The Abyss

When I was child, I watched as a child, reviewed as a child, read St. Paul as a child. But when I knew the old Russians and Swedes, and to a lesser extent, the French, I put away childish things like The Abyss. In fairness, I enjoyed this movie even during the summer before I moved to Austin. And I remember reading the book version over and over in fourth grade, jealously guarding it, removing it carefully each day during free reading, tracing the figures and illustrations of the rig until I could draw them from memory. What about this story so captured my interest I have no idea, but it could have been the floating water tube:

Whatever it was, I didn't find it this time. The structure felt boring and procedural, and while only a handful of characters drive the plot forward, none seemed especially real or vivid to me, as though the script's writers couldn't find the time or space, or any reason, to develop them. Nothing about a supernatural encounter with glowing, translucent, intelligent orbs at the bottom of the ocean should be routine. Right?

So either in the last five years I outgrew this movie, which seems unlikely, because I'm still, more or less, the same ignorant, impulse-dominated animal that I was then, or what looks childish is more a matter of temperament than taste. Probably when I watched it this time, I read in it only the absence of my prior experience. When I couldn't watch it in the same way, when I had to watch it again for the first time, I withdrew, thinking, "something about this movie is wrong" instead of "I should watch it with fresh eyes."

So take a lesson, Paul. Go walk with William in the lakes and valleys, where you may wonder at the newness of life and avoid distinctions between what is natural and what is moral. While the child is most definitely not the father of the man, he does accept his impressions as they are: brute sensations that we build into meaning and that connect us with a world beyond our imagining, beyond reason, and beyond unreason. Children do not think to ask, "is it right that I feel pleasure? Does this sunflower satisfy me?" or to make statements such as "trees are no longer appropriate."

I should give The Abyss a second chance, if for no other reason than to recognize that the ten year old incarnation of Koko preferred this movie, valued this movie, and rested within the sanctuary of its universe while outside, in the cold, winter settled on the school day mornings of her innocence.