Moby-Dick: The Movie
I recall with great clarity an incident a few years ago. The Moby-Dick Unit Exam loomed, and one student approached me and asked first if there WAS a movie version of the novel, second if I possessed a copy, and third if he could borrow it. There are several. I have them all. And, of course, I am a RIVER TO MY PEOPLE.
Because of my river-like nature, I added this: it's not going to help.
There are a number of cinematic reactions to Melville's magnum opus. The most recent is the Ron Howard explosion of yellow filters and bad accents: In the Heart of the Sea. This is not Moby-Dick, but rather the dramatization of the wreck of the Essex, a whaling ship which was stove by a whale, whose crew eventually resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Rumor has it that Melville met a survivor, got the story, and it haunted him. It is important to note also that, while Chris Hemsworth could easily play both Steelkilt and Bulkington, there is no cannibalism on the Pequod. (Cannibals, yes; cannibalism, no.) It has a reasonably good portrayal of whaling, but, well, it's not helpful.
There was a sort of mini-series version a few years ago which starred Ethan Hawk as Starbuck and William Hurt as Ahab. It extrapolated a lot and provided backstory on Starbuck, which is, I suppose, a worthy pursuit. Quite frankly, I did not enjoy it. At all.
The most famous version is the Gregory Peck version from 1956. That's right, Atticus Finch plays Ahab and he does a very good job. I take a lot of my own Ahab Day Ahab from his performance. The screenplay is by Ray Bradbury, the science fiction icon, and he is maybe as big a Melville guy as I am. There are, though, and he would admit, limitations on a screenplay which don't apply to a novel. All performances are pretty good, really, but there are a few unforgivable omissions and goofs. First, there are hardly any gams. The gams are about the only real action other than the whaling scenes, as the novel progresses, offer a sort of commentary on Ahab's character. Second, Queequeg is played by a German guy. Third, they sail out of New Bedford rather than Nantucket. This circumvents the whole "cut back to the very beginning" theme of the novel. Finally, there is no Fedallah. More on that later.
There is also a made for television version from 1998 starring Captain Picard, Patrick Stewart. If you ever get a chance to see it, you'll see that Elliot from ET is Ishmael. Queequeg is played by an actual Maori, which is refreshing, but most of the film is kind of hard to watch. It was 1998, and cg was NOT what it is now. Where they used a sort of rubber model of a whale in 1956, they had a really bad cg Moby Dick in this one. I have shown it to classes in the past and they actually laugh out loud when it come on screen.
But this version has Fedallah. And Fedallah is important.
I show a film to my American Literature sections about Mark Twain, and give special focus to the sections on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Towards the end of the documentary, one critic talks about how Twain's novel fully addresses the two main issues in American culture: race and space. Space is the less obvious of the two. Try to understand it in every way we understand space: physical space, mental space, spiritual space. Impromptu, he says words to the effect that Melville's ocean and Twain's river do address this issue as it deserves. The difference, the reason that Huck is a cornerstone of American culture, is the way it addresses race. Melville, he says, is more ambivalent.
It could be said that Melville is ambivalent about EVERYTHING. But that would be a digression, wouldn't it?
We have already seen Ishmael spout an almost twenty-first century liberal sense of cultural relativism. He says things like this, in chapter thirteen, as he and Queequeg take a ferry from New Bedford to Nantucket:
So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.
He also says this, in chapter forty-two, as he explains the contrasting power and effects of the color white:
though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.
This whole contradiction carries over into the discussion of Fedallah, the apparition. At the first sighting of a whale, he and his subordinates appear and man Ahab's whale boat. That is their only job and they are in the employ of Ahab, not the boat, seen, then, as privileged and cast as outsiders. Their appearance serves to further isolate them.
This, too, is a contradiction, because the crew is well integrated and the harpooneers are African, Native American, and Pacific Islander respectively. Ambivalence.
Fedallah is singled out from his Asian cohorts as being exceptional.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
Check out the last bit. Demon-spawn. Check out the bit before that: Asiatic communities "insulated, unchanging, unalterable." This raises a very interesting question. What is the difference between Tashtego/ Daggoo/ Queequeg and Fedallah?
The answer might be in the condescending tone that Ishmael adopts as he instructs Queequeg in the history of religion and religious dyspepsia at the end of chapter seventeen. He sees his own outlook as not only different, but clearly better. In that way, he's the average white man, then and now, tolerating Queequeg as one tolerates a child with a foolish notion. (Isn't that cute!)
But what happens when he encounters a man of a culture which is clearly the equal (superior?) of Christendom? Asian cultures were printing with movable type long before Europeans were. Asian cultures had gunpowder. Perhaps they even explored the shores of America! And they were completely different in their institutions and their dealings.
Ahab's embrace of this could be part of his break from the norm, part of his losing of his humanities.
Of course there are more movie versions of Moby-Dick. I highly recommend 2010: Moby Dick, an update of the story brought to you by the good people who continue to bring us Sharknado, with Ferris Bueller's dad as Ahab and Xena: Warrior Princess' best friend Gabrielle as a female Ishmael ("Call me Michelle").
Because of my river-like nature, I added this: it's not going to help.
There are a number of cinematic reactions to Melville's magnum opus. The most recent is the Ron Howard explosion of yellow filters and bad accents: In the Heart of the Sea. This is not Moby-Dick, but rather the dramatization of the wreck of the Essex, a whaling ship which was stove by a whale, whose crew eventually resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Rumor has it that Melville met a survivor, got the story, and it haunted him. It is important to note also that, while Chris Hemsworth could easily play both Steelkilt and Bulkington, there is no cannibalism on the Pequod. (Cannibals, yes; cannibalism, no.) It has a reasonably good portrayal of whaling, but, well, it's not helpful.
There was a sort of mini-series version a few years ago which starred Ethan Hawk as Starbuck and William Hurt as Ahab. It extrapolated a lot and provided backstory on Starbuck, which is, I suppose, a worthy pursuit. Quite frankly, I did not enjoy it. At all.
The most famous version is the Gregory Peck version from 1956. That's right, Atticus Finch plays Ahab and he does a very good job. I take a lot of my own Ahab Day Ahab from his performance. The screenplay is by Ray Bradbury, the science fiction icon, and he is maybe as big a Melville guy as I am. There are, though, and he would admit, limitations on a screenplay which don't apply to a novel. All performances are pretty good, really, but there are a few unforgivable omissions and goofs. First, there are hardly any gams. The gams are about the only real action other than the whaling scenes, as the novel progresses, offer a sort of commentary on Ahab's character. Second, Queequeg is played by a German guy. Third, they sail out of New Bedford rather than Nantucket. This circumvents the whole "cut back to the very beginning" theme of the novel. Finally, there is no Fedallah. More on that later.
There is also a made for television version from 1998 starring Captain Picard, Patrick Stewart. If you ever get a chance to see it, you'll see that Elliot from ET is Ishmael. Queequeg is played by an actual Maori, which is refreshing, but most of the film is kind of hard to watch. It was 1998, and cg was NOT what it is now. Where they used a sort of rubber model of a whale in 1956, they had a really bad cg Moby Dick in this one. I have shown it to classes in the past and they actually laugh out loud when it come on screen.
But this version has Fedallah. And Fedallah is important.
I show a film to my American Literature sections about Mark Twain, and give special focus to the sections on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Towards the end of the documentary, one critic talks about how Twain's novel fully addresses the two main issues in American culture: race and space. Space is the less obvious of the two. Try to understand it in every way we understand space: physical space, mental space, spiritual space. Impromptu, he says words to the effect that Melville's ocean and Twain's river do address this issue as it deserves. The difference, the reason that Huck is a cornerstone of American culture, is the way it addresses race. Melville, he says, is more ambivalent.
It could be said that Melville is ambivalent about EVERYTHING. But that would be a digression, wouldn't it?
We have already seen Ishmael spout an almost twenty-first century liberal sense of cultural relativism. He says things like this, in chapter thirteen, as he and Queequeg take a ferry from New Bedford to Nantucket:
So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.
He also says this, in chapter forty-two, as he explains the contrasting power and effects of the color white:
though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.
This whole contradiction carries over into the discussion of Fedallah, the apparition. At the first sighting of a whale, he and his subordinates appear and man Ahab's whale boat. That is their only job and they are in the employ of Ahab, not the boat, seen, then, as privileged and cast as outsiders. Their appearance serves to further isolate them.
This, too, is a contradiction, because the crew is well integrated and the harpooneers are African, Native American, and Pacific Islander respectively. Ambivalence.
Fedallah is singled out from his Asian cohorts as being exceptional.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
Check out the last bit. Demon-spawn. Check out the bit before that: Asiatic communities "insulated, unchanging, unalterable." This raises a very interesting question. What is the difference between Tashtego/ Daggoo/ Queequeg and Fedallah?
The answer might be in the condescending tone that Ishmael adopts as he instructs Queequeg in the history of religion and religious dyspepsia at the end of chapter seventeen. He sees his own outlook as not only different, but clearly better. In that way, he's the average white man, then and now, tolerating Queequeg as one tolerates a child with a foolish notion. (Isn't that cute!)
But what happens when he encounters a man of a culture which is clearly the equal (superior?) of Christendom? Asian cultures were printing with movable type long before Europeans were. Asian cultures had gunpowder. Perhaps they even explored the shores of America! And they were completely different in their institutions and their dealings.
Ahab's embrace of this could be part of his break from the norm, part of his losing of his humanities.
Of course there are more movie versions of Moby-Dick. I highly recommend 2010: Moby Dick, an update of the story brought to you by the good people who continue to bring us Sharknado, with Ferris Bueller's dad as Ahab and Xena: Warrior Princess' best friend Gabrielle as a female Ishmael ("Call me Michelle").
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