The Submarine Movies
Lyric Maro
The submarine film is a subgenre of war film in which most of the plot revolves around a submarine below the ocean's surface. Films of this subgenre typically focus on a small but determined crew of submariners battling against enemy submarines or submarine-hunter ships, or against other problems ranging from disputes amongst the crew, threats of mutiny, life-threatening mechanical breakdowns, or the daily difficulties of living on a submarine.
The genre plays on the psychological tension of the submarine's crew and their unseen enemy, signified by a soundscape that may feature explosions, the ping of sonar, the creaking of the submarine's hull under extreme pressure, the alarm ordering the submarine to dive, and the threatening sound signatures of a destroyer's propeller or of an approaching torpedo.
Some 150 films have been made in the submarine genre between 1910 and 2010, variously depicting submarines in relatively realistic stories about World War I, World War II or the Cold War, or purely fictional and fantastic scenarios.
Submarine films have their own particular semantics and syntax, creating a film genre concerned specifically with submarine warfare. A distinctive element in this genre is the soundtrack, which attempts to bring home the emotional and dramatic nature of conflict under the sea. For example, in the 1981 Das Boot, the sound design works together with the hours-long film format to depict lengthy pursuit with depth charges, and as the critic Linda Maria Koldau writes,[1]
Koldau identifies the basic syntactic structure of the submarine genre as "outside is bad, inside is good."[1] The unseen outside means the enemy: this may be from nature, with elements such as water pressure threatening to crush the hull, sea monsters, or underwater rocks; or human opponents. Meanwhile, the inside of the submarine represents the human warmth and trust of the crew for each other and for their captain, their lives bound together by the situation.[1] To this scenario can be added elements from within such as mutiny, fire, discord, or accidents including radiation leakage; and from outside such as water, terrorism, disease, and weapons, while the plot may feature sudden switches from being the hunter to being the hunted.[1]
The soundscape may depict the creaking of the hull under pressure: as Koldau observes, this is both realistic and metaphoric, standing in for the fear and the responsibility on the shoulders of the crew.[1] Stress may further be expressed in the acoustic signature of specifically submarine threats, such as the swelling sound of an approaching destroyer's propeller, the soft buzz of an enemy torpedo, or the submarine's own alarm ordering an immediate dive.[1]
This is a list of movies, grouped by the era in which they were made, in which a submarine plays a significant role in the storyline.[2] From 1910 to 2010, some 150 fictional films about submarines have been made.[1] Many of these are set in World War I, World War II, or the Cold War; others depict relatively "authentic" terrorist scenarios.[1]
Some movies depict historical events from actual battles or incidents, such as Above Us the Waves, a 1955 film which depicts the true story of the British Royal Navy's midget submarines attacks on the Tirpitz.[3] Other submarine movies develop a fictional plot created using more or less realistic details of naval warfare, such as the film U-571, which tells the story of a fictional U-boat in World War II.[4]
Other submarine films from the fantasy, science fiction or occasionally horror film genres depict entirely fictitious events,[1] such as the various film versions of Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Greetings from Read Max H.Q., and welcome to the latest edition of our mailbag! Every once in a while I solicit questions from subscribers and rifle through my slowly liquefying brain for a vaguely entertaining answer. This edition features questions about parenting anxieties, submarine movies, the threat writing poses to A.I., Ange Postecoglou, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
P.S. I did my best to find the muscle Mario video referred to in the question and fell short but I did come across this really excellent GameFAQs thread that feels like it should have become a meme at some point:
To answer your final question, not only should space travel be thought of as analogous to sea travel, all travel should be. Every car trip should have a captain, first mate, surgeon etc.; multi-car households should appoint a fleet admiral. Not only would this be funny it would solve the crisis of masculinity.
I've been thinking a lot about some of the points you've made about AI as it relates to writing and am wondering if there's some unresolved tension in a couple areas. I really liked the point about AI not being so threatening despite the recent breakthroughs because writing and reading are social experiences, but that seems to be a very different angle than how you talked about the TV industry. There, the lens was much more material (tradespeople develop skill and create value through their labor, AI is a fulcrum that capital is trying to use to extract more rent). How do those two pictures mesh for you? Do we need to worry about AI destroying the well-honed craft of writing, or is the buoyancy of human connection going to see us through?
Off the top of my head: 1.- What do you make of Brandon Sanderson's fiction, if you've read it? He seems to have become the new king of fantasy (a genre I abandoned in favor of Sci Fi and have slowly been getting myself back into), and is unnaturally prolific, but reading his first Mistborn novel, with very low expectations, I'm finding it predictably lackluster (though still much better than I expected) 2.- What do you think are the odds the US will see domestic armed conflict within the next decade? Including everything from full on civil war down to guerilla warfare style insurgence. 3.- If you had to become a single issue voter, what would the issue be?
I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding.
In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two
depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science.
Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.
Ronan Farrow's latest on Musk featured an interesting paragraph about how Musk loves anticapitalist texts/authors like Douglas Adams and Deus Ex (and Musk has previously named his rockets after technocommunist AI characters from Iain M. Banks's The Culture series). Bezos even tried optioning a TV show about the Culture series, but fortunately, it never transpired.
For instance Ged, the wizard of Earthsea, is kind of just the Michael Jordan of being a wizard, but magic in Earthsea is still very much something you practice and learn, he just happens to be a peak performer.
Piranesi could be a science fiction novel in which the protagonist believes his situation to be that of a fantasy novel. Believing an impersonal universe to be utterly, achingly personal creates its own magic. I guess anthropologists would call this enchantment? (One of my favorite books of the past few years!)
As is always the case, I got more questions than I can possibly answer in one go. If I didn\u2019t get to your question it might be because I want to save the topic for a future newsletter, or it might be because I just couldn\u2019t come up with a jokey response.
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