This is something that Jacques, one of the main characters in The Big Blue, touches on in a scene where he explains to his girlfriend what drives free-divers. "Do you know what you're supposed to do, to meet a mermaid? You go down to the bottom of the sea, where the water isn't even blue any more, where the sky is only a memory, and you float there, in the silence. And you stay there, and you decide that you'll die for them. Only then do they start coming out."