“We have given our hair to the witch,” said they, “to obtain
help for you, that you may not die to-night. She has given us a knife: here it
is, see it is very sharp. Before the sun rises you must plunge it into the heart
of the prince; when the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together
again, and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid, and
return to us to live out your three hundred years before you die and change
into the salt sea foam. Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise.”
She cast one more lingering, half-fainting glance at the
prince, and then threw herself from the ship into the sea, and thought her body
was dissolving into foam. The sun rose above the waves, and his warm rays fell
on the cold foam of the little mermaid, who did not feel as if she were dying.
Hans
Christian Anderson, The Little Mermaid
As Kenny and George leave the beach, Ford shows us a section
of the ocean, the moonlight’s illumination of the seawater. The water hits the
beach, sea foam appears, taking over the entire image. In a split second, Ford
fast forwards the foam dissolve, leaving us with the memory of the moon’s
shattered reflection, the remnant of what we saw of the ocean’s surface
throughout the beach scene.
I read Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid as a child. The mermaid never attains romantic
love from the prince, in the dawn after his wedding night, her sisters grant
her a knife with which she could return to being a mermaid. But instead, she
lets the sun pierce her skin, and becomes foam because she wanted her prince to
be happy. A grim comparison to Disney’s Ariel.
The foam in A Single
Man instantly conjured the image of the mermaid dissolving for me. I
thought, his death wish is all for Jim: the insufferable loneliness without
him, inability to be with him. But it’s not a sacrifice, just letting go of his
mortal life. The mermaid, on the other hand, will be able to attain an immortal
soul by doing good, when she failed to get the love of a human. I wondered if
George will become something more after decease. As he lay dying, Jim came and
kissed him, and left. I did not think Ford gave us a Christian insight to
death, that George should be with Jim for eternity. Jim didn’t lie down with
George; he said goodbye, and comforted him upon the body’s vanishing life. Jim’s
leave leads me to think that George’s soul doesn’t remain, it dissolves like
the foam, and soon the world will forget. But nothing is wrong with that,
immortality could just extend one’s suffering, and the way George died
involuntarily – after deciding to live! – makes me think his suffering ended.
