I wanted to do a different type of film than I had done before.  The drooling jaws of the Alien (Alien and Aliens) are terrifying, but it is basically just a bear in the woods.  An image via our genetic memory from neolithic times when big things with pointy teeth could eat us.

We hardly ever get eaten these days.
Those demons, though they are deep in our cells, have in reality been conquered.  And the real threat, the real monster which threatens us in the darkness, is our own propensity for destruction coupled with our own darn cleverness at building devices for killing.

I wanted the beings in the abyss, the NTIs, to be the opposite of the Alien.  Not horrible drooling demons from our subconscious, but creatures of grace and beauty which would appeal to our higher mind.  After scaring the shit out of everybody with the ultimate monster in Aliens, nothing could have been more boring to me as a film-maker than revealing another slimy critter.  They combine aspects of angels, butterflies, manta rays and Spanish-dancer nudibranchs … but somehow still possessing some quality of human expression.  They could be what we might aspire to be in a million years.

They don’t talk, though they have learned to understand English.
They are not telepathic.  They are trying to figure us out.  We are difficult for them: intelligent, technological creatures who are also brutally barbaric.

Though the NTIs are awesomely advanced, with a fluidic technology we could not even imagine, they are emotional and compassionate.  They, who can control the most powerful forces of the universe, respect above all things only the power of love.  When they discover, despite much evidence to the contrary, that the capacity for love exists in us, they spare us.

They’ve left us alone, because that is what you do with a primitive culture.  Their first interaction with us is to send us a warning … a very big warning.  The Abyss owes much more to Day the Earth Stood Still than it does to E.T., at least in its restored version.

I always saw Bud’s meeting with the NTIs in the final chamber deep in the abyss as a meeting with God.  He symbolically dies on the ledge, crucified on the nuclear bomb, and is taken by the angel of death into heaven.  There he meets the judge of all mankind, with his/her retinue of archangels, and witnesses that judgment.

The wave is biblical in its proportions, and the power which holds it back at the ultimate moment is seen as almost unimaginable.
A wave is a symbol of inevitability.  Once it rises, it always breaks upon the shore.  Nothing can stop it.  Like death, it is a certainty.

The divine spectacle of the suspended wave is an image straight from my dreams.  It is the source of inspiration for the entire film.  My single recurring nightmare, throughout my life, was that of a vast wave rolling toward the shore, miles high, turning day into night.
That dread, in my subconscious, became inextricably interwoven with the dread of death, and the specific dread of nuclear holocaust.  Dreams of nuclear apocalypse often tormented me as a child after I first discovered, at the age of ten, the true horror of the world in which I lived.

These dreams have not recurred since I completed The Abyss.

Bud argues with God in the chamber of judgment.  He represents, without even knowing it, that which is worth saving in all of us.

Given my previous films, The Terminator and Aliens, it was natural for audiences to assume before the fact that The Abyss would have at its darkest center a monster.  A bogeyman.  A critter.  Some terrifying force which would threaten our intrepid heroes until the final, terrifying and adrenalizing white-knuckle conclusion.  Many were disappointed by a film with very different goals.
There never was a "critter."
The critter was us.

The only bogeyman in this story is human nature.  The negative side of our dualistic nature.  Our capacity for love and compassion is in eternal conflict with our capacity for hatred and violence.  Our capacities for group-cooperation, courage, heroism, and self-sacrifice are exactly balanced by our capacities for fear, paranoia, chauvinism and violence.  Only the heart and mind together can guide us out of this abyss.

Structurally the film is unusual, because the "bad guy," Lt. Coffey, is dispatched about two thirds of the way through, leaving the last act with no villain.  But the villain is human nature, of which Coffey represented some bad aspects, and when Bud watches the NTI video (NTV?) in the room at the bottom of the sea, he is watching an indictment of us as a species.  The sequence of news clips, which I always called "atrocities greatest hits," is probably the real reason why I put this long cut of the picture back together.  More than the wave sequence, it is the heart of the film.

It is the critter.
And the critter is us.

The story is told in a very technical setting.  Just as the oil rig is a fragile world in which cool heads must use technology to stay alive, it is a metaphor for a world in which our technological progress directly threatens our survival (global thermonuclear war, environmental contamination, global warming, etc.)  A world in which we must take responsibility for our own salvation.

Technology is in many ways the highest expression of humanity.
Some would say art is, but art has been around since the cave-drawings of Altamont, and yet those people lived in disease and ignorance of the universe and its true nature.

Science and technology represent millenia of painstaking study of the physical world, and the learning of its properties and laws.  The things we take for granted in the latter years of the twentieth century are truly miracles.  And these miracles are reflections of the human soul which yearns to know, to understand, to build.

We have achieved mastery of our physical universe, and like the Krell in Forbidden Planet we stand poised on the verge of destroying ourselves with the technical results of that mastery.  Because we still have not mastered the monsters of the id.  So technology also tends to starkly represent the worst aspects of our nature.

When the demons within us have access to the new big guns, nuclear weapons, we are all staring right down the barrel of our fate and we will be untel we bring our spiritual evolution up to speed with our intellectual.

Though the film is now apparently dated, with its cold-war paranoia and its image of Gorbachev on the news, it is probably just as timely as ever and will be for several thousand years.  Human nature doesn’t change just because the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight.  And, by the way, all of the nuclear weapons in the world still exist.  Nobody’s chucking them, even though the Cold War is supposedly over.  Even without a clearly defined "enemy" we seem to fell that the ability to literally incinerate the planet is still a worthy asset.

It is an aspect of human psychology that difficult and painful things are denied.  And denial is so much easier when we have some reason to hang it on.  So we collectively use the so-called "end of the cold war" to move into a period of denial … denying ourselves that we are still in jeopardy.
But of course we are.
Perhaps more than ever.
Those missile subs are still out there, cruising the depths, each one capable of destroying an entire continent.

Despite containing some fictional technology (the underwater drill rig, the fluid breathing suit), the film is quite accurate about the Ohio-Class ballistic missile submarine, the Trident missiles, and the MIRV warheads.

As Coffey says, one sub contains 24 missiles.  Each missile contains 8 MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicle) warheads.  Each of which is about 5 times as powerful as the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima, killing 200,000 people in seconds.
24 x 8 = 196 warheads.
196 x 5 x 200,000 = 196 million people.  Dead.  In seconds.
From one submarine.
And we have a dozen of these things.  The Russians have even more.
These are real things.  Real monsters.  They exist in our world now.
We rarely think of them … but we should.

So maybe The Abyss is a monster movie after all.

The Abyss.  The title has meanings for me on many levels.
The literal meaning is sufficient … the abyss is the scientific and quite accurate term for that region of the ocean’s depths in which the film is set.

But the abyss is also a potent visual symbol and metaphor.
The bottomless pit.  A vast black void yawning beneath you.
It can be the pit of madness.  The black pit of fear.  Fear of the dark.  Fear of the unknown.
Fear of the great absolutes … the vastness of the black night of the universe.  The unreachable distances of infinity.
The unknowable black void which surrounds the tiny bubble of warmth and light which is our world.  The infinite night in which we, like a tiny candle, bear the flame of intelligence and compassion.

The film is set on the edge of the cliff above the void, the infinite blackness … from which one steps with the ultimate leap of faith.
Or is it the blackness of the subconscious, from which our demons come boiling up.

Or simply the bottomless pit from which there is no return.
The abyss of death.
Death comes with the inevitability of a wave.
Only one force can hold back the wave.  Love.
Bud wills the woman he loves back to life.
Love keeps us alive, by giving our lives meaning.
Bud himself enters the actual abyss to disarm the bomb, but he is also embarking on a voyage to the underworld.  Bud (Virgil) transitions from the living world to a kind of watery Hades.  From the moment he steps off the cliff he knows he is going into death.

He falls, regressing into insensibility, curling in upon himself, until he is like an embryo falling through a void between worlds.  Like a fetus he has liquid in his lungs, and is all alone in a black liquid world.

The abyss becomes the void between life and death.
Pre-birth and post-death become one state of consciousness, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The ego alone in the void.
The voice of the one he loves is the emotional umbilical which connects him to the other world.  Lindsey becomes his mother, the one thing which exists outside of himself.
Reminding him that he is not alone.

In his near-death state, on the ledge, he sees a manifestation.
A being of light.  Is it real?  Has he passed into another world?
By his expression, we see his transition is peaceful, satisfied … he has done his duty.  He accepts the symmetry.  His life for Lindsey’s.  To complete his transition he must allow the death of ego (per Tibetan B.O.D.)  He must release will and purpose, and allow himself to pass on to the next level.

He takes the hand of death.
The angelic being takes him to the other world.  A world of light.
It is the city-ship, or Ark Ship as I always called it, where the NTIs live (presumably they journeyed to Earth in it).
But to Bud it is heaven.  Lack of oxygen to the brain has put him in a hallucinatory state, where what he is actually experiencing is interpreted as archetypal.

He goes down a long tunnel.  Death as journey, transition, merging with the birth canal.
He emerges into a world of air … a rude awakening.  He draws his first agonized breath … like an infant, contorted and red-faced.
Reborn.  But higher on the karmic spiral.
On a more secular level, the cliff above the abyss functions as a symbol for the human race perched at the edge of self-destruction, seemingly ready to fling itself into nuclear oblivion.  Literally for the first time, we live in a time when we could obliterate ourselves from existence as a species.  Along with every other living thing on the planet.
Why would any sane species do such a thing?

But then, why create the possibility in the first place?  And we did that.

So maybe we are not quite as sane as we think we are.

The abyss can be the black void of the subconscious.
The place where we all really live.
The world of air and sunlight, the world we think of as our primary reality, is not the world in which our souls live.

We live in the abyss.
A lightless world, filled with demons and wonders.
There we dance with our deepest fears and our greatest hopes.
 

Jim
 

P.S. It’s probably a mistake to let filmmakers talk about their films.