Is It Soup Yet ?
Posted By Paul Kotik on 24 April 2006
Let's pick it up at just that point and see if we can move it out of the box. Fasten your seat belts -- we could end up miles from here !
Here's one of the problems : nobody has figured out how to show freediving, live, to an audience. The typical depth event involves a bunch of spectators drifting around a float or platform somewhere out on the ocean. At some point, a figure in a rubber suit disappears for a few minutes into the water. When the figure reappears, perhaps clutching a tag with a stenciled number on it, the boat crew whoops and hollers, and the spectators follow suit, albeit somewhat uncertainly -- they suppose something wonderful has happened, but they certainly have not seen anything very interesting.
Diver goes down, diver comes up. The video is better. It looks nice, yes, the translucent turquoise of the ocean depths always does, and would be soothing if it were not for the two-bit pop music tracks somebody always seems compelled to dub in. But what of the actual drama is conveyed in this way ? Nothing. This gets old very quickly.
The real story of deep freediving is, of course, hydrostatic pressure, anerobic metabolism and altered states of being. The problem for anyone trying to communicate this to a spectator is that there is little or nothing in the average person's experience of life that can help him relate what he sees on his TV screen to vicarious sense of what the freediver is going through.
Everybody drives a car, and when told that the racing car on the little screen is going 230 mph, everybody can extrapolate from personal experience to that of the race driver. Everybody has run, maybe back in school or maybe yesterday at the gym, and can gasp and marvel at the athletes in the last mile of a marathon. For most of the popular sports, the spectator has a way to cue off the visual feed and build, in his imagination, a connection to the athletes.
This is not true of freediving. There simply are not enough people in the world who have passed down through 30 meters on a breath of air, who have known the sensations of squeeze, the blood shunt, and the burn. How can this story be told to the uninitiated ?
Some have talked about spelling it out, on screen, in ways that make it real. Split screens: the diver in one window, and familiar objects in the second window, drawn down into the depths alongside the descending diver. Watching the football shrink and collapse, the egg implode, or the styrofoam coffee cup shrink down to the size of a thimble might be compelling.
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