The one that got away

How Mr. Limpet got me through childhood

Someone recently enmeshed me in one of those Facebook things where you’re supposed to name one, or 10 or 20, objets d’art that have deep personal meaning for you. In this case it was “just an image, no explanation, from ten movies that had an impact on you. 10 movies, 10 images, 10 nominations.”

This led me to deep thought. There are movies I love, revere and respect, movies with which I could fill top 10s, 20s and beyond; but when they talk about “impact” I assume they’re not talking about aesthetics; I assume they mean it hit you where you lived. That requires dropping the critical apparatus and letting heart and memory speak, like Ego being snapped back to his mother’s cooking in Ratatouille.

I thought back to my childhood, when everything was more or less pre-critical, and settled on the first movie I ever saw in a theater: The Don Knotts movie The Incredible Mr. Limpet. The Facebook meme forbade me to explain, but I will here.

As a boy I was exceedingly nervous and unfocused, partly because of our family situation — father dead, mother sad, alcohol and rage — and partly because I had an undiagnosed adrenal tumor that put me in something like a state of panic most of the time. I was extremely skinny and hyperactive and confronted most social situations, even playground encounters, as if they were vitally important tests in a subject I knew nothing about, given in a foreign language. I had good manners; that much I could grasp and repeat; but outside of that basic decision tree I was lost.

My default was to be enthusiastic and try to ape whatever I thought everyone else was doing. This made for many ridiculous spectacles. I recall one day the local kids assembled in the street in front of my house (we were on a corner lot) for a game of touch football. I had not played with these kids in what seemed like a long time — why, I can’t remember — but, encouraged by my mother and the excitement of the moment and possibly a hypothalamic mood swing, I rushed into the street ready for action. I actually joined a side full of confidence, though I was the farthest possible thing from an athlete.

We lined up and the opposing side threw the ball (we didn’t have kickoffs in street football) and it headed straight for me. I assembled my arms in a manner I thought suitable for a catch. The ball hit my funny bone. I screamed like Robespierre when the executioners pulled the bandage off and ran into the house. I didn’t come out to play for what seemed like weeks.

I wanted to be liked, but it was always a long shot that in any given situation I would act normal enough to be even tolerated, and I seldom beat the odds. This made me a weirdo in an era in which weirdos were still unwelcome, especially to other American kids, the most status-attentive creatures on God’s green earth.

I had some idea of escape: I had begun to go to school, and grasped that schooling led somewhere — higher grades, more exalted institutions, some kind of attainment and recognition, places higher and presumably better than the one I had been born into. But I didn’t know what that might be, or whether I’d really like it. And beyond some mental caricature of myself in a cap and gown, I had no idea what came after that.

Back then when I watched TV, my most reliable escape from the world and alternative view of it, there were no anti-heroes to whom I could relate. The outcasts were really outcasts — either villains, who were too aggressive and butch for me to identify with, or wimps like Don Knotts as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. Barney was skinny and hyperactive, too, though I couldn’t understand the petty authoritarian streak in his character that, I discovered years later, was what made him really funny. His fumbling and fussiness were most easily read by my child mind as cowardice, and, I decided resignedly, I must be a coward, too, since any time I saw people I knew I would fail to get what I wanted from them.

We went to see The Incredible Mr. Limpet on its first run. I think it was a matinee, and I don’t remember my mother or my sister being around, though they may have been. I was for all intents and purposes alone when the story unfolded.

The guy Knotts played, Henry, is in some respects a typical Don Knotts character; he’s a bookkeeper with a manner and mode of dress (sack suit, pince-nez) that make him look like what was then called a sissy. He’s also an amateur ichthyologist — a field with which he is humorously obsessed, which just denatures him further (‘Why don’t we all go over to the university tomorrow for Professor Hoffmeyer’s lecture... he’s gonna talk about the mating habits of the shellfish. It's a little risqué!”).

The story begins just before World War II; Henry washes out as 4-F in the pre-war draft, due to his eyesight and “other things,” but his more robust buddy George gets into the Navy. Henry’s wife Bessie seems much happier around George, who seems to practically live with them, than around Henry, but the film is meant for children (and also meant to clear the Legion of Decency) so this is portrayed as a simple frustration rather than a potentially adulterous situation. (When Henry, upon coming home from work to join Bessie and George, fails to kiss his wife properly, she gives George a whattaya-gonna-do look.)

This impasse is broken when Henry turns into a fish. The transformation is preceded by a trip by the threesome to Coney Island (they live in Flatbush!). Shortly before the trip, Henry sings, in his solitude, a gently jaunty number called “I Wish I Were a Fish” that has lived in my memory these 50-odd years:

I wish, I wish, I wish I were a fish
’Cause fishes have a better life than people
They don’t have all the care and strife of people
A fish
Can swim
That’s all they ask of him
A fish is free
To roam around the sea
And look for love wherever he can find it…

Even stupefied as I was by the unexpectedly huge projected image, the loud reverberant sound, and the half-attentive, half-chattering matinee crowd, I was drawn into Henry’s reverie and desire to live in a world that he imagined would be better than the one he had been stuck in by an accident of biology, and in which he could find love.

Even better, Henry is able to overcome that accident by falling into the ocean and (in a crude animated sequence that thrilled me to my core, involving organ stings and bright colorful flashes) turning into a cartoon fish. The presumed death of Henry seems only superficially worrisome to George and Bessie — and even to Henry. At my current stage of life I imagine even a marine enthusiast would be struck with blind terror as such a transformation, and if he were shown to accept it with equanimity that would be an obvious absurdist device like Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis. (I doubt that’s what Arthur Lubin, a director known mainly for Abbott and Costello movies and TV shows, was going for.) To my child mind, though, it made sense that Henry would be mainly curious and excited.

Sooner than later Henry rescues a “ladyfish” from a fisherman’s line and she, grateful and coquettish, takes him by the fin and offers to accompany him to the “spawning grounds.” The pair even thread and spin through a proto-psychedelic seascape in a number called, I swear to God, “Deep Rapture.”

But though obviously attracted to this ladyfish — which my child mind accepted as a higher agape order of affection rather than as a Shape of Water situation — Henry is nonetheless flustered with bourgeois morality (which we were meant to find comic!) and demurs. The female fish, unacquainted with the concepts of marriage and fidelity, takes off, and Henry is left forlorn.

A lot goes on next — America enters World War II; Henry finds his extraordinarily loud “thrum” (which I only just learned is a form of mating call) makes him a valuable naval reconnaissance agent; he hooks up with George and the Navy to fight the Nazis, etc. But for me the real payoff was when Henry is reconnected with the girl fish, and takes her to Coney Island so he can effect an amicable parting with Bessie, who is by then quite happily paired with George.

Bessie is mildly concerned with her status — “Am I the widow of a man,” she asks, “or the wife of a fish?” But Henry has completely adjusted his own view: “You couldn’t very well keep me in your bathtub. What would the neighbors say?” And with a few mildly affectionate words — no legal niceties, no formal dissolution of bonds — they let each other go, and Henry swims off with his piscine paramour.

Reviewing the movie now, I realize that I was confused, perhaps from the beginning, on large parts of the narrative. But it wasn’t the story as such that made, as the Facebook people put it, the “impact” on me that I still feel today. It was the freakish central character doing something other than, much better than, enduring his limited life; that he could magically will himself into a better reality that made him happy; that the people he loved eventually came to accept it; and that, whether they accepted it because they had no choice, or because they thought it was better for him — or even (this was my intuition; it isn’t really in the movie) because they didn’t care — none of that mattered in the least. All that mattered was that he was the one that got away — and, the ending implies, lived on happily in what to everyone else was a great unknown.