August 3: The first vessel to slip beneath the Pole
On August 3, 1958, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole fully submerged. Tonight's film: The Abyss (1989).
Some days the almanac hands me a story that is already half science fiction before the film even starts. Today is one of those. I sat down tired this evening, the usual noise of the day still rattling in my head, and then I read the date and I felt my shoulders drop a little.
On August 3, 1958, the USS Nautilus, hull number SSN-571, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, became the first vessel in history to cross the geographic North Pole fully submerged. Commander William R. Anderson had the conn. The mission was a secret Cold War operation code-named “Operation Sunshine,” an idea Anderson himself had proposed the year before to show what America’s new nuclear navy could do. The first attempt, out of Groton on August 19, 1957, failed because the polar ice was packed too deep. The second attempt left Pearl Harbor on July 23, 1958, slipped under the Arctic ice pack, and on August 3 completed the submerged transit. Nautilus surfaced north of the Pole and sailed on into the Atlantic. President Eisenhower later gave the boat the Presidential Unit Citation, the first ever awarded in peacetime.
What strikes me is the world it opened up. The point was not the Pole itself. The point was that a nuclear submarine could travel thousands of miles under the ice, undetected, and stay there. The deep ocean stopped being a place humans visited and became a place humans could operate. That is a different kind of frontier.
And that is exactly where The Abyss walks in.
In January of 1994, in the world of James Cameron’s 1989 film, the USS Montana, an Ohio-class nuclear submarine, has a close encounter with something it cannot identify and sinks near the Cayman Trough. With Soviet ships closing in and a hurricane on top of them, the Navy presses a civilian drilling rig called Deep Core into service as a recovery base. Ed Harris is Virgil “Bud” Brigman, the rig boss; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is Lindsey Brigman, his estranged wife and the platform’s designer; Michael Biehn is Lt. Coffey, the SEAL who starts to come apart under pressure. Down in the trench Lindsey spots a luminous shape circling her submersible and gives it a name: a “non-terrestrial intelligence.” There is something already living down there.
I will not pretend the film is perfect. Cameron shot about 40 percent of it underwater, in a purpose-built tank at Gaffney Studios in South Carolina, after the tanks in Malta were not deep enough. He and Gale Anne Hurd, who produced it for 20th Century Fox and from whom Cameron was by then separating, pushed the cast and crew to the edge. The film opened August 9, 1989, at number two behind Parenthood, on a $9.3 million weekend, on its way to roughly $54.2 million in North America and $89.8 million worldwide against a $50 million budget. The critics were split. Kim Newman, writing for Empire, called the first two hours “absolutely great action-man stuff” before the ending let the air out. A 75 percent Tomatometer, a Metacritic of 62. But Cameron’s water tentacle and the liquid-breathing dive sequence, where Bud descends two miles to disarm a nuclear warhead on a one-way ticket, helped earn the film the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
That dive is the heart of it for me. A man in an experimental suit, breathing fluid because the pressure would crush lungs full of air, walking alone into the dark to do the one right thing he can still do. The 1993 Special Edition restores the longer ending, in which the beings beneath the seafloor threaten to wipe humanity out for its warmaking and then choose not to. The Cold War is right there, barely hidden.
Nautilus proved the deep ocean was a place humans could go. The Abyss asks what might be waiting for us there. Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
There is another August 3 that the channel flagged for me, older and stranger. On August 3, 1492, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos de la Frontera in southern Spain on his first transatlantic voyage, in command of three small vessels: the caravels Nina and Pinta and the flagship Santa Maria. He set out expecting to reach East Asia by sailing west, and instead made landfall in the Bahamas in October. It is the old template, the voyager who leaves for one world and stumbles on another already inhabited. To that belongs The Arrival (1996), David Twohy’s paranoia thriller with Charlie Sheen as Zane Zaminsky, a radio astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who detects a signal from Wolf 336, about 14 light-years out. Zane thinks he is the discoverer. Slowly he works out that the aliens are already here, hiding inside human disguise and quietly rewarming the planet through disguised industrial plants to terraform Earth for themselves. The Columbus dynamic, inverted: the voyager finds out he is the one being discovered, and reshaped.
The other thread is colder. On August 3, 1921, U.S. Army Air Service Lieutenant John A. Macready took off from McCook Field in a modified Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, fitted with a 32-gallon hopper designed by engineer Etienne Dormoy, and flew to a grove near Troy, Ohio. Passing over the catalpa trees six times, he spread roughly 175 pounds of lead arsenate across six acres, about 6,000 trees, to kill the catalpa sphinx caterpillar. The first time an aircraft delivered a chemical payload across a wide area from the sky. To that demonstration belongs The Andromeda Strain (1971), Robert Wise’s film of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel. A government “Scoop” satellite crashes near Piedmont, New Mexico, and an extraterrestrial microbe settles out of the sky and kills nearly everyone in town. The whole nightmare begins with something drifting down from above. The 1921 flight proved you could put a chemical in the air and have it come down wherever you wanted. The film asks what happens when the thing coming down is alive.
Sources
USS Nautilus crosses the North Pole submerged (1958)
https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/submarines/uss-nautilus.html (SSN-571, Operation Sunshine, 23 July 1958 Pearl Harbor departure, 3 August submerged transit)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunshine_(USS_Nautilus) (Anderson’s 1957 proposal, failed 19 August 1957 attempt, second attempt succeeded)
https://ussnautilus.org/1014-2/ (Rickover’s nuclear navy, Eisenhower’s technological supremacy, Presidential Unit Citation)
The Abyss (1989)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/ (Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, James Cameron)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss (Gaffney Studios tank, 40% underwater shoot, $50M budget, Special Edition ending)
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/abyss-review/ (Kim Newman: “absolutely great action-man stuff,” the damp claustrophobic first two hours)
Columbus sets sail from Palos (1492), film: The Arrival (1996)
https://www.history.com/articles/christopher-columbus-ships-caravels (3 August 1492, Palos, Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115571/ (The Arrival, David Twohy, Charlie Sheen, Ron Silver)
First aerial crop-dusting flight (1921), film: The Andromeda Strain (1971)
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/history/pioneers/100_Years_Aerial_Crop_Dusting.pdf (Lt. Macready, Curtiss JN4 Jenny, lead arsenate, catalpa trees, Troy Ohio, 3 Aug 1921)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/ (The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise, Arthur Hill, Crichton novel)