It Remembers

Recovery of Connection in Anderson’s Life Aquatic

In my mind, Wes Anderson is the closest thing to a genius we have born west of the Mississippi. I’m not exceptional at geography, but I did fact check that Houston is indeed west of that river. I love all Anderson’s work, but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou has always held a special place in my heart. I watch it at least once a year, almost always around my birthday, and it’s always relevant to whatever stage of life I’m in. I could write a full novel about this film, but I’ll spare us and limit it to the poignant moments that I feel are most conducive to a discussion of recovery. There are a lot of them. That said, there is so much I don’t get to in this essay that deserves attention, and if you haven’t yet seen this masterpiece, I recommend you stop reading and go watch it now. Amazon Prime has it for rent, or I will gladly lend you the DVD if you ask me. I don’t even own a DVD player, so I could afford to part with it for a period of time. Once you watch or rewatch, get yourself a red hat and a speedo and queue some David Bowie, because we’re diving in. 

The Life Aquatic (2004) follows the latest documentary endeavors of oceanographer Steve Zissou, portrayed by Bill Murray, who lends just the right touch of ennui-infused egotism to the character whose recovery trajectory this essay follows. Steve has produced a once highly successful series of documentary films detailing his expeditions - also called The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; and Anderson opens with a scene of the world premiere of Steve’s latest episode: The Jaguar Shark: Part 1. The film recounts the team’s time on Pescespada Island and the terrible tragedy that befell them when Esteban du Platier, chief diver and closest colleague to Steve, was killed.  The footage of Steve and Esteban gives us a glimpse of their friendship, and as we watch the scenes of Steve in the aftermath of the shark attack, we see a complete chaos that the incident throws him into. The documentary is intercut with Steve in the present day, watching his dramatized life on screen with a grim expression. Steve attends the black tie event with his crew and wife, Eleanor Zissou, the brilliant woman hailed as the brains behind Team Zissou (to Steve’s chagrin) who is played by Angelica Houston. Steve resides over a Q&A with his audience after the showing, and he finds that the reception of his work is largely unpopular. His film and method of grieving are misunderstood and even criticized. He has made his pain into spectacle, expecting some validation or acceptance; but seeking connection in this form leaves him even more lost. 

Through these scenes, we’re able to see the complexity of the loss and the struggles that Steve faces in moving forward with his life and his life’s work. Steve’s loss is not only the loss of his closest friend, but also of the partner who shared in his glory as an oceanographer. I hadn’t really thought about this until now (in the process of writing this essay), but Esteban and Stephen are the same name - one Spanish and one Greek. So on some level, in losing Esteban, Steve has also lost himself. He has lost the strongest connection with another person, and consequently loses touch with his own self, with his crew and with his larger purpose. He experiences a void, an identity crisis, and he mistakenly believes that by pursuing fame via revenge - on the elusive and thus far  unknown jaguar shark - he can regain that lost sense of connection he had with his friend. 

Steve doesn’t know how to move forward without his friend, so he decides to go back instead. He decides that the only course of action open to him is to seek out the jaguar shark, thereby returning to the cause for his current grief. He is born into his past because he feels that he can recapture the connection he previously experienced with Esteban, with his wife, with the nature he explored and with his crew. This sense of connection seems to have been fractured even before Esteban’s death shattered it. We see evidence of Steve’s marital conflict in their interactions following the premiere, his genuine enthusiasm for his subject matter has given way to a competitive need to beat his rival, and his crew emanates a simmering disenchantment with the Zissou mission. Steve recognizes all of this, even if he won’t admit or address it, and his mission to find the jaguar shark becomes a desperate mission to regain everything that he feels slipping from his grasp with new urgency following the death of Esteban.

Steve cannot accept life as it is or himself as he is, so he grasps at his past self, setting out to recreate the person he was when he felt most in touch with himself and his world. In doing so, he refuses to accept his current reality. This time-travel-esque attempt to recover something lost  - that we can’t quite articulate but know we need - rings true of addiction as well. Substance use is appealing because we initially experience more of the good than the bad. We have this experience of something both familiar and new, an illusion of the connection so vital and intrinsic to our existence that it feels like coming home even if it’s a transient, false experience of the real thing. We’re constantly chasing that feeling because we need it to feel that our lives mean anything. It’s true that a meaningful life requires connection; however, we’re chasing a shadow of that connection by seeking to channel it through a substance. The deeper into addiction we slide, the more desperate our attempts to find connection in a substance become. 

Even as our warped attempts at finding connection in alcohol or another substance seem insane - given the destruction and chaos that ensue, to us in active addiction they present as the only option to survive. Steve, in determining to find and kill the jaguar shark as his next mission, does so because it is the only thing that makes sense to him as the next conquest of Team Zissou. The mission makes little sense to his audience in the theater when he announces this, and even his team - who loyally set out with him - are not as invested in this mission as they have been in the past. They don’t understand the point in seeking out a sea creature that only Steve has seen and knows to be real for the sole purpose of revenge. The audience that Steve intended to impress with ‘The Jaguar Shark: Part 1’ not only refuse to believe in the reality of the shark, but they also question the legitimacy of his grief. 

Something notable happens during the reception for Steve’s film. His team member Klaus - played by Willem Dafoe; think German Smee - introduces a small blonde boy - his “little nephew Werner” - who gifts Steve a crayon pony fish. The crayon pony is what Steve calls an “interesting specimen.” It looks like a Crayola set that’s been melted and molded into a little seahorse that’s just excited to be alive, even in a plastic bag the size you’d buy a goldfish in. Significantly, the horse comes from a child. Werner is the closest thing we have to the world of conscious connection and joy that Steve subconsciously craves; Werner’s gift symbolizes the availability of that state of being to Steve, even if he doesn’t see it for what it is. 

Shortly afterward, Steve gets into a physical altercation with a member of the press, who goads him with suggestions about Esteban’s death before snapping a photo with his disposable camera; in the frenzy, the pony fish’s plastic bag ruptures and begins leaking. To save the fish, Steve grabs a champagne flute from a passing stranger - whose work in the film remains uncredited - and dumps his colorful gift into a vessel meant for alcohol before carrying it above his head to protect it from further damage. I love this scene. It’s so weird and carries meaning on multiple levels. Steve’s actions reflect the fragility of his emotional state at this point in the film; he takes the comments personally and reacts on his feelings rather than reason. In dropping the symbolic pony fish into a champagne flute, we see Steve figuratively dumping his opportunity to live a truly conscious, connected life into a cycle of addictive behavior. It’s the best solution he has at the moment, and he acts on it. 

He vocalizes this choice in the subsequent scene in which he faces the possibility that he may not receive financial backing for his newest endeavor. He says to Eleanor and his producer, “if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go on an overnight drunk, and in ten days I’m gonna set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it.” He’s basically Ahab with a drinking problem. He turns to alcohol and revenge to numb the agony of the present and to serve as a compass in lieu of his lacking sense of self knowledge and purpose. God throws him another shot at precisely this moment in the form of Ned Plimpton - a soft-spoken Air Kentucky pilot played by Owen Wilson - who introduces himself to a vaguely responsive Steve. In the ensuing conversation, Ned reveals himself to be Steve’s supposed son. Steve reacts without emotion and excuses himself to be alone with this news. 

Ned comes to serve as a foil for Steve, their ambiguous father-son dynamic accentuating the ways in which their characters both complement and differ from each other. Right from their first meeting, Ned accepts Steve for who he is: his potential father, a flawed man, and the founder of the Zissou Society of which he has been a proud member since his childhood. Steve, however, cannot accept Ned as the man he is; rather, he attempts to make him part of his own story. He suggests rechristening Ned as Kingsley Zissou and only invites him to be part of the expedition because he views the father-son angle as an attractive feature for his film. Both Ned and Steve seek the same thing: connection and purpose. But while Ned accepts the people and experiences in his life as gifts by which to find and cultivate that connection, Steve continues to use these same gifts as means to fame, the end he mistakenly believes will make him happy and fix his brokenness. Both Ned and Steve live in the wake of loss. While Steve struggles to cope with the death of Esteban, Ned reveals that his mother, Catherine, recently took her own life. Whereas Steve plunges into emotional chaos in his grief, Ned accepts his mother’s death as a tragic result of the pain that consumed her. Acceptance doesn’t require that we like or enjoy reality; it simply requires a rescinding of our say in the matter. The desire for revenge stems from a need to regain some of the control we feel has been lost in a perceived wrong to us. 

All loss incites that need to recover control, to take back what has been stolen from us. The term itself implies that we once had something or someone of our own before losing it, him or her. And we do have something, but we don’t really own anyone in the way we sometimes perceive ourselves to. I’ve experienced my own loss, and it’s arguably one of the hardest experiences humans have to endure in this life. But the more I think about it, I can see that losing a person shouldn’t occupy the same category as losing my keys, which I’ve done more times than I’m proud of.

Death is one of the hardest forms of loss because of its permanency in the material world that we perceive as our greatest reality. Most of the time, this reality is the only one for us. It’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that there is a greater connection than the one we can actualize with our physical bodies.  Loss isn’t so much a loss of the person - the true self of that person - as it is of our connection and proximity to that person. We can experience a terrible weight in place of the lightness that was there before the loss, because we live in a physical world in which our bodily senses are our main informants. They convince our mind that material bodies count as more valuable than the true selves with whom we have connections. These senses tell us that we’ve lost someone when we can no longer see, hear or see them in our environment. We listen to this intel rather than our spiritual senses because they supply us with factual evidence of this loss. It absolutely is a loss and a difficult change when someone leaves us in this way, but they are not truly lost to us, and the physical loss dims when we’re able to recover our channel of true connection. 

When my grandmother passed away last summer, a wise man in my life told me to consider the line in the Apostles’ Creed - the communion of saints. It’s one of the beliefs listed among others that we recite in the prayer, and I hadn’t really given close attention to it until he directed me to it. He said that the communion of saints is our unwavering connection to all souls, both living and deceased, that we never truly lose the people in our life if we have a firm belief in this communion. This communion is the conscious connection we seek in recovery, the one into which we were born and only lose touch with as we experience the inevitable traumas of living in a broken world.

When we lack this connection, we fail to recognize the people around us as more than bodies, titles and extras in the drama of our self-centered story. Steve’s treatment of the people in his life reflects this kind of limited world view. He uses Ned for the relationship subplot he contributes, he assumes the motives of Bill Udell, the “bond company stooge”, he refuses to recognize his brilliant wife as the brains of Team Zissou, he steals equipment from a rival oceanographer’s lab, and he risks taking his entire crew into unprotected waters to save a little gas and time on his route.

When we find ourselves valuing others only by what they can contribute to our own stories, we make the same blunder Steve does here. I know that I’ve done it many times, and I continue to catch myself in this thinking from time to time. When I harbor resentment or act on my fears, I do so because my mind shifts back into that ego-centered solar system thinking in which it perceives everyone else’s actions as significant only in their relationship to me. In this universe, every word or action of another person moves in a gravitational relationship to me. That mode of thinking is delusional and harmful, and it leads us down a dangerous slope into egotism’s terrible kingdom of isolation. We often don’t even realize we’re doing it. 

Despite Steve’s selfish nature, Ned persists in loving him and trying to establish a connection with him. Ned even asks if he can address Steve as “Dad” while they’re shooting a dive scene. This request reflects Ned’s readiness to connect and love a man whom he barely knows as his father. Steve is not quite as ready for this level of intimacy, and he allows Ned to call him another “less specific” nickname: Stevesie. Ned accepts it, but as he later admits, “it doesn’t mean the same thing.”

Ned embodies the youthful, loving spirit with which Steve has lost touch. He places special significance on expressing his love through words and actions, gives generously of his time and communicates his feelings and intentions clearly. He also doesn’t care for the fame and recognition that Steve seems to value above all else. When Ned reconstructs the Zissou insignia, he includes symbols for Steve, Klaus, and even Esteban, saying he “didn’t want to impose” when asked about his own symbol. He does not expect or desire the recognition that Steve feels is necessary for a successful life; he seeks love and connection rather than fame. Steve does not understand the true nature of Ned’s love, even going so far as to criticize his romantic interest in the reporter, Jane, who has come on board to report on their adventure. Steve takes this romance as a personal slight, perceiving their relationship as something done to spite him, since he has this image of himself as the hero and main interest of everyone’s story. 

When Ned fails to report for watch duty because he’s spending time with Jane, a band of Filipino pirates hijacks the Belafonte and violently takes control of the ship and all its occupants. This is a situation in which many of the crew believe that death is imminent or despair in not knowing how the cards will play out. They are completely in the hands of their captors, blindfolded and tied up. Something seems to take hold of Steve’s willpower, and he breaks free from his ropes, seizes a gun and single-handedly runs the pirates off his ship in a frenzy of gunshots. I’ve lived through and heard of many experiences in which it seems that I or others miraculously lived through something we might not have made it through. We may chalk it up to chance, survival instinct, or luck, but I believe God has a hand in these circumstances. I think that in our darkest moments, when everything in us wants to give up or sees no chance of going on, a higher power works in us like a magnet, pulling us through and bringing us a step closer to that sense of genuine connection, even if we don’t realize it at the moment. If you’re alive now, reading this essay and breathing, no matter where you are, you are moving forward on a path for a purpose greater than you know, and there’s a good chance you’ve lived through some death-defying circumstances because of a power greater than your own, because someone was looking out for you even when you didn’t know you needed to be looked out for. You’re here for something, and it’s not to put logs in the fires of resentment or fear. We feed those without even realizing it sometimes, because we mistake the fire we need for survival with the fire that will destroy us. 

When Steve stops diverting blame for the situation and puts his own life on the line to rescue his crew, he takes the first step in returning to his true self, the one that seems to have been asleep for the past decade. He stops trying to live in the past and acknowledges the present, assuming the heavy responsibility of a captain whose ship is in crisis. He continues on this path in the next scene, acknowledging his poor choice of course and giving his crew members the chance to leave the mission without hard feelings on his part. Steve is still very self-centered. He brushes over his apology to Eleanor, he fixates on whether or not his crew still likes him before giving them the option to quit, and he gets into a fight with Ned after finding him in bed with Jane. They exchange harsh, honest words as well as a punch each, and Ned finally reveals that his mother told him that Steve had known about him since the day he was born. Steve faces possibly his greatest wrong - the refusal to acknowledge and embrace his son, and he now faces losing this young man as a result of his inability to let go of his own ego and fear. Fear keeps him from accepting Ned, but fear of losing Ned also tugs at him. Earlier, when the pirates seize Ned to take him hostage, Steve finally expresses genuine concern for his probable son. It’s the first time we see him acting like a father figure in a non-performative way, and the near death circumstances they fall into incite this action in him. Having survived the pirate raid, Steve now has the willingness to embrace others into his life, but he continues to struggle through his character defects. It’s the same for us when we experience a major wake-up call or hit a bottom. We know we need to change, but it’s not as easy as just being healed because we know it needs to happen. We need help. 

Despite his new willingness to change, Steve still struggles to be a father to his son and a leader to his crew. Though he admits his faulty decision to enter uncharted waters, Steve still takes the departure of several of his team members personally. He also holds onto the resentment he harbors against Ned for his relationship with Jane. This resentment leads to the physical and verbal fight between father and son in which Ned tells him, “I’m just a character in your film.” 

Steve needs a higher power to guide him back to his son, his crew and his purpose, and we see that power at work when Eleanor shows up at the ship mere minutes after his altercation with Ned. Eleanor’s return marks the return of reason to the operation.  When she presents evidence to track down the pirates on one of the Ping Islands, Steve finally admits “on the record” that Eleanor has always been the brains behind Team Zissou. This is a pivotal moment; Steve cedes credit for the intelligence behind his life’s work to his wife in front of the report he has been trying to impress, and in doing so he acts against every urge of his ego. In recognizing Eleanor as “the brains”, Steve lets go of the delusion that he is the major player in their story. He embraces his wife and peers as equals in this mission, the goal of which has become the rescue of his “bond company stooge” rather than the fame and revenge he initially sought. 

This rescue mission contains several moments that reflect Steve’s continued recovery of connection with the people in his life and with himself. The team lands on the island and searches inside the old Hotel Citroen, a significant part of Steve’s past, as he reveals that his honeymoon with his first wife took place there. After tumbling down a flight of stairs inside the ruins of the hotel, he admits his greatest fear out loud: that he’s a has-been whose personal life and career have fallen to ruin. He apologizes for ignoring Ned all these years and says he’s thought of a new nickname instead of Stevesie: Papa Steve. He finally admits the fear behind his resentment toward Ned, saying “for me to meet a guy like you at this time in my life - I don't know…I want to communicate my feelings to you, but I think I might start to cry.” Steve’s honesty and humility in this moment, in which he expresses the desire for connection at the risk of being vulnerable, is one without ego or delusion. He accepts life and himself as they are, and asks Ned to receive him and his love. He does so as he lies on the floor after his fall, surrounded by the ruins of a past life, and Ned responds by offering his hand to pull him up. It’s a great moment in which Steve literally and figuratively accepts Ned’s help to recover.  On the island, Steve discovers that his nemesis, Allistair Hennessy, is also a prisoner of the pirates. He engages in another one v. everyone shoot off with the pirates, risking his life for the man he claims to loathe. 

Despite his progress, Steve still struggles, and the people in his life give him the direction and strength he needs to move forward in his recovery even when he loses faith in himself. When Ned suggests they go up in the balloon to see if they can spot the jaguar shark, Steve voices his doubt that he ever saw the shark in the first place. I think we all have moments like this - the ones in which we doubt if we’ll ever be able to do it. We might wish we could just be “normal” and drink like everyone else or just can’t fathom the rest of our lives in sobriety, because it’s really hard sometimes. It’s hard for a variety of reasons, especially when we remember how easy it is to just numb everything out. Sometimes I look at my life and feel like I haven’t really made any progress because it lacks certain determinants of success and I don’t really have a clear sense of where I’m headed. Like Steve, I don’t have any physical proof that a jaguar shark even exists to recover, but when my brain returns to sanity I remember that searching for it is infinitely more fulfilling than giving up. Ned pulls Steve out of this funk, and the journey continues. 

This next part is a spoiler, so proceed at your own risk. Steve and Ned fly up in the helicopter to look for the jaguar shark; just as they spot the fluorescent snapper fish that Steve saw right before his first encounter with the shark, the helicopter malfunctions. They crash into the ocean, and Ned succumbs to his injuries. Steve carries his limp body ashore, and the next scene presents Ned’s honorable burial at sea. In contrast to his response to Esteban’s death, Steve remains composed and present, acting as the leader Ned demanded him to be and surrendering the body of his son to the sea with dignity. 

Before the accident, Steve reveals that he’s held onto the letter Ned wrote him as a child all those years ago. This moment is a beautiful reflection of the fact that recovery of that state we’ve lost - that conscious connection - is always accessible to us. Even if Steve wasn’t ready to contact his son or acknowledge his presence, he has held onto a piece of his connection with Ned just as we carry in us the potential for connection. We have to summon the courage to reach for it rather than holding it hidden in our jacket pockets, and it’s always there when we can do that.

Ned, as Steve’s foil, has borne enough similarity to the older man that we can’t help but notice their differences. As Steve advances in his recovery, the two men begin to share more qualities and have fewer differences in character. Steve becomes more team-focused, less selfish, and more willing to recognize the abilities of others. He becomes like Ned in his readiness to act for the good of his team and to share in his experience rather than use his achievements as excuses to gloat. Most significantly, he cultivates acceptance of himself and life as it is. When we truly embrace and engage in recovery, a part of us has to die in order for us to move forward. At the time that Steve must endure the loss of Ned - who serves as a reflection of Steve - the older man is ready to leave behind part of himself. 

In the wake of Ned’s death, the team learns that the tracking signal on the jaguar shark is in close proximity. Led by Steve, they pile into his submarine, the Deep Search; it’s the first time they’ve used it thus far in the film, and the yellow submarine deserves a little attention here. The name ‘Deep Search’ is written in large letters above the crossed out script ‘Jacqueline’ - who, as Steve tells Ned at the onset of their trip, didn’t really love him. The substitution of the phrase Deep Search for the name of Steve’s first wife reflects a shift in his muse and sense of purpose. The rejection of Jacqueline, though it doesn’t receive much attention in the film, reflects a loss that has been replaced by a need to search, to recover what has been lost in some form. This is recovery. Though Steve may not have realized it, he has been on this search since he first lost touch with the connection he was born into. We all live like this, searching for whatever means we find to recover that sense of connection. Unfortunately, many of us fall into the harmful and delusional cycle of believing that substances can meet that need. This isn’t a deep search though, the one in which we latch onto temporary solutions in our quest for connection. The deep search is the one that takes us within ourselves. Steve is finally at this point in his recovery when he invites his crew et al. to join him for a ride in the submarine. I’m not positive if Anderson intended a nod to the Beatles’s song here, but if he did it’s fantastic. McCartney said of the song, created for Ringo Starr as a gift to fans of the drummer, “It’s a fun song, a children’s song.” This connection to childhood brings Werner, Klaus’s little nephew to my mind. He made a brief appearance at the beginning of the film when he gifted the pony fish to Steve; and though he doesn’t have a major role, as a child he’s the character closest to our original state of conscious connection that is ours at birth. So the submarine, a symbolic marriage of a deep search and the state of childhood, serves as an appropriate vessel for Steve to enter as he goes in search of the jaguar shark. He doesn’t know what he’ll find, but he’s willing to dive to the depths of the ocean for it.

The submarine scene is beautifully executed. It begins with a group shot of the entire team huddled into the vessel.  As they descend into the sea, Steve plays “Ned’s Theme”, an original Team Zissou track, on the sound system. In this way he includes his son in his deep search along with every person who has come to mean something to him on his journey. They find the jaguar shark in the darkest spaces of the ocean, and as the creature swims over them and bites off the bait Steve tied onto the submarine, the team watches in a mix of silent wonder, fear and amazement. Anderson uses stop motion to present the jaguar shark, presenting the idea that the creature represents something indefinable by our material world standards. Steve finally says, as if to himself, “I wonder if he remembers me.” I’m always touched by the simplicity of that statement, the little hope of being remembered, being known by someone, that tugs so familiarly at the human heart. This is a reunion of self with self, a recovery of something he’s searched for his whole life, and a realization for Steve that what he has been chasing is not at all what he has expected. He has been set on revenge and knowledge, and he finds beauty and something beyond his capacity to capture in words or on film. When he speaks, everyone in the submarine reaches to place a hand on Steve; and the group shot of them all together reflects the newfound state of connection Steve has finally reached because he has willingly entered the darkest parts of his life. 

The film ends in the way it began, with the world premiere of Steve’s film. This framing of Anderson’s full film within the two episodes of Steve’s film series heightens the role of the filming within a film that he has woven into the fabric of his larger story. It’s a film about loss, grief, connection and recovery, but it’s also about the ways in which we choose to tell our story. Telling story is one of our most human forms of connecting, and through the evolution of Steve’s work on Part 2 of the Jaguar Shark episode, we see him become more honest and accepting in his practice of communication with his audience and team members. In the final scene, as his film premieres to an enrapt audience, Steve sits outside on the steps of the theater, alone with his thoughts until little Werner slips out of the doors to join him. 

Anderson uses a two shot of them sitting together as Steve reaches takes Ned’s Zissou Society ring from his pocket to give to the young boy. The scene gives us so much of Steve’s recovery. He has exceeded expectations for the film but takes no great joy in the success of its premiere. He doesn’t enjoy the spectacle or fame he once needed. He tells the story for the sake of communicating the journey and honoring the team who accomplished it. Werner seems drawn to him as he sits alone outside, suggesting that Steve has finally achieved recovery of that kind of simple connection with the world that he had as a child. 

Steve finally says, “This is an adventure.” The film ends to roaring applause, and the audience pours out. Rather than sticking around as he did in the first premiere to answer questions and gauge people’s reception of his work, Steve gets up, puts Werner on his shoulders, and walks out. He doesn’t say, “that was an adventure.” He says that it is. He finally sees and accepts his life as the reality and ongoing work of what it means to be human, and he recognizes his films as reflections of that reality rather than the all-important image of self and fame. Adventure etymologically means “coming to” or “arrival at”; so in this choice of words, Steve reflects his understanding that life is a constant movement toward something, a recovery always in progress that requires presence in the now. The final score depicts him continuing that adventure in the company ofWerner, Eleanor and his team. He has come to embrace the necessity and value of connection with others on this adventure, and he treasures the presence of childlike consciousness in his world. We’re reminded of Ned’s very first lines in the film - “What’s next for Team Zissou?” - as they walk into that uncertain next episode of life. They don’t leave us with an answer or some grand plot for the next film, and that’s OK. The film closes on the fact that this next adventure will be a continuation of the life aquatic, one that honors the lives not physically present even as those still wearing the red caps and Zissou blue march forward toward the ocean. This is recovery: finding that conscious connection and cultivating it even as life carries on with all its tragedy and joy. 

Steve accepts his adventure for what it is; he’s a man who has made mistakes, who is a couple decades past his favorite age, who has witnessed the death of two of his loved ones, who has been unlucky in love, and who has seen his career at both a height and a low. He is also able to see that he is the leader of a team who trusts him, that he has life still to live at this age and people whom he can love and who love him back. And he has found that conscious connection is available to him if he can continue to live searchingly and to take the circumstances of his life as they are given to him. Our individual adventures may have varying titles and may often feel that we are the only ones dealing with the particular challenges and pathways before us, but we’re all working to arrive at the same end. We’re living to find that conscious connection that is our birthright; we’re searching for that yellow submarine moment in the ocean when the familiar feeling of lightness revisits us and assures us that we’re home in spite of it all.