As Christian Petzold’s Undine hits the London Film Festival, it’s as good a time as any to explore one of the world’s oldest myths. How are mermaids being reimagined in contemporary culture?
Undine sees director Christian Petzold interpret a myth that can be traced back to humanity’s earliest civilisations. What is it about mermaids that so captures our imaginations? And what is it about the past decade that has seen such resurgent interest in sirens and seductresses of the sea?
If I was a woman watching Undine at the London Film Festival, I wonder if it would be exciting to see a water spirit lead a feature for the first time — and yes, let’s talk about The Little Mermaid and 2015’s Polish horror-musical The Lure. I also wonder if I might feel, perhaps, a little patronised.
One scene sees Undine — a given name, one that stems from the myth of a spirit destined to die if she is betrayed by her mortal lover — seeming to overpower her new romance Christoph during foreplay. He asks her to stop and recount a lecture on Berlin’s architectural history: ‘You say so many clever things, and in such a nice way.’
So the mood turns from sultry to pedagogical, as we move from the bedroom to the balcony and city lights twinkling in the distance. This is indeed Undine’s (Paula Beer’s) film: the camera stays tight on her, as she elaborates on the principle of form follows function: ‘In the early post war years some of the rooms [in the city’s Palace] were still used for exhibitions.’ Sexy.
Undine, John William Waterhouse, exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1872
Unlike Ariel in The Little Mermaid who gives up her voice to be with a man, Undine emphatically has one here — even if she is en deshabillée, in her night slip. But is it just me, or is there something flat and oversimplified here about director Christian Petzold’s repurposing of the Undine myth? It could be, on the other hand, innovating to portray a powerful, self-reliant mermaid figure with next to no fanfare; with only subtle nods to magic realism, pared-back direction and clean yet effective lensing (from DP Hans Fromm).
Either way, Petzold’s film slots into a lineage that stretches back for centuries; stories about mermaids are as old as storytelling itself, and they have always been bound up with women’s freedom and sexual agency (or lack thereof).
stories about mermaids are as old as storytelling itself, and they have always been bound up with women’s freedom and sexual agency
The past ten years have seen us reimagining mermaids in myriad ways. From Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water to Lady Gaga’s alter-ego Yüyi to Gucci’s postmodern mermaids clutching iPhones and branded clutches, it’s clear the mythopoeic figure is re-surfacing in our culture.
Might there be a parallel between the mermaid’s return and the last decade’s resurgent political consciousness of marginalised groups? Fourth-wave feminism has brought us a whole new vocabulary from ‘manspreading’ to ‘mansplaining’. #MeToo, with its emphasis on intersectionality, felled giants for sexual predation. Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance. We’ve seen a break-out of ‘plus-size’ models. All this has seen us reexamining women’s bodies and the spaces they occupy.
An undine depicted “pursuing Ulysses And Umberto” in a 1899 “alphabet of celebrities”
It’s certainly difficult to accept stories of mermaids scorned and dissolving into foam in a world where a teenage girl crosses the Atlantic Ocean by boat to speak at the UN to combat climate change (thanks, Greta.) That alone seems enough to provoke a re-evaluation of narratives surrounding women, water and political agency.
THE SPLASH HEARD ALL OVER THE WORLD
Melusine, mermaids, morgens, neck, rusalka, selkie, siren; Mindiss, Oshun, Olokun, Ap, Chalchiuhtlicue. Across millennia, any civilisation with a coastline, river or lake (read: all of them) has had its own mid-level water goddess. Water – that life-giving source – has been long associated with women’s fertility. Ancient Egyptian Anuket, personification of the Nile, is as good an example as any: not only was she the ‘Nourisher of the Fields’, but she was often prayed to for protection during childbirth.
Across millennia, any civilisation with a coastline, river or lake … has had its own mid-level water goddess.
Mermaids, though, are a different kettle of fish. The West’s best-known story is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, first published in 1837 (it was inspired by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s popular 19th century fairy-tale novella Undine, the story of a water-sprite who must marry a human to gain a soul) – though, when I say Andersen’s we all know I actually mean Disney’s, released 1990 here in the UK.
Where some see Ariel defying her father’s orders (the patriarch Triton, no less), others – and the more widely held feminist reading – see something like Mermaids author Sophie Kingshill’s argument: ‘You couldn’t have a more oppressive idea of what it is to be a woman – if you fall in love, you must lose your voice and spread your legs!’
Still from Undine (2020)
Passive, with no penetrable orifices, yet dangerous and seductive: ‘The story of the mermaid is the story of a very male sort of fear, the fear that a woman is always going to leave you or destroy you,’ Kirsty Logan, author of the mermaid novel The Gloaming, has said.
‘I HAVE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING EACH TO EACH / I DO NOT THINK THEY WILL SING TO ME’
Mermaids might be feared, but they are also the objects of men’s idolisation, as these lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock attest: female perfection lives always out of reach, over there, while I footle about in my melancholy over here.
It’s difficult to know how to read those lines (though I find myself glad that Prufrock didn’t have access to Reddit, as I fear he might have fallen prey to the manosphere). Eliot is most probably alluding to John Donne’s ‘Teach me to hear the mermaids sing’. In this ‘Song’, Donne starts by listing similarly impossible tasks, only to compare them to the impossibility of finding ‘a woman true, and fair’ i.e. a magical double-ideal, Madonna and whore. If only, eh!
Mermaid stories are about lines drawn in the sand. Historically, they have upheld the idea that there is not one world, but multiple worlds that people of different genders must move through, which should be kept separate. Land / water; male / female.
‘IF YOU LEAVE ME, I’LL HAVE TO KILL YOU’
Undine opens in medias res, with our eponymous heroine having an awkward conversation with her boyfriend Johanne, who has cheated on her. ‘If you leave me, I’ll have to kill. You know that,’ Undine informs him, a flash of anger rippling just under the surface. Petzold has arguably skipped over the sexiest part of the myth. But the question now becomes, can Undine change her fate?
No destiny-changing for now, since Undine is due back at the museum where she works. Petzold-Fromm’s camera sweeps lovingly over maps and models that describe the city’s scars, while Undine expounds on developments in pre- and post-war Berlin.
Petzold’s previous film Transit followed a young couple’s attempts to escape from occupied France, a story of problematised borders and self-preservation. So it goes here: a (laboured?) analogy about the interpellation of Berlin following successive historical traumas, just as Undine must find love to bridge the gap between water and land to save her soul.
A FISH OUT OF WATER
Unbeknownst to Undine, an underwater diver called Christoph (Franz Rogowski) has been listening to her lecture with amazement. He catches up with her at that same overdetermined café, where fates are sealed and conversation is stilted. ‘Your phone’s on the floor,’ says Christoph. ‘Shall I pick it up for you?’
Just when you think the scene couldn’t get any more awkward, besotted Christoph steps backward into a stack of shelves, unsettling a fish tank with a diver figurine inside. Meet-cute moves to epiphany. The tank cracks, shatters, and the pair are showered in water, an event that catalyses their burgeoning relationship into something far deeper. Fish helplessly flapping their tails foreshadow darker things to come.
The diver figurine, now broken, reappears throughout the film as a metaphor and motif for Undine’s predicament: how to hold the pieces together and remain whole? Especially when, at the film’s midpoint, Johannes reappears claiming he made a terrible mistake?
THE LURE
Undine slips into a sensual romantic drama, carried by Beer and Ragowksi’s chemistry. It’s easy to forget its mythical underpinnings.
We’re a far cry from 2015’s The Lure, which went the other way, leaning into the well-established Dangerous Seductress framework with its story of two teenage mermaids who get jobs at a strip club. They use their siren-like powers to feed their taste for human flesh, singing and slaying on a quest to find love.
I can’t help but think that a simpler and more successful détournement of the roles given to women in a male-dominated society, which also involved sequins, singing and slaying, is still Bette Middler’s iconic Delores DeLago persona (to which RuPaul’s Drag Race provided a glorious runway homage in 2018.)
THE FIRST MERMAID
Further back than Bette Midler, further than Donne in the Renaissance, and further even than those lethal Greek sirens luring sailors onto rocks, you can trace problematic mermaids (dangerous, desirable, other) back to Ancient Mesopotamia, c. 1000 B.C.
The story goes that when the fertility goddess Atargatis accidentally caused the death of her mortal lover, she tried to drown herself in the sea. But, alas, her beauty was too good to waste (*side-eye*) and the waters transformed her into a mermaid – her tail a reminder of her shame, signifying the slippery nature of women who might turn on men.
Miniature illustration of a Siren enticing sailors who try to resist her, from an English Bestiary, c. 1235
British poet Jazmine Linklater glosses things differently in online magazine MAI: ‘Atargatis was turned into a fish-woman, a kuliltu, for copulating with a human.’ The myth, she says, in no uncertain terms, is about ‘interpellation, expectation, societal control.’
Linklater’s Atargatis: Her Salt (from Figure a Motion, published in September) meets Atargatis where she is, rather than where we’d like to tidy her up into: she uses the mermaid to think through bodily experiences, sexuality and pain, and how society might attempt to control and bind certain experiences in the here and now.
Odysseus and the Sirens, painting by Léon Belly, 1867
Linklater’s mermaid, like Undine’s diver figurine, is ‘all offcuts. Residues. Parts. She almost always isn’t but glitters’. If punctuation in poems traditionally denotes a pause for breath, then here is breathlessness somewhere between lung and gill: full stops seem to do nothing to stop the lyric’s flow. The usual boundaries are unfixed, floating, frangible.
While, historically, the mermaid has been a symptom of men’s fear, in Linklater’s poem, she is a figure rising and falling (‘her flanks rise & fall with the atmosphere’s weight’). Even ‘lying in pieces’, in this liminal state of being beached, there is the hope of resurgence: ‘Residual music sings the kuliltu in moisture: sword in, right up to the hilt’. Ultimately, the agent wielding that phallic sword is left ambiguous. The mermaid, the other, is a figure capable of song as well as being somehow sung herself.
Whether in ancient Mesopotamia or in contemporary German cinema, there’s something about the mermaid we just can’t shake – but Linklater’s refuses to be confined by expectation; ever in motion, the mermaid is a figure attempting to bridge possible worlds: perhaps, in her generosity, she is seeking a soul for all of us.
Jazmine Linklater’s latest poetry pamphlet is available here from Guillemot Press.
