Blue sea. White sky. Puffy, whispy, peaceful navy clouds. Only a thin strip of peach on the horizon distinguishes above from below. You scan left. You are Julien, and you are at the helm of a sailboat. Charles, well-dressed in upper-crust boating garb, comes up from the quarters and remarks, in French, on the beautiful weather. He takes over your steering duties. You cross bowwards on the port side and adjust the sail. Charles is concerned. He cries out to warn you, but the mast swings abruptly and knocks you into the ocean. As you fight to stay above the surface, Charles, frantic, sails away. You yell for him to turn back, curse at him, curse at everything, but the boat fades into the distance. “Fuck, why isn’t he coming?” you ask yourself, but no answer follows. There isn’t an answer. You keep treading water.
You are participating in Sortie En Mer, or A Trip Out to Sea, presented by Guy Cotten. It is an online interactive video, and before it begins, text on the screen recommends you use speakers and make the video full-screen. Guy Cotten is not a filmmaker. Guy Cotten is a marine boating and safety equipment company.
No time to explain now. You are drowning. You must keep scrolling up to stay on the surface. No matter how hard or how quickly you do so, you can’t, at least not consistently. You take big, urgent, gasping breaths when you can, and you labor with muffled groans to keep your mouth closed when you go under. From beneath, the surface is dark and opaque, with ethereal green light peaking through here and there. Sun flares distort your vision. So do the bubbles and swell. The waves knock you down, but when you can, you float on your back, staring up at the sky. From this perspective, staring up from the sea rather than out from the helm, it is perfect blue, and the clouds perfect white. It is ideal, and it is inviting. Who knows what happened to Charles, but it’s abundantly clear that all the scrolling in the world won’t bring him back. You go under again.
It only takes a few minutes before you begin hallucinating. Looking up, you see a small child floating on an inner tube. Before you, there is a scuba diver staring you in the face. Then you are alone again, and then you get desperate. Suspended in dark waters, you claw off your boat shoes. Back above, juxtaposed against the perfect sky, you tear off a fingernail. You pound the water with your fists. You scream, and you moan, and you scream. More treading.
Eventually, you go under for good. Everything goes dark. The underwater gleam of the sun comes from below. You grasp at a woman’s ankle on the sandy floor. In a vision, she lies in bed, everything white, and she looks at you. The sun shines golden and your hands start to slip. The woman in bed looks concerned. You are holding your hand, and then you let go. The woman in bed screams. You look up at the surface, and your arms go limp before you. The screen reads, “You have drowned in…” and tells you for how many minutes you were swimming. Then, “Whenever you go out to sea, wear your life vest.” “Guy Cotten.”
Charles was never coming back because the video does not want you to get rescued. This is a drowning simulator; the outcome is inevitable, only a matter of time. It is a lifeless exercise, POV torture porn. You get knocked off the boat, you’re fearful for a while, and then you’re dead.
Make no mistake: the shaky cam and the panicked arm acting inspire real terror, but it’s temporary. The game component of the experience gets old pretty quickly. My first time trying Sortie En Mer, laxness, boredom even, overcame me, and I allowed myself to drown. A generic life and love that was not mine flashed before my eyes, I died, and I shrugged and started the video again. The second time went longer, but my motivation was curiosity. I wanted to see how the plot would sustain and progress rather than just, well, treading water. But even then, I had no survival instinct in play. The recommendation to watch full-screen and pump the volume was meant to make the trauma real, but detachment was also inevitable.
The soullessness of the interactive experience is compounded by the blatant cash grab. It would be one thing if this were simply a public service announcement, albeit a horrific one, but Guy Cotten doesn’t just want you to wear a life vest. The company wants you to wear a Guy Cotten life vest, and it links you to its site at the end to buy one.
The terror this video inspires passes. As effective as the POV is in the moment, the next time I’m out on the water, I don’t imagine I’ll be thinking about Julien and his tragic demise at the hands of an unforgiving ocean and a crappy fellow mariner. I will wear a life vest, though, because it’s the safe and right thing to do. Given the choice, I won’t choose a Guy Cotten. I’d like my life vest to be made by a company that actually shows some humanity and care for life.
Cohen is a member of the class of 2014.