Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘Becoming Cousteau’ shows he was more than TV star
Today, we associate Frenchman Jacques-Yves Cousteau with the ocean. If, however, you grew up in the 1970s as I did, the co-inventor of the aqualung, a pioneering nature filmmaker and environmentalist seemed to be everywhere. When he wasn’t on TV exploring the sea (as Orson Welles or Rod Serling narrated), he was in our textbooks, libraries and even getting skewered in Mad Magazine as if he were a politician or an Instagram influencer getting mocked in The Onion today.
John Denver even wrote and sang a hit song about him and his ship Calypso.
According to a phone conversation with Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus (“What Happened, Miss Simone?,” “Bobby Fischer Against the World”) held Monday, Cousteau was even more than that. She makes her case with her new documentary “Becoming Cousteau” and says there really isn’t anyone like him now.
“He was kind of a non-partisan figure, right? He was somebody who was at the Rio Summit (The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992) for instance. He’s with (Fidel) Castro and he’s with (George H.W.) Bush. I feel like there’s no person who can build those bridges today,” she explains.
“I think that the atmosphere in which activists like Greta (Thunberg) are working is so much more difficult, and there’s nobody who has that kind of celebrity and beloved-ness who can bring people together to talk about a risk, which could affect all nations regardless of their government.”
In some ways, Cousteau’s high profile obscured how much he actually accomplished before he died in 1997 at the age 87. At one point in Garbus’ film, Cousteau laments that he’s being asked to sign autographs when oceans are struggling to survive.
“I think you could still sign an autograph, but he’d also ask you to sign a petition and do more as well,” she says. “He accomplished the Antarctic treaty, which we now know doesn’t quite go far enough. His raising awareness of the fragility of the undersea ecosystems was hugely impactful.”
The film features Cousteau having lively conversations with schoolchildren, showing that he had a charm that other activists and oceanographers lack. At the same time, “Becoming Cousteau” recounts that his formidable accomplishments didn’t happen because he was superhuman.
“I wasn’t interested in hagiography. Seeing the human being and their flaws makes them more relatable. It was something he acknowledged. He was an absent husband and father and obvious non-monogamous. He also suffered great losses in his life. He took that pain from his personal loss and took that energy toward saving the planet,” Garbus says.
PETROLEUM EXPLORATION
It’s ironic that Cousteau’s explorations and later conservation efforts came after the initial investments he received came from undersea petroleum exploration.
“That was surprising for me because as a kid watching his show, I didn’t know about that and haven’t come across it since. With our lens today, we know about the dangers of oil spills to wildlife, but at that time there wasn’t that awareness, but he quickly learned by experience that (the ocean) was not something that should be touched. That’s what I found remarkable about him as an environmentalist. It was all from firsthand experience. He felt the warming of the water. He saw the degradation of the sea floor. He was able to chart that because he was diving for so long,” she says.
If ABC later canceled his TV series because they found his observations too strident, perhaps it’s because they hadn’t seen the oceans the way he had. Few others have.
“That’s something we talked a lot about in the [editing] room that this was kind of a Cassandra story, speaking of an impending doom but nobody believed you,” Garbus says,
Garbus herself can relate to Cousteau’s struggles to be heard because her recent narrative film debut “Lost Girls” on Netflix recounted how Mari Gilbert (played by Amy Ryan) began a campaign to convince police to search more diligently for missing and murdered women when her own daughter disappeared, and the bodies of several women were discovered on Long Island.
OPENED A DISCUSSION
Her movie seems eerily prescient after the disappearance and death of Gabby Petito. The nationwide attention Petito’s case received also opened a discussion of how many other women have disappeared without leading to broader investigations.
“The missing white woman syndrome,” Garbus says; “some of the missing sex workers in ‘Lost Girls’ were white women, but because they were sex workers they were not afforded the same national interest of someone like Gabby. Black trans women, Black women, and indigenous women go missing. There’s obviously no shortage of categories of people we can talk about who are also overlooked.”
Garbus has just received a Grierson Award from the 2021 BFI London Film Festival. It also played at this year’s Filmland in Little Rock. Cousteau himself left behind a formidable legacy as a filmmaker and broadcaster. He won three Oscars for “The Silent World” (1956), “The Story of a Red Fish” (1959) and “World Without Sun” (1964).
To make his own movies, Cousteau had to help invent casings for the camera so that it could see the same underwater images he could. For the first of those films, he also teamed with legendary director Louis Malle (“Murmur of the Heart,” “Elevator to the Gallows”).
PROFANE TO HIM
His little gold men came in the documentary category, but the word was profane to him. Perhaps he might not want a documentary made about him.
“He said a documentary is a lecture from someone who knows more than you. I’m not sure if he were raised in this modern media environment, with all the streamers where people are making documentaries that are entertaining and not at all lecturing, what he would feel today. He needed to separate himself from the genre, which I thought was amusing,” she says.
“He said, ‘I wanted to be the John Ford or the John Huston of the nature film.’ His career evolved, and he became more of an advocate and less of an entertainer. He said himself, ‘my films are no longer about pretty little fish,’ but he also very much understood the linkage between those pretty little fish and the environmental movement. You only protect what you love.”