Shark Whisperer’s Passionate Conservation Hints at the Inner Darkness of Ocean Ramsey

There’s a lesson, buried somewhere in the depths of Netflix’s new aquatic documentary Shark Whisperer, about how difficult it is for some of us to accept the explanations proffered to us about why a person would choose to repeatedly engage in an activity that carries obvious challenges and unavoidable danger. When looking from the outside, we try to rationalize obsession–to find not just concrete rationale for a person’s actions, but self-serving intent. Why else would they do this strange, dangerous thing that could easily kill them, unless they stood to profit mightily? But that line of thinking misses what is true of so many documentary subjects, and the reason why these people end up as the subject of documentary filmmaking in the first place: Their obsession is unique, and far from rational. They do what they’re compelled to do, perhaps because they feel it’s right, or more likely for esoteric and personal reasons they find difficult to fully articulate to someone who just doesn’t get it, and never will. So yeah, you can watch Ocean Ramsey swim with massive sharks and caress their toothy maws in Shark Whisperer and assign all kinds of self-serving intent along the way, but doing so will risk missing the profoundly meaningful experience she clearly draws from the activity … and the sadness lurking under the exterior of a person who has made their peace with death, regardless of how her own clearly apprehensive loved ones feel about that decision.

That’s the real meat of Shark Whisperer: Its hints at how a woman’s passion for shark conservation has undermined her own personal life, and how she ultimately has chosen to sacrifice her own safety and embrace constant, inadvisable threats in the name of her idealistic cause. The documentary skillfully captures both Ramsey’s seeming obliviousness to the pain and concern of her closest loved ones, and the ambivalence of the people watching her perform ever more dangerous stunts in the name of being an awareness-raising ally to nature.

Unfortunately, Shark Whisperer doesn’t actually seem to be aware that this is its most compelling element. Instead the film, directed by J.P. Stiles, Harrison Macks and My Octopus Teacher co-director James Reed, styles itself as a portrait of Ramsey’s passion for conservation, and the criticisms of her “reach out and pet the shark” methods that follow from scientific circles and various marine-loving corners of the internet. The film only skims here and there the personal elements of how Ramsey’s obsession has shaped her mindset, instead working hard to seemingly unearth juicier “controversy” around the woman where little of it honestly exists in any way that is consequential. Shark Whisperer wants you to believe that Ocean Ramsey is a “lightning rod” in marine conservation circles; in truth she’s just a very skilled influencer, amateur scientist, impressive free diver and messaging specialist who has earned a bit of unavoidable jealousy from a few of the talking heads that these filmmakers were able to track down, and the trolls commenting on Instagram videos.

And sadly, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a woman posting … uh, anything … on the internet receives her fair share of criticism and abuse. We’re shown some of those critiques, which range from the obvious garden variety sexism or misogyny (comments on her body, wild accusations of grifting), to more sophisticated concern trolling that worries aloud that Ramsey will somehow influence others to find and pet man-eating sharks. To which we can only observe: Do you know how hard it is to find a wild great white shark to caress? Try as these concerned souls might, it’s difficult to imagine Ramsey’s stunts, performed in the name of public education to stop shark hunting and slaughter, will somehow put any of her viewers in danger. Nor does her work seem to have any particular negative impact upon the sharks. This makes some of the comparisons–one person briefly invokes Tiger King’s Joe Exotic–feel particularly forced. Ocean Ramsey is not some huckster running a shark petting zoo, where she’s abducted the marine apex predators to put them on display. She’s a woman obsessed with sharks due to some largely unexplained misanthropic tendencies of her own, who clearly has always felt more comfortable in the ocean (even as a child), among sea life, than among other people. Her grasp on shark behavior at times seems more advanced than her understanding of human behavior, although she can at least intuit (correctly) that by exploiting her status as an attractive blonde woman, she can bring far more attention–positive and negative–to her cause than any man would be able to do in the same scenario. She’s tacitly agreed to shoulder whatever abuse comes along with playing up her femininity to the camera, because she knows the bottom line result is more impressions and a bigger audience for her message.