The year's movie THE WHALE, starring Branden Fraser as Charlie, won a lot of awards in this year's awards season, include a Best Actor for Fraser.
I recently saw it and, in general, I approve. SPOILER ALERT. If you don't want to learn certain facts about this movie and its plot, stop here.
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Charlie is morbidly obese and, in the course of the plot, he effectively kills himself by continuing to overeat while refusing medical treatment.
Charlie is also, importantly, an English teacher, assisting college students (by internet connection -- in his condition he cannot leave his home) as they develop their critical writing skills.
Charlie would perhaps rather be teaching literature than composition. The screenplay is full of references to the great American romantics, especially Whitman and Melville. The movie's title is a reference not only to the cruel term often used for obese humans, but to Ahab's nemesis.
What I wish to say is simply that the story is the most unabashed treatment of a Romantic sensibility, presented without a hint of irony, that I have encountered in a long time. Charlie is always admonishing the people with whom he comes in contact, in person and through video, that they should be authentically themselves, that their writing should above all be sincere.
We are expected to love the character despite his obvious flaws and largely for this trait. I, for one, am willing to do so. It is not that Romanticism in the capital-R sense does not deserve critical looks and/or ironic distance. It is just that sometimes we should be able to take our Romanticism straight, without either.
At one point Charlie is discussing with his daughter an essay she is about to submit to a high school teacher. The topic: Walt Whitman. She has gotten the title of the poem "Song of Myself" wrong. She has called it "Songs for Myself." He corrects her, and her obvious indifference to the error leads him to riff on that poem and on why it is interesting. She responds in a hostile way -- adolescently hostile toward him as Dad, but hostile toward Whitman as well whom (she contends) overwrites everything and whose central metaphor is pretentious.
Charlie responds, NOT by getting defensive on his own or Whitman's behalf, but by saying that if that is how she sees it, THAT is how she ought to have written the essay -- it would have been refreshingly honest.
"What a perfectly Whitmanite response!" I thought at once. And presented in the screenplay as a perfectly sensible response. Which it both is and is not.
Another (related) point -- this time about Melville. Years before the Now of the screenplay, when the daughter was at an earlier stage of her education, she wrote a theme about Melville. I have never heard of public school 8 year olds being expected to read and write critically about Moby Dick, but I am willing to suspend disbelief. Anyway, at THAT time Charlie's daughter repeatedly referred to Ahab as a "pirate."
The instant response of course is that Ahab is NOT a pirate. He is a legitimate businessperson of a sort critical to the economic system of the time, rather like the petroleum geologists who work for ExxonMobil in our own time. Like those hired-gun geologists, whaling vessel captains were in search of valuable energy deposits.
Anyway: is there a sense in which Ahab WAS a pirate? It is actually worth a lot of thought. People and institutions had invested in his ship, and by turning it into an instrument of personal vengeance rather than using it for the acquisition of those energy deposits ... well, perhaps his creditors, upon news of the disappearance of the Pequod, would have thought Ahab had gone over into piracy.
So ... he was and was not a pirate.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, In the words of one of those writers Charlie admires: I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.
Sounds like an in-depth study of misery. The work of Bergman comes to mind. Have always liked Fraser, whether in comedic roles or others. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteChristopher, I don't believe that Ahab was a businessperson (or that petroleum geologists are). They are employees of businesspersons. The Pequod wasn't "his" ship, except to command, and the disappointed creditors were not "his" creditors. He and the rest of the crew, I believe, were not salaried employees, but were paid a percentage of the catch, with each member's percentage depending on his rank (captain, first mate, harpooner, and so on). But I don't think that makes him a businessperson.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of eight-year-olds' reading Moby-Dick, I think that no young person should read it, even in secondary school or undergraduate school. I was fortunate not to have been assigned it in school, but to first read it in my 30s (and five times since). When I express my enthusiasm for the novel to someone, the typical response I get is, "I had to read it in high school (or college), and I didn't like it." And, of course, they never try it again when they would be ready for it.
On a more trivial note, the novel "Moby-Dick" has a hyphen, but the whale Moby Dick does not. I don't think that there is a reason for that. I'm not certain, but I think that the publisher inadvertently added a hyphen.
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