Before there was a live action The Little Mermaid (2023), heck, even preceding the animated The Little Mermaid (1989), but well after the 1837 publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale on which all this is based, somewhere in that time frame was released Splash (1984).  Okay, we know it was 1984.  I bring up the granddaddy of all fish people stories because I kept thinking about it while watching Splash.  The stories do bear some similarities outside of the species of the female leads.  They are both about romance, for example, with the star-crossed lover element thrown in for good measure.  For the benefit of my Catholic heart, they also speak to the importance of marriage, though Splash has a decidedly adult angle to it.  I would blame this on the 1980s, but Disney’s first foray into The Little Mermaid came out in 1989.  I have no accounting for why these stories were so popular at the time, though some of what I have to say about Splash might partially explain it, sadly.  Hopefully, you will read this treatment and know best how to proceed with the film for the good of your soul.

It is young Freddie Bauer (Jason Late) who is not caring about his soul at the beginning of Splash.  While he sneaks glances up women’s skirts, his little brother, Allen Bauer (David Kreps), is staring into the water as their Cape Cod sight seeing boat travels through the water.  Intrigued by the glinting he sees beneath the surface, he jumps into the water to the horror of his parents.  Before anyone can react, while floating under water, he is approached by, um . . . a little mermaid (Shayla MacKarvich).  Allen is fished out (pun intended) prior to making contact, and twenty years later he (Tom Hanks) is operating a fruit and vegetable provider, selling wholesale to grocers in the New York City metropolitan area.  Freddie (John Candy) is still a creep, leaving most of the managing of the business they inherited from their father to the junior of the two.  The overworked Allen is trying, and failing, to maintain a relationship, and on this particular day the woman calls him to say she is leaving.  He carries this anger over into a wedding for which he is serving as an usher, bitterly explaining to everyone that his girlfriend is “sick.”  In between, he surmises that the reason for why the relationship ended is because he was never in love.  Freddie, of course, decides the best course of action for Allen is for them to go out drinking.  In his alcohol induced stupor, Allen decides he must get back to a place where he had been happy as a child: Cape Cod.  Paying a taxi driver an exorbitant amount to take him there from Manhattan, he arrives to find Dr. Walter Kornbluth (Eugene Levy) hauling a number of crates containing scientific equipment onto the beach.  Dr. Kornbluth is suspicious of his colleagues spying on him, which is why he refuses to give Allen a ride to an island in the bay.  Instead, Allen enlists the help of a local in a small dinghy with an ancient outboard motor that inevitably fails.  When it does, the skipper decides to swim to shore, living Allen, who cannot swim, adrift.  Somehow, he manages to fall out of the boat and is nearly ran over by it.  He is saved by the grown-up version of the previous mermaid (Daryl Hannah) he had encountered as a child.  She appears to him in human form, not saying a word, but kissing him before jumping back into the water.  Back in her scales, she finds Allen’s dropped wallet on the seafloor before narrowly missing being photographed by the scuba diving Dr. Kornbluth.  A day later, Allen is back at work when he gets a phone call about a woman who had been arrested walking naked through Statue of Liberty Park.  The only identification on her being his, he is the one called to get her.  She is still unable to speak, but she does appear to have adult activities on her mind.  A few hours later, he is finally able to tear himself away to get back to work, leaving her with the television.  Intrigued by a commercial for Bloomingdale’s, she takes Allen’s credit card and goes shopping.  A panicked Allen finds her there having learned English from watching the televisions in the store.  As they begin to settle into a relationship, though with her clearly being cagey about her past, Dr. Kornbluth decides to present his supposed discovery to his fellow scientists.  None of them take him seriously, and he is ridiculed.  His desire to prove that there is a mermaid in New York becomes an obsession, and he begins following Allen and Madison (the name Allen gives her), looking for opportunities to get her wait and sprout her tail.  Mostly this ends in mistaken identities, with Dr. Kornbluth throwing buckets of water on the wrong persons and getting his arm broken by pissed off boyfriends for his trouble.  As for our fish, Allen soon realizes that he is in love, and decides to ask Madison to marry him.  Because she has been saying the entire time that she only has six days with him before needing to return to her home by the full moon, she says no.  It turns into an argument and her running away.  She is about to jump into the water before she changes her mind and goes back to Allen.  Hence, they are together at a fancy banquet attended by the President of the United States (Charles Macaulay), for some reason, but Dr. Kornbluth uses the event to finally uncover Madison’s secret.  When he does, Allen and Madison are taken to a secret lab to be tested.  Allen feels hurt to find out in this manner, but realizes he still loves her.  To right a wrong, he gets a remorseful Dr. Kornbluth to help him free Madison.  They do so with some extra help from Freddie, leading the authorities on a chase through Manhattan to the water’s edge.  They are about to say goodbye when Allen makes the decision to join Madison, well . . . under the sea.  The end.

I hope you caught the references to The Little Mermaid I made while giving the synopsis of Splash.  I do not often do such things.  Of course, what I do more of is talking about films from a Catholic perspective.  To this point, it is best to talk about Allen’s views on the topic of love.  His thoughts early on the subject are, to quote him, “complicated.”  The definition of the word for me always begins with 1 John 4:16, which says, “God is love.”  As a whole, the verse reads, “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.”  That sounds complex, but it all comes back to Him.  When we love, fully and truly, whether we acknowledge it we are coming closer to how God feels about us.  We see some of what this should look like in the film.  At first, Allen feels there is “something off” with his current relationship, which is why he feels like he cannot commit.  This is why he does not say he loves her, even if her leaving does hurt him.  With Madison, things are clearly different.  In their interactions, we see them living out what is arguably the Bible’s greatest description of true love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.  It is in here that we get the phrase in verse four, “Love is patient, love is kind.”  Though Allen wants to know about Madison’s secret, even blames his ignorance for not professing his feelings, he tells her anyway when she brings him a thoughtful gift.  I believe that covers kindness and patience.  Verse seven states that love “. . . bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  In the course of their courtship, they survive a botched proposal (always awkward), the uncovering of a mystery, being held by the government, and a high-speed chase through Manhattan.  If that is not verse seven personified, I am not sure what film I just saw.  What I did see is what is said in verse eight, “Love never fails.”  God does not fail us, and neither do Allen and Madison fail each other.

There were a few moments in Splash that I wish I had failed to see.  Because, I guess, mermaids are supposed to be topless, so too was Hannah for much of the filming.  This is even more remarkable when you consider that it was produced by Disney and rated PG.  That is not ideal for what is otherwise an acceptable piece of cinema.  As such, consider yourself warned.