Moby Dick
Moby Dick
This classic story by Herman Melville revolves around Captain Ahab and his obsession with a huge whale, Moby Dick. The whale caused the loss of Ahab's leg years before, leaving Ahab to stomp the boards of his ship on a peg leg. Ahab is so crazed by his desire to kill the whale, that he is prepared to sacrifice everything, including his life, the lives of his crew members, and even his ship to find and destroy his nemesis, Moby Dick.
CrossCutCritic reviewedApril 29, 2025
Of Whales and Gods and Men Turned Inward.
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“Call me Ishmael.”
A beginning disguised as detachment — but beneath it lies exile.
Few opening lines in literature carry such weight.
It is not just an introduction. It is a confession.
So begins Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s leviathan novel brought to cinematic life by John Huston in 1956.
This adaptation, co-written with Ray Bradbury, is reverent to the source but carved down to fit the shape of film.
What remains is stark and strange: a grimly beautiful film that refuses the conventions of adventure and instead offers something bleaker, truer, older — a confrontation with the raw mysteries of providence and the unfathomable freedom of the will.
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Gregory Peck’s Captain Ahab is a gaunt figure — less a man than a scar walking upright.
He commands the screen not with bombast but with gravity.
His voice, measured and meditative, cuts like scripture half-remembered and half-rewritten.
Ahab is not simply chasing a whale. He is chasing God, masked in flesh and fin.
He believes the whale is more than a brute beast. He believes it bears intention — malice, even.
And to kill it is to strike through the pasteboard mask of all suffering, all injustice, all divine silence.
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The sea here is not merely backdrop.
It is unformed, primeval, terrifying — the Book of Job rendered in waves.
It is the stage upon which men are unmade.
Ishmael (Richard Basehart), our narrator, is never quite our guide.
He is a witness.
He sees much, understands little, survives barely.
And yet it is from him — not Ahab, not the crew, not the god-haunted sermon of Father Mapple (delivered with strange, trembling power by Orson Welles) — that the story is remembered.
He lives.
He tells.
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There is no simple hero in Moby Dick, no clarity of good and evil.
There is only mystery — the mystery of God, of evil, of human will turned inward and burning with obsession.
Ahab is a man incurvatus in se — curved in upon himself, to borrow Augustine’s phrase later beloved by Luther.
He cannot bow to God, so he must strike.
He must command where he cannot trust.
He must master what terrifies him.
His is not unbelief.
It is belief gone feral — belief without surrender, without grace.
Ahab believes in providence, but not mercy.
In wrath, but not compassion.
He would rather damn himself on his own terms than be saved on God’s.
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And yet, Huston’s film never mocks him.
It lets him burn.
The Pequod, like the world itself, becomes a floating parable of the human condition:
A company of men, each trying to make peace with the deep in their own way.
Some pray.
Some drink.
Some obey.
Ahab rages.
But the whale does not rage.
It swims.
Silent.
Oblivious.
Or perhaps not.
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The genius of Moby Dick is that it offers no resolution.
The whale is not defeated.
God does not answer.
Ahab perishes in the hunt.
And Ishmael is left, floating in the wreckage, clinging to the coffin of his friend.
It is here, in this grim tableau, that something like grace appears — but not triumphant, not glorious.
It is a grace that saves one man from drowning.
No more.
No less.
It is not enough to make sense of the story.
But it is enough to remember it.
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What does it mean that only the one who never sought vengeance survives?
What does it say that salvation comes not to the righteous, but to the one who finally lets go?
If Moby Dick is a film about the hidden God —
then perhaps Ishmael’s survival is its only whisper of the revealed one.
Not in the conquest of the whale,
but in the endurance of the wrecked.
Not in power,
but in the voice that still speaks from the water’s edge:
"Call me..."
And waits.