some notes on Moby Dick adaptations

[eruthros]

Most book accurate Moby Dick adaptation:
Moby Dick (or, the Webcomic). Cute, sweet, and also accurate whaling content and levels of Queequeg/Ishmael.

Second most book accurate Moby Dick adaptation:
Моби Дик, a 25 minute paint-on-glass short film from 1999, which weirdly manages to cram in more important events from the book than the 2011 Moby Dick miniseries. (Though also it is a yikes because it replicates the racism, especially about Fedallah.)

Most hilarious Moby Dick adaptation:
The Sea Beast, 1926, which is explicitly a Moby Dick adaptation, and which gave me this amazing screencap:


Okay so:
a) Ishmael is sir not-appearing-in-this-film
b) Ahab's half brother Derek is in love with Ahab's fiance and pushes Ahab off a boat to be mauled by Moby Dick
c) Derek arranges for Ahab and his fiance to break up, and Ahab goes to seek his revenge against Moby Dick, because he blames the whale instead of ableism
d) Pip (a white guy) saw the whole thing, tried to tell Ahab, and finally reveals the secret to Ahab when Ahab is on his way to kill Moby Dick
e) Ahab kills Derek
f) Ahab then successfully kills Moby Dick and turns him into whale oil, and then he goes home and his ex-fiance is still unmarried. He hugs his dog and his fiance. The end! Yay happy ending!

I told twwings about this and we kept describing this adaptation with the Clue line "now I'm going to go home and sleep with my wife."

Anyway there's a reason the John Barrymore films don't appear past a certain point in any vid and also don't appear in the Queequeg/Ishmael ship vid (hard to ship them when there's no Ishmael).

Adaptation I had the most trouble fitting into the vids:
Moby Dick (1956), in which Gregory Peck plays an Ahab who looks like Abe Lincoln. I kept having to get him in the right place or do distant enough shots that it looked like "Ahab on a ship" and not "Abe Lincoln looking mad."

But also this adaptation has two white guys doing brownface to play characters of color (both Queequeg and Tashtego), which means those distant shots often didn't work because oh whoops there's Tashtego behind Ahab. Since Queequeg and Tashtego are two harpooners, they oared two separate whaleboats and made them unusable for my vids. This is why Dagoo is the only harpooner you see from 1956.

Worst adaptation:
You'd think this would be the 2010 Asylum Moby Dick, which is deeply lazy. But the thing is, although it's lazy, they know it's ridiculous, and so they lean into it and we get "Moby Dick destroys a cruise ship and eats a helicopter," which is nonsensical but also fun. Also Renee O'Connor plays Ishmael, so it has great Xena vibes. (She's in Here It Goes Again but she's hard to recognize.)

The real answer is 2011's Age of the Dragons, which is just terrible. It's actually in Here It Goes Again a lot, because it is in some ways a straightforward adaptation using a lot of the same filming conventions even when they make no sense ("let's get a barrel of water up onto our armored land boat"). But they do that adaptation in a completely straight "we're taking this totally seriously, this land boat makes sense" tone. And every actor in it is SO BAD or is receiving the worst direction of their lives. Danny Glover was apparently only there for like six days so he barely shows up in the movie, Ishmael is a block of wood, Queequeg barely has any lines, the costuming and CGI are terrible. If it understood what it was doing enough to be camp it could've been fun and ridiculous, but instead it's like "we are taking this LAND BOAT that uses HARPOONS to kill DRAGONS as seriously as if this was Game of Thrones, but with a fraction of the budget." It scores an astonishing 9% fresh on Rotton Tomatoes.

(The other real answer is the 1956 Moby Dick.)

Adaptations I'm maddest about not being able to source:
There are four Moby Dick adaptations with canon Ishmael/Queequeg relationships and I could only get one of them. SO MAD. The three unsourceable ones are:

a) Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Wu Tsang. Oh gosh I really wish I could have vidded this, it's an actual Queequeg/Ishmael romance and also sounds very interesting and talks about colonialism! Also Wu Tsang says that it includes a sexy blubber scene! Sadly it has only been aired at, like, museums in Madrid and Lost Angeles and the Singapore International Film Festival. I vidded a bit of the trailer but the trailer doesn't include any kissing OR any sexy blubber OR sperm squeezing. If you're near one of the places it's airing though check it out and tell me how mad I should be about not having it.

b) Dave Malloy's Moby Dick at the American Repertory Theatre. Widely reviewed as "ambitious but not successful," this is a musical adaptation that was like three and a half hours long and included substantial audience participation. It also, reportedly, had a very sweet Queequeg/Ishmael romance, which is completely absent from the like four videos the A.R.T. released about it. But if you want a sense of the production, consider Stubb Kills a Whale, the only filmed song from the production, and observe how I was unable to vid it in Here It Goes Again because of the audience participating in pink ponchos. And this adaptation also includes sperm squeezing which I was sadly denied? I can't believe I could have had TWO Queequeg/Ishmael sperm squeezing romances and instead I got NONE.

c) The Plexus Polaire Moby Dick puppet show, which is also not recorded - I vidded a bit of the trailer. skygiants reviewed the production here. There is a romantic scene between puppet Queequeg and puppet Ishmael and I wanted it! Also I wanted more of the whale puppet which I would have loved to have put in Here It Goes Again.

The only one I had access to is Ishmael by the Dead Puppet Society. It's set in the future, Moby Dick is an asteroid, Ishmael is a woman (who just killed her mom and ended a revolution against a dystopian society), Queequeg is a 900 year old android (who is powered by a perfect battery), and it looks nothing like any other canon I had. I tried to put the meet cute in "Queequeg and I" but they were on separate sides of the room instead of there-was-only-one-bed? Anyway it felt really weird to suddenly cut to the-future-and-Queequeg's-a-robot-and-Ishmael-is-a-woman just for a single shot of a kiss in that vid? So they didn't make it into the vid because there were literally no parallels.

Best Moby Dick adaptation not on the wikipedia list of Moby Dick adaptations:
I have no idea why The Sea Beast (2022) isn't on the list of Moby Dick adaptations. It's full of classic shots and Moby Dick themes? The captain nearly destroys the ship harpooning the sea beast in revenge? The shots parallel so well? IDEK. I put this movie in Here It Goes Again and #teamwhale - small child makes friends with the whale sea beast and then we learn that whaling is bad - and, hilariously, it is a children's animated film that gets the sailing parts right? They take the difference between the mainsail and topsail seriously.

Adaptations that I wanted to include but didn't make work:
Two good ones:
Pocketsizedquasar, who makes the Moby Dick webcomic, also drew a cool comic / text about Queequeg's tattoos, called "It Is Mine." I wanted to fit it into "Queequeg and I" but I couldn't make it work.

Speak, Thou Vast and Venerable Head by Julia Oldham, a super creepy semi-body-horror-y ink-style animation art project. Unfortunately because it's limited palette / high complexity animation it's super hard to cut into or see at vid speed.

And three silly ones:
This one isn't great but I was so boggled by it that I wanted to include it: there's a Schaaf fashion studio collection called "Death to Moby Dick." For real! And there's a video trailer for it!

Dick: A Card Based Game. This is like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, basically, but it's all Moby Dick quotes. I thought this would be fun but the game is out of print and the videos of it on youtube are terrible.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Someone on the internet made a compelling argument that the Molduking DLC was a Moby Dick adaptation, and so I checked it out, but the connection wasn't as easy to see visually.

Best Moby Dick-related kids show:
Moby Dick et le Secret de Mu. (I watched this in a combination of French and Polish with no subtitles.) Kid A is an Atlantean who is saved from some bad stuff by being put in a pod and going up to land, and then he has to figure out how to get back with the help of a monk, a talking bird, and Kid B, who is telepathic with Moby Dick. Kid B is always saving them by telepathically calling Moby Dick to help them, and Ahab chases Moby Dick to kill him and also get Atlantean treasure. Also Moby Dick sometimes teleports.

In order to get back to Atlantis, the kids, Moby Dick, and the bird have to travel the world, meeting various people and learning interesting things, to prove that they're worthy of having the tools to get back to Atlantis. Also possibly they're proving they're good environmentalists? Not sure. It's a little bit ATLA's first season in terms of vibes.

Moby Dick adaptation in which a whale has suicidal ideation
Dot and the Whale is a kids movie in which a whale (not Moby Dick) is beached, and decides not to try to go back to the ocean because whalers killed her whole family and she's sad. Dot goes to find Moby Dick, because she thinks Moby Dick can give the beached whale some encouraging words, but Moby Dick is ALSO sad and isolated because whalers killed HIS whole family, and he's like "listen, kid, I get it, I don't have any encouraging words for her." Then we cut to a reflection in his eye of the whole Moby Dick story?

Anyway eventually the kids save the beached whale by raising money to get her airlifted into the ocean, and by talking to her, but when I hit the double-whale-suicidal-ideation I was like "uh what."

Moby Dick adaptations that I avoided parts of because I didn't have time to do academic research:
Mr Magoo's Moby Dick. Both Ahab and Queequeg are purple-skinned in it? So obviously not including Queequeg. But Ahab perfectly matches a bunch of other shots so I was like, can I very rapidly find out about racist color coding in American animation in time to make this vid? No I could not, so I didn't include it.

The Woody Woodpecker and Tom and Jerry Ahabs also had a vibe of some kind of stereotyping, so I cut around them too.

A comparison of the two main miniseries, 1998 and 2011:

On the most important basis to judge any Moby Dick Adaptation, "did they get the whaling right," 2011 absolutely did not: they totally ignored that chapter in the book about how harpooners would be better at harpooning if they didn't have to oar. The harpooners stand up with their harpoons the whole time! Good for my vid but I harrumphed. 1998 on the other hand knows that Queequeg has to drop his oar, grab his harpoon, and turn around.

2011: Charlie Cox as Ishmael grew on me, and Ethan Hawke was very good at looking devastated in Ahab's direction, and Raoul Trujillo is great. So is the Ishmael/Queequeg vibe (even if they didn't film half of it). BUT this adaptation doesn't understand the point of Moby Dick: in this version, Moby Dick DOES have it out for Ahab specifically. Which isn't the point! The point is that Ahab is destroying himself in a quest for vengeance against uncaring nature! So weird. Moby Dick appears early in the miniseries being spooky and then there's hardly any regular whaling content or interaction with other ships. Also this adaptation makes Ishmael Ahab's confidant so he's always being excused from regular ship duties, which was deeply annoying when I was trying to vid the slow opening to "a vulture."

1998: More book-accurate, and Patrick Stewart was clearly having a great time as Ahab. I don't know about production conditions, but it feels less anxious about Queequeg and Ishmael - they wake up in bed together, they spend more time together on the ship, and (as you can tell from the vids), it's the only adaptation where Ishmael sees Queequeg die. However it makes one ridiculous change: Ishmael is not just new to whaling, he is 100% new to sailing. It's all "oh no his poor schoolteacher hands are so soft" and "he doesn't know what rigging is" and it's just deeply eyerolly. Ishmael is Mr Whale Facts! He is not Mr What Is A Rope!

Comments

[chagrined]

thank u for linking me to this entry buddy!! there are so many cool wacky things here to check out. I wish some of those live stage versions would come near me!!

also I was reminded of
a) this comic ami bought me that was like, inspired by moby dick but with space whales. I remember liking the art but the plot was meh.
b) this "Nantucket" whaling pc game I bought once, then ragequit super early on bc their portrait of queequeg was a generic white dude. wtaf. sadly the store I bought it from gave no refunds. 😭

[eruthros]

Wtf that Nantucket whaling game! Not cool. I did vid a bit of that game because, weirdly, it has a doubloon scene, but I vidded from the trailer so I didn't know it made that choice. Ugh. It's infuriating how much recent media chooses white dudes to play Queequeg, like, that game is from 2017 or something.

I kept looking for those live stage versions (and the Wu Tsang film, which is silent and played live with an orchestra) near me and it was always like, hmm, how about ... Madrid? Boston?

[pi]

This was fascinating to read, thank you for sharing!