In front of our eyes unravels a blue, flickering surface in perpetual movement, highlighted by tranquil yet eerie music. We stand still but the surface moves gently in ebbs and flows, unfolding an array of different shades of blue, from bright to almost completely black. As the image persists we begin to grasp that we are submerged underwater, like a crustacean safely positioned in the slime.
The sun rays arrive and diffract as they hit the surface, and only some of them break through it, to illuminate the underworld. We are allowed to stay with this image as it draws us toward tactile meditation. This tactility is enticed by the texture of the image: the gentle waves that become created underneath, the colours oscillating from light blue on the left side of the screen, connoting what is known, to navy blue on the right and bottom, indicating the unknown.
Interestingly it is the dark area of the image where human figures appear, pointing us towards the oceanic primordial soup where life on Earth began. As the figures swim closer towards the camera, we can distinguish a male and female body although priapic gender distinctions blur underwater: not only as the figures wear their diving suits but as the bodily edges soften, the human body loses its human qualities as it is forced to abandon its upright standing position. The figures dive deeper, we can discern that they carry spears. Are they hunters? They swim into a cave and there is she is – moray, a fish hiding in the rocky interstice. We can see the two bodies struggling – the male figure covers the female and grabs her hand while she struggles to let go. Who is predator and who is prey?
This is the opening scene from Murina (2021, Antoneta Kusijanovic) – the title of which was inspired by a fish moray that lives hiding in the interstices of underwater caves. It has two jaws and attacks when provoked. The film weaves the tale of teenage Julija (Gracija Filipović) who, not unlike the eponymous moray, transforms into a predator when driven to the edge by her abusive father, Ante (Leon Lucev), or rather by the patriarchal, ossified social model she is trapped in.
Solance in Watery Millieu
In this article we will focus on affective cinematic depictions of Julija’s resistance as she finds solace in the watery milieu. In order to approach this filmic portrayal of teenage rebellion, we will have to venture beyond an anthropocentric critical framework and instead depart into the murky waters of post-human theory. We will simultaneously endeavour to find a model of film criticism which relies more on the embodied, affective spectatorship (postulating our complete submission to the cinematic image). What we intend to emphasise are the filmic images that allow us to discover what is ahuman in our humanness. By relying on the ahuman as the concept that leads our analysis, we turn to Patricia MacCormack who coined it. MacCormack’s ahuman theory takes a radically abolitionist stance toward human subjectivity. As she explains, ahuman
‘verges on a nothing that includes everything. It utilizes our animalness, in a non-speciecist way, to remind us there are escape routes from humanism — which may encourage ethical relations — but not by knowing, fetishizing, or making an idea or a concept of another animal. Simply because when there is no human, there is no deferral to human-signifying systems’ (2014, p. 2).
By affectively observing Julija’s desirous interactions with water, we – as spectators – transform into sea critters, and are endowed with animal-like perception; our sense altered. As our perception transforms, our analysis must also adjust. It will thus aim attention not at linear narrative or disembodied symbolism but rather on the materiality of the cinematic image and its encounter with our own bodies as spectators.
Lastly, we would approach Julija’s sensual relationship with water, as well as our encounter with the film, as queer. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr in their introduction to the collection of essays Deleuze and Queer Theory describes the concept of queerness as ‘the force to affect and effect changes in the way one theorises, its capacity to produce deviant lines along established thinking and disciplines, its ability to queer the queer, that is, to undermine the self, to resist any normalisation’ (p.1). The desirous interactions with water and with film fit Nigyami’s description perfectly and although we will not attempt to get into too much detail on the academic discussions of queerness, it is important that we exceed our understanding of sexuality to non-anthropocentric frameworks.
Are we ready to sacrifice our straight posture and dive to discover the liquid world of ahuman desire?
LIQUID RESISTANCE
Following a success of her short film, Into the Blue (2017), a tension-filled meditation on demons that hunt a thirteen year old Julija (also brilliantly played by Gracija Filipović) on a small Croatian island, Antoneta Kusijanovic decided to remain in the watery milieu to direct her feature film Murina. Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, this suspenseful drama stole the hearts of viewers and critics, resulting in Kusijanovic being awarded the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Julija initially seems to live in paradise, but we quickly begin to comprehend that her coastal existence with her emotionally abusive father and her mother, Nela (Danica Curcis), entirely submitted to him, is almost unboreable. The arrival of a wealthy family friend from the US, Javier (Cliff Curtis), makes it even more difficult for the girl who must now discern the monsters of patriarchy in Javier’s flirtatious approach to her.
This watery desire is a form of resistance against androcentric priapic discourses that can never truly entice the creation of difference – in this game the winner must be masculine and white, driven by heterosexual desire. In order to stay in the game anything that differs from this model has to be covered and masked, and adopt a disguise to embody the model. However, as the film reminds us, this game requires the annihilation of our humans, our identity and thus everything that we are. It does not, however, have to be painful and we do not have to die. The death involves only our humanness and it can be effectuated by submitting to a desire that defies the neoliberal model – it could be an encounter with water or aesthetic encounter with art, such as film.
The aesthetic experience of this alien, underwater world of Murina can induce a temporary death of humanness and thus help us to navigate the waters of advanced capitalism without ever submitting to the annihilating logic of Sameness.
This is the only available strategy for Julija who escapes into the water every time she feels like exploding with the emotion she experiences. Their Croatian island home appears to be an in-between space, seemingly unmoored from wider civilisation but inextricably linked with it by global tourism. The weather is almost constantly extremely warm and sunny, the lack of tress making it impossible for characters to find escape from their escalating emotions. The only shady place is the house, but Ante’s exercising of control over Julija and her mother cannot be considered as a peaceful sojourn. The only remaining line of escape is the water.
This is evident in the scene when Julija is scolded by her father, just before Javier’s arrival. We can see her body jump into the water. The camera already submerged – the falling body pierces the surface, muddies the water around it. But what water does to the body is a softening, relaxing it. The tension born through standing upright is released, the body goes back to its earliest memories of the motherly womb and further still to the first primordial soup.
Julija descends deeper and lies on the mud, at one with her surroundings. This serene image is disturbed by a boat passing over – nothing but a dark shadow. The sound is muffled, in this underwater kingdom human hearing must adjust to different frequencies.
This is when Julija first meet Javier – dressed in her swimming suit, dripping with water – a stark contrast to the fully dressed, elegant visitors. Julija truly becomes a fish torn from her natural environment and forced to perceive like a human, walk like a human, her body ever missing the water. When Julija emerges and uncertainly walk towards the visitor, her gestures – hands trying to cover her suddenly naked body – indicate unease, embarrassment, uncertainty.
Javier turns out to be an older man, but gallant, well-dressed, speaking with a deep voice in an American accent. This gentlemanly outlook, so different from Julija’s father magnetises her and, as she attempts to bring her mother and Javier together, the boundaries between Julija’s desire for Javier as a father and as a lover become blurred. This desire, however, is still too entangled in the patriarchal, heterosexual matrix to be truly freeing. It is through and with the water that Julija can fully unravel her femininity – not as the Other in patriarchal model but as pure Difference in itself
DIVING INTO THE IMAGE
The moment when desire for Javier and for the water combine is one of the most powerful in the film, and occurs when Julija and Javier dive underwater to see a shipwreck. Javier’s approach to water seems more courageous than Ante’s who plainly refuses partaking in the diving activity, excusing himself with heart problems. But is Javier capable of the organic, desirous relationship with water as Julija is? Or is both men’s primary desire to conquer the water, to force it to be in service of them? It seems appropriate to recall Luce Irigaray’s cry to Nietzsche in Marine Lover that he might step from the land and air into the water, conquering his fear of it.
Water denies all binaries as it connects living beings, pulsing through our bodies as well as our fellow earthly critters, it covers the land, rocky interstices, deep caves. It is in perpetual transformation in its cycle as it travels from the rivers and oceans to our stomachs, through the toilet to finally repeat this journey ceaselessly. Such reflection on the liquid form leads us to the nature of reality as non-dual and inextricably interconnected.
During the diving scene, the film unravels Javier and Julija as organic parts of the Adriatic Sea and we as spectators are also invited to partake. We descend, camera underwater, filming what is beneath the watery surface. Julija, wearing her diving suit, is reminiscent of an astronaut probing uncharted terrain emphasised by the eery stillness of the underworld and muffled sounds of the girl’s borrowed respiratory system (diving equipment). Julija and Javier hold their hands and descend together, embracing the underwater world. They exist in the image as two bodies submerging deeper into the unknown in slow motion, moving smoothly – the allusion to the womb is undeniable but again, also to our beginnings: a primordial vein in which creation occurs. Time becomes unhinged as the bodies of these diving humans become enhanced and altered by the diving equipment but also truly transformed through water that endows them with an almost alien grace.
These atemporal images featuring water allow us to think non-duality, and our existence is driven by what Bergson called intuition³ – a bodily mode of thinking that does not refute reason but invites it to a symbiotic relationship with the body, ultimately unravelling their boundaries as blurring and indistinguishable.
LIQUID COMMUNICATION
Through intuition, communication based on spoken language ceases, and becomes fully embodied. Indeed, one of the central aspects of the film is communication, or rather the inability to communicate when an interlocutor refuses to be moved by the other, to be transformed by the encounter. Julija cannot truly communicate with any of the characters as they refuse to hear her desire to break free from patriarchal Sameness. How can they comprehend if for them this is the only model that has the right to exist, where Difference is always revealed as just another mask of the Same. The femininity as Difference that Julija strives toward so vigorously cannot communicate through spoken human language but involves the whole body as well as the surrounding environment. Communication involves the full submission of interlocutors to each other; only then can it be productive.
To truly master the art of communication is to enter into the act of becoming – to be transformed into another, to truly submit to the other and ultimately to realise there is no Other but One – two watery masses that constitute the One. In this vein, we could go as far as to indicate that Murina emphasises the non-duality of body and mind as they simultaneously create each other.
Is this why the watery milieu precipitates becoming, enables communication?
It is where Julija can truly let go of priapic dogmas, her body akin to a fish: softened but also more fluid. Submerged in water, human language ceases its meaning, words cannot be spoken or heard, bodily intuition is the only way to communicate. The encounter with water is a mode of communication between the sea and Julija, it changes her physiognomy but also the way she thinks and behaves. The liquid milieu encourages hyper-attunement to her breathing, and her limbs as they operate differently in order to move forward.
Julija ceases to be human and becomes-otherwise, closer to fish than the people waiting for her on the surface. The desire begotten through Julija’s contact with water is impersonal, defying the concept of humans as relying on reason – disembodied rational thinking. In the water Julija eschews her humaneness, her standing posture, allowing her contours to soften. It emphasises desire that is not heterosexual; it goes far beyond this – it is truly queer, it forces us to wonder forms of desire so divergent from the priapic models offered.
The film makes it even more evident at the end when Julija, locked in by her parents in order to prevent contact with Javier, manages to escape through a water canal that connects that connects the house with the sea. And later, when disappointed by Javier’s departure, she contemplates killing her father during their spearfishing but chooses to swim away, yet again becoming an organic part of her milieu as we observe her in a long aerial shot swimming through the blue surface.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Henry. Matter and Memory, N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer trans., New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition P. Patton trans.,New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche trans Gill, Gillian C.. Cambridge University Press. 1991.
MacCormack, Patricia. Cinesexuality, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008.
MacCormack, Patricia. ‘Introduction’, In The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory. Edited by Patricia MacCormack, 1-12, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Nigianni, Chrysanthi and Storr, Merl ‘Intoduction. … so as to know ‘us’ better Deleuze and Queer Theory: two theories, once concept – one book, many authors …’ in Deleuze and Queer Theory edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr.