The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
does the hard work and takes the necessary risks, saying concretely that the worship of the people of God can be spoken in a contemporary idiom and that the new language and pattern can be as...
...Truth to tell, if only we could enjoy it on its own terms, The Deep is not all that bad a thriller...
...Official harassment and the interest of federal agencies in our activities may well be among the social factors responsible for the romantic lure of the Irish revolution in the first place, which may seem a simple revolution with someone to shoot, quite unlike our own morass...
...simply doesn't make nature an adequate antagonist...
...He writes of America, about which he knows nothing, not about Ireland and its problems, which would seem to be the point of the violence in the North of Ireland...
...Fisher to declare his interest before you foisted him on your liberal readers...
...The four "leading" Irish Americans may have been taken in but you should not...
...Oh sure, the divers are attacked by a bunch of sharks at one point...
...It only allows them to splash around in their considerable talents...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, who has directed that no Republican--Provisional or Official--may appear on the air waves he controls...
...We probably sense its disaster as well as we ever will without going there...
...In the opening scene, for instance, Gail (Bisset) and her boyfriend Dave (Nick Nolte) are scuba diving while on vacation in Bermuda, and the bottom world they visit is such a dean, well-lighted one that we never get over our sense of complacency about it afterwards...
...and would we still if we knew them...
...It seems that recent events have us more worried about ourselves...
...The real "deep" is ,presumably murky, sinister and forbidding, but the movie doesn't get that far down...
...The larger notion that "lost" causes ought to be abandoned is more silly than cynical...
...On the contrary, it makes the shipwreck seem like a kind of fun house, where bogus thrills pop out of trap doors, and thereby renders the alleged deep shallower than ever...
...To the Editors: I find it regrettable that your expert on Irish affairs is an employee of Irish state television and radio, and as such an official of Dr...
...First, the utility of inflating the Irish body count to the American scale in order to bring it home to us is very dubious...
...The divers discover beneath the World War II ship and its cache of morphine the remains of an Commonweal: 499 older vessel, an eighteenth-century merchantman containing gold and gems bound from the New World for the mistress of the King of Spain...
...does the hard work and takes the necessary risks, saying concretely that the worship of the people of God can be spoken in a contemporary idiom and that the new language and pattern can be as meaningful, at times, as anything from the past...
...You have fallen for a seam...
...With the morphine as a decoy for Cloche the divers go after the jewelry, and there is a certain racism here in the fancy that drugs are a fit booty for a black man while only WASPs can appreciate the value of art and history...
...Moreover, as was the case with Vietnam, television brings home what figures may not...
...It's too bad that we don't go to movies any more just to be entertained by such fare...
...In fact, nature becomes little more than a sideshow in The Deep...
...If the film is too shallow for its stars, moreover, in other, more detrimental ways it is also too shallow for its audience...
...The IRA could not exist if the alternative to it were not so horrible...
...We need a new approach to violence and revolution, and this is a good place to start...
...The Noraid countersuit suggests instead that harassment has a galvanizing effect...
...Instead of an invader from outer space, they are the enemy within, the one beneath the skin of our own world and, thus, the one secreted inside us ourselves...
...How did they become killers and Marxists, if that's what they are, and how can they be changed...
...It is the context, rather than the statistics, of violent death that engenders grief and outrage...
...Despite this implication, however, the false bottom in both the supply ship and the film's plot make for a pretty good adventure story...
...Shame on you...
...As sources of terror, they have the advantage of being found at home...
...Instead of an exploration of the primordial, the plot turns into the opposite of that, an exploration of history...
...I share his hope that the export of guns will stop, but I question his understanding of how to stop it...
...We go only out of more urgent cultural needs now, and those The Deep never gets down to...
...They are only his torpedoes, a gang of paid assassins, a mob of teeth for hire...
...I favor the IRA, I would give them money for arms, if I could find a way to do it, because such arms are defensive...
...You let the writer say things such as "Irish people, North and South, were pleased etc...
...Cloche is the true villain here, but too human a one to be really contemporary...
...I wish you had asked Mr...
...He reduces the film's plot to an old-fashioned contest between good and evil...
...Of the civilians killed in the North very few were killed by the IRA...
...To the Editors: "Exporting Death to Ireland" [June 10] was a bad article and it was unethical of Commonweal to print it...
...But The Deep misses this mythological boat by not really making nature the villain of the piece as laws did...
...Why do we want to arm them...
...They are only acting as agents for the character who is the real villain in this film, a Haitian gangster named Cloche (Louis Gossett) who's after thousands of ampules of morphine among the goodies the divers have recovered from their sunken World War II supply ship What can the sharks do to top Cloche's own malevolence in chumming tuna and fish blood to attract them around the divers' boats...
...Two thirds of the total has been killed deliberately by Protestant Ultras...
...But these are not representative of nature in all her glory and horror as the one shark in laws was...
...Who are the IRA and what do they want...
...I can find no one who is sending arms to Ireland...
...Gall and Dave find traces of sunken treasure on this shelf where they are swimming in the opening scene, and the film stays marooned there throughout...
...THE SHALLOWS OOOOO OOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN In the first place, The Deep is something of a movie of lost souls, a backwater into which two stars who have never made it as big as they shouldmJacqueline Bisset and Robert Shawwhave drifted...
...They have a saying in the British House of Commons when a member speaks to a brief: "Declare your interest, Sir...
...The article was written by a functionary of the Republic of Ireland, a repressive regime, where trial by jury and other civil rights are in abeyance, where there is torture...
...Mass audience movies like these are always trying to tell us something about where our collective head is...
...Why do they act as they do...
...Lll I I I azm exchange e l v ewx 'Exporting Death to Ireland' New York, N.Y...
...The trouble with its terms is that they move farther and farther away from our expectations, from the confrontation with raw nature we came to the theater looking for...
...She even has the fish eating out of her hand...
...At the end of the opening sequence, something unseen underneath the hull of the wreck Gall is exploring does grab her probing stick and gives her, and us, quite a turn...
...Nothing...
...What the shark in laws offered as well was the reassurance that such evil is not really evil at all, but rather something inherent in naturema primordial instinct which, no matter how savage and terrifying it might be, can never be made morally accountable...
...A deeper ex$ August 1977:500...
...But what that something was is then dropped like the stick itself and never confronted ~ain...
...Second, it seems quite unfikely that harassment by U.S...
...But now that kind of science fiction is a joke, as Star Wars is demonstrating with great success...
...MSGR...
...It is embodied in a single Moray eel which lives on the wreck in a hatch that the three divers must swim past on their way to and from the treasure trove...
...I visited Ireland last summer and was astonished that this story of censorship on television and radio in the Republic is not better known here...
...This is why nemeses like the shark in Jaws or the ocean in The Deep come to mind...
...That is akin to having Pinochet's man tell us what the people of Chile are thinking...
...In subsequent scenes when she, Dave and a local adventurer (Shaw) return to the wreck to hunt for more treasure, the threat of the deep itself is literally shunted off to the side...
...If that is true, increased indefinite pressure at home should lead to more guns and not fewer...
...He deprives us of that enmity with our own nature, with Nature itself, which the film seemed to promise...
...CHARLES O. RICE Santa Fe., N.M...
...Southern Irish governments have been hoodwinked into abandoning the Irish Catholics of the North in the past...
...We have seen Belfast...
...When Americans were afraid of external aggression and foreign ideologies, back in the fifties, science-fiction films were serious business...
...Fisher appears to be doing his duty well...
...Being a monster easily circumvented, and living in a niche in the wall like some fairytale dragon in its cave, or a latter-day Grendel, the eel...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...R~VX RUBENSTE]N Pittsburgh, Pa...
...I believe the Southern Irish Government in concert with Britain is trying to muzzle Irish Americans...
...To the Editors: Desmond Fisher's article "Exporting Death to Ireland" [June 1.0] caught my interest as an IrishAmerican with a horror of bloodshed...
...authorities will change the behavior of gun-running groups...
...When a single death by violence has no haeaning, it is doubtful that 1000 similar ones will...
...DR...
...But as both an oceanographic space and a psychological one, it remains unexplored...
...Finally, the perception of the IRA cause as a lost one will be hard to come by at this distance, given the nature of guerrilla war and its reportage...
...It Came from Outer Space, as a popular title of the day put it, and like "it", The Body Snatchers and the errant planet in When Worlds Collide, et al., suggested that America was threatened only by extra-terrestial enemies, by invasion from without...
...The appeal which the deep itself should have had as the antagonist in this film is of course the same as that which the shark had in the earlier Peter Benchley script, Jaws...
...That other deep, the one we thought the title referred to, yawns suggestively beyond the edge of the reef they're on, and occasionally some boulders go tumbling off into it...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
