ADVENTURES ON SQUID ROW
When it comes to sea monsters, there’s no pod like a cephalopod, writes Mila de Villiers
’Iremember the day it all started. Seeing this really strange … thing,” local filmmaker Craig Foster narrates in his Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. Foster’s documentary, which follows the connection he forges with this specific member of the molluscan class Cephalopoda, drew attention to octopuses’ intellect, their habits, and marine conservation. And damn, was
Mzansi there for it!
Such was its popularity that comedian Glen Biderman-Pam created amajestic parody in a video called My Kreepy Teacher. In it, he anthropomorphises the apex object of suburban pool-paraphernalia, the Kreepy Krawly.
Yet prior to Netflix and Insta, cephalopods — particularly octopus, squid, nautilus, and cuttlefish — manifested themselves in humanity’s imagination via folklore, and they’ve had a raw deal for centuries.
The kraken, a cephalopod-like behemoth believed to be inspired by sightings of giant squids (which can reach a length of 15m), is regarded as the original adversary in Nordic noir. According to Norse sagas, the kraken is found off the coast of Greenland and Norway: “something twisted” is its name, terrorising seafarers is its game. The 13th-century version of the Icelandic epic Örvar-Oddr references a monstrous animal, stating that it is “the nature of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales and everything else within reach”.
Sailors’ tall tales aside, the kraken was once included in Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s seminal natural catalogue Systema Natura, first published in 1735.
The binomial nomenclaturist removed its entry as a taxonomical entity in later editions of the text.
Not even a mythological beast of yore is immune to the Disney dons, with the kraken playing a substantial role as antagonist in Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
A liberal approach to the term “big scream” and the inclusion of cephalopods is evident in 2009’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus . Slated by critics and lauded by monster disaster-flick aficionados, the first instalment in the Mega Shark series sees a coastal town terrorised by two prehistoric sea creatures, a Megalodon and — you guessed it — a giant octopus.
The weltschmerz-y, clarinet-playing, erroneously named anthropomorphic octopus character Squidward Tentacles was introduced to TV audiences in 1999 with Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants. The antithesis of the show’s happy-go-lucky porous protagonist, Squidward has since become regarded as a #relatable character for millennial viewers, spawning numerous memes dedicated to his aversion to a nine-to-five existence.
Depictions of cephalopods in the visual arts take a far more encomiastic approach to these animals. Pre-tentacle porn, the
Japanese artist Hokusai’s 1814 shunga — erotic art — woodblock print The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife details a woman engaging in hanky-panky with two octopuses. Hokusai’s work remains one of the most recognisable visual portrayals of erotica and inspired many contemporary Japanese artists to create similar work in honour of this print.
The US abstract expressionist painter
Mark Rothko’s 1944 Birth of Cephalopods, a surrealistic homage to the origin of life, subverts the notion that these marine creatures are inimical man-devouring animals — take that, Herman Melville. Unfortunately, not unlike Captain Ahab’s quest to seek revenge on the whale who left him devoid of a leg, literature hasn’t been kind to these tentacled creatures. In HP Lovecraft’s 1928 pulpy short story The Call of Cthulhu this cosmic entity is described as “[a] monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind”.
Sjoe.
French novelist Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in 1870, includes an infamous scene in which the Nautilus, the submarine his protagonists are covertly roaming the ocean’s depths in, is attacked by “un calamar de dimensions colossales — [a] squid of colossal dimensions”. A crew member lamentably shuffles off this mortal coil owing to the giant squid’s blitzkrieg, leaving the morale of his fellow surviving sea dogs at an all-time low.
Thank goddess for Ringo Starr, whose auditory ode to an octopus’s aquatic horticultural skills — Octopus’s Garden — appears on The Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road . Inspired by their propensity to collect pebbles, broken shells and shiny objects as means to conceal the entrance to their crevices — referred to as “middens” or “gardens” — the ditty paints a far more welcoming picture of these eight-limbed molluscs: “I’d like to be under the sea / In an octopus’s garden in the shade / He’d let us in, knows where we’ve been / In his octopus’s garden in the shade / I’d ask my friends to come and see / An octopus’s garden with me”.