From Moby-Dick to Contemporary Documentary: Experiencing the Oceanic

At first glance, the 2012 award-winning documentary Leviathan has little in common with Melville's Moby-Dick other than the fact that the setting for both texts' point of departure is New Bedford. With little dialogue and no narrator or explicit narrative, Leviathan's often gory documentation of a trawler's fishing voyage is no mirrored image of Melville's wordy novel. However, I interpret Leviathan as an artful extension of Melville's figurative and perceptual innovations which continue to resonate 200 years after his birth. In particular, my reading considers how reactions to both texts share a particular disorientation which when examined, reveals an oceanic paradigm that offers significant contributions to the study of Moby-Dick's influence and the developing field of oceanic studies. A comparative, close reading of Leviathan and Moby-Dick requires a break from land-based paradigms of interpretation. What emerges in its stead is a drifting reading/viewing experience that puts the sea and its properties at the center of our sensory experience.