Splash (1984)

Splash arrives from 1984 with the serene confidence of a film that has never once considered whether it is being watched correctly. Ron Howard directs Tom Hanks as a produce wholesaler who pines for a girl he met underwater as a child, and Daryl Hannah as the mermaid who comes ashore, is arrested at the Statue of Liberty for indecent exposure, and learns English by watching television. She takes her name from a street sign. Hanks informs her that Madison is not a name. The film regards this as a joke, and the decades since have regarded it as prophecy. The romance proceeds on the assumption that a woman who cannot speak is an ideal companion, which the screenplay treats as a feature of the fantasy and not a problem to be solved. Nothing pauses to interrogate this. The plot simply continues, cheerfully, toward the wedding.

The cast is uniformly white, and no effort was made to suggest otherwise. There is no gay subplot, no racial reckoning, no environmental warning, no sermon about the wealthy. Allen owns a fruit and vegetable business, and the film finds this admirable instead of indictable. The government scientists who capture Madison are villains of convenience, the sort of bureaucratic obstacle any comedy of the era required, and their laboratory functions as a plot engine, not as an argument about state power. Madison's nudity is staged for laughs and for the camera's pleasure, and the film never suggests we should feel otherwise. She is a silent object of desire who is rescued, twice, by men.

This is a light romantic comedy that wants nothing more than to be charming, and mostly is. It has no interest in instructing its audience about anything at all. The result is a picture of zero social consciousness in the contemporary sense, a clean vintage from a year when a mermaid could be a punchline and a love interest at the same time. We score it accordingly. The cellar is a lonely place, but somebody must keep the inventory.