An absolutely underappreciated masterpiece of a Movie, but at the end of the day, I love me an underdog piece of media. Little Fish was released in 2021 after being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A movie with perfect exploitation of cinema and spoken-poetry-like narration.
The movie’s premise is the story of a couple, Emma and Jude, fighting against a memory loss virus that threatens to erase their history together. Said virus is called NIA (Neuroinflammatory Affliction), and the aftermath of its befall strangely resembles the events of the pandemic of our time. However, the original short story from which the movie was inspired was released in 2011 by Aja Gabel, and the movie itself was shot in 2019. Knowing that, I can’t help but be amazed by Aja Gabel and Mattson Tomlin’s accurate depiction of the human factor in such events and their response to the disaster.
Parallels between NIA and COVID-19
In my opinion, the major parallels between the fictional disease and the real-world recent disaster are three.
In both the short story and the movie, Emma — the female protagonist and narrator — describes the initial news of the virus spread as “beautiful”. Her exact words in the movie were: “There was something quite beautiful to these stories at first.” Surely, we remember the collective initial response to the break of the news about the COVID-19 outbreak. How, at first, quarantine seemed like a much-needed time out.
Then, comes light-handed denial. A tragedy deformed into illusional numbers. So much of the news bounced right off our chests, then. No one was ready to bear the weight of the reality. “Always there, not here,” Emma said. As long as death does not haunt our very own streets or homes, it does not exist in our periphery, yet.
Like a second face of a coin, acceptance arrives inevitably after denial in the face of ongoing reality. The tragedy persisted beyond our mental capacity for willing condonation. Someone nearby caught the virus or some acquaintance made friends with death. In the movie, Ben and Samantha, who were friends with Emma and Jude, symbolized a miniature version of the world around them. Emma’s reflection on Ben’s memory loss projected her fears regarding her and Jude’s nearing future. When Jude catches the virus and begins to show symptoms of memory loss, she asks: “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”
Although the ordeal was global, the quarantine set everyone to deal on their own. Distractions were manifested in trend after trend. Almost everyone was glued to some sort of device because the moments of enforced solitude were, for some of us, the real threat.
Romance
Whether the romance was a co-genre or a subgenre of the movie, it didn’t really matter. This aspect of the story was still prominent, and if it wasn’t done brilliantly as it is, the story would’ve been off.
The relationship between Emma and Jude is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful portraits of relationships on the screen, which might be attributed to the actors’ obvious chemistry and the writers’ brilliant conveyance. The wholesome and compelling beginning of their relationship is shown in three major scenes; the waterslide, Halloween day, and their first date. Their common knack for impulsive decisions like proposing in the basement of the exotic animal shop among the aquariums, or getting married in the courthouse instead of waiting for their wedding date. Their notable concern for each other even in times of hardship in everything Emma did and Jude’s wish to be by her side somehow in the future knowing he might not be able to.
The actors adeptly embodied the love their characters shared, sometimes even in micro-details. In the short story, Emma tells Jude: “What we have are feelings. You don’t forget feelings.” The first scene in the movie spoke volumes portraying that idea. For first-time viewers, these two characters, who are clearly strangers, come together and somehow as if they’re star-crossed lovers or they have reunited after a recent lifetime and their connection blazes anew. When returning to this scene after watching the whole movie, it gains a new aspect and the narrative is changed entirely.
My personal favorite part of the movie is the Haptic Memory scene, which explores a desperate alternative to the memory they’re at risk of losing. Earlier in the movie, we’re introduced to the concept of associative memory when Emma explains to Jude how their dog’s memory depends more on it, so they shouldn’t worry about their dog forgetting them as long as they’re associated with a smell it can recognize. Then, in the Haptic Memory scene, they discuss another type of memory exclusively tied to touch.
In this scene, Emma and Jude exchange a request and a promise. Emma asks Jude: “Will you touch me?” But actually meaning; will you remember me? Jude offers her a sort of promise in this scene, saying: “I haven’t forgotten how you feel.” In the midst of his decaying memory, his words ring like an assurance. I am forgetting, but I’m not forgetting this.
Such as the pleasant times when frames resemble paintings, I find this scene resembling a beautiful quote written by Madeline Miller.
“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
In the end, somewhere within themselves, Jude did recognize Emma and she him, which is reflective of their love because to be loved is to be known.
Cinema (Spoilers ahead)
In the movie, we’re taken back and forth between the couple’s past and present. The director, Chad Hartigan, managed to set the storyline in an order that could’ve easily been confusing to viewers, but instead, it masterfully followed a clear vision all the while concealing any details that would give away anything too soon.
Both the narrative and scenes are woven together in a way that might not be deservingly appreciated upon the first watch, but watching the movie a second time immediately after it ended allowed these overlooked details to stand out and give the movie even more weight to its complexity.
Also, there were some changes made compared to the original short story, but the important details were still there. For example, Jude is a computer programmer in the short story. Occasionally, he spends his weekends outdoors and brings a camera along. But in the movie, Jude’s profession was solely photography and I honestly applaud that creative decision.
When Emma first introduced Jude to us, the viewers, she says: “He always had a camera in his hand and a photograph in his mind. He could seem guarded at first, but if you ever needed to know how he felt, you could just look at his pictures.” Both the movie and the short story were narrated by Emma, so Jude’s perspective of the story isn’t as prominent, although, in the short story, Emma gives us a pretty clear insight into who he is and how he feels. In the movie, we can see Emma’s stress and fears through it all. She is telling us about it. But what about Jude? Through her introduction of Jude, she’s giving us a clue. Look at his pictures. The first scene in which we see Jude after they both find out he’s showing symptoms of memory loss is him staring at his photographs and Polaroids on the wall. Also, let’s not overlook the obvious convenience of showcasing Polaroids and using them to further the plot of a movie centered around a memory-loss-causing virus.
The palette of the movie keeps switching between cold blue hues and warm indoor lights, and sometimes, both palettes overlap. I believe that, visually, the movie is pleasing and the frames reflect the poetic narration beautifully. All of this was matched with a soundtrack album that reflected the tragedy haunting the storyline, the apocalyptic theme, and the tender sentiment centering the story. The song “See You in the Dark” —both the movie version and the one performed by Soko — serves as a true musical love letter between Emma and Jude.
Another thing that I loved was the visual display of the distortion in the memories as they slowly fade away. Whenever Jude tries to remember the details of a certain memory prompted by Emma’s questions, the movie cuts to the memory the way he recalls it. Then, as she corrects him, it cuts to the memory the way it actually was. This little detail brilliantly sets the viewers to recognize the plot twist by the end of the movie where we see Emma recalling a memory with a bluntly distorted detail. Throughout the movie, we see a frame from the Halloween day scene of falling little toy soldiers with red parachutes. In the scene where Emma realizes she’s showing symptoms of memory loss, the movie cuts to the toy soldiers with white parachutes.
For the entirety of the movie, I was awaiting the obvious tragedy to take place, Jude forgetting everything including Emma, but the ending (God, the ending!!) excelled in displaying the tragedy as it is, but adorning it with a bittersweet aftertaste.
Beginning and ending the movie with the line: “I was so sad the day I met you. I can’t remember why” is by far the best part about this movie. Having the movie circle back to the first scene and completely change the way we viewed that scene, and using that line on different occasions, making it mean separate things in each one.
The first time Emma meets Jude was on the waterslide and her memory of that day is that: “I was so sad the day I met you. I can’t remember why.” She was sad because it was closing, but after meeting him, she was no longer sad. And the second time that she meets him, supposedly, for the first time was in that last scene. And her narration for that moment, again, is: “I was so sad the day I met you. I can’t remember why.” But this time, she literally can’t remember why, because she, too, had lost her memory and the reason for her sadness then; Jude forgetting her.
And the movie ends there… with the lights turning off in her mind, forever erasing her memory of them, but the ending is left vaguely open for a possibility for them to find each other again with all the liberty for the viewers to assume their future. I was anticipating being destroyed by the ending, but the inevitable tragedy somehow lost its wounding grip on me.
The ending of the short story is different but no less beautiful. In the short story, Emma concludes it with the line: “One day we won’t be strangers to each other. We’ll only be new.”
