Driving through the urban sprawl of Little Rock, Arkansas, Brittany, AKA Mermaid Sparkles, remarks: “I’m shit out of luck, being a mermaid here.”
Sparkles, as you may have inferred, is one of a growing number of performers – several of whom are followed in Cynthia Wade’s documentary MerPeople – trying to make it in a nascent but rapidly expanding industry. Or, if you are the rightwing proselytiser Amanda Grace, whose speech on the subject at Trump Doral recently went viral, “a division of the kingdom of darkness and highly technologically advanced”.
Grace should watch MerPeople – which shows people wriggling into their tails as if they were particularly unforgiving pairs of tight jeans, sucking on air hoses as they swim as ethereally as possible around aquariums and rinsing their burning faces under taps when the pH balance of the water is wrong – and relax a little.
We will probably live to see the full commodification and corporatisation of mermaid living. But, at the moment, it is still sprat, not shark – a community as much as an industry. It is fascinating to observe something at a transitional point. Everyone knows everyone. There is a jokey, but bonding, vocabulary – things are “fintastic” and “mermazing” and they are all “seasters”. Local mermaids support each other in “pods”. Sourcing wigs is fun, but finding places that allow you to practise in tails is tricky for most. At the pointier end of things, there are people like Eric Ducharme, a maker of the highest-spec tails known as the Mertailor, and Morgana Alba, the founder of the Circus Siren Pod.
Ducharme was taken under the wing – and that is not at all the right idiom – of the mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs underwater theatre in Florida when he became a devoted fan as a young boy. He grew up to become a performer there. Because he had Tourette syndrome and “was very artistic”, school was an unhappy place and the mermaid world his refuge. When health concerns took him out of the water and deposited him on dry land, he turned to tail‑making instead.
He is now also an entrepreneur, keen to make his salvation into a profitable business. In the course of the documentary, we watch him take delivery of his first tank – 49,000-litre capacity, £80,000 price tag – and start his own mermaid show. Sparkles auditions, but doesn’t make the cut. Tristan, “the Red River Merman”, does, although his past drug addiction returns to threaten his place in what he likens to a family.
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Alba was taught survival skills from a young age by her adored Green Beret father. She was devastated as a child when he left. She became a circus performer, specialising in knife work and acrobatics, but diversified into mermaiding and soon found that she had more bookings than she could handle and so started hiring. Now, her revered Sirens are drilled, disciplined and more practically inclined than most of the other mermaids we meet. “I’ve always really railed against the concept of being an elite, but it seems to have happened anyway,” she says, shrugging.
Four years ago, Sparkles failed to sparkle at an audition for the Sirens; her second attempt is one of the many emotional arcs we follow among these slightly weird and rather wonderful people.
Speaking of which, I insist you watch the series for long enough to meet The Blixunami – an absolutely radiant, mesmeric presence, but forged in the fire of growing up gay in the middle of a devoutly Christian family in the south and hearing hate for “his kind” spewed from the pulpit every Sunday. He is devoted to his Barbies (“I have no shame in my game!”) and to life as a merman – overseen by Naja, “my mermama … She gives me the acceptance I didn’t get from my real mother.” You will wish for only good, beautiful things to happen to this gentle, hilarious soul.
MerPeople is not a deep dive into the psychology of mermaiding. It is content to let us draw our own conclusions about the needs and wounds that lead people to extreme fandom. As a portrait of a burgeoning industry, it is also a portrait of late western capitalism. Is mermaiding what we are up to now that the railroads and atom-splitting are done and dusted? This is not interrogated, just left as a question you can pose to yourself, if that is what snags your attention. It is a splash around in the shallows, charming and melancholy by turns, but still a testimony to the endless ingenuity of humanity and how much it yearns to heal itself.