When I was a little, pre-pubescent kid, I was watching the movie Moby Dick on our Black and White TV with my mother. In those days of three national networks and a local educational channel, movies got on television rather fast after the initial theater run.

Years later I was both surprised and disappointed that the movie was actually in color. Then and now I prefer viewing the movie with the television adjusted to black and white as I, as it turned out even as a child, like the film noir of the black and white version I assumed it was, and thought, and still do, that it became too “commercial”, too cheap in color.

I was fascinated with the basic plot, Ahab, and all the whaling lore. Years later, ending up in New Bedford, I met people who had been children when their off-shore whaling fathers living in the Azores stepped in as extras in real chase scenes only seen from the back with the actor’s close ups added later, and who had the immigrated here. Working at the New Bedford Whaling museum as a volunteer transcriber, I have come to learn a lot of the behind the scenes trivia about the movie like where the hydraulic whale that almost killed Gregory Peck has rested since the filming off the archipelago, and the ship, the Pequod, was the one built and used by Disney in Treasure Island, and just working at the Whaling Museum and sometimes reading at or, more likely, doing some volunteer job or two during the annual reading of the unabridged version of the book at the Moby Dick Marathon, there is so much more I have learned to have me appreciate the movie that much more. 

When the movie had ended on the TV and my mother got up to begin preparing supper I asked her if besides everyone but the one guy getting killed, was the whale also killed or did it get away. I felt for the whale because both the first time when the captain lost his leg and the second when he went to get revenge, he had gone after the whale not the whale after him. Until their first encounter, the whale had no reason to even wonder if Ahab even existed, much less go after him and hunt him down.

I just felt it would be wrong for the whale to have been killed by the man who had wronged him first.

Diplomatically and rather Schrodinger-ish, my mother just commented that we were not meant to know. Depending how the movie hit you whether or not it lived or died would be what you figured it was.

Ishmael may have claimed that he alone survived, but how did he know what happened to the whale?

He had picked up Ahab’s arrogance.

I like having the choice. It reveals who you are by who you rooted for, the people or the whale.

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