THE ABYSS
To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity, the arts have recourse to every species of imposture; and these devices sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. Imitation diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones; as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds shall become so perfect that they cannot be distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again. –Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
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On the basis of James Cameron’s previous features, one could call him a professional recycler, and one of the most cunning in the business. Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) owed a great deal to The Road Warrior (1981) and Blade Runner (1982), while his Aliens (1986), which borrowed from First Blood (1982), was the literal sequel of Alien (1979); his only other “major” writing credit is as cowriter on another sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part Two (1985). (I haven’t seen Cameron’s unsung first feature, made in 1981, but that was a sequel, too–Piranha II: The Spawning.)
The Abyss displays the same virtues as its predecessors. The ideological touchstones this time around are a couple of basic polarities–cold war versus detente (in terms of attitudes rather than actual events) and bossy femininity versus nurturing motherhood–and Cameron manages to juggle and dovetail these two oppositions until they almost begin to seem like two aspects of the same conflict. But here Cameron clones and combines elements from not merely one or two other blockbuster hits, but a whole slew of them, including Alien (again), The Ten Commandments, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Rambo films, E.T., and several Disney features.
A team of nine underwater oil scouts headed by Bud Brigman (Ed Harris) is sent by the U.S. Navy to the Caribbean after the U.S.S. Montana, a nuclear submarine, has become incapacitated on the craggy edge of the Cayman trough–a drop of over two and a half miles below the ocean floor. Brigman feels that he and his crew are unqualified to carry out the assignment, but he is given no choice in the matter, and the tensions on his vessel (called Deepcore) are intensified by the arrival of his estranged wife Lindsay (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Lindsay, the brusque and brittle designer of Deepcore, understands its operations better than anyone else, but she is known to Brig and his crew as “the queen bitch of the universe.” Also joining the mission is a four-man team of Navy SEALs headed by Lieutenant Coffey (Michael Biehn), an excitable cold warrior who becomes convinced early on that Soviets are responsible for the Montana’s accident, which occurred about 80 miles off the coast of Cuba; Coffey later emerges as a borderline psycho itching for war.
This still doesn’t explain, however, why the aliens don’t serve an equally nurturing role for the Montana or Coffey, or why the exclusive importance of mankind’s encounter with a superior alien intelligence is that it brings about a clincher between Bud and Lindsay (with Christian overtones as they both apparently stand on water, not to mention the heavenly choir that celebrates their kiss). For the answers to these questions and others, we’ll obviously have to wait for the sequel. In the meantime, we can ponder the quote from Nietzsche in the press kit–“When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you”–which implies that narcissism is what’s at the root of all this compulsive replication.
