The Day of the Dolphin (1973)
In sheer genre terms, only the werewolf-horror film entry Wolf (1994) in Mike Nichols’ filmography is as strange an excursion as Nichols’ fifth feature, a paranoid-conspiracy thriller starring George C. Scott and “talking” dolphins. Nichols’ long exile from urbanity in Mexico during production of Catch-22 had now sufficiently faded from memory to allow Nichols to book himself another lengthy, remote location shoot, this time on a remote coast in the Bahamas. Instead of working with vintage airplanes, he would now work for the first (and last) time with animals among the dramatic leads. Significant passages in the film elapse without dialogue; indeed, The Day of the Dolphin is intensely cinematic; the ecstatic marine cinematography is reminiscent of the “pretty” ironies of the Berkeley idyll in The Graduate; the simple beauties of the world (and of the cinema) are not as they appear.
This was the golden age of the paranoid-conspiracy thriller in Hollywood, borne of the era that offered the Pentagon Papers and the secret bombings of Cambodia, the Watergate break-in and the subsequent White-House cover-up. It would have been impossible for a 1973 audience not to have cultural associations with a plot that features a battery of recording devices and tapes that disappear in order to facilitate a whitewash. Alan J. Pakula became the auteur of the genre in the loose trilogy of films Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), but many other directors in the Hollywood firmament explored the genre as well, including Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation (1974; he was nominated against himself and The Godfather, Part II for Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards) and Roman Polanski in Chinatown (1974). Polanski had originally been attached to write and direct The Day of the Dolphin, in 1968 (he had been laboring unenthusiastically over the script in London when his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, died of multiple stab wounds inflicted by the Charles Manson gang, and he was understandably unable to refocus on the project afterwards).1 For Nichols and Henry, the genre offered a logical and novel excursion into insights they’d already been making about the causes and effects of self-delusion in reified systems.
Every one of his first five films shares a thematic preoccupation with the problem of communication. Dolphin foregrounds this meditation, since it presents as its protagonist Dr. Jake Terrell (Scott’s character), biologist, zoologist, and linguist. Vincent Canby, who for the first time was unable to give Nichols an unqualified review, dwells on the source material that inspired Robert Merle to write the novel Buck Henry greatly simplified for the screen: the work of Dr. John C. Lilly. “Unlike Dr. Lilly,” writes Canby, “who finally gave up his work on the grounds that it was cruel to take away the dolphins’ freedom in the interests of research, the hero of “The Day of the Dolphin” pursues his [linguistic and behavioral] experiments to their successful conclusion.” He concludes that not even Scott is immune from the undignified tone inevitably introduced by talking fish: “No matter what he does,” Canby argues, “the dolphin is bound to uptank him.”2 Polanski had bailed out of the project, unsure of how to create a dignified thriller from a Dr. Doolittle premise; the reviewers had a field day savaging the film with witty puns and hyperbolic exclamations about the creaking plot; Pauline Kael was at her most venomous, calling it “the most expensive Rin Tin Tin picture ever made” and wondering, “if Mike Nichols and Buck Henry don’t have anything better to make movies about than involving English-speaking dolphins in assassination attempts, why don’t they stop making movies?”3 As a matter of fact, they did: it was their last collaboration.
But while Dolphin suffers the inevitable slings and arrows of the backlash that had been waiting for just such an invitation to their ridicule, the film is anything but literal in its intentions. Nichols’ next foray into the paranoid conspiracy thriller would be in Silkwood, where among the intimate relationships of another strong ensemble cast, the shadowy conspiracy is secondary to the trespasses of friends and lovers. The many critics who carped at the silliness of Dolphin’s conspiracy plot (and this was nearly everyone) missed the point: Nichols isn’t a thriller director, and he didn’t suddenly become one for his “talking-fish film.” While previous Nichols films dramatized the limits of language or the unwillingness of characters to reveal themselves through language, Dolphin offers an inquiry into the evolutionary morality of language. Like those earlier films, its conclusions about our dysfunctional species are dark—so dark that, in the language of the scientific hypothesis that serves as the prologue to the film (“Why, after millions of years as a land animal, [… the dolphin was] compelled—or decided—to return to the sea”), Terrell implies humans may constitute an evolutionary cul de sac rather than progress.
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After the very brief title sequence offers the inscrutable image of a dolphin’s eye, regarding us under a baleful scratch of strings in Georges Delerue’s Oscar-nominated score, Dolphin begins in performance, a highly self-conscious presentation by Scott, noted actor of Broadway stage and Hollywood screen, who squints and growls directly at the camera in close-up with a pure-black backdrop. Scott was a star. Nichols clears the set of all distractions and lets the performer perform. But what the performer is performing is his character’s performance: as we eventually learn, he is Dr. Jake Terrell, beneficiary of a Franklin Foundation grant to conduct research into animal behavior, specifically of dolphins, and what we are witnessing (when Nichols finally allows us an establishing shot of Terrell before his audience) is one of the indentured performances the Foundation periodically extracts from its beneficiaries as in-kind payment for its largesse. Terrell’s first word, “Imagine …” suggests yet another level of referenced performance, however: Nichols the filmmaker addressing his audience with a paraphrased invocation of Coleridge’s suspended disbelief. What Terrell and Nichols are asking us will require our cooperation in art’s shared act of hypnotic suggestion. We’re being asked to believe that dolphins can speak toddler–English.
But whether we do or not is not the point of the film. Nichols is not making a statement about marine behavioral conditioning circa 1973; the film is about objectification, commodification, and exploitation, and the conceit in which dolphins can talk provides a metaphor for the manipulative hegemonic exploitation of the purest and least corruptible. Scott’s performance as the trained and performing researcher is a fascinating study in self-delusion: Terrell believes he is protecting the dolphins from the exploitation of a cynical outside world, but he has failed to protect them from himself. In the opening monologue, there is a richly provocative balance between hubris and reserve in Terrell’s manner, and it simultaneously makes his claim as a scientist more credible while also allowing us the inference that he knows more than he’s telling and enjoys the control. Nichols helps to create this impression of covert reticence via ironic insertions of vignettes in Terrell’s research laboratory, where the dolphins perform for a man we will later know as “Mahoney.” The dolphin show is a variation on two early-childhood activities: shape differentiation and object retrieval. Mahoney watches, impassive, as first one shape than another is retrieved; then he asserts his will and introduces a “trick,” substituting an already retrieved shape. The dolphin, consternated, awaits Mahoney’s recognition of his “error.” The vignette plays without diegetic sound, only Delerue’s anxious score inflecting tone. Terrell has just been declaiming the ingenuous rationality of the dolphin point of view as a “perfectly accurate receptor of information about the world for miles around”—which presumes that the world for miles around will be a perfectly accurate transmitter of information. As the ensuing narrative implies, in the conduction of information, the human is a far less reliable and thus far more dangerous species than even the shark, the dolphins’ most natural enemy.
Terrell’s presentation sets down certain basic premises of dolphin reality: its existence is “ecstatic,” reliable, enviable in its efficiency of communication; it’s a life of “two worlds”—the water and the air. Nichols again interjects a brief vignette, of an obviously distressed dolphin bound by canvas harness and human hands and wired to various laboratory technologies recording vital signs, and Terrell assures us the dolphin has “few natural enemies.” We sense simultaneously Terrell’s belief that he is not an enemy of the dolphins and an ironic detachment, via these insertions, of the cinematic narrator from Terrell’s implied self-assessment, in which he has distinguished himself from “certain clumsy scientists” who investigate via vivisection rather than non-invasive observation. Nichols’ inserted vignettes puncture the absolute authority Scott’s presence otherwise commands as Terrell, and we understand Terrell’s performance to be about more than adding to the sum of scientific knowledge: he’s doing his dance for a private foundation’s continued patronage and protesting too much—attempting to subdue the malignant doubts he has about his own motives as a researcher.
He ends his presentation with what may at first seem pure immersion in the realities of his science: a short documentary film of the birth of his star subject, “Alpha,” so named because he was the first dolphin to be born at the Terrell Center, to a mother who died soon after Alpha’s birth. His pride in Alpha is as palpable (“We raised him ourselves”) as it is patriarchal: Terrell is “Pa” to Alpha, and Terrell’s wife, Maggie, is “Ma.” Asked about the military’s interest in dolphin intelligence, Terrell sounds either naïve or willfully ignorant when he claims, “The government and I pay very little attention to each other. […] I’m not a political scientist. My degrees are in biology and zoology.” The film he has shown his audience is ideological, a projection of his belief that his method is hands-off and non-invasive, but most important, organic, the equivalent of the proud father showing snapshots of his child. Also reminiscent in this staged performance is another performing patriarch, Mr. Braddock (William Daniels) in The Graduate, intent on maintaining status via the show he alone can command: his progeny’s performance, and its redounding glory. We must understand Dr. Jake Terrell as in the grip of objectifying forces as he presents Alpha to audiences: his objectifying scientific will, in which the dolphins are inevitably a means to the end of knowledge; and his financial necessity, in which both he and the dolphins are commodities the Foundation must market to maintain, in turn, its own solvency and credibility.
Nichols further erodes the dramatic authority of Dr. Terrell/Scott by permitting audience insolence: a woman presses the intelligence issue, wondering if the dolphin she’d heard about that can count to eight in recognizable English is the product of “some kind of trick or something.” Terrell’s response is a condescending smile and a parroting of her own vocabulary: “Yes, I’d say—yes, just a trick.” The matter-of-fact acceptance of this default currency of human interaction, the “trick” or deceptive illusion, would have a powerful enough irony simply by our having sensed Terrell’s withholding—he, too, has been engaged in a “trick,” in collusion with his assistants and the Foundation. But as the woman turns to talk to her neighbor, the camera reveals Mahoney among the audience members (prominent, even if we don’t recognize Paul Sorvino, because he is one of the few men in the room), and we sense the conspiracy is deeper and, because in the first inserted vignette we’ve already seen Mahoney attempt to trick the dolphin and thus expose the Terrell Center as a sham of rote conditioning rather than logical decision-making, we presume that Terrell’s “trick” is merely a wheel within wheels, of tricks far deeper than the ones he himself has performed at the Center and on this stage.
The immediate aftermath of the public event, which to all appearances has been a strategic success for the Foundation, suggests the commodified, transactional relationship the Terrell Center has with the Franklin Foundation, as manifested in the Terrell’s interaction with Harold DeMilo, his Foundation liaison. Questions persist about Terrell’s enormous bills for recording equipment; Terrell wheedles a ride to his boat from DeMilo (despite its being significantly out of DeMilo’s way). DeMilo attempts to modify Terrell’s thinking about his command performances (“It’s all in the name of good public relations,” he says—a tombstone aphorism for a man like DeMilo, who has staked his reputation upon appearances), and Terrell, one foot already on the pier, reminds DeMilo he needs more money. There is professional courtesy between them, but what underlies all is manipulative negotiation of power.
And then Jake Terrell has left behind the land for his own private island, a bubble of supposed autonomy. In his brief exchange with Mike (Edward Herrmann, looking something less than nautical in a job where his spectacles would be perpetually sprayed to opacity with salt), we learn that Maggie has suffered some injury from Alpha and that Jake is more concerned with Alpha than with his wife; Jake repairs below deck and commands, “Wake me before we get there.” He wants to have resumed full control of his faculties before resuming full control of the compound as he steps off the boat; yet the emphasis upon entering a dream world as he moves from the land to his liminal compound and its shimmering, watery laboratory poses a way of understanding Terrell’s relationship to the wider world. In the longest philosophical dialogue in the film, between Jake and Maggie after it is inevitable that they must surrender Alpha’s secrets to general consumption, Maggie refers to Jake’s anger: “because the world is coming in here and interfering with your little kingdom, all those people who carry whatever disease you think the outside world has.” Jake will come to recognize that this “disease”—commodification—is one he has brought with him into their dream world he has constructed for the meeting of the species.
Certainly his arrival at the compound suggests that, if this is paradise, there is nonetheless trouble here. Jake is palpably drawn toward the lab, a striking piece of poured-concrete architectural sculpture that sits at the heart of the compound, but his assistants all assume he will want to see his wife first. As portrayed by Scott’s real-life spouse, Trish Van Devere, Maggie is resigned to Jake’s ill-temper and distraction, releasing him to Alpha as a worldly continental wife might permit him to see his mistress. In a moment of roughhousing, Alpha has bitten Maggie’s leg, which is depicted in the foreground of the composition, shapely and bandaged, as Jake enters. Maggie is displayed on the bed less like an invalid than a Titian Venus, and yet Jake barely notices her. “Was he—excited?” Jake asks, with an avidity that suggests a sexualized subtext. “That’s what—the third time this week.” Maggie playfully asks, “Getting jealous?” but as he leaves, she’s the object of desire ignored. At the tank, David (Jon Korkes) refers to Alpha’s maturation as well: “I think his Ma and Pa aren’t enough for him anymore.” In ironic hindsight, we can read this as David steering Jake towards adding another dolphin to the secret training sessions, to improve his conspiracy’s odds of success. And we wince at Jake’s order to install an intercom system between the lab and the house, an impulse to improve communication that has such keen cultural associations with deception. It’s another of Jake’s attempts to control his reality, and like the listening devices that were bringing down a Presidency as this film was released (the Senate Watergate Hearings opened three days before Dolphin), it’s a technology ripe for misuse.
Jake clears the lab to be alone with Alpha; after Nichols cuts back to Maggie, alone and preoccupied by Jake’s preoccupation, a long shot pans from Maggie at their bungalow across the compound to the lab’s locked doors, inside of which (via dissolve to the lab’s interior tank window with its movie-screen-sized dimensions) the film finally locates a version—Jake’s version, from which everyone, even Maggie, is excluded—of paradise, in the gorgeous underwater photography capturing Jake swimming with Alpha, who has just recognized him, tenderly, by name: “Pa.” The camera lingers in close-up on Jake’s hand, stroking, patting; his wedding band glints in the light, and we wonder at the odd exchange Jake has had with Maggie, so detached from genuine intimacy through habitual familiarity and professional distraction. It’s yet more evidence that Terrell, smartest man on the island, is oblivious to certain essential realities that will leave all of them vulnerable, especially the dolphins who have guilelessly entrusted themselves to his care.
We already know—or assume we know—some things about Mahoney, to whom we are finally introduced by name in the next scene, when he calls on DeMilo at the Foundation. Mahoney is oily; our reservations about him are only deepened by his brazen lack of a convincing story for why he wants an introduction to Dr. Terrell and his research center. Told “Terrell doesn’t want visitors—strangers—at the Center,” Mahoney shoots back, “Why, is he hiding something? […] Is he scared somebody’s going to run off with that good-looking little girl he’s married to?” While DeMilo has inspired little warmth in us, his contempt for Mahoney’s apparent tastelessness seems well-founded, leading him to a direct question: “Are you a blackmailer, Mr. Mahoney?” Mahoney demurs, yet also says, “I have access to a lot of files, public and private, all kinds of sources—when we get to know each other better, I’ll tell you some things about yourself that will simply astound you.” We know from Mahoney’s later admission to the Terrells that this is an oblique reference to DeMilo’s closeted sexual orientation, which DeMilo demonstrates he is willing to protect at the cost of more than merely Jake Terrell’s project; caving in to Mahoney compromises the Foundation’s conspiracy as well. He’s such a slave to projecting a conformist image that he’s willing to risk everything: “All in the name of good public relations.” Among Mike Nichols’ many characters over the course of his film career, only Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) and Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) of Angels in America seem more deeply terrified by who they actually are and by what it might mean if this identity should become public knowledge—but there is genuine anxiety in many of Nichols’ narratives about full disclosure of oneself, given the risks of lost potency or control involved in the surrender of one’s secrets. While not as extreme as the gendered taboos Joe, Roy, and DeMilo face, characters as different as George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) in Virginia Woolf, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) in Carnal Knowledge, Stewart (James Spader) in Wolf, Val (Dan Futterman, who plays the image-conscious son of Armand and Albert Goldman) in The Birdcage, all politicians in Primary Colors, and “Alice” (Natalie Portman) in Closer all keep the truth of themselves to themselves as protection against cultural vulnerability.
DeMilo’s exclamation about the Terrells’ island, “It’s like being in another world!” must have its attractions for DeMilo, and he seems hurt when the Terrells suggest he may have come to visit with a hidden agenda, though of course that’s exactly what he’s done: he threatens the Terrells with loss of funding, and Jake deals Maggie out of the conversation. Nichols and his director of photography, William A. Fraker, leave her centered, alone, and dwarfed by an enormous vacant picnic table, a reminder of other times Jake has left her alone to pursue research business. Far from emphasizing her passivity or victimhood, however, Dolphin attaches to Maggie a fierce loyalty to those she loves that can’t be distracted or dissuaded (as can her husband’s). In their long philosophical conversation at the center of the film, it’s clear she’s been advising Jake all along, to little effect. Jake may be the more advanced intellect, but Maggie has the advanced heart; she’s the most centered and admirable character in the film, despite Jake’s serial marginalization of her. She’s a prototype of the kind of character Nichols would turn to in the rest of his career, beginning with Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood and culminating with Belize in Angels in America—strong iconoclasts who glimpse the redemptive truths inherent in reification and who understand or come to understand an alternative way of being in the world.
What follows is the first of Jake and Alpha’s command performances, and it opens with Jake doing his best impression of a director, editing together his narrative of interspecies communication. The “screen” of Alpha swimming in the tank glows blue in the background, where DeMilo is asked to take a seat. “What do you know about linguistics, semantics?” Jake asks, then follows, condescendingly, with, “Okay, lesson number one,” a reference he could be making either to the first tape he plays of his lessons for Alpha in English morphemes or to teaching DeMilo the rudiments of his work. Either way, there is an imperial air to his performance, an assumed mastery quite at odds with what we know to be the conspiratorial chaos gathering around him. His hubris is on full display here, though it takes the board’s later visit to turn it into self-righteous arrogance. The narrative of Alpha’s metamorphosis moves from initial problem (the dolphin’s unintelligible, though intelligent, battery of clicks, whistles, and other noises) through progressive complications towards a climactic counting of numbers from one to ten, not the mere eight that the woman had asked about during Terrell’s last public appearance on behalf of the Foundation. Jake’s performance has its desired effect, as Delerue’s melodious score implies. Jake even permits DeMilo to see Alpha’s introduction to Beta, the female dolphin Jake hopes will stimulate Alpha to even faster learning. As DeMilo leaves, the men default to their quid pro quo interaction with each other: while DeMilo promises confidentiality and full support, he asks a “favor” as well: “There’s a man I know,” which he quickly amends to “an old friend of mine, Curtis Mahoney.” Nichols cuts to Maggie on the bungalow verandah, watching the men talk in the distance, out of earshot. We know what Maggie knows: that Jake’s ambition is blinding him to sense. The sequence ends with Jake’s uneasy gaze at the departing plane and the last purely harmonious “dolphin dance,” Fa and Be (as they are known in the simplicity of single-morpheme nicknames to facilitate their learning) in a synchronized movement to Delerue’s romantic “Nocturne,” the main theme of the soundtrack score. As we are its only witnesses, there is a sense in which the diegetic narrative does not classify it as “performance” in the same way as it has treated Jake’s public displays; it is a time-out from the narrative, a moment of “purity” amidst the projected image-making. Jake may delude himself he has found a separate peace, a return to Edenic simplicity of motive; the swim to “Nocturne” reminds us that not even Jake’s motives are pure, and that for true transparency of motive, we must turn to the “lower” mammals.
Two weeks have passed when we encounter Jake and Maggie, spatially (and spiritually) separated by a research tank, wringing their hands about Fa’s “regression” to his own language, learned from Be. Jake’s uncompromising behaviorist methodology forbids him to award a morsel to Fa so long as his prized pupil remains uncooperative, but Maggie clearly has a less conditional sensibility. Jake looks on in disapproval as Fa and Be reap unearned reward from his wife, purely out of affection. For all his disgust with the meretricious strategies of the “land” world (the Foundation as “tax write-off” for the super-rich, the general public one insatiable appetite for “freak-show” consumption), Jake can only understand relationships as transactions. DeMilo has wheedled information about the research project from Jake by threatening to revoke his funding; while this infuriates Jake, he has established no less commodified a relationship with Fa, and the imminent relationship with Mahoney gains no traction because each has typed the other as unwilling to negotiate any connection beyond the purely transactional.
Nichols’ and Henry’s structural design in this suspense melodrama takes the familiar editing technique of the cross-cut, typically employed at the climax of the action, and applies it throughout, less often to juxtapose simultaneous actions than to present apparent contrasts or oppositions. In this section of the film, two newcomers have entered the liminal space of the Terrell Center, one (Be) from the sea, the other (Mahoney) from the land. Be is instantly and profoundly welcomed by Fa; Mahoney is given the “scenic route” through turbulent waters by Mike’s water-taxi and washes up at the Center looking half-drowned, wrung out by nausea. Given the glimpses we’ve had of Mahoney, the narrative tempts us to a point-of-view sympathy not with Mahoney but with all those he has come to “invade.” Jake and his staff (acting on Jake’s orders) engage in a campaign of half-truths and subterfuge, fobbing off an unnamed dolphin as Fa and claiming ignorance of any communicative rapport with dolphins. Again Nichols frames Jake and Maggie with the research facility between them; seated on their verandah, they parry their anxieties about Mahoney, DeMilo, and “the good ol’ Establishment” until Jake autocratically concludes, “Let Mr. Mahoney do his job, whatever that is, and get out, and we’ll go on about our business.” Jake’s confidence that he can control and manipulate the world he’s built is matched only by his naivety that such control is in his power. The next scene demonstrates this, when Mahoney catches David and Lana (Victoria Racimo) in a cover-up; that night, Maryanne (Leslie Charleson), working alone in the lab, hears someone trying to enter. Mahoney departs the next morning with the prophecy that Jake will need to reach him “when the time comes” and the assurance, “We’re all on the same side.”
Nichols and O’Steen wittily cut to a sliding metal lock between the main and holding talks, Jake’s latest strategy in the war of wills with Fa, his lately recalcitrant prodigy: Jake intends to impose sides. The fascinating, nearly 10-minute sequence that follows dramatizes the tedium of behavior modification, as Jake commodifies both relationships and communication by withholding Be (and his own affections) from Fa until the dolphin relents to the superior, controlling will of man. The sequence ends with Delerue’s triumphal, neo–Baroque brass voluntary, joyfully leaping dolphins, and, in a comic lampoon of the narrative’s critique of all the objectifying impulses of even the most well-meaning humans in the narrative, a nighttime beach party at which the celebratory centerpiece is a culinary confection in the shape of a dolphin, soon to be sliced and served for the revelers’ consumption.
A brief exchange Jake has with Larry (John David Carson) reminds us again of the “dream”-like quality of their liminal, island-based position between two worlds, even as Jake has Larry checking the Center’s underwater barriers for evidence of other infiltrators, like sharks. Jake admits that, “since Alpha started speaking, I’ve had a feeling I haven’t had since I was your age […] that there are infinite possibilities.” Again the narrative undercuts Jake’s vaulting ambitions via ironic parallel cutting: a call from DeMilo, whose agenda Jake reveals in a night-shot meeting with the staff. Mahoney has learned about the breakthroughs with Alpha and Beta and intends to publish what he’s found out; the Foundation’s public-relations damage control requires Jake to get out ahead of the story and reveal the Center’s work. In another husband-wife composition, Jake is foregrounded, Maggie silently backgrounded, and the Center focally between them; their philosophical argument at the core of the narrative is mere minutes away. The scene ends with Jake’s paranoid lament, “They’re sneaking up on us,” and Henry’s screenplay once again relies on cross-cut to make concrete Jake’s lurid fear, as Mahoney and his partner Stone reach the island’s shoal by small, unlighted trawler. Nichols’ cinematic language continues to characterize Mahoney as the invader, though in retrospect we can revise our understanding of Mahoney’s motives—he’s gathering his facts to “expose” Terrell’s work so it cannot be co-opted for service to some covert, antagonist ideology. We don’t believe Mahoney and Jake are “on the same side” until Jake does (and with as little satisfaction, given Mahoney’s distasteful methods).
By Nichols’ standards, the Terrells’ philosophical argument in their bungalow’s bedroom is a model of terse economy. At just under two minutes, it is a mere fifth as long as the most notorious “conversation” in Nichols’ filmography—the one in the Taft Hotel bedroom between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Jonathan and Sandy have several longer conversations in Carnal Knowledge, and even Sandy and Susan speak for as long when they first meet, at the Smith College mixer. Of course, George and Martha’s theatrical conversations dwarf any subsequent conversations in Nichols’ films for sheer volume (temporal or sonic). Yet there is a frank maturity to Jake and Maggie’s exchange (ironic, given Maggie’s accusing Jake of being a “baby”) that is never possible in any of these previously presented conversations. One reason why none of those other conversations stand a chance of accomplishing true exchange is because the participants are not proceeding from a desire for equal footing. Mrs. Robinson and Jonathan lord their Machiavellian stratagems over Benjamin and Sandy, respectively. George and Martha have been engaged in a decades-old linguistic wrestling match. Sandy and Susan project ironic social avatars at one another to hedge against the vulnerabilities of exposure. These aren’t conversations so much as no-holds-barred competitions for an upper hand. Another, related reason these conversations don’t promote full and free exchange is that one or both parties in each remain unable or unwilling to look squarely at reified reality and to acknowledge it for what it is. In Jake and Maggie Terrell’s conversation about Alpha and the future of their research, Maggie has the courage of her convictions: she knows she is right, and will not stand down from that truth. As important, the two genuinely love each other (if Jake remains too easily distracted), and his respect for her wisdom is palpable as she lays out for him a vision of reified awareness.
Maggie’s word-choices signal her less-than-wholly supportive position on Jake’s conduct as a researcher; besides his being a “baby,” Jake has set up his own “little kingdom,” and he dreads “whatever disease” the “outside world” carries. All of this diction is encoded with angry critique that Jake could respond to with righteous indignation. That he doesn’t storm away is one measure of how much he values her perspective. Jake not only fails to deny any of their judgments upon him, but he confirms how profoundly he’s convicted of the threat of this “disease”: “it can kill Alpha and Beta […] by turning them into ‘valuable properties.’” His paranoia is the vision of the reified: the dolphins’ commodification by the socio-economic establishment. He can see the “disease” of the reified “outside world,” but isn’t quite able to see that he is himself a carrier. Maggie does, however. “Jake,” she says, creeping across the bed and into close-up, something the dynamics of the Jake-centric mise-en-scène have not often afforded her (or, as in the first shot of her, lounged across the bed, have served only to objectify her), “if they’re going to be exploited, who’s responsible? You taught them our language. Why? To become like you?” Nichols and O’Steen cut back to Jake, reassuming his centrality, though his faith in himself and his mission as a researcher has been shaken. Admitting he may have been “wrong,” Jake sits on the bed near Maggie’s lounging form. The resulting composition is as comfortably intimate as any shot of the couple thus far, though Scott’s noble profile still juts imperiously above Van Devere’s penetrating gaze. “We should have become like them,” Jake says wistfully. “Like what they are: instinct, and energy.” Maggie’s solution foreshadows the film’s conclusion: “Then let them go. Send them back to the sea.” In despair, or with residual calculation, or most likely in a combination of these two states, Jake replies, “I’m afraid it’s too late. They wouldn’t know what to do or where to go. We’ve changed them.” And he leaves, rejecting Maggie’s reified wisdom to prepare Alpha for his biggest performance yet, before the Foundation’s board of directors.
Jake and Maggie Terrell (the real-life husband and wife team of George C. Scott and Trish Van Devere) attempt to cross the liminal space between land and water and between species in The Day of the Dolphin, Nichols’ conspiracy thriller released during the summer of the Watergate hearings in 1973. Everywhere among the “land mammals” is duplicity and mistrust; the dolphins bring a literal, “face-value” understanding of reality into their meetings with humans, but even the most well-intentioned of men (like Jake) prove to be confusingly two-faced in their objectifying motives for making interspecies contact.
The performance, which takes place not in the research tank but at the pier, at the most obviously liminal of meeting points between land and sea, is a complicated, multi-level admixture of presentations. On its face, the event is a scientific demonstration for the project’s sponsors. Yet for Alpha, the moment is merely the progeny’s willing performance for his master. For Terrell, the performance is a celebration of all he has accomplished; Maggie has acknowledged this at the beginning of their philosophical conversation, when she says realistically, “The world has to find out about this sooner or later; that’s all part of it. What’s all this work been for?” The question hangs in the air between them much in the same way that Mr. Braddock hectors his son floating in the pool in The Graduate: “Would you mind telling me what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?” Benjamin, adrift, replies pointedly, “You got me.” Similarly Jake, less confrontational but no less adamant than Benjamin, admits, “I don’t know any longer.” In his first phase as a filmmaker, Nichols crafted narratives that built not so much toward the expected crescendo of epiphany as toward revelatory exhaustion. Stymied by a grasp of the pointlessness of socially proscribed action, key characters in all of Nichols’ early films find themselves at a loss for motivational momentum. They are stronger on the question of what not to want than on an ambition worthy of their future effort. Nichols’ satiric vision is the realist’s perspective, exploring the way we live now less than how we once lived, or ought to live. When Jake comes up against the bankruptcy of motives for why he has built the Terrell Center, he concludes what a veteran showman must conclude: on with the show. Terrell’s show with Alpha stands as an ironic conflation of father and son in the birthday-party scene in The Graduate, where Mr. Braddock all but drowns in his own flop-sweat trying to show off his award-winning son and another expensive present he’s bestowed, the diving gear. Jake, like Benjamin, hates the commodifying aspect of his life, but like Mr. Braddock, is compelled to conformity to satisfy the version of himself in which he has so heavily invested over time.
But the strata of performance in this scene are visually underscored by the strata of the mise-en-scène: the sea on the lowest plane, inhabited by Alpha; Jake still perched in his liminal space on the landing dock; and the board members arrayed along the upper promenade of the dock. As we eventually learn, the Foundation’s board also projects an identity and interest other than its true, conspiratorial agenda. Accompanied by DeMilo, they sit in a line like judges, peering down upon Terrell and the dolphins, and during the performance, the camera alternates between high-angle shots down on Terrell, Fa, and Be below and low-angle shots from Terrell’s vantage point up on the board members. Terrell is the one whose potency is in jeopardy—he must perform for their continued sponsorship—and the conversation with Maggie has shaken his previously unquestioned sense of professional achievement. However, the board’s boorishness, particularly exemplified in the tone-deafness of Wallingford (John Dehner), permits Terrell to regain his illusion of superiority. He has trained Alpha to perform for food; the board (and the scientific Establishment to which its largesse gives Terrell entrée) has trained Terrell to perform as well. And there is yet another audience to this performance: hidden by ground cover across the cove, Mahoney and Stone view the show via field glasses. Mirroring Terrell’s perspective, the camera treats Mahoney as the threat and the board as locus of legitimate power, the body that can command performance.
The performance in essence constitutes a second round of philosophical conversation, commencing with Alpha’s assertion, “Man is good.” However, unlike the Terrells’ conversation, conceived in frank and forthright exchange between equals in an atmosphere of love and respect, this conversation is fraught with complications from power, deception, and objectification. Only the animals are guileless and without false motive in this exchange. The subject of sharks—predatory violence—becomes the board’s preoccupation in testing Alpha’s conceptual apparatus. Wallingford stands, exaggerating his assumed hierarchical position in the meeting, and pompously begins a hypothetical scenario about a shark that Terrell gently corrects. Wallingford bulls forward, stating, “There is a shark in the tank,” spooking Be out of the holding area. An impromptu performance of damage control ensues: Jake sends Fa to retrieve Be, a demonstration of the enormous trust the dolphins have invested in their master (thus unwittingly manifesting their vulnerability to manipulation, precisely what the board has come to see). When Alpha returns with Be, he shares an insight with Terrell: “Man say things not.” It is Alpha’s first conscious experience of mendacity. Wallingford asks for clarification, and Terrell, secure in his illusion of ethical superiority, happily translates: “He’s calling you a liar.” Terrell goes on to explain that, while the dolphins’ sonar communicated no warning of imminent predators (unlike Jake himself, who has no such heightened sensory awareness of the danger in his midst), “they trust us more than they do their own instinct.” Because she has not been privileged with depiction in the scene, we’re startled to hear, off-screen, Maggie add, “They’ve never been lied to before.” Her voice, relegated once again to marginality, indicates how swiftly her quiet moral authority has been subjugated to her husband’s compulsive desire to perform. The board members, having learned the most important single item they’ve come to confirm, politely suggest moving to “less emotional questions,” such as swimming speed and future language acquisition, ancillary items in their plot. Suspecting nothing, in his willful desire for innocence like that of the dolphins, Terrell seizes the opportunity to demonstrate Alpha’s emotional devotion to and dependence upon him. The scene ends with Alpha nuzzling Terrell’s leg like a subservient house pet, prompting Terrell’s smugly defiant (and terminally naïve) gaze of triumph.
His command performance immediately begets another: the Foundation compels him to return immediately to the mainland with them, and Maggie, hoping to protect her husband, offers to leave the island as well—an unexpected coup for the conspirators. The next time Terrell will see Alpha, the dolphin will have completed a crash-course in human mendacity. DeMilo confesses his own dishonesty about Mahoney, blaming Mahoney’s “pull with the people in the government.” Terrell confides in Maggie that he intends to “out” Mahoney at the press conference, still naively believing he can control events, and ironically intending the same tactic Mahoney has used to manipulate DeMilo (exposing hidden secrets as a means of assuming power). At this point, the film settles into the machinery of the thriller formula—Stone’s breeching of the lab’s secure perimeter (and subsequent assassination); the theft of the dolphins (based in faked telephone communication by David and false promises made by the staff to the dolphins); the stonewalling of the Terrells by the Foundation, who have never had the slightest intention of communicating with the public about Terrell’s advances and thus exposing a key component of their conspiracy; and the programming of the dolphins to commit murder. Alpha and Beta are kept captive just beyond reach of their natural habitat, hovering above the ocean in ergonomic slings and having their inherited philosophical premise, “Man is good,” irrevocably altered.
And so, when Mahoney returns to the compound and demonstrates—another dramatic performance, this one in utter silence—how David compromised the confidentiality even of the Terrells’ private quarters, Mahoney is transformed in Jake’s assessment from oily enemy … to oily ally. He is, indeed, on their “side,” yet his tactics are deplorable, as they learn in his admission of manipulating DeMilo. During a slow zoom across the dark compound to a close-up of Jake, Mahoney reveals David’s true identity and allegiance to “the guys you work for.” Jake blusters his demurrals, but Mahoney implacably rejoins, “Oh really? I always thought you work for the people that pay you.” The unpleasant truth of the observation stuns Terrell to silence, and the camera begins a slow pan of the huddled, half-lit faces of the loyal remaining staff, beginning with Maggie, who manages a meager, “That’s not fair.” She knows its truth, has known or suspected it longest of anyone other than Mahoney at the table. In the tradition of Hollywood paranoid-conspiracy thrillers, vague but potent questions about the conspiratorial vulnerabilities of the nation’s governance become part of the conversational mix, but Nichols and Henry remain committed to metaphysical rather than political inquiry. The question of whether government is good is far less pressing than establishing or disproving the essential veracity of Alpha’s claim that “man is good.” Attendant upon this central preoccupation is the danger of surrender to commodified delusion. Late in their counter-conspiratorial dialogue, Mahoney abrasively asks Terrell, “[H]ave you been living on this planet?” In his own estimation, Terrell has not; it’s what has been revealed in the philosophical conversation with Maggie. He has naively believed he could insulate himself from the “disease” of the land by repairing to his liminal retreat between land and sea, there to have a meeting of the minds with the ingenuous, instinctual other. Yet he has taken the Foundation’s money and fed his voracious ego in the training of a dolphin in his likeness, carrying the “disease” of commodified value into this tropical paradise. The next day, as Jake, Maggie, and Mahoney attempt to anticipate what nefarious use to which the Foundation may direct the dolphins, Nichols and Fraker compose a gorgeous shot of Maggie and Mahoney seated at the table, the iconic research facility a vivid gray-green reflection in a window behind them. Terrell has just recognized the end of all this: he has trained the dolphins to be used for the grand illusions of man and with no regard for their intrinsic value. The only wrinkle in his plan is that the conspirators have stepped into his place.
Nichols and O’Steen return to cross-cutting, now in its more conventional rhetoric as parallel, simultaneous actions. The Terrells undertake the heavy-hearted process of dismantling what little remains of their dream, beginning with the release of the other dolphins that have been under their control. On the conspiratorial yacht, David’s lies about “Pa” being on the boat and extorting his cooperation by withholding Be exacerbate Fa’s precocious adaptation to the manipulative dishonor of men. With Be in hand to deliver the “ball” (the bomb to be affixed by the dolphins to the hull of the President’s yacht), Wallingford assembles a firing squad to eliminate Alpha, who escapes, returns to the Terrell Center, and, having been instructed by Terrell that the men are bad and that the “ball” is also bad, Fa is discharged to solve the problem. He intercepts and coaches Be to save herself by off-loading the bad “ball,” and since the dolphins’ only understanding of off-loading is the affixing of “ball” to “boat,” they return the “ball” to its rightful owners. The conspirators are silenced; all that remains is to silence the conspiracy, and the resolution of Dolphin dramatizes this process as it is concluded on the mainland, the island, and in the sea. Much of this film has been preoccupied with communication, beginning with Terrell’s opening presentation, directly to the camera, and foregrounded in the drama of interspecies linguistics. But nearly all that communication has been bound up in pretense and objectified performance. In this sense, the coda of Dolphin depicts a capitulation to those various social forces that have undermined genuine, free exchange. The last seven minutes are a series of variations on subsidence into silence, and Dolphin’s narrative arc thus traces, across its tidy 100-minute length, a similar trajectory to the ten-minute “conversation” Benjamin attempts with Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, which begins in Benjamin’s desperate effort to establish some meaningful connection with Mrs. Robinson beyond the purely carnal and ends in resigned defeat: “Let’s not talk at all.”
With the debris of the conspirator’s yacht still smoking in the sea, O’Steen jump cuts to Elizabeth Wilson as Mrs. Rome, emerging from behind a closed door with a leather portfolio clamped to her breast. In a fluid, single take that suggests the efficiency with which the Foundation manages all its secrets, Fraker’s camera tracks her through the Foundation’s corridors, her grim face alternately lit by the false smiles she must offer to staff she passes. She enters DeMilo’s corner office with its spectacular sea views and hands him a single-page memo he reads and promptly shreds—end of shot, end of the narrative’s business with DeMilo and the Foundation: silence on the mainland. The form cut from the shredded memo to a shot of papers being incinerated in an old drum on the beach at the Terrell Center acknowledges that Terrell and company are just as anxious to leave no trace of the past and its illusions: silence on the island. The human animal can will silence and thus revise history, but dolphins cannot. Their understanding of the world is too literal; it wouldn’t even occur to them that reality could be reconstituted by language and possessive control.
When they return, the dolphins offer their story without embroidery or abridgment, and without apology: the “ball” and David are “not.” Terrell reels under the recognition that his prized pupils have become remorseless killers. As a plane begins to buzz the island, perhaps bringing retributive silence, Terrell embarks upon the capstone performance of his compromised relationship with the dolphins. He has taught Alpha “man is good,” but he has awakened to the reality that, at best, his species has an ambiguous relationship to moral authority. To save the dolphins’ lives, he must deny all—his love for them and his life’s work. He begins sentimentally, with assurances of love that are ardently returned by Fa, prompting an exasperated Mahoney, agitated by the appearance of the plane, to exclaim, “Everybody loves everybody! Now let’s get out of here!” Mahoney was unceremonious about his partner’s death and unsentimental at the prospect of ruining the lives of DeMilo and his family; he’s a man denatured by life in the shadows—not a “bad” man, but a man who understands life as permanently characterized by ideological “sides” and the objectifying struggle for power that such divisions imply. Terrell announces to Alpha his intention to abandon the great liminal experiment of the island: “Listen, Fa: Pa and Ma go to land. Fa and Be go to water. Fa not see man, not talk to man.” In a moment of verbal irony, Fa summarizes: “Not talk.” Terrell confirms: “Not talk. Swim, eat, play—not talk.” His unsentimental rationality at the approach of the “bad” men appears to convince Alpha: “Fa go now,” and they turn away. Yet Maggie cannot resist the moment’s last opportunity for affection, prompting Terrell, back turned to the water, to snap: “Pa is not”—a profound, metaphoric admission of his failures. Terrell’s utterance is the ultimate ironic use of language, negating himself via performance.
The staff disperses, literally running for cover. Jake and Maggie also move towards cover, obviously to give whoever is in the plane more difficulty in finding them, but the instinct seems more organically to derive from shame and a desire to hide themselves from Alpha, who has not yet retreated into resigned silence. He intrepidly calls to them from the sea. The two-shot close-up of the Terrells walking up the beach towards the tree line shows the sea and the Center behind them, a final reminder of the liminal dream they’d briefly, falsely conjured out of Jake’s willingness to chase his own version of commodified success. “Don’t turn around. Keep moving” are Jake’s final words of existential wisdom in a narrative that began with his exhortation to “Imagine” and, at its midpoint, still found him marveling at “infinite possibilities.” Eventually the strategy is a success, and Alpha stops calling and swims away: silence, finally, from the sea. The film’s final, melancholy shot returns to the familiar compositional strategy of bisecting the Terrells via the physical bulk of their research center in the background. The shot, a half-minute take in which the only movement is of Maggie’s hair and the vegetation in the soft, tropical breeze, fades in the same fashion as the Terrell’s dream. Their dream is “not.”
An era of Nichols’ life as a filmmaker ended with the completion of The Day of the Dolphin. It satisfied his contract with Joseph E. Levine and AVCO-Embassy, always for Nichols a profoundly uncomfortable fit.4 Dolphin was also the last of his three collaborations with adapting screenwriter and close friend Buck Henry (who makes indelible small-part appearances in the other two films—as the intimidating Taft Hotel desk clerk in The Graduate and as Colonel Korn in Catch-22, but who only appears, uncredited, in an early audience scene in Dolphin, though he has a large, off-screen presence in the film because it is his voice, electronically treated, that serves for the dolphins5). Henry and Nichols both felt themselves to be under attack due to what they believed to be knee-jerk Hollywood mistrust of New York talent; Henry describes his thinking about the dissolution of the partnership with Nichols as both organic and an acquiescence (“Let them have other targets”6), though he’s since gone on record as disapproving some of Nichols’ subsequent, middlebrow filmmaking ambitions.7 While Nichols would make one more film, The Fortune, before vanishing from feature-film production for nearly a decade, by the time he returned he was a transformed filmmaker, chastened by his early auteur celebrity (and its critical backlash).
Unlike the grotesqueries of perspective in The Graduate or the outsized, Vaudevillian madness of Catch-22, the narrative of Dolphin is an unabashed presentation of an imagined rather than reflected world, in which the dim possibility of rational, interspecies communication in human language is asserted as the accepted reality. What nonetheless makes this a Nichols film is how the science-fictive overlay reflects the usual dysfunction between people—friends, lovers, business associates—as a result of capitulation to the default power dynamics of majority culture. In his opening lecture, Jake Terrell the evolutionary scientist has posed his curiosity about “Why, after millions of years as a land animal, [the dolphin’s] species was compelled—or decided—to return to the sea.” Nichols the psychological realist has proposed an answer: the land may be too inhospitable a place, dominated as it is by that most predatory of all species, the ultra-territorial, hegemonic homo sapiens. We are everyone’s worst enemy, including our own. Men like Wallingford are the monsters of objectification; men like DeMilo are their willing or helpless enablers and accomplices; men like Mahoney are reified cynics, aware of but numbly philosophical about their own denaturing. The Terrells are reified dreamers; awakened to the “disease” of the outside world they’ve never quite managed to escape. Jake’s ambitions have ended at the sea, but in Maggie Terrell rather than in her brilliant, blustering, hubristic husband, Nichols made an early discovery of what would become his central narrative focus when he returned to filmmaking after his eight-year hiatus: the woman—or powerfully feminized man—resistant to the marginalizing assumptions of patriarchy. Nichols would explore this archetype in fascinating variations through, for example, Meryl Streep’s tour de force portrayal in Silkwood, Harrison Ford as the rehabilitated title character in Regarding Henry, Streep again as Suzanne Vale in Postcards from the Edge, and the Pitt women (Streep and Mary-Louise Parker) and Jeffrey Wright as Belize in Angels in America, but Maggie Terrell is Nichols’ first tentative step towards this new kind of hero.