Film Culture (1956)

respect his opinion very much, I do believe that my interpretation penetrates to the deepest parts of Melville. It emphasizes them and does not try to avoid any of them. What do you think about Moby Dick’s message? LAUROT: I think the book’s content extends beyond the concept of message. In the first place, it is a book on the human condition, with all the complexities and contradictions that it implies; and it could not be reduced, as it has been by many, to the presentation of a struggle between “good” and “evil” forces. There is a poetic overtone in it, a song of man and the elements transcending the dramatically presented conflict. And, for the same reason, the book’s power transcends the symbolism of images and situations. Even if we see Melville’s world as a world humanized by an ethic, this ethic surpasses the Christian W eltanschauung .. . Remember Father Mapple’s words? “Mortal or immortal, here I die... I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee. . .”’ Ahab, on the other hand, is haunted by the Absolute, and that is why he, literally— hunts It. In this, he is comparable to Orestes in The Flies: they both want to liberate man from the Supreme Being. And beyond that . . . every work of art is a departure from the given world that is Nature, but it is an organized, explained world. The greatest works of art, however, go beyond the presentation of an intelligible world 5 “& and create one that is recognizeable and yet as complex and subject to as many interpretations as the phenomenal world in which we live. . . HUSTON: Yes, certainly. That is why I also think that Melville goes much further than just the presentation of opposing, warring concepts. He seems to have written the book with several parts of his nature. It isn’t just one man and one point of view—it is a half a dozen men and different points of view. It is the writer, the moralist, the philosopher, the scientist, the cetologist, the dramatist. I don’t attempt consciously to correlate all his facets in my film, but let them exist in their original richness and spontaneity. For example, I think that he wrote the Father Mapple speech in a completely different spirit from that in which he approached the philosophical vein that runs through the book and underlies the events. He wrote the sermon as a religious man, deeply passionate in his belief. And this is somewhat mysterious and puzzling, for the sermon is in conflict with his philosophical concepts. It ts, in fact, as you pointed out, a denial of it. It also occurred to me that the story of Noah is the story of Ahab in reverse, but even that cannot be taken as ultimately true. Melville was carried away by the magnitude of his thought. Theologically, the book is a blasphemy. Ahab is at war with God, there is no question about this. He sees the mask of the whale as the mask that the deity wears. He sees the deity as a malignant, rational being that is out to torment the race of men and all other creatures. And Ahab is the world’s dark champion who grapples with this omnipresent and enslaving force. LAUROT: Without this dimension, Moby Dick would have been reduced to such an orthodox presentation of Good and Evil as is literally incarnated in the characters of Billy Budd and Claggart. HUSTON: Bz7//y Budd is indeed that, a very simple book, though a later one. Moby Dick says God is evil, or at least, Ahab says God is evil. The pragmatic-minded Starbuck interprets the blasphemy on a bourgeois level. He thinks that the mission of the whaler men is to furnish oil for the lamps of the world. But Ahab’s blasphemy is even greater than Starbuck dreams. LAUROT: You seem to be taken with the ideas in Moby Dick aside from its narrative as