The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau

You have to go to sea

Every generation recasts the cultural canon, but the Boomers, with their socio-political firepower, blew it all up. From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, they scorned the old orthodoxies, rediscovered forgotten gems and created a whole new corpus of culturally awesome content. And then never stopped going on about it. But were their choices… ok?

OK, Boomer: The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1966-1976)

An eccentric explorer, his stylish wife and pilot son set to sea in a specially customised ship, crewed by a motley gang in matching outfits with little red hats, on the hunt for exotic marine life that they can harass, film and occasionally blow up.

The paragraph above describes The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Wes Anderson’s whimsical midlife-crisis movie about dysfunctional fathers; but it also describes The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a series of marine life documentaries from the ‘60s/’70s. Jacques Yves Cousteau was a pioneer of underwater photography and his groundbreaking films brought the ocean into living rooms around the world.

A caption at the end of The Life Aquatic denies all connection with Jacques Cousteau. I imagine a large number of lawyers insisted on this, because the resemblances are clear. Anyone who didn’t grow up on Cousteau – anyone who wasn’t already familiar with his ship, the Calypso, and its crew, all his weird gadgets and dramatic storytelling – must have been absolutely baffled by Life Aquatic.

At one point in his film Conshelf Adventure (1966) Cousteau shows a cut-through model of his undersea base. In moments like this you absolutely could be watching a Wes Anderson movie. Like (I assume) Anderson I was obsessed with Cousteau as a child. In the UK his films were shown as part of The World About Us, a BBC documentary strand. They were undemanding viewing for dreary Sunday evenings, sending children off to bed to dream of teeming coral reefs and intrepid submarine adventures.

This is what nature documentaries were like in the ‘60s and ‘70s: the exoticism of the Imperial travelogue, the larger than life adventurer, a sense of Victorian exploration and acquisition rather than scientific observation and discovery.

The Legend

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s biography is itself like something out of a children’s story, or an inter-war pulp novel. He trained as a pilot in the French Navy in the ‘30s before a car crash put an end to his flying ambitions. He took up swimming as a form of recuperation and fell in with a couple of maverick sport divers on the Mediterranean coast. It was there that he invented the aqualung, a device that finally enabled free diving for long periods at depth. After the Second World War (which he appears to have avoided by staying underwater), Cousteau acquired a decommissioned minesweeper, which he rechristened The Calypso, and roamed the world with a gang of mismatched scuba experts, having extraordinary adventures exploring the unknown depths. 

At first he took oil company money to conduct underwater surveys (something of which he appeared justly ashamed in later years), and recruited a young film student called Louis Malle to record his exploits. Le Monde du Silence (1956) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Documentary Film, and a legend was born.

Cousteau wasn’t the only extraordinary figure on The Calypso; the whole show came across as a live action Hanna Barbera cartoon. Cousteau was joined by his pilot, cameraman and shark-bait son Phillippe; his team, all in their matching red beanies (a tradition among French divers); and his wife, Simone, who fulfilled the Smurfette role by playing soi-disant ‘Shepherdess’ (her name for herself) to the whole crew. They even had a bizarre array of Thunderbirds-like vehicles, including the Sea Saucer, a UFO-shaped, bright yellow mini-sub.

Ah, that yellow. If there was one thing that marked out Cousteau’s team as distinctly French it was the peerless design and solid branding. From the opening titles to the vehicles and equipment, everything – aside from the red beanies – featured a distinctive yellow that stood out superbly against the submarine blue. The aqualungs were stylised into sleek backpacks; the masks were streamlined helmets with built in headlamps. Everything was in a black and yellow colour scheme that made the divers look like a cross between Bond villains and The Fantastic Four.

All of this contributed to what now feels like the strange tone of his documentaries. They are frequently framed as ‘adventures’, with titles that sound like lost Tintin books: ‘Lagoon of Lost Ships’, ‘The Smile of the Walrus’, ‘The Sleeping Sharks of Yucatan’. As with other shows made before the advent of dispassionate, scientific nature documentaries – like the young David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest (1954–63) and the films of Hans and Lotte Hass – the crew become characters in the story, and their underwater explorations and experiments were often dramatised.

This technique made them feel deeply futuristic. In Conshelf Adventure Cousteau was conducting experiments in building permanent submarine labs, a strong theme in contemporary science fiction. Shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–68), Gerry Anderson’s puppet show Stingray (1964) and the Japanese anime Marine Boy (1965) all featured sci-fi submarines, undersea bases and undiscovered marine mysteries. By the ‘70s the promise of life underwater was everywhere, with the Usborne Book of the Future (1979) promising Sea Cities by the year 2000. 

Man had been to the Moon, but the depths of the Earth were still unexplored. Inner space was where we should be venturing. Space exploration was largely the province of two global superpowers – and only one of those could actually manage to land a man on the Moon – but a single obsessive Frenchman could build a minisub and discover whole new parts of our own planet. 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water but we have mostly travelled over its surface, terrified and tantalised by the deeps. Cousteau’s innovations hinted at a frontier that was within the reach of almost anyone.

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The Reality

In The Life Aquatic the adventurer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is explicitly a failure. He is an amateur charlatan whose adventures spring from his childish egomania and whose films are slipshod, fictionalised schlock. He has fallen deeply out of fashion, and is driven to silly stunts to keep his fantasy afloat.

None of this is true of Cousteau. To be fair, he seems to have had an almost stereotypically French personal life, with at least two families, and his oldest son did die in a tragic plane crash much like [spoilers] Ned ‘Kingsley’ Zissou (Owen Wilson)¹, but he was not, by any measure, a failure.

Cousteau’s films were shown on TV all over the world and he was massively famous throughout the ‘70s. Footage of meetings of The Cousteau Society (founded in 1973) look like fan conference appearances by film stars; rooms packed with starstruck adults and awed children gazing at their hero in wonder. His fame faded, though, as fame always does, and his earlier films did go out of fashion in later decades; but he carried on making new ones. The problem wasn’t so much that they were outdated; it was more that they were depressing.

Cousteau was making his films at a crucial moment, just as the global networks of the post-War world began to tighten international connections and the impacts of the Industrial Revolution on the environment began to become visible. To his alarm, he started to realise that the ecologies he studied were disappearing before his eyes. At a meeting of the Cousteau Society, he was asked by a small boy about the prospects for the submarine cities we had all been promised. He replied:

‘I don’t think we are going to build an underwater civilisation. I think we should first build a good civilisation on land.’

His enthusiasm for the underwater world fuelled his environmental campaigning: ‘I  believe that some day people are going to revolt and begin to care’. Where Wes Anderson portrays the Steve Zissou Society as a childish fan club, the Cousteau Society still campaigns on marine preservation.

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Is It OK?

I think we can grant that ecological campaigning and marine preservation are ‘OK’. More specifically, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was instrumental in engaging an entire generation with the natural world. You can still see Cousteau’s techniques of building stories into scientific observation in the work of David Attenborough, the great master of the genre. It was a textbook example of the core principles of popular science, summarised perfectly in the BBC mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. He hooked the audience with the narrative structures of pulp adventure and the promise of a magical unseen world; then, once he had their attention, he delivered a new perspective on our actually-existing planet and the forces that threaten it.

Cousteau was one of the first people to do this because he helped to invent the equipment that allowed it to be done. His team were able to swim with sharks and go and annoy octopi because Cousteau had developed the aqualung and built his minisubs. They were able to show us their adventures because of the innovations into filmmaking they had pioneered. In The Life Aquatic the creatures Zissou encounters are all stop-motion fantasies, but the crew of the Calypso were able to film the genuine wonders of the sea and share them with the world, a remarkable and fascinating achievement.

And anyway, I do not want to put his ‘period styles’ aside. Because they’re wonderful. Wes Anderson paints Steve Zissou’s world as faded and down-at-heel, a relic of a more colourful, more romantic moment. I suspect he does this because, like me, he finds Cousteau’s world colourful and romantic. All those bright yellow submersibles, those little red hats, those sharks and ships and submarine adventures; they’re all so cool. Watching Cousteau’s documentaries now is like looking through a delightful porthole into a technicolour world in which a merry bunch of weirdos sets off into the wild blue yonder, just to see what is there.

Cousteau’s motto was ‘Il faut aller voir’. It’s a shame it was in French, because the English translation offers a lovely pun: you have to go to see; you have to go to sea. There is a shot in the credits of the show which features Phillippe Cousteau, in a splendidly ‘70s beard, piloting a seaplane. It soars over a calm sea, under a clear blue sky, seabirds swirling in its wake, and I still want to climb into the television, pull on my little red hat and join the Calypso. It remains deeply romantic, an image of a world in which things were undiscovered, things were unknown, and you could have adventures with your friends. In a sea plane.

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For more ‘70s science programming, there’s always Dr Jacob Bronowski and ‘The Ascent of Man’

1. Or did he? Watch the closing credits and look out for a pipe-smoking figure in a pilot’s cap in the crow’s nest of The Belafonte.