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I have a  fear of the ocean, and a love of BBC nature documentaries narrated by  Sir David Attenborough.

If I ever perchance am eaten alive by something–a pack of hyenas, a killer whale, or a colony of ravenous hagfish–I would want Sir David Attenborough narrating. It would just make the whole thing easier to deal with.

Sir David narrates the shit out of things.

Being a huge fan of both Sir David and watching animals do things, I was elated to find some of his BBC documentaries available on Instant Watch.

Unfortunately, they were about the ocean.

Of which I am FUCKING TERRIFIED.

To answer your question, yes, I’ve been in the ocean. I grew up in South Florida the daughter of a boating enthusiast, and though we went boating in freshwater much more often, we did go boating and to the beach on occasion. At the time, I was uncomfortable, but not terrfied of the ocean. I waded, I swam, I snorkeled, I got sunburnt.

Not so much with the actually being IN the ocean anymore.

Now I can go wading. I can wade like a motherfucker. And when it comes to sushi or fried shrimp, just set down the tray and back away, and then bring more in about fifteen minutes.

And I like watching oceanic documentaries, but as a coping mechanism I have convinced myself they are documenting the life of another planet or dimension. Otherwise, I would never be able to even look at the ocean again.

Because the ocean is big.

Real big.

And we, as humans, aren’t really adapted to it. Oh sure, every once in a while somebody swims the English channel or there’s footage on the news of some handful of fools doing a polar bear dip, but when you come down to it humans don’t swim too well.

We don’t have webbing, we don’t have nictitating membranes to protect our eyes underwater, we don’t have sonar, and we have shitty lung capacity.

Also, the whole ‘can’t breathe water’ thing.

But the absolute worst thing about the ocean for me is all the horrible, horrible stuff living in it.

There are THINGS down there. Terrible things!

And no matter how horrifying and grotesque something looks, it can ALWAYS be worse.

Wikipedia has this to say about the blobfish: ‘the flesh of the blobfish is primarily a gelatinous mass with a density slightly less than water.’

That means it probably feels like holding an egg yolk in your hand.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

Or there’s some damn thing that reproduces by attaching itself to the female’s underside and becomes part of her body and continually releases sperm. Or there are clouds of tiny squid who reproduce by filling the surrounding waters with their eggs, in order to be fertilized by floating sperm packets.

PACKETS.

Or there are killer whales killing young gray whales and only eating the jaw and tongue–so there’s a giant whale carcass just out there, floating around and being picked at by all these little fish until it falls to the bottom and is consumed by beings too horrific to even talk about.

There are predators against which there is no escape. If a bear comes after you, you climb a tree or something. If a shark comes after you, you’re lucky if you drown before it starts eating you.

And everything, EVERYTHING, from whales to dolphins to eels to sunfish to regular fish to sharks to jellyfish to krill, is covered in slime. These slime cocoons act as protective barriers to the ocean water, which can carry all kinds of weird shit. When you swim, they tell you not to touch the fish because touching this protective mucus tracksuit can affect the fish’s natural defenses to the aforementioned weird shit. SLIIIIIIIIME.

So the ocean to me is kind of like rolling around on the floor of a peep show.

For the most part, these are silly neuroses and I’m aware of that. I let these smaller concerns trouble me because the big reason I’m afraid of the ocean, I mean the really really big reason, is this:

Conceptually, the ocean is huge. And it has its own thing going on, completely independent of human evolutionary development. We came from the ocean, and yet have no business there anymore. Oh, we use boats, and scuba tanks and snorkels and submersibles and underwater robots and sonar and fishing nets, but when you come down to it, we don’t have business in anything but the very immediate coastal seas.  We just aren’t made for it. we can swim, but no matter how practiced or strong a swimmer, our kind of swimming is more of a controlled flailing.

It’s true what they say, you really can’t go home again.

Also, the ocean is big in a spatial sense. I mean we might think ‘Oh, it’s not that big on a universal scale,’ but that’s the problem: past a certain point, we humans have no concept of how big it IS. We might ascribe values to it in the quadrillions, but like age, it ain’t nothing but a number. It’s ascribing an abstract to a massive, massive concrete. And if the average person can’t even conceptualize the ocean, which again is not that big on the universal scale, how the fuck can we possibly conceptualize other concepts measured by numbers so big they need scientific notation? They have to ABBREVIATE the gigantic numbers they use to quantify these things. RIDICULOUS.

No wonder so many people have trouble understanding the importance of space travel, the concept of global warming, or the multifarious process of evolution. It’s all a question of scale, man.

Nevertheless, I found the Blue Planet series both informative and terrifying.

The series is broken down into episodes like Coastal Seas, Tidal Seas, Open Ocean, The Deep (terrifying!), Arctic Seas, and others I haven’t gotten into yet.

It was during The Deep episode, in a segment detailing the lives of creatures living absolutely sunless existences on the edge of volcanic vents that I began to be excited by the prospect of life on other planets. If life can evolve in such conditions, surely it can spring forth elsewhere in the universe!

Then I got excited thinking about the prospect of otherworld life, and from thence the VERY exciting idea of otherworld nature documentaries. I hope it happens soon enough that the BBC can make a documentary about it, and Sir David can narrate it.

He’d narrate the shit out of it, y’all.

It’s singable, it’s quotable, it’s eminently loveable–it’s a musical about a man who makes a deal with the devil in a the form of a Mean Green Mother from OUTER SPACE–It’s Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors!

I first saw Little Shop in the theater, in 1986. This would make me feel old, if it weren’t the first movie I’d seen in the theater where someone said ‘shit,’ because I was about seven years old.

The only film written by songsmith Alan Menken, Little Shop was based on the musical of the same name, which was in turn based on a Roger Corman horror film of the same name. I saw the latter many, many years ago, and remember it being the kind of black comedy that is so black it draws in all surrounding molecules. It had none of the anarchic fun of the 1986 film, and is one of those rare examples of a remake surpassing the original.

OMG WASN’T THAT FUN?

Between the phat beats, clever lyrics, infectious rhythms and otherworldly-awesome performances by the whole cast, there’s almost nothing wrong with the film. You could argue that the sets look cheap (as in the totally cardboard cutout train that occasionally passes in the background of Skid Row), but that’s part of the film’s aesthetic: it has the feel of a stage musical, and since some of the performers were putting in big, broadway performances (Ellen Greene never met a note she couldn’t belt, and the world is better for it) the movie is stronger for its occasionally cheap-looking backgrounds. The ‘fake’ look only adds to the feel of the movie. If you set it in a real-looking world I’m not sure it would have the same microcosmic feel. Plus, the fakeness of the sets means that the actors’ performances command that much more of the audience’s attention, and the realistic Audrey 2 looks that much more solid and alive by comparison.

Fun fact: some of the Audrey 2 scenes were filmed at 16 frames per second, then sped up to the traditional 24. This meant that actors interacting with the plant had to act in slow motion–which is why the plant, for a giant cable puppet, has such a flawlessly fluid movement, as in this clip.

Played by Four Top Levi Stubbs, the Audrey 2 is the sort of prop that took on a life of its own–on viewing the film, I catch myself thinking ‘I wonder what that plant is up to these days. He was really going places.’

Since Frank Oz worked with God in Human form Jim Henson, he knew a thing or two about making a prop come to life and the puppet’s performance is, to coin an alliterative phrase, perfect. More than that, If Stubbs wasn’t a charismatic maneating plant (or Moranis wasn’t a suitably likeable nerd) the movie would be dead in the water. After all, how can you make a movie about a deal with the devil if the devil has no charisma or charm?

Moving on: if you’re unfamiliar with the story, sweet, affable nerd Seymour Krelborn (Moranis), pines for the love of Audrey, a vaguely-trashy and baby-throated girl with a boyfriend who likes it rough. One day Krelborn, who lives in the slowly-dying Skid Row plant shop  where he works, comes across a strange and unusual plant after a remarkable solar eclipse, and takes it home. But the plant has a secret–it’s carnivorous.

In order for Krelborn to maintain the fame and fortune that the shop suddenly begins experiencing, he must feed the plant his own blood at first–and then, as it becomes bigger and bigger, it begins making its own demands. A hostage to his own fortune (or so he thinks), Krelborn must feed the plant or face failure–of the shop, of his own career, of his blossoming love with Audrey 1.

Enter Orrin Scrivello, DDS.

In one of those amazing performances that should have won some kind of Oscar, Steve Martin almost steals the show as Audrey’s boyfriend and sadistic dentist, Scrivello.

Once upon a time, Martin was the kind of comedy genius who could make even the most dour and miserable of bastards laugh. His antics brought smiles to children and adults alike, and he spawned characters whose contributions to the pop culture lexicon made America a slightly better place.

Nowadays, I just don’t know.

Anyhow, once upon a time, he was a man who blew the doors off a song about how much he enjoyed being a sadistic dentist. Here is that song.

I can’t remember the last time I did anything with that much enthusiasm. Clearly, I picked the wrong career.

Little Shop is one of those movies that always cheers me up, no matter what kind of mood I’m in. It’s infectious songs and perfectly over the top performances drag a bad mood upright.

It’s less a cult movie than a sleeper classic, the kind of strange little film that some love completely and others find stuck in their consciousness like a commercial jingle, or a toy keychain they found as a child and can’t part with. If only more musicals had this kind of charm.

Little Shop of Horrors is available on Instant Watch, but apparently on the DVD there is an alternate ending in which Audrey 2 takes over the world. Known as the ‘Everybody Dies’ ending because–guess what!–everybody dies, the ending was changed when test audiences didn’t like it. I can’t say I blame them–I love a story with a happy ending, and since Krelborn’s great sin was that he just wanted to protect his loved one, I can’t see it necessary that he come to a bad ending.