Film

The Most Romantic Film On Netflix Is ‘My Octopus Teacher’

It’s about a man and his octopus, and it will break your heart.

by Joseph Earp  25 September 2020
My Octopus Teacher is a Netflix sensation

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In the opening scenes of My Octopus Teacher, Craig Foster meets one of the loves of his life.

The year is 2010, and Foster is diving in a small, underwater locale just off the coast of South Africa known as the Cape of Storms. He’s burnt out — sick and tired after years of working as a documentary filmmaker, and looking for some kind of release.

And then he finds it. Sifting through a small forest of kelp, he encounters a young octopus, hidden amongst a pile of shells. “At the time, I didn’t know I had witnessed something extraordinary,” Foster says.

At first, she is stand-offish, hiding herself in a kelp leaf. But then, ever-so-slowly, she begins to relax around Craig. And so begins a love story of sorts, a year-long relationship between a man and an intelligent alien living right here on earth.

Octopi: Our Aliens

My Octopus Teacher, which has already become one of Netflix’s biggest films of the year, is a loving exploration of the octopus mind. Foster’s young octopus friend is strikingly intelligent and curious: she recognises him, fiddles around with his camera, and begins to form important connections with the diver.

Not that Foster’s octopus is particularly unique — octopi are famous for their curiosity and their striking intelligence. In captivity, the creatures will develop likes and dislikes around certain staff members, plan complicated escapes, and spit thin streams of water at overhead lights in order to break them, so they might relax in the dark. Otto, one of the most famous octopi of the last few years, had to be entertained with a chess board in order to stop him from causing chaos.

“What’s more, the octopus’s brain has a structure completely distinct from that of our own,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes about the creatures. “Even birds and fish have brains which exhibit a one-to-one correspondence with parts of the human brain. But the octopus’s brain is built on a different model entirely.”

And that’s the thing: octopi are smart, but not in the way that we are, or for the reasons that we are. In his book Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life, philosopher and scientist Peter Godfrey-Smith notes that octopi are very distant relatives of ours; they broke off from our evolutionary tree many millions of years ago. They’re further from us than dogs; monkeys; birds. In fact, the common ancestor between the human and the octopus is a worm — a flattened, extraordinarily basic thing that lived 600 million years ago.

That might be precisely why we find them so interesting. Octopuses are, as Godfrey-Smith puts it, an example of nature building conscious life twice, creating a similar sort of creature from two incredibly divergent paths. We share almost nothing with octopi. But they are so like us; so curious, clever, and mischievous in all the ways that we associate with human children, not with a deep-sea animal that has brains in its tentacles.

My Octopus Teacher: A Love Story

In her review of Godfrey-Smith’s book, Amia Srinivasan notes that this paradoxical alien closeness is precisely what has historically led humans to be sexually attracted to octopi — there is an entire rich cultural history of hentai and tentacle porn.

Indeed, in the days after the release of My Octopus Teacher, a much-mocked viral tweet thread called Foster’s octopus a “queer slut from outer space” and noted that Foster’s love for the creature seemed deep; almost erotic.

That thread had its problems — for instance, it weirdly reaffirmed gender norms by applying them to a creature that does not perform femininity  as we do. But it strikes at something true about the human/octopi relationship. Not that it’s necessarily sexual. But that it’s necessarily so intense; so strange.

It is true that Foster is fascinated by his new friend, and deeply loves her in a way that transcends boundaries. Early in the film, he spends hours obsessively discerning octopus tracks, so that he might find his friend in the maze of the kelp forest. In any other context, we would call this kind of love “obsessive.” Later on, he admits that she has subsumed his life. There are scenes where she dances across his arms; across his body, while he looks on in wonder.

It is no spoiler to say that My Octopus Teacher has something of a tragic ending — anyone with even a passing knowledge of octopi life-spans, or perceptive enough to notice that Foster speaks about his friend in the past tense, will know that the film ends with a goodbye.

But what a beautiful goodbye. In its final moments, the film provides a shockingly literal representation of Foster and the octopus’ journey — an embrace from “across the evolutionary” tree, as Godfrey-Smith would put it, as a human and an alien hold each other in their many arms.

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.