Why is submarine.......
Called submarine?
The way he and his father feel about themselves, their depressed state.
MovieChat Forums > Submarine (2011) Discussion > Why is submarine.......
Near the start of the film he talks about how he slips into school in the morning unnoticed, like a submarine.
shareActually he says "like a torpedo". The movie is called Submarine because it's the way he (and also his dad) feel about life. They feel like they're always submersed (like a submarine), because they're depressed.
shareJust something that I don't think people have mentioned here, but My thinking was that it was called submarine because of the link made between humans and submarines when talking about sonar, you need this to detect submarines and humans don't have it, we're all like submarines submerged and hidden, giving away nothing.
This is probably quite a pretentious way of looking at it but I like to think that at the end when they stand there smiling with only water up to their ankles, that they are no longer submerged, and they are finally being really open. Like they are standing there honest and naked....... or something. Well makes sense in my head anyway, none the less a very enjoyable film, whatever the meaning of the title.
I Sympathise with Lars Von Trier.
I both agree and disagree with your point. My take on it was that, if anything, submarine has a double meaning. for his dad, being "submerged" is akin to feeling like he's drowning in his depression, and we see that oliver relates to that in the bathtub scene and the pool scene where he literelly jumps off the deep end. oliver also sees the deepness of the ocean as scary, because the deeper you get to a person's core, the scarier it is--such as how he became weirded out with jordana after she started to talk about her emotions. however, in the beginning, like you pointed out, oliver talks about submarines having the ability to detect hidden things, and we are not able to do that as humans. so in this regard, i took the idea of a submarine as being able to connect with somebody or relate with someone on a deeper level, which i think was somewhat aluded to in the last scene that you mention. in the end, oliver reciprocating jordana's increasingly deeper steps into the ocean kind of signify that he has a deeper understanding of her and that he will follow her into 'troubled waters' in the future. so in this sense, being submerged isn't necessarily a bad thing--it's an indication that they won't hide themselves from each other anymore, they will be more open, as the above poster noted.