Episode 4: The Whale Watcher & Conspiracy America

The Whale Watcher: Barfing About Blubber

Watching The Whale I was struck by several insights into the issues raised by this film. Firstly, by how un-American this movie was. Where were all the beautiful people? American celluloid and TV is, generally, characterised by a smug self-confidence with everybody sensing that they are the bee’s knees. The Whale watcher: Barfing about blubber. Holding up a mirror to a nation with a massive obesity problem is not normal fare on American screens. The clever use of intertextuality with that god awful American novel Moby Dick called attention to the theatrical roots of this production. The play/movie grappled with those age old American themes so densely inculcated within Moby Dick. God, religious belief, and questions of morality fill the pages of the great American novel. If you have ever attempted to read Moby Dick, the actual white whale is rarely sighted within its pages, rather Melville subjects readers to endless tracts on earnest searches for meaning within the Christian paradigm. It is a book that tries too hard to be morally deep and meaningful. 

A Whale Of A Film About Fat 

The morbidly obese central character at the heart of The Whale is filmed unflinchingly stuffing his fat face. Fat people are rarely featured in movies apart from their roles as comedic bit players, generally, employed to lighten the tone. Funny and fat is the usual score. Maybe, funny/sad and fat for films with a little more shading. Grossly obese in close up is not a Hollywood template for box office success. The whale is beset by an ensemble of characters representing family, friendship, fast food, and American evangelical door knocking Christianity. In his last days and hours in terminal decline our whale encounters filial responsibility, an embittered but loyal carer, daily pizza deliveries, and a lost soul hoping to save a whale with missionary zeal.

Conspiracy America: Suspicious Minds

You, like me, may have wondered why Americans, in particular, are so susceptible to conspiracy theories and the paranoid thinking that accompanies them. The more traditional explanation for such phenomena is that of the social grouping suffering from a much expanded size in terms of vast population growth. Very big cities and populous nations are thought to be prone to these manifestations on the mere basis of communities overwhelmed by their own numbers. More recently, however, I think that a closer fit for the American mass psychosis experience is due to something else and/or something more. The peculiar doubt that many Americans feel about their governments and institutions may be rooted in something more directly causal. Conspiracy America: Suspicious minds.