No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.
This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.
Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.
We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.
i took 3 years of film classes and i still don’t fucking understand how the camera obscura works. thats magic to me idc
this? sorcery. they should arrest this guy
people explaining this to me are missing the point. yes i know its a physics thing. i know our eyes work the same way. however. i simply believe light shouldn’t work like that
oh hey it’s my favorite thing that light does: turns the inside haunted by the outside!
You were born with a unique set of eyes, ones that allowed you to view the sea as clear as glass. By the time you got old enough to join your ship’s crew, you were smart enough to know not to tell them about everything you saw below the waves.
I can see through water.
No, I don’t mean in the usual ‘look in a glass of water, see what’s on the other side’. I mean…
It doesn’t matter how deep down the water goes, it doesn’t matter how rough the surface of it is, it doesn’t even matter how cloudy the water is- if there’s water, I close my green eye and look only with my grey and I can see all the way to the bottom of it.
Growing up, it took me a while to realize I was the only one that could do that. I grew up in Kansas. My first experience with water was swimming pools and puddles and just about anyone can see to the bottom of those. My first trip to a lake was kind of weird but it was spring fed and those are like glass to everyone. There were a couple of childhood vacations to Atlantic City but we only went as far as the beach and the water’s just not that deep. I mean - its the Atlantic Ocean but -
what I’m trying to say is I was never out over any Deep Water. Not deep enough to realize that what I was seeing wasn’t what anyone else was seeing. Not until I was in college. A bunch of friends convinced me to work a summer break job over on Nantucket Island. We’d share a place to cut the cost and busk a little on the side and make out pretty good. And I didn’t think anything of it as we took the ferry over to the island. I didn’t think anything of it until I was a half hour into the trip and I walked out on the deck because who doesn’t love salt wind blowing in their face and I looked down over the side and -
I thought it was the shadow of the ferry gliding over the floor of the ocean under us at first. I thought the fish and squid and, further down the lobster and crabs scuttling out of the way was because the ferry’s shadow startled them.
And then I shut my green eye so the overlap stopped.
There are - things. Things in the ocean. Things that glide like the ghosts of sunken ships and murdered whales. Things down in the dark so deep we can’t see them, things so huge that sonar mistakes them for the sea floor.
Things that know we’re there, up above them.
Things that ignore the fish and sharks and dolphins but that pay attention to us.
It shadowed us all the way out to the island and my heart never left my throat. I could already feel the cold water closing around my head, hear the way it would blot out all noise when it did. I knew, the second I took my good eye off that - thing - so deep down there, that it would lift away from the floor of the ocean and start to -
It finally stopped when we passed over the Andrea Doria, trapped forever in her frozen tomb, settling down over her like a blanket smothering a dying man. I think that was where it lived, when it wasn’t shadowing ferries visiting the Grey Lady.
My legs were so weak by the time we reached the pier that my friends had to help me off, laughing about sea-sickness. People had been throwing pennies over the side as the ferry rounded Brant Point. People had been leaning over the railing of the ship on and off all trip. But I was the only one that had seen that thing in the water, a moving, stalking, bleeding oil slick of movement the whole way.
When summer ended I took the plane home and I didn’t look out the tiny window the entire cramped flight. I didn’t want to see it again or worse -
I didn’t want to see what might shadow the island itself, even larger than the one that had followed us out to it.
I don’t go near the ocean anymore. Pools are enough for me. I like being able to sleep at night without dreaming of icy cold water closing over my head and darkness waiting patiently below me.
I’m still better off - so I’ve been told - than the poor schmuck who knows what lives at the bottom of Lake Superior.
I’m watching Splash (1984) which is a romcom about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid, and when she chooses a human name she chooses Madison and guy says “that’s not a real name, but alright” which seems to imply that Madison was not a name until at least the 80’s and all girls named Madison are actually named after the mermaid. thought you should know
