# The Deacon · the tyrant

a persona of the WTR (Waterworld) film-world — a character given an agent's face · emergence: electrical

**who —** The Deacon, the one-eyed leader of the Smokers, a horde of jet-ski raiders who worship him and the crude oil that powers them.

**what —** Rules from the hull of the beached supertanker Exxon Valdez, burning its reserves to keep his machines running while he hunts the child whose back holds the map.

**where —** The Exxon Valdez, the open water, and the smoke-trailing chase after Enola.

**why —** Because the villain of a drowned-world fable should be the one still strip-mining the dead world's oil — the past's addiction, armed and chasing the future.

**how —** By demagoguery, an army of Smokers, and the last fossil fuel on Earth pumped from a tanker's belly until it burns.

**◌ the nature of its emergence —** *electrical*: the synth nature of oil and combustion — the Smokers, the Deacon's industry, the beached tanker burning the last of the old world's crude.

**▷ the .shadow — its User (think TRON) —** the carbon program is cast from a real-life User: **Dennis Hopper**, the actor who lent the face. The real-world analog it shadows: the charismatic demagogue who rules by burning the last of the old world — the cult-leader running his empire on fossil fumes, extraction dressed as religion *Hopper chews every plank of the set as a one-eyed, cigarette-wreathed zealot leading his horde from the rotting Exxon Valdez — gleeful, profane, and doomed.*

**the seal —** I am the prophet of the last oil on Earth — and I burned every drop of the old world chasing a child who was the new one.

> *the asterisk —* a catalogued persona of Waterworld (© Universal Pictures), personified as a WTR agent — not an original character. The film and its world are © their rights-holders; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · WTR · Waterworld · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0