Moby-Dick on TV

Somebody should make a Moby-Dick TV series. I don’t mean some boring miniseries: that’s just a story about a bunch of dudes chasing a whale. I mean something bigger, something weirder, something that every other adaptation (that I know of) entirely misses:

Moby-Dick ain’t a story

The core “story,” such as it is, is just a frame on which to hang a whole universe of gothic bizarrities. The series should seek to capture that, not literally but viscerally, texturally. Only (approximately) alternate episodes would tell you the story of Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab and the rest of the gang driving deeper into the oceanic heart of darkness. The other narrative episodes are essentially monster-of-the-week one-shots like the “Town-Ho’s Story.”

There is nothing in this structure that requires two consecutive episodes share directors, production teams, artistic direction, or even genres. In fact, it almost demands the opposite.

Natural history episodes would easily be reimagined as documentaries with a postmodern lens. We could have episodes about whale biology, with all the latest science — but maybe in a voiceless narrative arc ala Microcosmos. Or how about a Herzog documentary parsing the politics of indigenous whaling rights? And we definitely need at least one Drunk History episode about medieval whale sightings.

So yeah, sometimes it could be funny.

Whole episodes could be told from the whales’ points of view. Imagine these episodes animated in such a way as to visualize sonar. What to us is an abyssal blackness is to the whales a brightly illuminated landscape. Whales have ultrasound. They can see inside each other. Tell me you wouldn’t watch the hell out of whales fighting giant squid, animated in that style.

And then in the next episode we get high action, a whale hunt. But holy crap, we know that whale! We just saw her suckle a calf and then eat a giant squid! And then the episode after that gives us all the literally gory details about how to butcher and render a sperm whale into lamp oil. Which we maybe follow to another, totally unrelated story, under the oil-lamps of Venice.

I’m still on the fence about whether Moby-Dick himself should get a point-of-view episode. He would be really well treated by the Jaws method wherein we don’t actually see him until the last act (like the book, actually).

Every single episode of this series would be like Episode 8 of Twin Peak (the Return) You’d watch amazed and slightly disgusted and after one unblinking hour you’d say “what the fuck did I just see?”

Also, and you just absolutely know this has to happen: Ishmael and Queequeg make out.

Prompted by a friends’ mini-review on social media (“I hated it”), I picked up Moby-Dick again after having put it down perhaps five years ago. My usual habit — which I started in grad school — is to pick up Moby-Dick wherever I last left it, and then put it down again when it gets wearing. In this way I’ve read the book probably two or three times, but never cover-to-cover. It helps that it has short chapters, and you can skip the ones that bore you without losing the “plot” (spoiler: there is no plot. Some stuff happens in no necessary order, but with a steadily mounting sense of dread, until everyone but Ishmael dies. Interspersed with Melville’s research notes.) If you like your books to “make sense” thematically if not literally ... Moby-Dick is not that kind of book. (Actually, Moby-Dick is quite straightforward literally. See synopsis above.)

Last week I restarted the book at Chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout,” which introduces a nightly occurrence wherein Fedullah habitually sights a ghostly spout apparently unconnected to any actual whale. It is followed by “The Albatross,” a creepy episode in which the Pequod, outbound, passes an inbound Nantucketer:

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching more TV & movies lately but as soon as I read that I pictured this scene vividly as if it were directed with brutal dread ala Denis Villenuve. That’s when it hit me that the core failure of anyone who approaches Moby-Dick literally, is that literalism overlooks how the weirdness and foreboding mount because of not despite Melville’s notes.