbound feeling of a year in frozen isolation.

Man & Beast

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reads the essay “Man & beast,” his reflections on the zoo from the May issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2021

Man & Beast

On the un-zooing of the zoo 

What is so wild about If I Ran the Zoo? Don’t ask young Gerald McGrew. It was hard to escape the news when, on March 2, the zoo-loving protagonist of Dr. Seuss’s 1950 children’s book was captured and caged along with five other titles. The author’s own estate threw away the key to what quickly became the endangered species of its archive. The confinement not only ended the publication and licensing of six books. The move also cut into our ability to buy used copies of the books online. eBay announced it was “sweeping our marketplace” to remove these titles that now violated the company’s “offensive material policy.” The street price for ragged copies shot up a hundred fold. Overnight, Mein Kampf became more available than the anapestic tetrameters of that “New Zoo, McGrew Zoo.”

Somewhere between “Pasternak, Boris” and “Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr,” “Seuss, Dr.” might seem like an unexpected addition to the samizdat library. Yet some have long looked to cancel the writer beloved by generations for hitting the funny bones of children while twisting the tongues of parents. This year for “Read Across America Day,” the National Education Association declined to acknowledge Seuss at its annual March event that is, in fact, timed to coincide with the author’s birthday (Seuss had been the focus of the event during both the Obama and Trump administrations). Faced with the full loss of its intellectual property’s value, “working with a panel of experts, including educators,” Seuss Enterprises instead used the birthday to announce that six Seuss books were the first things to go—like stockings hung all in a row.

Born in 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel had the misfortune of beginning his career as a college humorist at a time when nothing was funny, at least by today’s standards. Some of Seuss’s sophomoric efforts were indeed cringe-making by anyone’s standards. As his early work has been unearthed, activists have painted Seuss as an unregenerate racist who encoded hate into everything from The Cat in the Hat’s supposed minstrelry to Horton’s unwanted paternalism in hearing that Who.

The indictment of If I Ran the Zoo speaks not only to a modern problem with Seuss but also to a modern problem with zoos. Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens are the married academics behind an organization called The Conscious Kid that has led the prosecution against the book. With over two million followers, their Instagram account is the kind that promises to reveal “Childhood nursery rhymes you didn’t realize were racist.” In their 2019 study called The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books, the two make a diversity audit of Seuss and particularly target If I Ran the Zoo.

By scouring the world, or at least the world of his dreams, for unusual animals “to be put on display in the White male’s zoo,” according to the authors of the study, Gerald McGrew traffics in Orientalism, subservience, “exotification, stereotypes, and dominance”:

In addition to White males dominating the presence and speaking roles of characters, their violence is used as a tool of White masculinity to support dominance and White supremacy over additional forms of masculinity. An example of how White supremacy, specifically White masculinity, uses violence to support dominance is mentioned in the findings where we see a White male holding a gun while standing on top of the heads of three Asian men.

It is true that McGrew enlists “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell.” He also goes “to the African island of Yerka” and employs local aid to return with a “tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka.” Yet the study’s authors conveniently ignore that McGrew’s exoticizing gaze was an equal opportunity offender, extending to the “Far Western part of south-east North Dakota,” where one can find a “very fine animal called the Iota.” McGrew also tasks local blue bloods in the “Wilds of Nantucket” to “capture a family of Lunks in a bucket.”

For some, the history of America’s zoological parks is not so unlike the one imagined by young Gerald McGrew—and just as damning. For those who run today’s zoos, their cultural position may be just as tenuous as the publication of If I Ran the Zoo. As far back as 1985, Dale Jamieson was writing “Against Zoos” for a chapter in Peter Singer’s In Defense of Animals. In 2018, a group called the The Non-human Rights Project sued the Bronx Zoo, New York’s flagship zoological institution, demanding legal personhood for Happy, the elephant who has lived “wrongfully imprisoned” at the zoo, the suit maintained, for forty-two years. While a Bronx County Supreme Court judge ruled against the motion in February, the zoo nonetheless announced it would soon end its elephant exhibit.

The un-zooing of the zoo should come as no surprise. Since 1993, the Bronx Zoo has officially not been known as a zoo at all, but the “Wildlife Conservation Society.” At the time of the renaming, zoo guides complained that they must now be known as stuffy “docents” in a “wildlife conservation center.” “The society is no longer simply a keeper of zoos and an aquarium, wonderful though those facilities may be,” responded trustee John Elliott, Jr. “The society’s primary mission is to save wildlife. Its new name reflects that mission. Fair enough?”

While the Bronx Zoo has, unofficially at least, now consented to calling itself the Bronx Zoo, a conservation mantra continues to permeate its exhibits. Animals, when they can be seen, are often woefully under-identified, appearing as mere props for a presentation on the dangers of pollution, or deforestation, or some other man-made calamity. At the conclusion of many exhibits, we are given opportunities to atone for our own culpability in this Malthusian world through the contribution of funds.

The zoo’s mission creep reflects a growing discomfort over the dynamics of its founding, a time when elite (and, yes, white) collectors indeed filled cages with game nearly as exotic and far-flung as those specimens for McGrew’s zoo. At the Bronx Zoo, the animals are now dispersed across the park, but what remains of its turn-of-the-century art and architecture, often overlooked by visitors, still speaks to the zoo’s original ambitions.

The New York Zoological Park, as the Bronx Zoo was originally known, began as an initiative of the Boone and Crockett Club, an association founded in 1887 by ten wealthy big-game hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt. Dedicated to game protection and game preserves, in 1895 the Club seeded the board of a new zoological society that would establish a free park “with North American and exotic animals, for the benefit and enjoyment of the general public, the zoologist, the sportsman and every lover of nature,” the Society wrote in its first annual report of 1897. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Jacob Schiff, and William C. Whitney were among the first donors as the society took control of 261 acres, an ambitiously large tract of undeveloped land straddling the Bronx River that had been acquired by the New York City Municipal Park Commission in 1884.

These days visitors mainly arrive at the zoo by some back door, as parking lots disgorge them unceremoniously in some odd corner of the park. Yet as conceived, the zoo presented an ordered and elevating classical assembly leading visitors up to nothing less than an acropolis for the animal kingdom. To get some sense of that, today’s visitors must start at the zoo’s original entrance along East Fordham Road, at one time an arboreal boulevard serviced by nearby elevated rail and separating the zoo from the New York Botanical Garden to the north.

Here one of the last monuments of the zoo’s classical period still anticipates the animal wonders within. In 1934, the zoo unveiled the double-arched bronze gates as a memorial to Paul J. Rainey. His sister, Grace Rainey Rogers, commissioned the sculptor Paul Manship to create the fanciful design based on actual animals in the zoo’s collection. Tortoises, cranes, storks, owls, bears, deer, baboons, leopards, and a lion named Sultan perch on the gate’s stylized vines. The menagerie pays tribute to Rainey, the big-game hunter who filled the zoo, as well as nature museums, with the gifts of his exotic specimens. His 1911 report of his arctic adventure to capture “Silver King,” one of the zoo’s first polar bears, reads like a cross between If I Ran the Zoo and King Kong. As Rainey recounts, after much struggle the first bear he roped on an iceberg was mistakenly garroted: “Presently it seemed to me that the bear was choking, and I ordered the rope loosened at once. Too late! His eyes were glassy, and he was stone dead.”

Past the Memorial Gates, the original zoo entrance leads onto a fountain plaza and set of monumental steps that were at one time bursting with floral arrangements, now mainly turned over to parking and denuded lawn. Here the Rockefeller Fountain, of imagined sea creatures, still adds to the stairs’ Italianate design with its unusual provenance: originally from Como, Italy, where it was created by the local sculptor Biagio Catella in 1872, the fountain was purchased by William Rockefeller as a gift for the zoo in 1902.

Up the stairs, the zoo’s Astor Court, originally known as Baird Court, still speaks to the zoo’s original focus, in mineral if no longer in animal or vegetable form. Designed by the architects Heins & La Farge, the Court’s brick and limestone neoclassical buildings once housed the animals at the heart of the zoo. Modeled after the Court of Honor at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893, Astor Court is symmetrical and longitudinal, with the Primates’ House, Lion House, and Large Bird House leading on to the domed Elephant House. Stone and terracotta animal sculptures by Eli Harvey, Charles R. Knight, and Alexander Phimister Proctor cover the façades as though the buildings have been given over to the natural world. Of this design, only the central sea lion pool still serves its original function. While the Court buildings have been restored and maintained through a gift of the Astor family, they are otherwise closed to the public or greatly altered. The Elephant House now houses the museum’s rhinoceri, while the cages of the Lion House have been removed to create an immersive exhibition called “Madagascar!” Lions, primates, birds, and elephants (for now) appear elsewhere, removed into sprawling and often distant settings.

The Elephant House at the Bronx Zoo. Photo: WCS Archives.

These naturalistic habitats, most likely more salubrious for the animals’ captivity, may be in line with updated zoological practice, but something got lost in the transition. The animals at the zoo are not in a state of nature, despite the artifice of their current surroundings. With their ordered arrangement, the animals as presented in the neoclassical Astor Court were more clearly and honestly in a state of man. The animal heads sculpted onto these buildings at one time even reflected the actual assembly of the National Collection of Heads and Horns, prize trophies that originally occupied a sixth Court building, designed by Henry D. Whitfield in 1922.

From McGrew Zoo to Bronx Zoo, zoological parks as originally conceived served to reveal not white supremacy but human supremacy, and therefore human responsibility, over the animal kingdom. The big-game hunters who founded the Bronx Zoo maintained such a deep respect for animal behavior and animal habitat that they created this shrine to animals. In the modern age, the animals of the world are the captives of man with no chance of release. Let’s at least give us unwitting jailers a direct engagement with the wonders of creation in our charge. If I ran the zoo, that’s just what I’d do.