The Mariner: Why Waterworld (1995) Has the Decade's Most Misunderstood Hero

He has gills. He has webbed feet. He drinks his own filtered urine with the pragmatic expression of someone who made peace with unpleasant necessities long ago. In the film's opening scenes, he sells a woman into slavery for a jar of dirt. He is, by any standard the film's floating atoll communities apply, monstrous.

The film spends its first act making you understand exactly why they fear him. Then it spends its next two acts slowly dismantling why the fear is wrong about what matters.

What makes the Mariner different from the decade's other action heroes

The 1990s action hero had a specific shape. He was large, invulnerable, essentially humorless, and organized around the premise that enough violence applied to the right targets would resolve any problem. The archetype ran from Sylvester Stallone through Arnold Schwarzenegger through Van Damme, and its emotional register was competence without vulnerability.

The Mariner is the inversion of this archetype. He is competent, certainly, but his competence is the competence of a man who has survived by removing everything that could become a vulnerability. He does not allow himself to want things. He does not allow himself to attach to people. He has, in the process of adapting to a world that punishes attachment, made himself nearly incapable of warmth.

This is the more interesting and more honest portrait of what a man shaped entirely by survival would actually look like. It is not charming. It is not immediately likable. It asks the audience to spend time with someone who would, in real terms, be deeply difficult to be around, and to understand over the course of the film that the difficulty is not a character flaw but an adaptation with a cost.

How Enola changes everything

The film's story is not a romance, despite the presence of a romance. It is the story of what happens when a man organized entirely around solitude is forced, by a child, into connection.

Enola, the ten-year-old played by Tina Majorino, has no capacity for the kind of constant vigilance the ocean demands. She is dependent in ways the Mariner cannot afford and cannot ignore. She wanders. She makes noise. She trusts people before she has reason to. She does all the things that a person adapted for solitude finds most intolerable, and she does them with the complete absence of self-consciousness that only a child can manage.

The Mariner's incremental discovery that this dependency is not a burden but a reason is the film's central emotional arc, and Costner plays it with the quality of a man who has been sealed so long that thaw is almost physically uncomfortable. He does not have a scene in which he decides to care about Enola. He has a series of scenes in which he acts as though he does not care about Enola and is visibly wrong. The performance is built from what Costner does not say rather than from what he says, and it is considerably more sophisticated than the film's reputation suggests.

The Deacon as the argument's other half

Dennis Hopper's Deacon is the film's counter-argument. Where the Mariner has adapted forward, into the world as it has become, the Deacon has organized his power around the last reserves of petroleum from the Exxon Valdez. His army runs on oil. He preaches a religion built around the tanker's final destination. He is the villain of this specific story because he has committed the future of his community to a resource that has already run out everywhere else, and cannot imagine a form of power that does not flow through what he already controls.

The film does not state this argument explicitly. It makes it through production design and world-building, through the specific details of how the Smokers' society functions and what it costs them to maintain it. The Deacon is not simply a man who wants power. He is a man who cannot conceive of a world in which the power he holds is not the only kind that exists. The Mariner, with his gills and his webbed feet and his indifference to the drowned world's categories, is the living proof that such a world is already here.

FAQ: Waterworld (1995) Characters and Story

Who plays the Mariner in Waterworld?

Kevin Costner plays the Mariner, who is the film's unnamed protagonist. Costner was also a producer on the film, which gave him creative input on the production and the final cut.

What does the Mariner's mutation mean in Waterworld?

The Mariner's gills and webbed feet mark him as a biological adaptation to the flooded world, someone who has evolved (or been evolved) to live in the ocean rather than on land. The atollers fear and distrust him because his mutation makes him visibly different. Thematically, he represents the adaptation the human species will need to survive in the world it has made.

Who is the Deacon in Waterworld?

The Deacon, played by Dennis Hopper, is the leader of the Smokers, an army organized around the petroleum reserves of the Exxon Valdez. He is the film's antagonist and represents the failure to adapt: organizing a civilization's future around a resource that has already run out everywhere else.

What is Dryland in Waterworld?

Dryland is the mythological object the story is organized around: the last remaining landmass in a world where the polar ice caps have melted. It is believed by most characters to be a legend. The Mariner has visited it and will not confirm its existence until the film's final movement. Dryland turns out to be the summit plateau of Mount Everest.

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# SPEED RACER (2008)

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