Abstract
Director Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) appropriates the life and work of ocean explorer and documentary filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau to fashion the story of an adventure filmmaker adrift in his life and art. In drawing on a real, external referent in Cousteau's documentary legacy, Anderson's reflexivity reaches out of its normally hermetic shell to dramatize – and problematize – the production and reception of the nature documentary. The Life Aquatic's fiction can productively be read as a literal and metaphorical exploration of issues related to documentary as co-constituted by viewer consciousness, and as a commentary on our own expectations and desires in looking at animals through nature documentary.
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