Thursday, October 4, 2012

Moby Dick In Media


I am a regular reader of a website called AV Club. It’s a subsidiary of The Onion that factually reports on pop culture news in a comedic fashion. Anyways, in the past couple of days, two new Moby-Dick projects have popped up in the news.


The first of which is a new Moby-Dick In Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace movie. Sound familiar? That’s because, as Cecilia showed in class, Futurama already did this (albeit as a 22 minute episode of television and not a 90+ minute movie).
That episode of Futurama (entitled “Mobius-Dick”) was a really great episode (which is rare for the current era of the show). I think fleshed out, a space Moby-Dick could be very entertaining. As Star Trek and various other Sci-Fi shows and movies have shown us, outer space and the ocean are very similar. They both consist of vast amounts of nothingness. If your space ship or ship ship bust, you could be stranded, or worse, be pulled into the void. There’s also the aspect of exploring the unknown. Space is the final frontier! (The band Iron Maiden, however, would argue that death is in fact the final frontier.)
So this movie has a lot of potential. Will I see it or will it ever go beyond the development stage? Who knows? If it’s done right, it could be great. If it’s done poorly, literature types may riot.


The second project is an M. Night Shyamalan (Shimalamadingdong, as he likes to be called) television series. This one I’m not so optimistic about. First of all, it’s M. Night Shyamalan. Everything he does is so pretentious and so reliant on gimmicky twists. This could work with a more mystery oriented novel, or even a novel full of secrets like Behind a Mask, but it doesn’t play well with Moby-Dick. It’s a “dense symbolist tome” full of whale descriptions. Unless they take lots of creative license, the series will be very unbalanced. One week will explore the possible sexual relationship of Queequeg and Ishmael, whereas the next, it’ll be like a 19th century version of an episode of a whale-centric Nova episode.
The only positive I can think of is that this might give them the opportunity to explore Ishmael a bit more. We know nothing about the guy. We don’t even know if Ishmael is his real name. It would be nice to see an Ishmael who isn’t just a guy who is there. (Though based on the last chapter, it certainly seems like he was but a guy who happened to be there and live to tell about it.)

2 comments:

  1. Now that I am looking for it, there are Moby-Dick references everywhere! It’s like when you buy a new car and then you see your model of car everywhere. Same color too, it’s really curious. Some would actually call that the cocktail party effect. We have a world of information to take in and we only process certain things that strike a chord, like our name at a loud party or other people driving the same vehicle in a sea of traffic.
    Starbucks, SpongeBob Square pants, Futurama are all contain allusions to this classic novel, and now you are saying M. Night Shyamalan wants to create a television series? I wouldn’t say I am very hopeful for it either, for the same reasons you pointed out. Most of these contexts do seem absurd though and some of them are, but some actually work! I personally enjoy the SpongeBob reference to Moby-Dick, but mostly because I brought it in to class for show and tell. I suppose it just takes a bit of creativity to include the beautiful rhetoric of Herman Melville into everyday mindless media.
    It is truly amazing to behold the depth of intertextuality our society brings to the table; Books that reference other books, movies alluding to books, etc. It creates a limitless stream of information moving back and forth. Picking out one single item like Moby-Dick and then searching for it in popular media is not as hard a task as it seems. The references are ubiquitous!

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  2. Wesley and Jeffery--those references ARE everywhere. There may be a more recognizable book in American literature, but I doubt it--Huck Finn, maybe. About your point about IShmael: how much of the book depends on our not knowing much about him?

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