What We Can Learn About Emotional Payoff From My Octopus Teacher
By: Jennie Nash
Tags: Storytelling, Books And Authors, Books, Writing, Documentary

What We Can Learn About Emotional Payoff From My Octopus Teacher

TLDR: This post does not have one single thing about politics in it.

Photo by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash

Spoiler Alert: You can tell by the title and the genre what this Nextflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, is going to be about, so there is no real spoiling it. It’s sort of like saying you’re going to spoil an episode of The Blue Planet by saying that you will see some crazy animal behaviour. It doesn’t really spoil the experience — because the camera work is so extraordinary and the whole spirit of the thing is so amazing and you see the crazy animal behavior and think, Right… I expected that. That being said, what I am going to say in this post might stick in your head in a negative way while you are watching My Octopus Teacher in the way reading a critical review of a movie before you see it might stick in your head in a negative way, and if that’s going to bug you, consider this a spoiler alert. Another Preface About This Post (Because Why NOT Have Two): This blog post is part of a challenge that Dan Blank and I gave ourselves. It arose one day during our weekly mastermind chat. Dan said, “I’m going to watch The Octopus Teacher again because I have to write about it — and I have to do it before Jennie Nash does.” I’d heard about the Netflix documentary from some friends, who said it was extraordinary, but that was my only knowledge of it. “What?!” I said. “Why?” He began to answer, something about how I would surely write something about — and then I said, “STOP! Don’t say anything else!” And we devised the challenge: to each watch this film and write something about it we would find meaningful for our followers with no conversation or communication about what we were each doing. Challenge is my word that I put on the endeavor — and the reason I chose it is because the challenge any of us have is to write what we see and think and feel and believe, and to know in our bones that no one else in the world could possibly write the same thing, because we each see and think and feel and believe such very different things. I feel 100% certain that what I am about to write here is nothing like what Dan is going to write. And odds are good that it is nothing like what he thought I was going to write, either. You can read his post on The Octopus Teacher HERE.

My Octopus Teacher is, first and foremost, a gorgeously filmed nature documentary. It immerses you in the wild ocean world of the kelp forests off Cape Storm, also known as the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. There is mind-blowing underwater camera work and a haunting musical track and moving time-lapse photography and the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon shots that make you scratch your head and think, “How did they CAPTURE that?” This all is to be expected from the medium — it’s nature photography by a guy who has been doing it professionally all his life — but it’s still dazzling.

The story is about Craig Foster’s unusual and unlikely relationship with an octopus, whom he visits every day for nearly a year. It’s a gripping tale about the power of observation, the nature of trust, the vulnerability of being both predator and prey, and the fact that the strange creatures who inhabit the earth are far more like us than they are different.

Foster used a simple structure to contain his tale: the commitment he made to spend time with the octopus every single day. Many excellent and powerful stories have been told using this kind of construction — someone who vows to make every recipe in The Art of French Cooking (Julie and Julia) or someone who attempts to live for a year exactly the way Jesus lived (My Jesus Year) or someone who wants to see how their relationship is impacted if they have sex every single day (Sex Every Day). It’s a human imposing some kind of time stamp on an idea or a topic that doesn’t naturally lend itself to being contained by time. It’s a process of immersive storytelling and it tends to amplify fascinating things about the individual storyteller, the idea or topic, and humans in general.

Had Foster left it at that — had he focused on just that story (the daily visit to the octopus, how it is that a human can befriend an octopus, what you can learn by knowing an octopus) in just that structure — it would have been a very different, and in my mind, a more resonant story. But he didn’t leave it at that. He put another framework around his relationship with the octopus that was a completely different kind of narrative: the story of his own healing.

And he doesn’t make good on the promise of that story. He cracks open the door and never opens it to let us in. At the end, I was left with more questions than answers — and not the kind of questions (questions about life and death and pain and recovery and resilience and perhaps redemption) you want at the end of this kind of story. I felt as if I’d been led on; I felt cheated.

Cheated, Jennie? By a Beautiful Documentary? Really?

Yes! Here’s why — and here’s why it’s so important for writers to give us the emotional payoff they promise (which means they need to both make the promise and then close the loop).

The opening of this film paints the picture of a man who is in a great deal of emotional pain. Unable to work, unable to connect with his family — it’s clear there is some kind of deep inner turmoil. It’s just not entirely clear what the turmoil is — depression, anxiety, emotional burnout, exhaustion, overwork, all of the above? He never lets us see or feel or experience or know the specific pain he is in. He recalls working to film the master trackers in the Kalahari desert (in the film, The Great Dance) and speaks about being in awe of how close they are to nature; he realizes that in order to heal, he needs to experience that level of closeness. But then he leaps right to this solution — which is to go to the ocean where he grew up and immerse himself in it.

He references his wife and son in this opening frame — we see them in fuzzy camera footage — and although he doesn’t say it, we get the sense that he has to leave them in order to heal. He never tells us what they think of his leaving or if they worried or objected or threw a coffee pot at him. He just goes off to the cold waters of the kelp forest where he meets the octopus. We watch as the relationship with the octopus unfolds, thinking we are going to get the explanation of his pain so that we can more fully experience his healing we know is coming; the movie is, after all, called My Octopus Teacher.

Twice we almost get the story — when he first picks up the camera and starts to film, it feels like a kind of thawing, and we expect him to let us into the pain at that point, to explain it or describe it or wrestle with it in some way, but he doesn’t; again, we get to see the solution — which, for him, is to create, to go back to the work he loves that he had to leave — but we don’t get to see the problem that solution is meant to address.

The second time we almost get the story of his pain is when the shark tears the limb off the octopus (so dramatic! How was he THERE for that scene??) and the arm re-grows. Foster talks about the remarkable ability of the octopus to heal and the remarkable ability of himself to heal, too.

I was thinking, Yes! The ability to heal is remarkable! Nature is so amazingly resilient! The octopus heals and we can heal too! But heal from what, Craig Foster?? How much more resonant it would be if we knew! If we had been able to experience whatever darkness Foster felt that drove him to the sea.

The End Must be Earned

The final betrayal for me was at the end, when Foster’s teenage boy enters the story. The boy swims with his dad. Shares this beautiful moment with his dad. Seems to commune with his dad and with the ocean his dad loves.

So when did the boy come to the little house by the sea where Foster lived when he met the octopus? How long was he there? Was he angry at his dad, at first? Confused by his dad’s pain? Brooding? Mad? Refusing to swim? Totally forgiving at every turn?? We don’t know. At one point, Foster says that he was telling his boy about the octopus all along, and was able to introduce them to each other. When was that? What was the boy’s response?

Foster states that his relationship of trust with the octopus helped him build his relationship with humans. That is a powerful message but that is the moment I felt cheated. You can’t give me the emotional ending if you didn’t give me the pain at the beginning, if you didn’t earn it.

If the healing was about his relationships, what was the nature of those relationships? Was the son there the whole time? Was the wife? Is the wife the mother of this son? If not, where is she? And what happened to their relationship? She is nowhere to be seen at the end — no mention of her, no reference of her — so we can guess. And indeed a quick Google search tells me that Foster is divorced from his child’s mother.

The point here is that if you don’t give your reader (or viewer) the story, they will make one up. Telling a story is like leaving breadcrumbs in the woods, revealing the path, showing us the way, taking us where you want us to go. Not enough breadcrumbs, and we’re off following some other trail.

The Lesson the Octopus Taught

The measure of a movie, for me, is often if I wake up after watching and keep thinking about it, keep pondering it. In this case, I did that. The octopus part of the story is an amazing story. I had so many of the GOOD kinds of story questions — questions about octopus and the kelp forest and how long Foster could stay underwater, and who filmed him, and how he got that insane shot of the shark. Foster said that the octopus taught him “that we are inseparable from nature.” I love that message — it would have been the perfect point to a story about his relationship with the octopus, and perhaps a perfect explanation of how to heal from deep pain: to reconnect with nature, to immerse ourselves in the wildness of the environment around us.

But it is not the same lesson he learned about reconnecting with his son, whom he said at the start he didn’t know how to parent. Foster did not give us that lesson. His decision to share it and then hold it back from us caused a rift between the viewer and the creator.

In the final credits of the film, you see that Tom Foster — the teenage son — did the aerial photography and also wrote music for the film. So there was definitely something big going on between father and son that we were not allowed to see.

And you may be thinking, “He can protect his son! He doesn’t have to bring his son into it!” But he DID bring his son into it. He SAID that at the start — I couldn’t be a good father to my son. And he BROUGHT the kid back at the end of the story, but only to say, “He’s a great swimmer and loves these waters, too.” He doesn’t say anything like, “I learned what love is,” or “I learned the incredible power of forgiveness,” or “I learned how fragile our time on earth is and how we have to work to maintain our relationships.” He chose to put the son into his story, but didn’t let us experience that story.

Storytelling is a powerful contract between the creator and the reader/viewer. When you tell a story, you make a promise. It’s your job to see that promise through — to give us what you said you would. Either be willing to go all the way, or tell a different story where you can do that.