Underwater (2020)

Doomed shipboard narratives are all about the end of the world; the ship is the world and when the ship ends the world ends. Put the ship at the bottom of the ocean and the void of space is replaced by the claustrophobia of the weight of the collapsing environment; all those cubic miles of water crushing down into implosion. That systems failure is due to a Kraken is metaphoric, not of actual sea creatures, but of the giant and unrepairable rift extraction-capitalism has torn in the planet. Never mind that the monster here is dumb (a more gelatinous and translucent animal would be far weirder) for it registers via anime kaiju and matinee monster horror as the Apocalyptic Sublime. The sublime has always been apocalyptic. It is a bodily religious experience; the principle feeling one of radical and irreversible finitude; it’s beautiful, it’s bigger than thought, and it kills you. The apocalyptic sublime is an aesthetic category that becomes lethal. Whereas the apocalyptic banal makes a return to normal—Robinson Crusoe is one example: life just goes on—there can be no such return after the apocalyptic sublime, and any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat. The multiplicity of life may come to end in the reedy depths of our warming and acidifying seas, but the ocean’s implacable and inhuman rage never will.