The Man from Atlantis was a TV series that cashed in on the popularity of underwater films in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though the series didn’t run for long, it was impressive enough to birth multiple adaptations as comic books and novels. From today’s perspective the whole project seems a bit silly with questionable character drawing and superficial visual attractions. I was however impressed by the great emphasis on scientific details in the story lines. The episodes are also a bit like disguised lessons in popular ocean science.
The episode “Melt Down” written by Tom Greene deals with a sudden global sea level rise caused by melting of the polar ice, intentionally induced by the series’ super-villain Mister Schubert. You could call it prophetic, but then of course, the reason for the meltdown here is not collective political failure but individual roguery. The depiction of the effects of sea level rise are spooky nevertheless. Looking at it today, 50 years later, this little dialog seems to recapitulate perfectly the absurdity of the current situation along the coasts of the USA. “Hey, aren’t you from that Ocean Institute? You know what’s causing all of this?”
It’s quite funny – if only it wasn’t quite as sad…
Thanks to my comic dealer at the fantastic Fantastic Store for the lead!
Extraordinary natural occurrences and appearances were traditionally explained in myths, legends or so called Tall Tales. They fall in the larger genre of folklore and different from myths or legends they are relatively young or have known or contemporary authorship. An example from European Antiquity would be the “Alexander Romances“, fictitious accounts of the life of Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BCE) that exist in over 100 known versions and several languages. In the USA a popular figure of Tall Tales is the giant Paul Bunyan. Tales about Paul Bunyan first appeared in the mid 19. Century and include among others explanations for the existence of the Grand Canyon and Minnesota’s Thousand Lakes.
In a facebook post I recently came across this humorous first nation version of a Paul Bunyan tales. It’s a great example how natural science, political satire and ancient mythology intersect. And it also shows how closely connected and intertwined the folklore of US-American white settlers and the folklore of first nations in the Americas is.
Believe it or not, us Ojibwe also have a story about Paul Bunyan. He came to the area known as Red Lake and tried his de-forestation BS, but Nanaboozhoo – The Greatest Ojibwe who ever lived – obviously wasn’t having none of that. They got into a fight that lasted 3 days, and finally our hero picked up a giant walleye and slapped the outlander silly with it. Paul got knocked on his ass in a mud puddle, so hard it left an imprint of his buttcheeks there in the wet ground…that’s why the lake is shaped the way it is and why we were able to keep our forest. You’ll never hear this story in a book, but that’s basically how I heard it from my father when I was young – after coming home from kindergarten in Bemidj (Paul’s favorite town, mwahaha!) and talking about him. That’s the story behind the Paul/Babe & Nanaboozhoo statues in that town. This used to be a sign at the rez line, I remember the chimooks didn’t like it and kept cutting it down. But the story lives on, and now you know.
The only constant is the creed of the Barrier Islands of North Carolina according to marine scientist Orin Pilkey. In his introduction to this PBS documentary from the 1980s, Pilkey provocatively comments the image of beach houses slowly being swallowed by the sea with the following words: “For some this is a tragic and an ugly sight. But I think it’s beautiful. Because surrendering this house to the sea represents a bright promise for our future.” He later says “I’ve really come to think of these islands as living things. They are constantly responding in sensible and even intelligent ways to the forces of nature.”
The evocative title of the documentary refers to the slow movement of these islands over millennia. But as Pilkey makes clear, islands lie these will continue to move and need to move in order to sustain. So called “hard stabilization”, the effort to stabilize shore lines by sea walls and other massive concrete structures, Pilkey calls “a recipe for disaster”.
In contrast to today’s buildings and infrastructure the early settlements on the islands were much less permanent. Some of the early settler’s houses on these islands were equipped with a trap door in the house, in order to let flood water flow through to limit the damage to the house’s structure. Many houses were even built in ways, so that they could be easily moved away from the shore. Houses but also whole villages, like Diamond city, appeared and disappeared across the islands over the course of it’s history of settlement.
This film and Pilkeys argument are actually pre-climate-discourse at least as public opinion is concerned. This makes it a fascinating document of the development of environmental thought. Basically all the worries, warnings and arguments of today’s coastal climate adaptation discourse are here – but without sea level rise! It’s simply ill guided real estate development and false landscape planning.
“Tides” (alternative title “The Colony”) is a sci-fi movie from 2021 about a post-apocalyptic world at the moment the first human communities are about to re-settle again. The only territory suitable is a coastal strip that is covered by tides twice a day. The area is a tidal zone, not quite land and not quite sea, with little to no vegetation and natural shelter for the people to build a more permanent habitat.
The landscape and weather in the story are the same as on the location, the movie was filmed. “Tides” was largely filmed outdoors on the small island Neuwerk in the German Tidelands, situated between the estuaries of the rivers Weser and Elbe.
Neuwerk during low tide
Director Tim Fehlbaum explained in an interview how this landscape inspired the movie plot in the first place:
“For the outdoor scenes we went to the German Tidelands, which was where the idea for the film started. I’m a very visual director and my ideas often have a visual trigger. I had never been to the Tidelands and having grown up in the Swiss mountains being at the low point of Germany was eye-opening. Looking out at this expanse of water was so interesting because in an hour or so, everything you just saw becomes covered in water. The floods in the film are real, and they come in twice a day. Shooting there was exceedingly difficult because we could never shoot much longer than two or three hours, and I always wanted to keep shooting, but it becomes a question of minutes before the water is at your knees and suddenly up to your chest.”
You could say, the movie is really an exploration of this landscape and the living conditions and the atmosphere in tidal zones. That human renewal after the partial retreat and ecological meltdown takes place in such a tidal zone is interesting as it references this landscape as a realm of opportunity, transition and change – a liminal space full of potential rather than decay.
This confirms what historian John Gillis wrote in 2012 in his study of The human shore: “The many votive offerings and burials that have been found in such places as England’s Witham Valley leave little doubt about the cultural generativity of places where land and water met. Wetlands were among the first terrains to be enculturated, transformed through ritual performances from undifferentiated nature into memorable sacred places. From the earliest times, ecotones produced not only a good but meaningful life.”
I find this inspirational in regard to our current situation of ecological and social transformation. Author Kim Stanley Robinson made a similar reference to the “intertidal” as a space of opportunity and renewal when sketching his “Super Venice” in the post-apocalyptic novel “New York 2140” four years earlier. It is striking how both works are set in tidal zones, how both interpret them as spaces of renewal, and yet how radically different they paint this landscape. You can read my post on Robinson’s book here.
In Germany as well as in many other countries, images of extreme floods often found their way on postcards. Here is a selection of postcards. (click on the image to find the online source)
Ryan Goslings 2014 movie “Lost River” is most of all a portrait of urban decay and our fascination with decay in a broader sense. The film juxtaposes the stylized display of bodily mutilation and destruction in a Grand Guignol style cabaret on the one side and the at once slow and dramatic decay of urban environments in the US rust belt on the other.
While buildings on fire – an image particularly indicative of the Detroit situation in the 1980s and 1990s – or urban structures overgrown by vegetation are the two main visual ciphers for urban decay in the movie, a flooded town also plays a central role.
As one protagonist explains, the town is called Lost River, because a section of it was once purposefully submerged when a water reservoir was built. Beneath the river lie the remains of that city and also a prehistoric theme park. Pre-historic monsters are said to live in the deep water. The idea of a prehistoric past lurking underneath the water’s surface is reminiscent of J.G Ballard’s 1962 novel “Drowned World“, where global climate change and flooding causes nature to regress into an early state of evolution.
The movie pays little attention to this submerged town. Instead it effectively uses one rather simple image in several scenes: the street lights that stick out of the water and create an eerie sense of displacement and confusing proportions.
In the post-apocalyptic action movie “Waterworld” from 1995, all human settlements have drowned as global warming has melted the ice caps. At the time in 1995, “Waterworld” was the most expensive movie ever made and it was not a huge success. Maybe the prospect of a drowned world was not a hot topic at the time? Or maybe open sea sailing and a virile but lonesome yachtsman boating around in the sunset was a too elitist scenario to appeal to a larger audience. (much of the movie appears like a tourism commercial for a Future-Punk-Cape Cod. It is still today regarded as one of Kevin Costner’s campier acting efforts.)
The plot, set in 2500, revolves around the quest for “Dryland” the mythical last unflooded piece of land. The lead character is a sailor with amphibic abilities, one of the first mutated humans to have adapted to live in waterworld. (He has small gills behind his ears and adnated toes.) Because of his abilities he is able to dive down to the drowned cities and bring back soil and other valuable objects that he trades above water without disclosing their origins. He thus strengthens the common believe in a hidden land above water and becomes a target for adventurers and pirates searching for Dryland.
Eventually he agrees to disclose the secret to his companion and takes her on a dive. At this point in the story, it becomes clear to the character that there is no sacred refuge to go to but that humanity is stranded on boats and floating cities with nowhere else to go. (As the plot continues they do however eventually find dry land, which pretty much turns the story from a drama to a soap opera.)
This is the scene of the dive to the drowned city and it is the only scene in the movie set in the drowned world.
“Waterworld” was clearly an effort in eco-fiction. The original script was written in the 1980’s. In 1989 the oil tank ship Exxon Valdez spilled it’s cargo off the coast of Alaska, causing the second largest oil spill in US history. In the 1995 movie the ship features prominently as the setting of the final fight between the mariner and the pirates. “Waterworld” was clearly informed by climate politics and the knowledge of continuous sea level rise already apparent in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s unfortunate that due to a questionable directing job and unconvincing plot twists the movie is today much less recognized for it’s political message than for it’s costly antics.
Image of the swimming settlement in the movie “Waterworld” from 1995. The settlement is called “Atoll” in the movie but in fact it is a human made swimming construction. There is no natural land left known to the population of waterworld.
This sequence from the movie clearly shows the allusion to the Dutch cultural heritage with a windmill and a manually operated large weir mechanism featuring prominently.
There is an optical phenomenon called looming in which objects at sea appear to be floating in the air above water level. In Spring 2021 such an image photographed went viral online.
(click n the image for article.)
Apparently this phenomenon was well known throughout history among coastal communities as it appears as a sign for bad luck in legends and myths. Along the German North Sea coast it is a common superstition that loomings announce severe floods and houses or cities that are seen that way will be submerged and lost. (see the post on vineta) It’s interesting to note that in the superstition the city is first elevated above and then submerged under the sea level.
This image is also a case of looming:
It shows lake Michigan apparently with the skyline of Chicago in the distance. “Due to the curvature of the earth, the city isn’t visible over the lake from here: the image is a refraction of the real skyline projected above the horizon. Like the boat in David Morris’s image, this is an example of ‘looming.” (National Geographic).
Similar illusions of floating cities also appear on land, particularly in arctic regions due to the extreme temperatures. During the gold rush in the 19. Century, reports of mysterious cityscapes became very popular. agical cities foating Cities floating above ground are also a popular topic in science fiction literature and film. There are numerous reports of travelers seeing city skylines appear out of the fog or above the ground, ofter referred to as “Silent Cities”.
