There will always be a market, one presumes, for people who get dangerously close to apex predators. It’s a hook that has entertained viewers forever, a weird kind of voyeurism tinged with the odd suspense of knowing that at some point, it’s all going to go badly wrong. Steve Irwin was the obvious example, though the crocodile hunter’s ironic death by stingray almost felt like an anticlimax. The subject of Netflix’s Shark Whisperer, Ocean Ramsey, is still faring well, despite regularly free-diving with sharks. But it’s undeniable that a lot of the attention she gets rests on the idea that one day, she’s going to get eaten, probably on camera.
The rest of the attention comes from other things, most of which are touched upon in this feature from Ramsey’s husband, Juan Oliphant, which is about not just Ramsey’s daring conservation exploits but also how she managed to amass so much attention by smartly leveraging social media with her considerable assets. She’s smart, sure, but she’s also very attractive, and once she realised that people were more inclined to care about sharks if she swam near them in a very revealing swimsuit, she was off to the races.
There’s an unavoidable element of bias here. Ramsey has many detractors, some of whom feature in the film, but they’re presented in the style of catty haters who just don’t get Ramsey’s passion for sharks. That’s an easy argument to make in a documentary that is a collaborative project between Ramsey and her husband – it would have been more compelling, I think, to lend proper weight to the claims that not only is she scientifically a charlatan, but also that her methods of “raising awareness” around sharks undeniably run the risk of glamourising things that will without question get idiots killed. People will do anything for the ‘gram at the best of times.
But Ramsey is adamant that free-diving with sharks, without the use of safety cages, is some kind of lofty calling, and gives her a unique insight into how the creatures behave and communicate. And she’s probably right, honestly. But her fascination can sometimes run the risk of coming across like a demented obsession. In the few scenes we see of Juan and Ramsey interacting either privately with each other or with friends, the shark stuff feels weird – gifts of shark teeth necklaces for kids, a shark-themed wedding, and so on, and so forth. Passion is one thing, but this seems like something else; something, the more cynical side of me might suggest, that seems very manufactured.
This is why the lack of real debate about whether Ramsey is a passionate conservationist or an attention-seeking fraudster is especially notable. While the immediate health risks of Ramsey’s approach are pretty self-evident, this is similarly reframed as a kind of martyrdom, a woman so passionate she’s willing to die for the cause of conservation. She even cautions people not to blame the shark, which likely nobody would, in the same way they wouldn’t blame lightning if it struck someone who spends all of their time standing under pylons. But that isn’t the real issue. The real issue is the extent to which Ramsey making swimming with sharks look cool and glamorous and a sure-fire path to social media stardom might get people eaten alive, and that is barely raised, let alone adequately explored.
For some reason, every time he’s on camera, Juan reiterates that he has no control in their relationship and Ocean just does what she wants, and that he, by extension, does what she tells him, even if it means swimming alongside her and risking his own life. This doesn’t fill one full of confidence about the documentary being even-handed in its presentation of the facts, but it does have a pretty significant upside. Juan being in the water with Ramsey has produced some truly extraordinary footage.
This footage is reason enough to watch Shark Whisperer, regardless of any concerns about what it may or may not leave out or gloss over. Rarely have I ever seen such strikingly intimate close-up video of these creatures, especially not framed with this kind of danger and, oddly, beauty. Given how amazing the film looks, it’s hard not to be swept up in the case that sharks must necessarily be more intelligent and empathetic than they have historically been portrayed as in classics like Jaws and even recent hits like Under Paris. And the central argument that any animal being hunted to extinction is a bad thing – look to the white rhino for a recent example – is impossible to quibble with.
But we perhaps shouldn’t be fooled. Conservation is all well and good, but normalising jumping in the deep end with dinosaur monsters probably isn’t, and it’s vital to understand the difference. Shark Whisperer isn’t especially interested in that understanding. Ironically, given it’s about a woman who has been criticised for using her comeliness to garner personal attention on the back of a noble cause, the film is very much style over substance. But it has a lot of style.