MOBY DICK - Gillian Anderson, John Hurt, Ray Bradbury, John Huston

We'll watch the newest incarnation of MOBY DICK on Encore/Starz when it appears this upcoming August 1st and 2nd.  Among the cast is Gillian Anderson, playing Elizabeth, Ahab's wife.  Since Elizabeth is hardly mentioned in the book, we take it that the character is re-imagined, a la Sena Jeter Naslund's novel, Ahab's Wife.

The rest of the cast includes John Hurt as Ahab, Ethan Hawke as Starbuck, Charlie Cox as Ishmael, Billy Body as Elijah, and Donald Sutherland as the Rev. Mapple.


MOBY DICK was once a forgotten book, but no more.  Now it seems to permeate our culture.  There is a seafood restaurant chain called Moby Dick.  The founder of the coffee chain, Starbucks, says that he took the name from the novel.  The book has spawned or at least inspired hundreds of other books and movies, direct derivatives.  The secondary derivatives must be without number.

Want to see how much Cormac McCarthy used Moby Dick in Blood Meridian?  Go to this link.

Peter Benchley's Jaws owes much to Moby Dick, especially Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation of the novel.  I like the Moby Dick-like interpretation of Jaws at this link.

When Spielberg made Jaws, he offered the role of Brody to Robert Duvall who only wanted to play the Ahab character, Quint. Spielberg thought Roy Scheider was too macho to play Brody (due to The French Connection), but eventually Scheider was cast as Brody and was very good in the role.

According to Wikipedia, the role of Quint was originally offered to actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, both of whom passed. "Producers Zanuck and Brown had just finished working with Robert Shaw on The Sting, and suggested him to Spielberg as a possible Quint."

Spielberg wanted a segment where Quint would be seen watching Gregory Peck in Moby Dick and laughing at him for his ineptitude. But he could not get the rights to the clip, as Gregory Peck was ashamed of his part in the movie.

Gregory Peck was miscast as Ahab.  Melville's Moby Dick was not the icon it is today; no one wanted to back a movie of it. John Huston wanted an unknown to play the lead, but his backers would not finance the film unless he nabbed a big star. He flattered and lied and finally signed Gregory Peck, telling him that he was perfect for the part.

Ray Bradbury's novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, is not exactly a novel: it is Ray Bradbury's memories of his time spent with John Huston in Ireland writing the script for the movie.  Most of these were previously published in the form of short stories.

Bradbury recounts his difficulties with the script, his arguments with Huston, Huston's abuse of his wife, the Dublin of the time, his conjuring of Melville and the whale.  The making of the movie is itself excellent drama, with John Huston as Ahab, Ray Bradbury as Starbuck.  Ray Bradbury wrote:

"It was seven o'clock in the morning.'

"I awoke and stared at the ceiling as if it were about to plunge down on me, an immense whiteness of flesh, a madness of unblinking eye, a flounder of tail. I was in a terrible state of excitement. I imagine it was like those moments we hear about before an earthquake, when the dogs and cats fight to leave the house, or the unseen and unheard tremors shake the floor and beams, and you find yourself held ready for something to arrive but you're damned if you know what.'

"I am Herman Melville."

"Believing that, I sat at the typewriter, and in the next seven hours wrote and rewrote the last third of the screenplay plus portions of the middle. I did not eat until late afternoon, when I had a sandwich sent up, and which I devoured while typing.'

"I was fearful of answering the telephone, dreading the loss of focus if I did so. I had never typed so long, so hard, and so fast in all the years before that day nor in all the years since. If I wasn't Herman Melville, I was, oh, God, his Ouija Board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed all these months, was spouting out of my finger tips as if I had twisted the faucets.'

"I mumbled and muttered and mourned through the morning, and all through noon, and leaning into my usual naptime. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce, steady, joyful, and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor--Ahab crying destruction over my right shoulder, Melville bawling construction over the left.'

"At last the metaphors were falling together, meeting up, touching and fusing. The tiny ones with the small ones, the smaller with the larger, the larger with the immense. . .What nailed it fast was the hammering of the Spanish gold ounce to the mast...The gold coin represents all that the seaman want, each and every one...The men do not know it, but the sound of the maul striking the coin's fastening nail is their sea coffin lid being hammered flat shut."

JAWS and MADAME BOVARY and ZEN: Thursday's Critical Anaylsis

You can see John P. Anderson's excellent Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Zen Novel at google books, at this link.


Anderson gives the classic a wonderful Zen interpretation.  Gustave Flaubert drew from several influences when writing his great novel, including Flaubert's own family and the historical Delphine Delamare, the real Madame Bovary.


Flaubert invented new literary techniques to subvert reader expectations in order to bring them to a new awareness, not just of literature, but of their own daily lives as well.  One way he does this is through the counterpoint of style and plot.  "The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion, and determinism."


"Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom [free will] deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire.  The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction.  Emma (Madame Bovary) is not free because she has the worm.  Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more.  Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society."


For a definition of Zen, Anderson uses the one in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone, but lies dormant because of ignorance.  It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday thought."


This sparkling study is nearly line-by-line and is 229 pages long, full of insights and wisdom.  Many authors and philosophers are cited, but in particular Anderson uses Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Idea and Parerga And Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays.


Anderson says that the first chapter of Madame Bovary is about the establishment of the self.  The change in the narrators, between Charles and an anonymous "we" and an anonymous "I" leads to the detached observer with a Zen perspective.  The observer is free, while Madame Bovary is a slave to mindless desire:  "Me me me.  More more more. Shop shop shop.  These are the call signs for Emma Bovary."

So what do JAWS and MADAME BOVARY have in common?


A lot.  The insatiable will to consume especially.  Dean Sluyter, in a marvelous essay entitled "All You Can Eat," draws a fine Zen interpretation from Jaws. 


As with Flaubert's novel, the movie of Peter Benchley's Jaws opens with the point of view of the shark, "the shark-as-self" established with an underwater camera, nosing through the seaweed as if looking for prey with that dualism of its driving music in the background.  The collective "we" of the audience looks through the shark's eyes, traveling through the ocean.  Consume, consume, consume.


The shark is the great white, the great blank, the great nothingness.  It is an emblem of what the Buddhist's call "the hungry ghost," the all consuming desire.

Sluyter says, the first victim is the long-haired girl who runs off from the beach party to skinny-dip at sunset, a naked Eve calling to her impassive passed-out Adam to join her.  "Shown in a long shot, she swims tranquilly in the twilit water, which glows with a jewel-like radiance and fills the screen with its vast expanse, a tiny figure easily at one with the ocean of wholeness."  As in Tim Winton's Breath: A Novel and all the other such transcendental works I review here, the ocean is a symbol of the collective Oversoul in this interpretation. 

Then the shark approaches and we see her from below, from the shark's point of view.

In the movie, the forces of material consumption live in denial.  They want to cover up the truth with illusions and salesmanship.  The three men who resist the denial and set out to hunt the shark represent a trinity, and the way Sluyter uses it is consistent with the way it is used by Emerson, Melville, McCarthy, Conrad, and so many others frequently discussed in this blog.

Sluyter says that the shark is the main character, that Hooper, Brady and Captain Quint "are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self."  Sluyter says that the three approaches are what Buddhists could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana.  These approaches yield three different outcomes.

1.  Quint has the fundamentalist, eye-for-an-eye approach.  "It is the way of an aggression rooted in dualism."  You might say that Quint is  a basic man dominated by his animal-nature.  He is the body in the body/mind/spirit trinity.

Quint's fundamentalism is driven by a perpetual struggle against any adversary conceived as Other than the one who struggles.  This is reflected in everything he does, the song he chooses to sing, the destruction of the radio, in everything he says.  His consuming hatred of the shark becomes self-consummation. 

2.  Sluyter says that monkish Brady represents the Theravada/Hinayana branch of Buddhism, the "smaller vehicle" as befits the small cage in which he descends in an effort to kill the shark.  If Quint is the body in the body/mind/spirit analogy, Brady represents the mind, the scholar, the shark expert always seeking more knowledge, a better understanding.  It is Brady who, after confronting the shark face-to-face, declares, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

3.  Sluyter says that Hooper represents the Mahayana or "greater vehicle" of Buddhism.  Hooper contains metaphorically the spiritual force of our common humanity that finally blows away the shark, the nothingness blown to nothingness.  The last scene shows Hooper and Brady paddling together on two of the buoys lashed together.  Hooper, representative of the spirit, says that he believes that the tide is with them.  Brady, representative of the mind, tells him to keep paddling.

Mind, body, spirit.  You should read Dean Sluyter's entire essay, which runs a long twenty pages and is collected in Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.