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January 18, 2007

What the Horror Flick Owes Moby-Dick

Part I: The Suspense of the Unseen: The Wholeness of the Whale

As I continue to swim the vast, magnetic ocean of Moby-Dick, I see how many contemporary horror films (Alien, Jaws, The Abyss, to name a few) share Melville’s ploy: keep the creature hidden until the climax of the tale. Actually, the revelation coincides with the climax; and the elaborate cloaking devices which lead to that moment are meant to build terror as we are fed scant rumors and innuendos, accounts of terrible effects (damage, carnage), and fragmented glimpses (fluke, fin, spout) of something too appalling (Melville’s word), too nightmarish to apprehend all at once.

That which is ultimately revealed (visible) holds profound significance; here, as the embodiment of evil. The words “monster" and “demon" are embedded in “demonstrate"; and exactly what the White Whale demonstrates is the thrust of the novel.

Melville postpones our full acquaintance with Moby Dick. One means of deflecting the inevitable is through Ishmael’s obsessive research on whales and whaling, a lot of conceptual information that interrupts the action of the novel and delays the empirical encounter. In chapters 55 and 56, for example, the narrator details errors in book illustrations; we glean a partial sense of the whale as Ishmael critiques mistakes in the rendering of one anatomical part or another: “the prodigious blunder…of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes." After pointing out such gaffes, he concludes: “So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like"--except by going whaling, but at the “risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan"--a threat and challenge that builds fascination and suspense, and which prepares the reader for the final full, physical vision of the whale.

In chapter 48, “The First Lowering," the proximity of a whale is deduced by the white water he has churned up. Then the hump is glimpsed. And in true horror-movie fashion his awful impact on the whale boat is described: “Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us." But the whale stays hidden and the drama proves inconclusive: “Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped."

An ominous reverberation of the whale (and reminder of its mythic measure) occurs in chapter 59, when the Pequod encounters a monstrous squid, "a great white mass" ... "like a snow slide" -- the sperm whale's food, whose size suggests the scale of its consumer. Like the whale, the great squid appears and disappears from sight, until we get a full view of him: "A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; ... but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.... As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again..." And the point of view of sober, reliable Starbuck, who, "still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed--'Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!'" The monster could have been designed by ILM and the scene directed by Ridley Scott.

The squid shows up in a moment of suspicionless tranquility "one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea." The word "preternatural" - perhaps a 19th-century Romantic favorite - arouses chills itself; its use is ironic and telling in a work so imbued with the data of natural history. Melville continues the lullabye: "when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush...." Out of the calm scene this alternate white monster is spied by Daggoo from his watch. He, the ship, and the reader least expect the encounter. Catching us offguard in "calm before the storm" or "out of the blue" style is another familiar tactic of horror films.

Horror films titillate with similar well-timed peek-a-boos, designed to anticipate the exposure of the monster in all its gory-glory. For a horror film to work, for a creature to be truly “appalling," the sum of its parts is always surpassed by the whole; suggestion gives way to manifestation. It seems that Moby-Dick—from fin, fluke and spout to final epiphanic breaching, prefigures the convention of gradual revelation in horror films today.

Posted by Jane on January 18, 2007 8:34 PM

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