Educational Media Reviews Online

Sea Level Pressure: A Surfer’s Paradox is just one example of how to use surf footage for a good cause. SurfAid international is a non-profit, humanitarian aid organization “dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering through community-based health programs.” (SurfAid website) that works almost exclusively in coastal areas that are frequented by surfers. The profits from sales of Sea Level Pressure go to SurfAid.

Unfortunately, besides a lot—a whole lot—of great surf footage there is little of substance in Sea Level Pressure that would motivate sales or recommend it for library collections. Interleaved among long shots of waves and surfers are interviews from a variety of surfers about the seeming paradox between surfing and working every day. The interviews attempt to capture this tension but don’t really succeed in explicating what it might be about surfing in particular that makes it so paradoxical. Wouldn’t most of us rather do something we enjoy—at the beach, no less—without the obligation to go to work? How is surfing any different from skiing or other activities (drugs?) that also offer a lifestyle along with the action?

The film reiterates surfers’ need to surf instead of doing almost anything else. Since Gidget (1959), we have seen on screen the desire to reject squares and live the life of a surf bum. Moondoggie is in thrall to The Big Kahuna who has the seemingly perfect life of living on a shack on the beach, eating what he catches and being adored by younger surfers and bikini-clad women. One of the main conflicts in that classic surf movie is between the squares and the surfers and the tension is resolved when we discover that The Big Kahuna actually has a “square” job with the airlines. Moondoggie returns to his former existence as a coat-and-tie, east coast college student and meets Gidget again on a blind date arranged by their respective fathers. Sea Level Pressure is still examining the same dichotomy.

How most surfers in the film deal with the issue is by striking an uneasy balance between surfing and work, working in the surf industry while surfing as much as possible or just abandoning square culture all together to surf as much as possible while living at the subsistence level. Add that to extensive footage of surfing and you’ve got Sea Level Pressure. Its main function seems to be to have something visual to promote SurfAid fundraising. For that purpose, it is great. For educational purposes it doesn’t achieve the its claim which is to “examine[s] the surfing lifestyle that consumes us, the major conflict that arises from our absolute need to surf everyday, and how we as individuals—in the water everyday—deal with this issue.” (DVD container.) Specifically, I would like to know more about why the need to surf is absolute and what it is about the surfing lifestyle that is so consuming that it is incompatible with wage labor. Sea Level Pressure assumes the former (uncompromised surfing) and presumes the latter (incompatibility with work.)

I do not recommend this DVD for purchase for educational collections, but I do encourage direct donations to SurfAid international.