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Tuesday
Although I am posting this before seeing the Oscar nominations, which will be announced tonight, I can confidently say that two of the likely award winners have been heavily influenced by Moby Dick. It so happens that my Faculty Discussion Group just wrapped up up a months-long discussion of Herman Melville’s famous novel so I am particularly attuned to the echoes.
I’ve written about Moby Dick’s influence on The Whale. While the film may not get nominated for Best Film, Brendan Fraser is sure to be in the running for Best Actor.
Meanwhile, the film I saw Saturday night manages to piece together Moby Dick, Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Free Willy, Titanic, Terminator, and various westerns, teenpics, nature documentaries, eco thrillers, and video games, all in stunning 3-D. The film, of course, is James Cameron’s Avatar II: The Way of Water.
Cameron has invented giant whale-like creatures, called tulkuns, which function as spirit guides for an indigenous Polynesian-like people. His film also features a crazed Marine captain, Miles Quaritch, who is determined to track down Jake Sullivan regardless of the cost. He is Ahab-like in this mission, prepared to sacrifice men and boat alike if that’s what it takes to capture the fellow Marine man who went native and abandoned the mission of conquest in Avatar I.
Having married a native woman, Jake now has a family. No longer safe in their forest environment, they flee to a part of the world resembling idealized South Sea Islands. To flush them out, Quaritch uses tulkun hunters as bait. If they kill enough tulkuns, then Sully and the islanders will attack. (Okay, so the plot here is rather iffy since the hunters want to kill all the tulkun they can anyway.)
A number of underwater scenes capture the grace and power of the tulkuns. For his part, Melville captures the grace and power of Moby Dick, especially in this scene where he is seen from the vantage point of a whale boat:
As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side.
The whalers gaze in awe:
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale….On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings….
And thus, through the serene tranquilities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.
Cameron is also Melville-like in his focus on the over-the-top technology that is used to hunt these magnificent creatures. There are speedboats, small submarines, crab-like vehicles that grab, and a gigantic ship. The novel also features the latest technology, although in this case it is the on-board factory used to process the whale. Melville compares it to an Inferno as he describes the fires that light up the night.
At least, the whalers in the novel use the entirety of the whale. In the film, the men are after only one small thing, which is a yellow fluid that, we are told, stops the aging process. A single container-full, they know, will fetch millions if not billions of dollars. While there is no exact equivalent in Moby Dick, we do learn of a substance called ambergris, a fluid generated by a sick whale. Stubbs, the second mate, discovers it in one whale corpse:
“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained…
In the next chapter we learn about the uses to which ambergris is put:
[A]mbergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
The last portion of the film involves an all-out battle, with the Sully family and the native islanders pitted against the whalers and the marines. Oh, and one of the tulkuns gets involved as well. As with the whale in Moby Dick, the hunted becomes the hunter, with the tulkun taking advantage of the cable stuck in its flanks to destroy those chasing him. We see the tulkun first leap upon the mother ship, causing untold damage, before returning to the sea and then leaping one of the whaling boats to entangle it in the cable. Here’s the scene where Moby Dick attacks the Pequod:
[All the crew’s] enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces…. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
And here’s where he goes after Ahab’s whaling boat:
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
Numerous though the allusion are, I think Cameron missed a great opportunity to echo one of the novel’s most memorable scenes. Imagine Quartitch meeting his death the way that Fedallah the Parsee does. Fedallah is a mystical figure aboard the Pequod who mysteriously disappears on the second day of the chase, only to make an unexpected reappearance on the third day:
While [harpooners] Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
Instead, Cameron brings Quaritch back to life after he appears to have been drowned by Sully in hand to hand combat. Apparently, he needs to be the villain in Avatar III as well.
It’s not surprising that the filmmaker most responsible for keeping alive the Hollywood epic tradition would draw heavily on one of America’s greatest epic novels.