SEE · Volume One

Splash (1984)

and the Woman Who Learned Herself from Television

A mermaid arrives with no language and no name she can say. She learns to speak from department store televisions and names herself after the advertising industry's street. The kindest film in this series, and the one that shows most plainly where the lessons came from.

Splash (1984). Directed by Ron Howard. Tom Hanks as Allen, Daryl Hannah as Madison, with John Candy and Eugene Levy.

She arrives with no words and no name anyone can say. She learns to talk from the televisions at Bloomingdale’s, and she picks her name off a street sign on Madison Avenue.

She learned who to be from the screen. So did we.

This page belongs to The Pattern on Screen. It follows Mannequin, Weird Science and Sleeping with the Enemy. Like every entry there, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis.

Splash is the gentlest film in the series. Allen is a decent man, Madison is nobody’s victim, and the ending does something none of the others dare. It still belongs here, because it shows the thing this whole series is about more plainly than any film we have read: a woman learning how to be a woman from a screen.

The Story

In 1964, eight-year-old Allen Bauer falls off a tour boat off Cape Cod and meets a little girl underwater. She is a mermaid. Twenty years later, Allen co-owns a produce business in New York. Back at Cape Cod, he falls into the sea, and wakes on a beach with a beautiful naked woman, who kisses him and dives back into the water.

She finds his wallet, uses the charts of a sunken ship to find New York, and follows him there. She comes ashore with no clothes, no language and no name that can be spoken in English, and is arrested and released into his care. At Bloomingdale’s, she learns English by watching the televisions all day. Asked her name, she chooses one from a street sign: Madison. She has only a limited time on land.

They fall in love and plan to marry. Then a scientist who has been hunting her exposes what she is, and she is seized by government agents and taken to a lab. Allen is shocked, and at first he turns away from her. He comes back. With help, he breaks her out, and at the water’s edge she warns him: if he follows her into the sea, he can never come back to land. He jumps in after her anyway, and they swim toward an underwater kingdom.

Splash was released by Touchstone Films. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

What It Gets Right

She chooses him. Madison is no statue brought to life and no woman built to specification. She crosses an ocean, reads a map and walks into Manhattan on her own, because she decided to.
She knows her limits and says them. At the end she tells him the cost plainly: if he comes, he stays. She does not hide the price to keep him.
He is the one who gives everything up. In Mannequin, in Weird Science, in almost every film on our list, the woman is the one who disappears into his world. Here the man leaves his entire life to go into hers. For 1984 that is a real reversal, and it deserves the credit.

What It Still Teaches

1. A woman is a blank page

Madison arrives with nothing: no words, no history anyone can see, no name he can say. Everything about her life on land is new, and Allen is the one who knows how the world works. She delights in everything. She has no past to bring into the relationship and no one to compare him with.

That picture of a woman, beautiful, grown, and brand new, is one of the oldest fantasies there is. It is also the ideal the Seducer looks for, the mask in Chapter 7 of The Narcissism Decoder: someone with no history of her own, who will take his version of the world as the world. A girl watching learns that the most lovable woman is the one who has not become anyone yet.

2. She learned to be a woman from television, and named herself after advertising

This is the image this whole series is built around, and Splash films it without blinking. Madison learns to speak from the screens in a department store. Then she names herself after Madison Avenue, the street whose name is shorthand for the advertising industry.

It is played as a sweet joke, and it is the most honest moment in any film we have read. A woman with no self of her own becomes a person by absorbing what the screens and the store tell her. That is what happened to a generation of girls watching films like this one. We learned our lines from television and took our names from what was being sold.

3. To be loved, hide what you are

Madison’s secret is her tail. She keeps it hidden from the man she loves, because she knows what will happen if he sees it. When the truth comes out, she is right: he is shocked, and he turns away before he turns back.

The lesson is quiet and it lasts. The real you, the part you came from, is something to hide until he is too attached to leave. Many women learn to keep their tails dry for years: the need, the history, the part of them that does not fit his world. The work of a relationship becomes managing what he is allowed to see.

4. Love means someone gives up their whole world

The ending is the film’s great reversal, and it keeps the old rule inside it. Love here still requires one person to leave behind everything they had: home, family, work, the very air they breathe. Splash only changes who pays.

A girl watching learns that real love is total. It is proven by what you give up for it, and the bigger the loss, the truer the love. That is the same belief that keeps women in relationships that cost them their friends, their work and their families, one piece at a time, because giving things up is how love is supposed to feel.

The Series So Far

	Mannequin (1987)	Weird Science (1985)	Splash (1984)	Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
Where she comes from	A mannequin he shaped	A computer and a doll	The sea, by her own choice	An abusive marriage
Her voice	Silent in public	Loud, and all for them	None, then learned from TV	Silenced at home, then free
Who dresses her	Jonathan, for the window	The boys’ wishes	The department store	Herself, for Ben
Who gives up their world	She does	She does, then vanishes	He does	She does, then kills him to keep the new one

Even the kindest film in the series keeps the rule that love means somebody has to disappear.

If You Grew Up on This

You may have loved this film. It is warm and funny and generous, and wanting to be Madison, beautiful and fearless and new to everything, was an easy thing to want. Nothing on this page takes that away.

Some questions to sit with:

Where did you learn what a woman in love is supposed to be like? Can you name the screen?
What is your tail? The part of you that you keep hidden until you are sure someone will stay?
What have you given up to prove you loved someone? Did they ask you to, or did you learn it was how love works?
What was your name before anyone taught you what to be called?

Madison crossed an ocean on her own before she ever learned a word of English. The courage was hers first. So was yours.

You’re the audience now. You can see where the lines came from.