Episode 172: Mermaids, Media and ‘Splash’ (Myth Movie Night)

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We all need a little bit of escapism in times like this, so we’re taking a voyage under the seas to examine the Tom Hanks movie Splash, and how we see mermaids in media. We also ask the very important question: How would a mermaid ride a dolphin? 

Media mentioned in this episode:

Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of Covid19, drowning, eugenics, NSFW discussions about fish people, accidental death, intense weather, colonialism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, and enslavement. 

Housekeeping

- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel! Buy a copy and see our new lists of previous recommendations, guest books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books

- Multitude: Listen to HORSE episode 45 for a haunted hotel story. Join the MultiCrew at multicrew.club, and check out Next Stop in your podcast player or nextstopshow.com!

Sponsors

- Doordash is a fast, convenient food delivery app. Get $5 off your first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter CREEPY at checkout.

- Skillshare is an online learning community where you can learn—and teach—just about anything. Visit skillshare.com/spirits2 to get two months of Skillshare Premium for free! This week Julia recommends “Confident Quilting” by Joellen Kemper. 

- Honeybook, a purpose-built business management platform for creative small businesses. Get 50% off your first year on HoneyBook.com/SPIRITS.

Find Us Online

If you like Spirits, help us grow by spreading the word! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. You can support us on Patreon to unlock bonus Your Urban Legends episodes, director’s commentaries, custom recipe cards, and so much more. We also have lists of our book recommendations and previous guests’ books at spiritspodcast.com/books.

Transcript

Amanda:

Welcome to Spirits podcast a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda-

Julia:

And I'm Julia.

Amanda:

And we are still here bringing you Episode 172, Mermaids, Media and Splash from Myth Movie Night.

Julia:

Yeah, we know it's a bit of a rough time right now for a lot of people and we thought a Myth Movie Night was the perfect time to kind of have you guys sit down and watch a movie while you're at home and we could talk about it.

Amanda:

Absolutely and very happy to report that Tom Hanks is doing all right and in recovery.

Julia:

And we're happy to hear it.

Amanda:

Absolutely. We feel very fortunate to be able to bring some routine and laughs and normalcy to your week as all of us figure out what's next and take care of our loved ones and stay responsibly indoors.

Julia:

Yep, but luckily podcasting is an indoor medium and we can do this from our homes.

Amanda:

We absolutely can and we are grateful, but especially now, running a small business in the year of 2020 we're very, very grateful for those of you who pledged to support the show and make this possible on Patreon. So welcome and thank you so, so much to Francis, Katie, Bandy, Callahan, Liz, Lola, Kylie and Congrats Whitney, which was the name of the patron. So congrats Whitney.

Julia:

Congrats Whitney. We don't know what happened, but you deserve some congrats.

Amanda:

You absolutely do. Thank you to our supporting producer level patrons, Phillip, Nikki, Tyree, Megan, Debra, Molly, Skylus, Amanda, Sammy, Neil, Jessica and Phil Fresh. As well as our legend level patrons all of you along with other patrons every dang week make it possible for us to do this for you. Clara, Lacey, Brittany, Josie, Kylie, Morgan, Kilo the husky, Beam Me Up Scottie, Audra, Necrofancy, Mark, Mr. Folk, Sarah and Jack Murray.

Julia:

What a good group of people. I would totally go to Cape Cod with then, and then almost drown trying to see a mermaid.

Amanda:

And Julia in the future when we are able to travel and hang out on the beach on Cape Cod, what kind of drinks are we going to be serving up?

Julia:

Sea Breezes Amanda. Sea Breezes, they just make me feel like I'm on vacation rather than in my apartment and it's exactly the kind of drink I think I need right now. I don't know about the rest of the world, but that's the kind of drink I need right now.

Amanda:

I love it a lot. Can I tell you about one of the books I've been reading in my spare time?

Julia:

Oh please.

Amanda:

So I've seen a lot of folks on Twitter talking about Station Eleven, which is a book by Emily St. John-Mandel, or Sinjin if you're in Jane Eyre. It is a great book that is about a apocalyptic future, so maybe not the best reading for everybody. I know that I am certainly not choosing to reread that right now, but she has a new book out called The Glass Hotel, which is wonderful. I love it so much. I was lucky enough to get a review copy which is as famous as I need to be. It is about a Ponzi scheme and also the disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. So it could not be more relevant to my interests. I am really enjoying it. It is a little bit escapist. A little bit crimie and it's just really something I need to get my mind off of things right now.

Julia:

That sounds incredible. I might just pick up the Kindle version ASAP.

Amanda:

Absolutely. It comes out on March 24, so next Tuesday. So pre-orders really, really help authors to prove to publishers that people want to read their books, so you can go ahead and pre-order it now from your library or at spiritspodcast.com/books where we have lists and links to buy all the books we recommend from independent bookstores.

Julia:

Now is the perfect time to start reading those books.

Amanda:

Absolutely our local book stores are doing curbside pickup and I'd love to make sure that the money I am spending right now is going back to support our local community.

Julia:

Excellent. Love it.

Amanda:

And Julia, speaking of very relevant content, I hear that there was something very spooky, very creepy cool on another Multitude show this week.

Julia:

There was Amanda. If you aren't listening to HORSE, HORSE's Multitude's Basketball podcast, that isn't about the wins and losses, but instead about the weird stuff that happens on and off the court. And they recently covered a haunted hotel story that would be a great jumping off point for our listeners. It is creepy. It is cool. It is also extremely funny. And that's Episode 45 the Demon Monocle.

Amanda:

HORSE is really, really good listening right now, as will be Next Stop, our audio sitcom. The trailer is out now. Sometime special is coming out next week and then the show comes out in April on April 14. We are incredibly excited. It is exactly what I want to listen to right now, which is friends being actually friends and living in a world where they're dealing with stuff but also loving each other and making jokes and the actors are so so good. The writing is so so good, and I cannot wait to share it with all of you.

Julia:

It is hilarious. You can go find it by searching Next Stop in your podcast app, or you can go to nextstopshow.com and at Next Stop show on all the social medias.

Amanda:

Fantastic. And finally just as a reminder, if you listen to Spirits on Spotify and you are not getting the show in your subscriptions like you are used to, a very small amount of you will need to resubscribe to the show. So just check it out. Ask your friends. Make sure, put it up on your Insta story and be like, "Hey, if you listen to Spirits to Spotify make sure you're getting it. If not, search for it now."

Julia:

Yeah, do it up. Share the show. We just want to bring a little bit of joy and laughter to everyone's lives right now.

Amanda:

Absolutely. And we are thinking about you. We are here for you and we are very happy to bring you Episode 172, Mermaids, Media and Splash, Myth Movie Night.

Julia:

Amanda I have brought to you a movie that I had seen only bits and pieces of as a child and as an adult, wild movie. Genuinely a wild movie.

Amanda:

I hadn't seen a damn thing Julia, but I was a great opportunity to revisit the early oof of Tom Hanks who is currently getting great medical treatment and will be fine.

Julia:

Yes. Additionally Amanda, I wanted to let you know before we started this episode that this movie in particular got not great reviews, because they were like, "Who is this Tom Hanks guy, why didn't you just make John Candy they main character?"

Amanda:

Hey Tom, your great.

Julia:

Tom's great. He's not a very likable character in this movie, but Tom Hanks-

Amanda:

Oh no, no, no.

Julia:

But in general a great dude. And Ron Howard loves using him now. So we all win.

Amanda:

I totally agree and hugely that we are going to be discussing some examples on mermaids and media and I have to tell you that I did log onto JSTOR and have my academic friends jailbreak some PDFs for me. So I took extremely seriously my task here of researching mermaids in literature and I cannot wait to get into it.

Julia:

So if you don't already know, we are going to be discussing the 1984 fantasy romantic comedy directed by Ron Howard, Splash. It is one of Tom Hanks' earliest films. It also features John Candy, Daryl Hannah, Eugene Levy and a couple other people.

Amanda:

And a mermaid.

Julia:

And a mermaid. Daryl Hannah plays a mermaid. She's great at it.

Amanda:

But as always, you do not have to have watched this movie to enjoy the Myth Movie Night, so we are now going to do a two minute and two minutes only summary of the movie. So if you want to watch it yourself and don't want any spoilies, go ahead and skip about two minutes and 30 seconds.

Julia:

All right, I'm going to get the timer started for you Amanda. On your mark, get set.

Amanda:

I'm ready.

Julia:

Go.

Amanda:

All right Julia. So baby Tom Hanks is impulsive and jumps of a boat in Cape Cod, even though that is explicitly where Jaws was and sees a beautiful mermaid girl when he's underwater. He can breathe, which is also very strange and weird, but then his dumb parents pull him back into the boat and break their connection or whatever, and he writes it off as a hallucination, because he had a near death experience, even though it definitely gives him baggage and disrupts him from having real relationships for frankly 20 years.

Amanda:

So we flash forward to him as an adult where he takes a breakup trip back to the Cape as we have all done. Meets a crypted scientist, as we have all done. And then falls into the water promptly again and sees the dang woman. She is fully a mermaid. She is pretty. She is naked. But the scientist also sees her so she ends up taking Tom Hanks' wallet and goes of course, where else would a young mermaid loose on the town with a couple of Bennies go? To New York City. So she is of course arrested immediately as soon as she comes up on Liberty Island for being naked. She learns to speak English from TV and stuff, ends up calling Hanks and tells him that she has, "six fun filled days when the moon is full to stay around," but if she stays longer she can never go home again.

Amanda:

So they fall in love. The scientist tries to expose her as a mermaid, and sure enough, bunch of stuff happens. In the third act she gets captured. Together with the Hanks star they rescue, the scientist and Hanks rescue Madison the mermaid. She named herself after the avenue, which is funny and then they run away at the end of the day to live happily ever after.

Julia:

Yes. In the ocean.

Amanda:

In the ocean.

Julia:

Amanda, under two minutes. I'm very proud. It's a good whole thing.

Amanda:

Thank you. I took notes as I went so I would know what beats to relay here.

Julia:

Proud of you.

Amanda:

It was pretty entertaining. Is it a great movie? No. But did I get to see baby Tom Hanks, yeah.

Julia:

Yes, yes you did. There were a couple of things that I wrote down just as weird notes and also things that didn't make sense. For example, at one point he was like, "We're going to get married tonight. You just have to go get a blood test first." Which I didn't know was a thing.

Amanda:

Yes. It was.

Julia:

It was. Yeah, during the 80s you had to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases and genetic diseases that may get passed down to potential children. That's not a law anymore I can tell you that. Or at least in New York State, because I got married.

Amanda:

No. Super eugenicsy.

Julia:

Then also I feel like the funniest and most unrealistic part of this movie is they filmed all of the beach/underwater stuff in the Bahamas when it's supposed to be Cape Cod and the Hudson River and stuff like that.

Amanda:

Yeah. It's nothing like what it's like to live here.

Julia:

Yes. Also a fun fact about the filming place that they filmed in the Bahamas, this was one of the first movies that Touchstone put out, and Touchstone was the Disney owned company that was like Disney wanted to make more adult films. So they used Touchstone as their production company for that. And because this was a Disney owned product, when they were filming in the Bahamas, they were kind of scoping out the area and the place that they ended up scoping in the Bahamas is now Disney's private island that you can take Disney cruises to, Castaway Cay.

Amanda:

Oh, no way.

Julia:

Yeah, fun fact.

Amanda:

That is very funny and another Hanks foreshadowing, which I think is great.

Julia:

There you go. Also, they made a sequel to this movie, that was made for TV and it was called Splash, Too, like T-O-O. They got none of the original people back. It's a bad movie.

Amanda:

So Julia with this wonderful framing, putting us in the mood to talk about mermaids and everything, what is it that you want to share with us this week? We did a full episode on mermaids, Episode 83 and it was super fun. Mermaids from all over the globe. Lots of queer crews and it was very good.

Julia:

I'm going to do a little bit of a mermaid background for the people who haven't listened to our mermaid episode. I recommend you do though. There's a couple of different and new information that I found since we did that episode, and I think it also kind of leads into the discussion that I want to have, which is about why sailors found mermaids hot, and also why we still think fish people are cool to fuck nowadays.

Amanda:

Okay. Because we do somehow.

Julia:

We do. We do. And Amanda what do you want to talk about for this episode?

Amanda:

I have several really interesting examples of mermaids in literature, both plays and books, and a couple of book recommendations for our listeners to take away and enjoy contemporary versions of mermaid myths.

Julia:

Awesome. How about we do the little bit of background first, and then you can talk about the literature and then I can talk about why we find mermaids sexy.

Amanda:

Very good.

Julia:

Awesome. So perhaps the oldest concept of the mermaid was actually a merman, which was Ea, the Babylonian god of the waters. He was the god that fixed the national borders. He assigned the god's their different roles, and more importantly for the purpose of our discussion was represented as either half goat half fish, or half man half fish. You can kind of trace the imagery of the Capricorn to Ea the Babylonian god.

Amanda:

Julia I really have to know what half was fish, what half was goat.

Julia:

To half goat, bottom half fish. It's usually bottom half fish.

Amanda:

That's the least terrifying version. And yes people, I have seen the reverse centaur meme. You do not have to tweet it to me personally.

Julia:

All the time. All the time. They tweet it to us.

Amanda:

Every day. Every day.

Julia:

In terms of old mermaid figures, there's also the Syrian goddess Atargatis, who was the chief goddess. She was a fertility goddess and she was the protector of the city of Hierapolis. Doves and fish were her animal symbols and she was described as a mermaid goddess specifically in representations in the city of Ascalon. In Hierapolis, her temple was by far the largest and it featured a pond of sacred fish that were there to honor her. It is also said that she had a human form, but punished herself by turning into a mermaid out of shame for killing her human lover.

Amanda:

Huh. So the human mermaid romance has been around since the very beginning.

Julia:

Yeah. Interestingly there have been a lot of instances in mermaid folklore and mermaid mythology where a human is transformed into a mermaid, but it wasn't until later on with the Hans Christian Anderson Little Mermaid where we see the reverse happen, where a mermaid transforms into a human. I'm sure you probably will talk about The Little Mermaid later on in the episode, but.

Amanda:

Yes. I have a little bit of information on that. But also some kind of contemporary criticisms of it, which I thought was very interesting.

Julia:

Love that. All right. Of course there is also the Greek and Roman nereids, which some original sources describe them as quote the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough with scales. And that's according to our good friend, Pliny the Elder. Shout out [inaudible 00:13:57]. Pliny also said that Legatus of Gaul once saw a considerable number of these mermaids, nereids dead on a seashore and that they were seamen that would climb onto ships in the middle of the night, sitting on the side and eventually if they were allowed to remain there, the ship would tip and sink into the water so long as they sat there.

Amanda:

Oh no, that seemed like a tale used to make sure that night duty people do not sleep on the job.

Julia:

But absolutely that is true. Most of these lists would also include sirens as an early form of mermaid stories. But sirens were originally stories that featured women who were half women, half bird and it wasn't until the middle ages that the siren appeared as a mermaid.

Amanda:

No kidding.

Julia:

Yeah. However, this is when the idea of the temptress mermaid emerged in western culture. From the middle ages onwards, mermaids either fell into one or two categories, or were a mix of both. So they were the fowl temptress that would lure men to drown and or devour them in the dark depths of the sea, and there was the beautiful seductive maidens who were much kinder to the lonely sailors that they set their eyes on. To be safe, most sources from this period would basically warn you to stay away from mermaids in general. Olaus Magnus who was a 16th Century cartographer and writer warned fisherman that if you were to reel up a merperson, "Do not presently let them go. Such a cruel tempest will arise and such a hard lamination of that sort of man comes with it. And of some other monsters joining with them that you will think the sky should fall." So not only would catching a merperson bring you bad luck, but apparently they also could control the weather. That's a fun fact.

Julia:

So if we want to see a story that is somewhat similar to our movie there is a story out of the Netherlands in 1430 about how the dykes near the town of Edman failed during a storm and when the storm cleared a few girls went out rowing in the flood waters. They ended up finding a mermaid who was washed ashore by the storm, "floundering in the shallow muddy waters". The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend tells the story saying, "They got her into the boat, took her home and dressed her in women's clothing." Because she was a lady and she was also naked. So she stayed on land with the girls despite again the tail did not transform like it does in Splash here. But she was never able to speak and could not be taught to speak. So kind of similar to what we see with Madison at the beginning of the film where she has to learn to speak from watching a bunch of TV.

Amanda:

Yeah, and I wonder where that kind of mutanist came from? Wondered if it was sort of an opposite of a siren's song, but it sounds like it's sort of different variations popped up throughout time.

Julia:

Yeah, and I think in the instance of this movie, one when she tries to say her name, it sounds like dolphins basically. So obviously they're not speaking in human speak. Or human language in the underwater part. Probably because it wouldn't translate very well.

Amanda:

Also I'll put a pin in that for one of my examples later.

Julia:

Hell yeah. Love it. So the age of discovery was perhaps where we start to see that sort classical sailor mermaid relationship that we see reflected in most of modern media. John Smith, the Pocahontas guy, claimed to have seen a mermaid off the coast of Newfoundland in 1614, saying that, "Her long green hair imparted to her an original character that was by no means unattractive."

Amanda:

I mean, after certain days at sea, you're like, "Listen, this is fine."

Julia:

Even Columbus, that asshole claimed to have had experiences near the Dominican Republic in 1493, saying the day before, when the admiral was going to the Rio Del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water, but were not as pretty as they were depicted. For somehow in the face they looked like men, but most likely what they saw were manatees or dugongs or anything of that sort. That nature.

Amanda:

Listen, gay panic is at the bottom of what y'all should be worrying about on Columbus' voyage.

Julia:

Yes, honestly.

Amanda:

Check yourself.

Julia:

So Amanda, why do sailors love mermaids? We see in a lot of different examples of ships from the time period I just mentioned that mermaids were often carved into the prows of ships and that's considered good luck, because apparently their boobs, since they're always topless, could calm rough seas, pacifying the sea gods and assuring good weather.

Amanda:

Extremely funny.

Julia:

Which according to sailor folklore, the opposite would happen if a clothed woman was found on a ship, that's usually why they were not allowed on ships or tossed over board. But as we've seen in sailing and pirate history, there has been plenty of women who have been aboard ships either disguised as men or living their full and best lives.

Amanda:

Also so I'm sure that anyone who has breast fed will really relate to that description.

Julia:

Yes. Yes, I will.

Amanda:

Let's calm the tempest. Okay, we good.

Julia:

And besides the fact that you said that they were often malnourished and living in harsh conditions, and sure we can talk about how sexuality and sex between sailors is a thing, but that's also not a topic I'm specifically an expert in, so I'm sure people can research it, but I'm sure relationship between sailors of the same sex were a lot more common than you would think.

Amanda:

Yeah, and I'm sure that we're also here being limited by the fact that we ... Like the things that you talk about and the things that you do are very different. So here we're talking about myths and accounts that were circulated in public, or at least in that sort of social sphere. So I don't think it's going to be representative of what actually happened in any case whatsoever.

Julia:

Absolutely. But the sailors loved mermaids because the call of the mermaid was tempting, because it called for them to abandon themselves. So they could leave the harsh life that they had either on shore or on ship and could start a new one with the merfolk. Water is purifying. It represents rebirth, but it also represents death and destruction. The call of the mermaid is a call to the unknown. It's taking a risk and a potential transformation in order to become something different and potentially more.

Amanda:

That is fabulous and it reminds me so much of the production of Moby-Dick by Dave Malloy, that Eric Silver and I saw in Boston, which does such a good job of depicting the ever present threat of mutiny and why that's also really not an easy decision to make. So I imagine that this kind of consistent fantasy or push and pull of the routine and obligations that you're in versus the danger, but also maybe freedom of what could be out there is so persuasive. And it's not necessary even sexualized. It's like a yearning, and sex lives in that domain sure, but it's also so emotionally wrought.

Julia:

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is actually a great point where we can transition into talking bout some mermaid media, but first Amanda do you want to join me to get a refill?

Amanda:

I sure would. So Julia right now a lot of us are relying on delivery so we can continue to be responsible and make sure that we distance ourselves from anybody who might be vulnerable. And one of the services that I have been using to make sure that I am getting what I need for my household, but also being responsible is DoorDash. They are partnering with our local grocery store to make deliveries and all kinds of restaurants, both national chains and local businesses that you can continue to support with your dollars via delivery.

Julia:

Yeah, and DoorDash makes everything super easy. Ordering is easy. All you have to do is open the DoorDash app, you chose what you want to eat and your food will be delivered to you wherever you are. So not only is your favorite pizza joint on there, but they also have 310,000 restaurant partners in over 4,000 cities. So you might just find a new favorite in these times where you might feel like cooking.

Amanda:

Absolutely. In all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia you can order from your local community or those chains that you really enjoy with DoorDash. They also make it very easy to communicate with your delivery person, which I really appreciate and when you tip them, the whole tip goes to the delivery person.

Julia:

And please make sure you tip your delivery people, it's rough out there for them right now.

Amanda:

So you can get $5.00 off your first order of $15.00 or more, when you download the DoorDash app and enter the code CREEPY.

Julia:

Yep, that's $5.00 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the app store and enter the promo code CREEPY.

Amanda:

One more time, code CREEPY for $5.00 off your first order with DoorDash.

Julia:

Amanda in the upcoming weeks or possibly months, I decided I'm going to learn a new skill. Now that I'm home and have the time to do so. So I went immediately to Skillshare. So Skillshare is an online learning community where you can explore new skills, deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity. You can learn stuff like illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing and more. I'm specifically learning how to do quilting with Confident Quilting by Joellen Kemper. It's just an upbeat positive way of creating new things and I really, really like that. With Skillshare short classes, you can move your creative journey without putting life on hold. So you can explore your creativity as well, at skillshare.com/spiritstwo, where our listeners will get two free months of premium membership. That's two month free at skillshare.com/spiritstwo.

Amanda:

And finally this week we are sponsored by HoneyBook for all of us in the gig economy and freelancers in media with small businesses there is a lot to think about, a lot to do and now more than ever. So I really appreciate when I can organization all of my client communications, my bookings, contracts and invoices and make sure nothing slips through the cracks even when we have to adapt and deal with all those challenges that life throws at us as freelancers, self-employed people, small business owners. I use HoneyBook to automate all of that busy work. They have easy to use templates for emails, proposals, brochures, and invoices making sure that when clients do come in and want to pay us, we make it as easy as possible to do so. There are e-signatures, automation, all kinds of tools that will help you save time and get paid faster. Right now HoneyBook is offering our listeners 50% off when you visit honeybook.com/spirits. Payment is flexible, which I really appreciate especially now and this promotion applies whether you pay monthly or annually. That's at honeybook.com/spirits for 50% off your first year.

Julia:

Yep, honeybook.com/spirits.

Amanda:

And now let's get back to the show.

Julia:

All right Amanda. I have refilled our Sea Breezes, which is a very classic kind of cocktail. It's not exactly like the fanciest of cocktails, but sometimes you just want vodka, cranberry juice and grape juice. A little bit of lime on top.

Amanda:

So satisfying. It's so satisfying.

Julia:

It reminds me of cruise ships and coasting across the Caribbean.

Amanda:

A world in which people could go on cruise ships.

Julia:

In my past where we could go on cruise ships.

Amanda:

Grapefruit juice is also good to put in your beermosa, which I am obligated to point out. It's a great drink. It's so good.

Julia:

We love a beermosa here on Spirits podcast.

Amanda:

Use a SeaQuench. Do a little grapefruit juice, a little tangerine juice come on.

Julia:

All about it. All right Amanda tell me about some mermaid media.

Amanda:

So Julia the obviously one here and the one where multiple people just pasted the Wikipedia description into a Twitter reply when I asked for people's favorite mermaid myths. I know, thank you, is of course The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson, which has really become, I didn't really realize this is the national sort of story of Denmark and the mermaid is the symbol of Denmark in a lot of ways. Which again, not qualified to talk about, but it was something that came up again and again in my research.

Julia:

What they didn't want Hamlet? Strike that.

Amanda:

So the beats of the story I think are familiar to any of us who are familiar with The Little Mermaid. They really did hew closer to the original tale closer than I expected. But the point that really stood out to me when I was reading a plot summary here, is the pain involved. So let me quote to you from the summary here. "When consuming the potion," that would turn our mermaid heroine into a person, "will make her feel as though a sword is being passed through her body. Yet when she recovers, she'll have two human legs and will be able to dance like no human has ever danced. However, she will consistently feel as though she is walking on sharp knives."

Julia:

I feel that in my soul, thinking about the expectations of women, especially like going out, and it reminds me of the Hot Date. If anyone hasn't watched Hot Date, great show. Emily Axford and Brain Murphy. All about relationship. But here is a great episode where they're going out for their once a year date night to a club, and Emily has to dress up and is walking around and by the end of the episode she is literally horror movie bleeding from her feet, because she's been wearing the heels all night.

Amanda:

Yes, it's a very good show and definitely worth watching. And it's also a point where I think my first instinct was to say, "Oh yes, oh their fairy tales were darker." Like we sort of discussed and unpacked in the Grimms' Fairy Tales previous Myth Movie Night. I also wanted to dig into what people have said and thought about bodies in fairy tales and in myth in this way. So I found this wonderful paper by Lori Yamamoto which is titled Surgical Humanization in the Little Mermaid for Marvels and Tales by Wayne State University Press in 2017.

Julia:

That sounds incredible. Please tell me more.

Amanda:

It's extremely good and I'm siting it in the description of this episode so anybody who would like to read it can. So this is what Lori's paper is about and I couldn't do it justice by explaining the whole thing, but as always the introduction of this paper is a great summary what it's all about. Yamamoto writes, "The importance of social modeling, for that most impressionable of audiences children, has not been lost on disabilities studies scholars. There's increasing interest in disability in children's literature. As such, the disabilities study model for reading fairy tales frequently looks at the way the disability functions in a didactic mode." Which side note, is kind of like an instructional way of talking. "So what does the audience learn consciously or unconsciously from this text? How are disabled bodies used? This model emphasizes that children's literature creates or reinforces cultural norms associated with, 'good and bad bodies,' especially as markers of race and gender and further reinforces a moral equivalency between body and spirit. The strength in this model is precisely in identifying a fundamental allegorical freighting of the disabled body." In essence here not just saying that, oh there are some ways in which disabled bodies are depicted, or used like a moral thing in literature, but that by presenting them it is teaching you something, because fairy tales are used didactically. They're used to teach kids lessons and difference between good and bad.

Julia:

Yeah, that's a great point.

Amanda:

And Yammamoto's findings in The Littler Mermaid are complex. At the end of the paper, she writes, "It's worth noting how far Anderson departs from the traditional models of either binary good or bad bodies, or a narrative arch of overcoming bodily limitation," which is obviously so present and messed up in fairy tales. "Anderson's text presents a nuance, a vexed view of physical embodiment. By using this paradoxical body that never escapes a simultaneity of wholeness and mutilation, normality and abnormality, human and other, Anderson's story moves beyond being a mere morality tale about the transcendent soul. This disruptive bodies inability to settle into a normative shape even in death goes so far as to ask whether the notion of humanity itself, that supposed fusion of body and soul, holds water."

Julia:

Couldn't have made it through without the pun.

Amanda:

Oh yeah. So listen I think it is absolutely fascinating. It's a really, really good view to have on this original story. If anybody would like to go and read it in its original or in one of the many translations, but the point here being that it's not like the protagonist, "overcomes her body," and is a human and is that way forever. It's that bodies are complicated, bodies are not a marker of your inherent moral goodness and that there is a wealth of information on disability studies in fairy tales that I'm going to be digging into.

Julia:

No, that sounds like a great point of more research for both us and our listeners, because obviously you and I are both able bodied people for the most part, and I think that it's not something that I have much experience on. It's not something I really thought about in reading the story in the past. So I love that you brought to both my and our listeners attention.

Amanda:

But Julia I also brought some silly things, because that is the main thing we do here on Sprits is mix serious contemplation of mortality and morals with silly jokes. So this one is courtesy of my friend Marquez who's on Twitter @MarquezTheGM and also is one of the co-hosts of the wonderful show Tabletop Potluck.

Julia:

Great show.

Amanda:

So catch us back to back in your pod player. Marquez's tweet said, "In Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon is like, 'Hey remember when that mermaid sang so beautifully while riding on a dolphin that the seas were calm but the sky went wild.' And Puck went, 'Yeah.' And then he just uses that as context for a different story that's actually relevant." And I was like, "Marquez I didn't." But now I do Julia. So I would really love if you may indulge me to quote from Midsummer Night's Dream.

Julia:

Yes please.

Amanda:

Also a complete side note, during the Oscar presentation, Oscar Issac and Selma Hayek presented an award together, and my brain was like, "Oh let's Oberon into Tonya." And forever this will be my head cannon.

Julia:

So good. I love it.

Amanda:

Oberon says Julia, "Well go thy way. Thou shalt not from this grove til I torment thee for this injury. My gentle Puck come hither. Thou rememberest since once I sat upon a promontory," which is a big ledge, "and heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, that the rude sea grew civil at her song. And certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the seamaid's music." And Puck goes, "I remember." Because Puck is enslaved. "That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, flying between the cold moon and the earth Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took at a fair vestal throned by the west and loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow as it should pierce 100,000 hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon. And the impartial voterass passed on, in maiden mediation fancy-free." I'm quoting this long Julia because I really just love the invention of the phrase fancy-free. And this is where it is.

Julia:

Okay. I also kind of got caught up in the words love shaft. So that's rad.

Amanda:

Yeah. No, it's not great but just to finish up, the point here is that Oberon is going through this whole story of like, Puck I once saw this thing but you missed it. And this is how and why he's saying all this shit. "The bow fell open a little western flower before milk-white, now purple with loves wound. And maiden's call it 'love-in-idleness'." Not a fancy name. Not a catchy one. "Fetch me that flower. The herb I shooed thee once. The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid will make a man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees. Fetch me this herb and be thou here again and Ere the leviathan can swim a league." Then that's the famous Puck line, actually stemming the sexualization that we're thinking about here with mermaids and sea creature. "I'll put a girdle around the earth within 40 minutes."

Julia:

Nice. I think love shaft would have been a better name for that flower.

Amanda:

It really would have.

Julia:

Yeah, anything would have been better than that.

Amanda:

Anything. Love-in-idleness. I almost forgot it and I just read it 10 seconds ago. It's still in front of me. And I jus think it's extremely funny that the mermaid is riding a dolphin, which I have never seen before and also that her breath and song is like making the sea super calm, the sky super excited and also kind of hearkening or heralding this discovery and sort of amazing sight that Oberon saw. Almost like a shooting star of like Cupid shooting a bow and leading him rainbow pot of gold style to this flower.

Julia:

Here's a thought Amanda. Let's do a thought experiment with me real quick.

Amanda:

Let's do it.

Julia:

How would a mermaid ride a dolphin?

Amanda:

So I was thinking about this.

Julia:

Good, I'm glad.

Amanda:

I think either it has to be sidecar, motorcycle style, and she just holds on to the side of the dolphin, and sort of presses against them. Or, tandem bike. Two tails swimming, two creatures moving, and sometimes the dolphin jumps and the mermaid holds onto the dolphins fin and just gets more air than she could on her own.

Julia:

So my thought process was lay on stomach, grab the dorsal fin, or side saddle like ladies riding horses when they have big skirts.

Amanda:

I think so, but you could only side saddle when the dolphin breaches.

Julia:

No, I feel like you could still side saddle. You hold the dorsal fin like a pommel, then you just ride along. I image there is probably some sort of saddle involved in it, but who can say.

Amanda:

It's very interesting why would a dolphin permit this. Why wouldn't the mermaid and the dolphin just be friends and swim together, it's very puzzling.

Julia:

Why do horses permit us to ride them. They don't we just chose to do it. They don't Julia.

Amanda:

They don't.

Julia:

We should stop enslaving animals to do our bidding. That's just my opinion.

Amanda:

I know. Is any of it ethical. Who knows? So I have a few just contemporary recommendations, but we can either do that or get into a broader discussion.

Julia:

Why don't you give us some more contemporary ones and then I can talk about sexy merpeople and why we think they're hot. And it ends with a quote about male entitlement.

Amanda:

Cool love it.

Julia:

Great.

Amanda:

So Julia, throughout this process I also wrote down a bunch of books that I want to read. So I can't summarize them for our listeners, but I can invite you to read them and to join us spiritspodcast.com/books. You can get a list of all the books we recommend and I will buying these from my local Indy bookstore WORD Bookland and checking them out.

Julia:

Hell yeah.

Amanda:

So first we have The Pisces: A Novel by Melissa Broder, about a woman who falls for a handsome male swimmer. Got gender soft version, pretty good.

Julia:

I will talk about the Pisces later on, but go on.

Amanda:

Oh thank God, good.

Julia:

It's great.

Amanda:

We have Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, which came out in 2017. One of Twitter's favs. I love Mira so much. So this is actually a follow up to her 2015 novella Rolling in the Deep. Very good. It focuses on Toni Stewart a sonar specialist who becomes obsessed with mermaids after her sisters disappearance. Her sister Anne worked as a reporter for Imagine Entertainment. While filming a mockumentary about mermaids the crew of the ship, which is named Atargatis vanished.

Julia:

That's the name of my goddess that I mentioned earlier.

Amanda:

Extremely good. Mira is the best. So just to finish off, Toni vows to discover the truth about what happened to her sister in this wonderful follow up to Rolling in the Deep.

Julia:

Hell yeah, that sounds incredible. I love a mockumentary.

Amanda:

I love mockumentary. I love a world where a mockumentary film maker is a job, because it is and it's just wonderfully contemporary. But then in a wonderful segue, this also brings up the book The Deep by Rivers Solomon. Which has been recommended to us a ton on Twitter and I see why. So Julia follow me in this journey. In 2017, this American Life had an episode called We Are In The Future, which explored Afrofuturism, a strain of science fiction that addresses the intersection between larger African diaspora and technology across mediums. The episode followed producer Neil Drumming as he covered the topic and also commissioned the song called The Deep by Clipping, the experimental hip-hop group including Daveed Diggs of Hamilton, which I have loved for years. The song was then turned into a book by Better Worlds author River Solomon.

Julia:

Hell yeah. Love it.

Amanda:

So the song opens by kind of depicting an underwater society built from the offspring of pregnant women who are thrown overboard from slave ships. When companies exploring for oil attack their cities, the descendants of those children begin an uprising. The song builds in intensity as it cover the rise of the society, the attack and the retaliation. So Solomon kind of covers this arch, but also explained to The Verge, in a great article I will also link, that the original song contained a considerable amount of material that was of particular interest to them personally including, "Diaspora and slavery, ecological devastation in memory and remembrance. It also seemed like a chance for adventure. The world Clipping describes in the song is wild and alien and strange. The deep sea itself is wondrous black pit of mystery. Who wouldn't want a chance to journey there?"

Julia:

Oh, that sounds extremely cool. I want to read that immediately and listen to the song.

Amanda:

I've already requested this book from WORD, so I suggest that everybody check out The Deep by River Solomon. The song The Deep by Clipping and if you wish the Afrofuturism centric episode, We Are in the Future, by This American Life.

Julia:

Excellent. I love that. I'd also like to recommend a book that is coming out soon that I have been seeing a lot about and I'm just super excited, and that's The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea, by Maggie Tokuda-Hall. It has a gender fluid love interest. There's pirates. There's stolen memories and double agents and a bunch of different mermaids included in it. So highly recommend it. It's going to come out on May 5 of this year and you definitely want to check it out. I think it's going to be great.

Amanda:

Oh so good.

Julia:

But speaking of all of these great pieces of media Amanda that mention mermaids, I want to talk about why we still think mermaids are super sexy. Because we are no longer sailors on ships traversing the world. So why are we so into it? And why are women in particular so into it? When I Google mermaid romances, the first search I got was a Good Reads list that 138 books.

Amanda:

Yes, it's also a big trope in fanfiction.

Julia:

Yes. Absolutely. Then I found an incredibly article from L.A. Magazine title Why Are We Still So Obsessed With Sexy Fish People, and this is from March 20, 2019. It talks about the Pisces, which you mentioned, Aquaman, The Shape of Water and sponsor of Sprits Siren, and a bunch of other things. Modern scholars have claimed various different theories as to why we're still interested in merfolk, fish people, et cetera. Despite the fact that we're no longer lustful sailors suffering from malnutrition and horniness.

Amanda:

True.

Julia:

Sarah Kessler from the USC Annenberg School points out that fear around climate change and the creeping raising ocean levels might have something to do with it. Merpeople are also aspirational in a way. Kessler is saying that quote, "They are at once human and sort of better than human, and perhaps having a kind sophisticated relationship with sexuality is part of that image."

Amanda:

That's very true. There are some kind of super heroic or fae or alien elements to mermaids, which to me just kind of reminds me of swimming. You see a sea creature swimming and you're like, "Holy Shit. You have the flash powers of" ... It's amazing.

Julia:

Mermaids represent that kind of unknown element of the ocean and it's the same unknown element as to why people find aliens really sexy.

Amanda:

Yeah, I think so.

Julia:

Because it's that final frontier on both sides. There's also a Huffington Post article that I found called Why is Fish Sex So Hot Right Now? An Investigation by Claire Fallon. Her article takes a bit of a different approach claiming that the phenomenon of in particular women's interest in merpeople arises from a dissatisfaction with the concept of straight men.

Amanda:

I mean, I get it.

Julia:

Yeah.

Amanda:

I also have seen a lot of gender swapping. Gender fluid. Like human to mermaid transformation stories in Fandom and elsewhere. I think there's something to be said for that idea of bodily transformation and sort of limitlessness or even transcending the boundaries of gender or bodies. That is really freeing and exciting to sort of imagine.

Julia:

And as some of these typical romantic tropes of the modern day kind of reveal themselves to be other problematic or corrupt, think of film stars, doctors, handsome princes, et cetera, a romantic interest outside our own society is much more tempting. So like Tom Hanks at the end of Splash, we want to swim away from a corrupt society and join something new and separate. According to Fallon, "One seductive yet impossible fantasy might be the romantic attention of a man who lacks the exhausting baggage of male entitlement."

Amanda:

Word. Happiness.

Julia:

So yeah, I think that says a lot about just our dissatisfaction with life and society is why we love mermaids and merpeople so much. I think that it offers this idea of we can leave at any time and find something new and different that is separate from the world that we currently live in.

Amanda:

Yeah, it's a really wonderful thing to imagine and I think especially in a time where a lot of us are thinking about the limits that bodies and society place on us and doing the hard work of letting our imaginations run wild, but also reconciling that we the real work of day to day living, surviving and building and maintaining relationships. That there is a lot of value imagination brings to our lives and I just want to encourage everybody and also remind myself that we have permission to escape and we have permission to lose ourselves in our hobbies, in nature, in conversation, whatever it is that brings us that sense of zen, of limitlessness of sitting at the top of a crow's nest on a ship's mast and looking out and not remembering the world below you. That is okay and that is necessary and that is just, I don't know. If mermaids are your thing, rock on.

Julia:

Hell yeah. Have sex with a mermaid. Live that truth.

Amanda:

Listen if they're enthusiastically consenting, you do you.

Julia:

I don't think there's a better point that I can end this on, so remember listeners, just stay creepy.

Amanda:

Stay cool.