“I’m always asking my dad how that boat knew to go down right there, right over us. He laughs and says, ‘God did it.’"
Glory at Sea (2008) is a 25-minute short film about a rag-tag group of survivors of a terrible storm who together build a boat and sail out in search of the loved-ones they have lost. It is never explained why they think their children, lovers and friends are still alive; yet they simply steadfastly believe it to be true. The boat they construct is simultaneously grand and woefully inadequate to the task of sea travel; yet sail it intrepidly into the sea they do. Hurricane Katrina is not referenced by the film, yet it haunts its fabric; one need not know that the film was conceived and shot in New Orleans to feel the weight of the tragedy in its every frame. Before reading on, I would suggest that the reader watches the film here: it will be a brief but glorious use of your time.
I take Glory at Sea to be metamodern simply in the sense that it embodies one of the discourse’s many strands: a contemporary form of Romantic Irony – what Schlegel called “the eternal oscillation between enthusiasm and irony”. This is a feature that we can see reappearing in different forms in a significant number of recent movies, and one which I shall be returning to on this blog.
