by Ben Spatz
When I was a kid, I had this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in which You are living in England and You visit Stonehenge and find yourself brought into a world of faeries and magic. I remember this one part, where You (of course a boy) were traveling with this girl, and encountered an angry witch. The angry witch tries to take You from the girl, but she holds on to you. Her holding on to You protects You. The witch turns You into fire to burn the girl's fingers, and she turns You into a beast to scare the girl, and other things too... But the girl holds on. She holds on and saves Your life.
Years later I wrote a story in which a pair of lovers spend the night in a hotel in Paris. One of the lovers turns into a warewolf, and the deal is that unless the other lover holds the werewolf tightly all night, the transformation will be permanent. So the second lover holds on all night, while the warewolf scratches and attacks. At dawn, the warewolf turns back into a human. The lovers say goodbye, for in warewolf form one lover has killed the other.
Luc Besson's films always deal with this issue, the issue of one lover being part of a Greater Force while the other is merely mortal. This is obvious in _The Fifth Element_ although it doesn't play a big role. But the climactic scene has the best image of this I've ever scene: The Perfect Warrior having a huge force shoot out of her so violently that she screams, with the force being hugely important in the future of the universe, and meanwhile her lover holds on to her, because that's all he can do.
This issue is much more clear in _The Big Blue_. This is a movie that is actually about the sea while including a love story, just like _Titanic_ was actually about a love story while including the sea. In the character of Jacque, there is even what D&G would call a "becoming-dolphin." It's exactly like the possession of Leeloo by the Light of Creation, or the becoming-wolf of my character in the "Wolf" story. But here it's coded as sexual competition. In the other two cases, love is a separate thing that effects the possession. In _The Big Blue_, Jacque's love for the ocean is direct competition for his love of a woman. The first night he has sex with Joanna, he goes out to the sea afterwards and stays with a certain dolphin there until dawn. You don't have to imagine bestiality to realize that he is committing adultery with the dolphin, and therefore with the ocean itself (since that dolphin is just the Anomalous dolphin out of the whole dolphin multiplicity).
This makes the competition between human love and superhuman possession very clear. There is even a scene in which Jacque recognizes that particular Anomalous dolphin as female. And in the end, the dolphin/ocean wins. Jacques goes down into the ocean to meet his dolphin lover, abandoning his woman lover on the surface. She is pregnant at the time, and crying out for him to please stop.
Is this irresponsible and wrong of him? Of course. At least, on a moral scale. And I think that this kind of movie in our society is also very problematic, since we live in a society where men constantly abandon their families to go out and do their own thing. But in many of Besson's other movies (_The Fifth Element_, _La Femme Nikita_, and _The Messenger_), the character linked to the superhuman is female. And once we remove sexual politics from the equation, there is a philosophical puzzle here that can't be answered so simply.
Maybe his choice is "beyond morality." Maybe it's Kierkegaard's "leap into the unknown," with Jacque as the Knight of Faith. If you believe that you have the potential to merge with the universe on that scale, how can anything earthly have any importance? There is a "Fantastic Four" comic book in which a woman named Freddie volunteers to become an interstellar traveler in exchange for having the job of selecting planets to destroy. An older man warns her morally that she is going to be responsible for many deaths. She says: "So? A few less bug-eyed monsters... What's that compared with me being able to go out there..." What a dangerous sentiment. But my sociopathic side understands it completely.
In any case, there is something about those people, those prophets, those visionaries, those polos possessed... In movies, they are almost always shown in contrast to another human, someone who wants to be possessed but is not. In _The Big Blue_ there is Enzo, who claims to be the best but always fails. The distinction is even more clear in Peter Shaffer's play _Amadeus_. There is one who is the best, a true visionary, who lives inside the music/ocean, and one who is second best, who can perceive the greatness of the first but cannot reach it. From one perspective, Jacque/Mozart is alone on the mountaintop, while Enzo/Salieri is cast down among the dumb masses of humanity. But from another perspective, Jacque/Mozart and Enzo/Salieri stand together at the top because they at least know what visions are, even if Enzo/Salieri cannot quite surrender his humanity enough to truly recieve them.
And while I've got this comparison going between Enzo/Jacque and Salieri/Mozart, why don't I add Dysart/Alan and Javert/Valjean at the same time. And I will also consider how to fill the following terms: x/me and me/x. But I won't put in any proper names for x here.