Wu Tsang, “MOBY DICK; or, The Whale,” 2022, film still

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) has one of the best-known plots in American literature – a man named Ishmael joins the crew of the whaling ship Pequod to stave off grim and morbid thoughts; under the sway of the domineering Captain Ahab, the crew sets aside the usual hunt in quest of Moby Dick, the legendary sperm whale that had taken the captain’s leg on a previous sailing; after extended chase, Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, leaving only Ishmael alive, clutching his friend Queequeg’s coffin, awaiting rescue. Such summary belies much of the text, however, which is full of digression, ceteological speculation, musings on the philosophical significance of the whale’s whiteness, elaborate set pieces, and a vibrant intertextual apparatus, including an opening assemblage of literary passages discussing whales, “Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian.” [1] This excess of textual matter provides what the critic Leo Bersani calls Moby-Dick’s “cannibalistic encyclopedism,” [2] its attempt to subsume a world of other cultural referents (in motley disarray) into an understanding of expansive, extractive American enterprise – an attempt which necessarily (and perhaps self-consciously) fails for its folly, mirroring Ahab’s own monomaniacal quest for consumption. [3] Wu Tsang’s meditative 2022 feature-film adaptation, MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, concerns itself largely with Melville’s textual detritus; it provides an abstracted and socially complex take on the material, centering those things that escape plotting or planning – from the secrets of the deep ocean to the diverse “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways” who constitute the Pequod’s crew. [4]

In parallel to the collaborative workings of a ship’s laborers, the film is the product of creative entanglement, scripted by Sophia Al-Maria, with costumes by Telfar, a score by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee, with Asma Maroof, and enabled by the artists’ collective Moved by the Motion (Tsang is a member, as is Tosh Basco, who plays Queequeg). The film is billed as a silent feature, and it is shown with orchestral accompaniment, emphasizing the coproduction of the work as the audience attends to live interpretation alongside the recording. The anachronistic play of technology – silent dialogue alongside virtual oceans generated via a video game engine, providing an expansive backdrop to the ship’s deck set in the manner of classic Hollywood rear projection – sets the film out of time and emphasizes the historical continuity of extractive violence. Insertions of historical footage mix with computer-generated imagery that might ambiguously be nebula or cosmic storm, creating historical film played akin to futurism. Before the Pequod sets sail, Ishmael (played by Thomas Wodianka) and his “bosom friend” Queequeg (one of the ship’s harpooners) are confronted by a prophet who attempts to warn them away with visions of a whale’s eye, “death in its whiteness.” She speaks of “reptilian beasts whose decay burns the earth and poisons the air,” and the film provides documentary images of oil rigs. The whale hunt and its oil are linked to the petroleum industry to come, all concerned with light and fire, causing ecological devastation and expending voluminous labor power.

Wu Tsang, “MOBY DICK; or, The Whale,” 2022, key visual

Though most characters’ speech is transmitted via intertitles, the Sub-Sub-Librarian provides a roving voiceover, both narrating and critiquing the events of the film, providing counterpoint to the work’s expansive social commentary. Played by Fred Moten in robes, necklaces, and colorful makeup, they are not relegated to a scholarly hermitage but rather live among piles of books within the whale, provided and providing a vantage distinct from those who hunt or command labor. The Sub-Sub’s speech is collaged from a variety of sources, including Moby-Dick itself, with Moten’s own extrapolation overlaid, and a great deal of quotation from the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James’s visionary book on the novel.

James felt Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways was important enough to publish and distribute himself in 1953. It reads Melville’s novel as an anatomy of a developing tyrannical personality, one possible outcome of the contradictions James saw in ever-late capitalism. And it counterposes Ahab’s fury and drive to that of the crew, their factory-organized collaboration, and the communalism and freedom they might otherwise have explored beyond the reach of nation (the book is dedicated to James’s son, Nob, “who will be 21 years old in 1970 by which time I hope he and his generation will have left behind them forever all the problems of nationality” [5] ). Among other things, James is careful to note the separation of Ahab from the crew in their labors, the fashion in which he holds his concerns above and beyond those of his crew: “for two hundred pages we shall see the men at work, and either Ahab does not come in at all, or when he does, he is concerned only with what life has done to him and his monomaniac revenge.” [6] This division, in which Ahab expects work to continue but be subject to his caprice, is what prompts James to declare him “the most dangerous and destructive social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization.” [7] In the voiceover, the Sub-Sub lingers in particular on James’s description of the force of “the plan,” the abstracting power of which pushing aside concern for the well-being of workers or the preservation of democracy, prioritizing instead accumulation and conquest.

Life on the boat is not without its intimacies and its beauties. The carefully stylized set, with its dramatic lighting and deep colors, recalls the harbor of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, a violent yet intoxicating site of exploratory desire and illicit filiation. We see Ishmael and Queequeg lingering in a hammock together, and scenes of both leisure and labor on the boat are often rendered as synchronized dance, by turns tender and boisterous. The metamorphosis of the crew into choreographed company does not signal the descent of the film into fantasy but rather gestures at the capacity of the crew to labor in a fashion that transcends the sum of individual means (Bersani calls this, in a reading of the novel, “a kind of democratic camaraderie in shared work,” which might enact a “transformation of part of the crew into a ‘wild’ operatic chorus” [8] ). Even these scenes of potent association cede to the factory-like work of the whale hunt, though. Early on, we’re given an imagining of one of the novel’s most famously homoerotic scenes, an extended rhapsody by Ishmael on the particular joys of laboring to disaggregate globules of a slaughtered sperm whale’s spermaceti. Sticking his hand in a communal basin, Ishmael recounts squeezing the sperm to liquefy it. This mundane task is elevated to a joyful camaraderie by the shared labors of the other ship workers, and it becomes positively ecstatic when, amid the sperm, one’s hand is caught in the grip of a neighbor’s and is clenched while the oil streams through one’s fingers. In Tsang’s rendering, the crew are shirtless, chanting “squeeze” in unison, and the vat they dip their hands in is glittery and thick, covering their forearms in a glistening silver glow. The Sub-Sub, meanwhile, describes the book as “open ended […] a network for futurity,” giving potency to the liquid, slippery, grasping hands. But midway through the film, this work at the vat is placed in the full context of the factory-like organization of the whaleship, presented alongside an assembly line where men batter coagulated whale fat apart, their hands now working in furious isolation. The “squeeze” chant no longer seems the work of harmonious desire but rather a time-keeping device to ensure steady laboring – the social possibilities of bodies in conjunction captured by the plan.

Wu Tsang, “MOBY DICK; or, The Whale,” 2022, production still

Whereas the flurry of action aboard the boat is subsumed by Ahab’s will, even as the crew manifests an undercurrent of wayward desire, the motions underwater are subject to drifts and eddies following very different laws of motion. From inside the whale, the Sub-Sub can critique the seizure of history in the name of progress, and the obvious virtuality of the film’s seascape speaks to the desirability of things that exceed what is deemed “natural.” This countercurrent is further dramatized in Tsang’s companion piece, Of Whales (which has been displayed at the Venice and Los Angeles biennials, the Gropius Bau, SFMOMA, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum Madrid), where a spontaneously generated VR video (with accompanying score) moves through underwater environs, without force of narrative or enclosure. Drifts of jellyfish move across the expansive screen, and the images leisurely transmute: night sky to ocean depths, stars to bioluminescence, whale’s eye to black hole to swirling storm. The video stream occasionally becomes a kind of visualizer, overtly responsive to the shifts in the score, recalling a laser show or the various graphic functions of some music software. This subsumption of visual to audio helps position Of Whales as a piece of ambience, aspiring toward the production of an environment rather than the enactment of telos, closure, attainment, extraction. Another linked work, EXTRACTS (part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial) furthers this, presenting outtakes from the film alongside an installation constructed from parts of the Pequod set; positioned in new context, without the weight of the feature’s narrative, the acting of the crew is given more playful rein, freed.

Tsang’s film sees the ocean as a site of anti-colonial resistance, even as it was traversed in the name of colonial expansion. Where Melville’s novel is circumspect in registering racialized violence – positioning Queequeg, for instance, as Ishmael’s dearest confidant (perhaps lover) while also fetishizing him as “savage” and “cannibal” – Tsang understands its role in the crew’s hierarchy as entangled with the demands of working, gendering, desiring. Melville’s canonical work is fecund in its many contradictions, as a “great American novel” that displays the brutality of American domination and as a vivid display of the achievements of communal labor even as that labor is repurposed for vengeance. In making it the subject of her film, Tsang can surface the antinomies that sustained American ideals in an age of capitalist expansion and demonstrate how they continue to inform the pursuit of profit. When Moby Dick is spotted, in the film’s final act, it is first seen as an oil platform, before it is re-registered as a whale in infrared. The violence it visits on the ship is an affront to capture. The whale’s whiteness is in the end ephemeral, epidermal, whereas Ahab’s and that of much of the crew is lived, extractive, brutalizing. The whale escapes such cultural determination, even as it is used to signify; when it sinks into the ocean’s depths, it speaks to the possibilities of escape, a rapturous fugitivity taken as the site of authority.

Whatever possibilities of filiation are hinted at in the collective motions of the crew, the final scenes do not allow them to flourish; we are given not the openness of the crewed vessel outside the dictates of Ahab or the plan, but rather the scene of shipwreck and the whale triumphant. But where Melville leaves us with Ishmael alone, clutching Queequeg’s coffin (inscribed with renderings of Queequeg’s hieroglyphic tattoos, in substitution for his body), Tsang gives us other ways of persisting past ruin. Pip, the anarchic Black cabinmate who forever confounds others’ attempts to restrict their abilities (they are initially presented as “on the lowest rung of all” the ship’s crew), sinks with the ship, but not to drown; rather, they arrive in the mouth of the whale, entering its body. There, they don spectacles, apply glistening makeup, and open a grand book. The Sub-Sub, in like attire, looks at them from across the room. In shared study, they become what Moten and Stefano Harney describe as “the visionary company” that might be found “in the hold, in the break” [9] – comrades against gender, capture, and capital, searching for entries to a new story in the midst of the present one.

MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, silent film, 2022, directed by Wu Tsang, written by Sophia Al-Maria, score by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee with Asma Maroof.

Jo Giardin is a postdoctoral fellow with the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and with the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. They are presently writing on the politics of communalism and separatism in the 1970s and are working on a critical history of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, its relationship to trans communities in Baltimore, and its often noxious effects on access to trans care and affirmation.

Image credit: 1. Courtesy of Schauspielhaus Zürich, photo Greg Amgwerd; 2. Design Pics Inc / Alamy Stock Footage; 3. Courtesy of Schauspielhaus Zürich, photo Greg Amgwerd