SPEAKER_02 1:02

It's occurring to me that I've never really done a particularly in-depth conversation on a on a film in this way, certainly not in this format. So I feel a bit I'm I'm a little bit nervous about it, but I don't but I'm I'm sure I'm sure we'll be fine. But yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

It's it's like an interesting thing to think about. And I've been thinking about a lot lately. Like, what exactly will we be doing with these movies? Because I think I think like a lot of movie reviews are washed and garbage, and I don't like them. Um like when they're like, this is a eight out of ten. What on earth does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Like how do you like it's no, I I entirely agree with what with the with the message that you sent saying like, yeah, okay, how how does this help us to to sort of shed light light on the text and that kind of thing? Like, yeah, I'm not I'm I'm for one, I'm not particularly interested in saying this is this bit's not very good. But you know, it's yeah, you're you're right. It's not a format, and it's also not really what we're about. We're about enthusiasm over stuff, and we do that very well.

SPEAKER_03 2:03

Okay, um, so uh welcome to PequadPad, and specifically welcome to Melville at the Movies, our inaugural Melville at the Movies episode. My name is Tristan Belville Marquis.

SPEAKER_04 2:13

I'm Meg.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

And call me Johnny. And uh before we get started, uh, we want to thank you specifically, you listener, um, be you in Portland or in Oslo uh or uh New York City, we also have a good New York City following. And else everywhere elsewhere, um, thank you very much for donating your money to this project. Um, this is not necessarily like meant as a money-making uh venture, uh PequadPod, but it is nice to uh recoup some of the costs that we outlay for uh for making this project. And like uh your support is so important to making this a sustainable project for us to uh work on. So thank you very much. This is uh a special bonus episode just for you, um, and we're excited to do it. So, what are we talking about today? So, this is our inaugural Melville at the movies, and I think I would say we're starting with the most iconic and easily uh identifiable Moby Dick movie or like Melville movie um compared to some of the other ones we have coming down the pipeline. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:17

Which will take some interpreting.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Yeah, yeah, why don't we do uh Pokemon 2000?

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Oh no, I I think the difference the the similarities are incredibly obvious, I think, to anybody with a passing acquaintance with either the text or the film.

SPEAKER_04 3:31

That's right. I'm when we do the Devil Worse product two, I'm gonna have to make the connections, but we'll all get there.

SPEAKER_03 3:37

Yeah, yeah. Um, but yeah, we're we're very excited about this project. Um, just a little bit of I'm expecting these to come out about like once every like either month and a half or two months. Um so that's kind of like what we're looking at. This first one's going to be, like I said, Moby Dick. No hyphen, no hyphen, Moby Dick, just Moby Dick from 1956 with Gregory Peck. Um, and then we'll be doing In the Heart of the Sea, and then we'll be doing Pokemon 2000, and then uh there's a bunch of we got a big list of uh ones we're gonna be working on eventually. Not all of them have been slotted into particular dates yet, but that's okay. Um, so what did we think? First impressions, Moby Dick 1956.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

Um, I really l enjoyed what I will call, again, in sort of my amateur stance, the cinematography. Um they make as many movies of the time did a big thing in the beginning about it being filmed in technicolor, but then kind of something surprising happens, which is that the movie is not incredibly colorful, or rather the palette of it is very um sort of gray and brown, except for this interesting scene with the St. Elmo's fire. And I think that aesthetic, that sort of philosophy could be seen as sort of a blanket statement for the movie as a whole, which is like kind of autumnal and a little bit kind of woozy. Two thumbs up for Gregory Peck. We'll talk about it. I think he was great. Ishmael, too old, but cute, great fisherman sweater.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

Yeah, what about you, Janny? Yeah, I think I entirely agree with Meg. I think something that really struck me is how impressive it is as a feat of filmmaking and specifically in terms of the use of animatronics. I think it's really difficult re-watching this film in 2026, having watched it, you know, several years ago, thinking about it because we we live in a well, we live in a post-JOR's age for a start, but also we live in an age of w w where CGI and animatronics are just they are they've they've come such a long way, inevitably since 1956. But nonetheless, I I was really, really impressed by the way that the pursuit scenes and the scenes involving the animatronic whales were surprisingly well, surprisingly realistic. Uh especially given given the time that it was recorded in.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I agree with both of y'all. Um and I think like uh thinking about how we talk about movies and like how we talk about uh movies as they relate to source material is an interesting question. Um I think one of the most banal statements that like I I feel like I hear uh all the time is oh uh it's it's not as good as the book, or like the book's better than the movie. Um and like try trying to like unpack like what does that mean, right? Um to me it's not that informative of a statement. I think it's like almost similar to like translation, right? We we've talked on the show before about how there's lots of different translations of Moby Dick and some of the perils with translation, uh, or like translating what like the one thing into like either another medium or another language, there's always something lost in that. Um, or like it's it's it's necessarily different than the original, right? And like translating a colossal book into like a two-hour movie, um, I think you know, like you can't replicate the book in that medium, right? I don't think that's possible. Um what I think is maybe a more uh fair metric or like fair way to analyze this kind of uh uh translation from book to film is do I think that the essence of the book or like do I think that like the feel of the book is captured? Even if like they're not able to include everything, like they're necessarily not they're going to have to leave stuff out that's just like uh um a part of the deal, right? Um but does it feel like Moby Dick? Does it have like is there some sort of like subjective experience that's shared between like reading the book and watching the film? I would say that overall it doesn't feel like Moby Dick. I think there's something like uh essential to the book that's missing. I think there's like a lot of the sort of mysticism and a lot of like the exuberance, and like I feel like Ishmael's not present. Like there is an Ishmael character, but I feel like the um the character of Ishmael as we get them in the book is absent, and there's like that lack of like curiosity. You maybe get it a little bit, but I think that's like the biggest thing to me that seems absent. I agree with Meg, though. I think uh Gregory Peck's Ahab is very good.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

I think I'd agree with you there, Tristan, and I think something that inevitably the the adaptation struggles with is how do you adapt a first-person narrator? This immediately makes me think of the Baz Lehman adaptation of The Great Gatsby and Armando Yanuchi's adaptation of David Copperfield. Both of those novels have really distinctive first-person narrative voices, which are broadly impossible to translate into the kind of multi the the the much more collaborative narrative of of a film, and I think and I think the adaptation of the text in Bobby Dick suffers in exactly the same way. Um I think the way that the interiority of Ishmael is presented, by and large, for me, works quite well. I mean, they you they use voiceover in abundance, I think they kind of have to.

SPEAKER_04 9:17

And it's fine, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

I for me it works. I can understand why it might not be quite to everyone's tastes. Um and inevitably you kind of get you can tell that uh the actor is in a studio recording those things and that they are kind of layered in a very 1950s way over the slightly more kind of swashbuckling scenes.

SPEAKER_04 9:39

Yes, of the time, yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

That's fine. If we were gonna be charitable, we might say that the the Ishmael's narrative voice kind of jars a little bit with some of the more sort of swashbuckling scenes of the text of Moby Dick. Um I sort of doubt that was intentional, but I'm nevertheless really interested in it as a choice.

SPEAKER_04 9:57

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think, yeah, I think all that, I think all that is fair. I think any time we're gonna sit down with any of these films, um, you can, I think it's almost a choice, like to feel there's the intellectual thing where you can say that this does or does not seem to capture the spirit of the book, which is to say, I would say like the energy. And it's almost gonna be impossible to do that unless the movie stops doing its plot, like the book does, and starts to become an academic lesson in and in many points incorrect about Wales, and then comes back and becomes a stage play and then stops and becomes a music video, and then stops and becomes an action movie, which is possible, but that movie would have to be like a you know, Peter Jackson level epic on that it's possible that we may we may never get. So then our question becomes is this two-hour movie an accurate representation of one of the threads of Moby Dick? And I feel like a lot of us are kind of moving towards the idea that this feels more like a John Houston movie about whales because it must center a pro the needs of a movie are different than the needs of a book. We need a protagonist, he needs to want something, and we have to see him try to get it, fail, come up against his, the people who are trying to get him to stop, win, and then ultimately lose in an hour and 55 minutes. So we can't do a lot of the things that we find incredibly charming about the novel in order to do that. So then our question is less does this succeed as an adaptation of this incredibly weird ass book? And is this a good movie about trying to kill a whale?

SPEAKER_05 11:40

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 11:41

And even that question is strange because at least in my opinion, I've I felt it was very slow-paced and sort of like languid. And it's about Ahab, who doesn't have a lot of energy except for in his voice, and he still feels very Gregory Peck and paternal. That's how I'll always see him. This was post-Roman holiday, but pre-mocking bird. So that's an interesting sort of place to sort of see where was he. So yeah, I'll be interested to sort of hear from you guys how you felt about just as this as sort of a proto-action movie, or if that's is what it is, or if it's more about a guy trying to find validation that just happens to have action scenes in it, and is it successful on those terms?

SPEAKER_02 12:25

I mean, yeah, well, I'm I'm thinking also about how the film was marketed. I mean, uh if you look at the poster uh for uh for the film, you there's the there's there's a huge there's a big big old picture of Gregory Peck, and then the kind of the tagline for the film at the top of the poster is the man, the whale, the vengeance. So that clearly that's what they're going for. They're not going for um deep-sounding uh uh uh sort of introspective uh epic, which is also about whaling. You know, so in terms of the brief that the film seems to set out for itself, and this speaks to what you were saying, Meg, I think it actually hits that brief quite nicely. Yeah, it does it succeed in translating some of those other things a little bit less. I think it fulfills its own brief very, very successfully, whether or not it sort of translates the things that the three of us love and and and other people who love Moby Dick, um sort of had the success of that. Yeah, okay, perhaps perhaps a little bit less so.

SPEAKER_03 13:24

Yeah, I guess we could think about like maybe uh three questions that are interesting to like frame, like both like this uh particular film, but also like other ones that we'll approach. Um one, like, does it succeed at its own goals? Like basically like looking at the film just as the film without thinking too much about the source material. That's like one like avenue of looking at it. Two, uh because like at least this one is like uh based on a source material, to what extent does the film capture like some kind of feel or energy of the source material? Like, is it a like kind of like thinking about like translations? Like, you know, if you were to translate Moby Dick into Spanish, like does it that's like you know, you're going to have a lot of changes, but does it still have the same sort of energy or field? Kind of thinking like that, like in that like this is called a book or this is a movie called Moby Dick, does it capture still like does it translate like from the book to the film medium successfully? Um and then three, uh maybe um to what extent, like you know, like I think it is interesting to think about like the the the changes that are made uh between like the the book and I you know you're always gonna have changes. Um but like there's this one's interesting too because it's not just like redaction, like you could take think of like changes that are made um to like make it like uh doable within the runtime, but there's a lot of changes to the text that happen in this movie that uh aren't just redaction or not aren't just cutting down the source material, but actually like change the plot in significant ways. And so I think those are interesting things to like think about what what's going on and like what's the motivation behind some of these changes, some of which to me like were surprising. Um, for example, um I was shocked at the decision to make like some random sailor, the one who spots uh Moby Dick and get the gold de bloom. Um when in the book it's Ahab. I it like that to me is like a very odd one because it's it seems to me like it'd be more cinematically interesting to stick with the original plot there. And like I don't think it would it doesn't take any more uh screen time to have that be like how that happens. I'm curious what you all think about that change.

SPEAKER_04 15:35

I don't know if I had a thought about that change or even remember who took the doubloon off. Um I mean, maybe I think it what that does is it fulfills the promise made earlier that he literally says, which is like whoever spots this gets this gold. And in the book, maybe it's interesting um because it is a broken promise, but maybe in the film that we made in 1950, not that people in 1956 couldn't understand irony or something like that, but that they were just like, and then someone gets the gold, you know what I mean? Like um again, for the two-hour job that we have, they were like, well, Ahab can't spot it himself. He's the one who nailed it to the thing. Like maybe they wanted it more streamlined in that sense.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Yes, I suppose translating that moment into film is complicated because if you set it up narratively, like whoever spots this is gonna get it, then for it to be the person who says that I can see how actually on screen that doesn't quite track as well as it does in a textual narrative.

SPEAKER_04 16:39

Uh yeah, I think it could be really cool, but then it would be a different thing. Then it would be about you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Like, yeah, it would be we've certainly at the same time though, I really like what you've just said there about the unfulfilled promise uh and the way that Ahab's uh agency is made different in the translation from text to screen. Yeah. Part and part of that is also the absence of Fidalah and the nature of the prophecies. Of course, the prophecies are also changed, um, of course, because of the absence of Fidalah, the prophecy that Ahab can't die while Fidala is there obviously gets completely disempowered. Um, only hemp can kill thee and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 17:21

Uh yeah, I guess I think that's in his merged with uh Elijah. And Elijah's prophecy uh changes, but he likes it. That part a lot.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

That bit that bit really made me laugh.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Yeah, I liked that guy.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Oh he was he's he's very, very excellent, but I also got the sense of um of they had they had to append right at the end of that scene that his name was Elijah So they have Ishmael saying what is your name?

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Wait a second, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

I think it does happen in the book store. I think uh I do think he does happen in the book. There are a lot of because I did check, because I was checking to see like how much the prophecy changed. And I I do think like that is actually true to the book.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

It is, it is. It it feels slightly more contrived on screen. Yeah, as many things do, especially then because I think after that, then it's basically just a slow fade out into the next scene, unless I'm misremembering.

SPEAKER_04 18:27

Not our first and not and not the last.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Certainly not, no.

SPEAKER_03 18:31

Interesting thing about that actor um who does Elijah. Uh I've got his name here, so um his name's Royal Dano. I don't know if that's how you how he would have pronounced it, but uh he there's a lot of like Abraham Lincoln-esque stuff in this movie. So like uh Gregory Peck looks very Lincoln-esque. This was actually pointed out um in like uh the New York Times uh like contemporary review of the movie, is like they they pointed out like it's kind of odd how like much like Abraham Lincoln, Gregory Peck looks like, but Royal Dano is actually the voice of Abraham Lincoln at Walt Disney World's uh Hall of Presidents.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Wow. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide. Surely God would not have created such a being as man with ability to grasp the infinite to exist only for a day.

unknown 19:31

No.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

No.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

Man was made for immortality. I hope he uses his Elijah voice.

SPEAKER_03 19:40

I feel like he must. Like his Elijah voice seems way bigger than like he doesn't look like a very large man, but he's got such a big voice.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

I think that's wonderful though. I think it's so right for that character. Yeah, that he plays this very slight, kind of slightly stooped man, and then yeah, he does have this really kind of yeah, you're surprised that that voice comes out of him.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

Yeah. Um okay, maybe to like go back a bit and uh we I think it's great that we've been jumping all over. Um let's uh like take it from the top of the movie. So we start off, we've got Ishmael like walking in the wilderness, he walks by a waterfall, and we've got like a version of the uh of Loomings, of like kind of his monologue in Loomings, a changed version of Loomings, but maybe let's start with like the opening line. What did you all think of the Call Me Ishmael in this film?

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Call Me Ishmael.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

We hope you've enjoyed this preview of Melville at the movies. You can listen to the full episode and access more bonus content by going to patreon.com forward slash pequodpod and subscribing at the stub, star button, or a habit level.