For tattooed there is a cryptic map rumoured to show the way to the mythical ‘DryLand’, ensuring that everyone wants a pound of her flesh, and eventually driving the Mariner to make one last stand against the Smokers. The little girl – whose very name reverses ‘alone’ while also evoking the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb – is a living, breathing MacGuffin with a potentially explosive payload on her back. What eventually humanises the Mariner is the (initially unwanted) company of Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her young ward Enola (Tina Majorino). The latter is embodied by the Mariner, a rugged loner who, owing to an amphibious mutation that has gifted him with working gills, is a literal fish out of water (or ‘ichthyosapien’), unable properly to integrate into the leftover dregs of human society. This is the pioneering badlands of the Wild West, or the post-apocalyptic wastelands of The Road Warrior – except utterly aqueous – where a threadbare civilisation is beleaguered on all sides by murderous greed and animalistic individualism. Such community as there is comprises floating ‘atolls’, bartering whatever goods come their way while trying in vain to keep trouble out, and the ‘Smokers’, a navy of petrol-headed, cigarette-coveting pirates led by the Deacon (Dennis Hopper) and based in the rusty wreckage of the Exxon Valdez. He is a survivor, though he is running on empty, and this is true of the others he encounters, all recycling or stealing everything – even corpses – and gradually dying out for not only a lack of resources but also a surfeit of scavengers and merciless marauders.
If the shot appears to be taking full, objectifying advantage of Costner’s status as a sex symbol, the urine trickling between his legs serves to undermine any mainstream erotic appeal.Īfter collecting his urine in a jar, the Mariner puts it through a makeshift series of filters, and thirstily drinks the liquid that comes out the other end. On its deck, this ‘man with no name’, credited only as ‘the Mariner’ (and played by Kevin Costner), is first seen from behind as the low-angle camera tilts up his legs to his butt. Our protagonist’s particular island is his modified trimaran, which we first see in an aerial zoom that emphasises its extreme isolation in a sea of blue.
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