Moby Dick Blogging

Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. It’s fascinating the way it combines a huge number of genres and sources of information into one cohesive whole, from the history of the word “whale” to discussions of (at the time) scientific theories about whales, the process of hunting, butchering and transporting whales, the place of whales in the global economy. And that is just the stuff surrounding the main narrative, the story of a man who’s barely there surrounded by a representatives from all over the globe, stuck on a ship captained by a madman at war with nature. It’s epic stuff.

Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat are worried about a particularly dire sounding adaptation of Moby Dick into a movie. Of course it’s not going to be a good movie. Most great works of literature can’t be turned into successful films. It’s absurd to think that they could. Most great works of art are extremely medium specific. This is why it’s so rare to hear a great cover of a great song, especially one as idiosyncratic as something like Moby Dick. It’s much easier to turn a bad book into a great movie (say, The Godfather, Fight Club or The Shining) than a great book into a good movie (Wings of the Dove, perhaps. An okay movie, but an amazing book). I’ve only seen a couple of films that truly topped good to great novels that they were working from: No Country for Old Men to name a recent example, but also Blade Runner, Election and American Psycho.

If Patrick Stewart and the CBC couldn’t kill Moby Dick, I think we’ll live through this one as well.