Ringing all the underwater, underwater, underwater bells

I am trying to figure out whether I can actually make an argument that Ron Howard's Splash (1984) is a queer film—even if the accidental kind, like Orwell with sexcrime—without being doomed to failure or just fail. It was a shower thought, which means very late at night. But I watched the film for the first time in several years with Viking Zen and her daughter for this week's Movie Night and this time it struck me that it's a story in which someone is outed. The ways in which Allen freaks at the revelation of Madison's nature (which she has been trying to tell him and he has been somewhat derailing with his certainty that it's a non-issue: "What, you're already married? You're dying, you were once a man? Whatever it is, I don't care!") are more Neil Jordan than Mélusine. Their first encounter afterward, he flinches violently from her when she tries to touch him. He walks back into work the next day and everyone stops with the fruits and vegetables to stare at him, prompting John Candy's inimitable holler: "What are you looking at? You never saw a guy who slept with a fish before? Get back to work!" Eventually he will realize he loves her, full stop, but first he has the kind of attraction crisis that desires the audience to slap him upside the head: "Nobody said love's perfect."—"Oh, Freddie, I don't expect it to be perfect, but for God's sake it's usually human!" I do not know how far the original material can be considered in this question, since Splash extensively rewrites "The Little Mermaid": instead of the mermaid futilely sacrificing herself for the hope of love on alien land, it's the human man who gives up his world to follow her into the shape-changing sea. Maybe I should be looking more generally at passing narratives. Or sleeping. The latter is probably a good idea regardless of the intellectual success of this paragraph.

I was also in the shower when I realized that Peter Cushing would have been my ideal Andrew Ketterley, even better than Ernest Thesiger—whose Dr. Pretorius displays the necessary air of superiority, but Cushing possessed the equally necessary ability to fold instantly and pathetically, as shown more than once in Cash on Demand (1961) and used to devastating effect in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954). I think it's an extension of the quality teenybuffalo remarked on when discussing his Van Helsing, a clearly marked hero who never looks as though being on the side of light is easy or without fear; he seems to have had a knack for suggesting uncertainty, vulnerability. (It certainly accounts for his reading of The End of the Affair's Henry Miles, who by all rights should have been boring as a box of bricks. Instead he's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film.) He would have had no difficulty with the more threatening aspects of Uncle Andrew, the magic that is sufficiently indistinguishable from mad science and the complete, clinical disregard for anything he views as a lesser being—which means girls as well as guinea pigs—and I can hear that crystal radio voice of his exactly in the self-deceiving self-dramatization of "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny." Ditto the casual references to exploding test subjects. But the character needs to be scared out of his wits by Jadis—both for the comedy and because it illustrates a measure of her sheer power: after meeting her, Digory is never afraid of his uncle again—and I don't know if Ernest Thesiger, supremely bitchy as he was, could actually do abject terror. And the height would have been right, and the sharp face, and the rather epic hair. And in an impossible alternate universe, he and Tilda Swinton would have been something to see on the same screen.

Alexander Waugh's The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2008) is a densely and stylishly written combination of biography, case study, and sociopolitical history and I am delighted to be halfway through it, but, man, do not read it to cheer yourself up.