Becoming Cousteau

Year 14, Day 204 - 7/23/22 - Movie #4,209

BEFORE: OK, enough about Dean, Frank, Sammy and Jerry - they'll all be in my year-end wrap-up now, because mostly they all crossed over to each other's documentaries.  It turns out you can't tell any of their stories without footage of the others, so they've turned up in my Summer Rock and Doc Bloc about as often as the Beatles usually do, when I focus on the rock bios. But I'm bookending those four stories with docs about PBS stars, this creates a sort of symmetry for the week, with Bob Ross and Jacques Cousteau acting as the bookends. 

Louis Malle carries over from "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown". 

THE PLOT: A look at the life, passions, achievements and tragedies surrounding the famous explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, featuring an archive of his newly restored footage. 

AFTER: Well, they say "Never meet your heroes".  In past years I'd be doing exactly that, because it's Comic-Con week in San Diego, and I spent over 15 years working that circuit, doing that San Diego run, leaving for the airport at 5 am on a Wednesday so I could be there to set up a booth at noon on Preview Day, working like a dog for five days straight and then either flying back on the red-eye or losing a Monday workday just to get some sleep before the flight back. It was fun and profitable for a while, but over time it became frustrating and so not worth it, the costs involved kept rising to the point where my boss was losing money, no matter how much we sold, so it was time to end it.  I still miss it, part of me wants to be there in the thick of things, but we got out a couple years before the pandemic, and that turned out to be a very smart move for a whole litany of reasons.  But I met so many famous people there over the years, either because they came to our booth or because I stood in line, I got my Star Wars autograph collection out of the deal, and a lot of great stories.  Now I just have to try to stop missing it, which isn't easy.  But after watching all of these documentaries about very human subjects, it makes me wonder what personal details I'll learn someday about all of those people I met, and will I still be able to admire them at that point?  

Take Cousteau, for example, though he's got nothing to do with Comic-Con, but in the later years he did become a celebrity and appeared at events like the "Cousteau Day of Motivation" in Houston and the U.N.'s International Conference on the environment way back in 1992, which was a lifetime ago.  But Cousteau was warning humanity about climate change way back then, before Al Gore made his movie, and before the U.S. became like Africa-hot for two weeks every summer.  Seriously, I have to go outside later today to work a screening, and I am NOT looking forward to it.  What's keeping me going during this time of (mostly) work inactivity is the fact that on my days off, I can stay home in an air-conditioned room.  Sure, money's going to be a little bit tight this month, but I've got some cash coming in from part-time festival work I'm doing from home, so I think I'm going to be OK.  

Right, sorry, Cousteau.  The man had a different sort of life, he got hooked on free diving when he was in his twenties, and played a key role in the development of the aqualung, or what came to be known as SCUBA, and so therefore he was an inventor and pioneer.  There was a time when humans didn't spend so much time underwater, and so there was a whole new world to explore, and he and his crew captured a lot of it on film.  At a time when astronauts were preparing themselves to venture into space, there were also aquanauts who were preparing to dive deeper and deeper, and the thought that humans were going to need to live underwater someday.  I don't think that's a logical progression, if I'm being honest, and Cousteau came to change his mind on this point, but hey, if the icecaps keep melting, it could still be necessary.  

"Explorer" isn't really the right title, that kind of was pitched by the editors who fabricated the storyline on the show "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau", because that played well with audiences, it was better than "a guy with a boat who keeps spending time underwater for some reason".  And mistakes were made in those early days, in order to get funding to keep the Calypso operating, Cousteau's crew did a bunch of work for oil companies like BP, and finding out that there was oil off the coast of the Persian Gulf is the main reason why Abu Dhabi in the U.A.E. has so much of the world's wealth right now.  Also, in the early documentaries things would happen like the crew would see a bunch of sharks attacking a whale, and they'd pull the sharks out of the water and beat them until dead, just for the crime of being sharks.  Look, I don't really like sharks either, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that the best thing to do is to just leave them alone, or better yet, stay the hell out of the water.  I can't swim so this whole enterprise of deep-sea diving and underwater exploration is completely alien and ridiculous to me. 

Cousteau had some kind of arrangement with his first wife, Simone, she agreed to marry him and bear his children, provided she could then spend her life on the boat and diving whenever possible, that was her greatest love.  Even when Jacques was touring the world, attending screenings and environmental group meetings, Simone was back on Calypso, running things and taking care of the crew. So they spent a great deal of time apart, it turnes out. Much like Jerry Lewis, Jacques' great love turned out to be filmmaking, and sharing his love of the underwater creatures with the world via film, and then later television.  Maybe he and his wife had some kind of understanding, as they remained business partners after the romance cooled off, and it turns out Jacques had a second family on the side.  He met Francine Triplet at one of those environmental summits, and they had two children together while Simone was still alive, then Jacques married Francine the year after Simone died.  Hey, whatever works, I guess, he had instant second family in his golden years, and this time he spent more time with his kids. 

The first two sons spent most of their childhood years in boarding schools, but on their vacations they went out on the ocean with their parents, and then as adults Jean-Michel helped out the Cousteau Society with organizational matters, and Philippe was more of the explorer type, he was a producer and pilot for his father, but died in a plane crash in 1979, and after that his father was never quite the same.  Instead of seeing his mission to save the oceans as a calling, Jacques regarded it as a punishment, and stuck with it another 26 years, only his show got really dark and pessimistic about Earth's prospects.  I'm not saying he was wrong, but you do get more flies with sugar than with vinegar, just saying.  

Cousteau also believed that the world was overpopulated - and I'm thinking he was right on the money, even back then.  Do we need 8 billion people in the world?  No, we do not.  The best thing we can do for the environment is to stop having so many damn kids.  Keeping abortion legal is a great first step, because if everybody has 3 or more kids then the world's just going to run out of all resources faster, or we'll have to resort to cannibalism or worse.  Obviously you can't kill 350,000 people a day, that's barbaric, but if we don't take steps to stop population growth, then that's going to happen, one way or another, and the least painful solution is to stop making more people, or we're all going to end up underwater, and not in submersible cities. 

Oh, yeah, and Cousteau was right about dumping stuff in the oceans being a really bad idea.  For decades everyone felt that the ocean was a fine place to put everything you needed to get rid of, including barrels of radioactive waste.  I'm not saying there's a GOOD place to put that stuff, but the ocean certainly isn't one. Cousteau's publicity campaign got a large dump of waste postponed in 1960, and a company was forced to remove the barrels that they did dump, so more power to him.  But then, umm, NITPICK POINT, years later on when his son died, Jacques Cousteau was OK with a burial at sea?  How is that not ocean pollution, dumping a wooden coffin and a dead body?  Seems a bit hypocritical to me. 

Check out this documentary on the Disney+ service, it looks like not many people caught it when it was in theaters last November. 

Also starring the voices of Vincent Cassel (last seen in "Child 44"), Jocelyne de Pass, Frederic Dumas, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Sammy Davis: I've Gotta Be Me"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road")

with archive footage of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Philippe Cousteau, Simone Cousteau, Carol Burnett (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Irresistible'), Fidel Castro (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Dick Cavett (also carrying over from "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Jacques Chirac, Deborah Norville, Pablo Picasso, David Wolper, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 red beanie hats