The Heart Of The Unknowable
“We know not its depths or the host of creatures that live there. Monsters, are they real? Or do the stories exist only to make us respect the sea’s dark secrets?”
The tradition of man vs. beast cinema has its earliest roots in King Kong but you’d have to go back to the previous century for the inspiration behind Ron Howard's recent film In the Heart of the Sea: Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick.
There are few film fans who haven’t at least heard of Jaws, and with In the Heart of the Sea, director Ron Howard definitely takes a page from Speilberg’s book, which itself was inspired by Moby Dick. While Jaws remains at the top many film fans’ lists of fave movies in which humans struggle against the awesome power of animals, it’s not the only one that proved to be a powerful box office draw. More recently The Grey, starring Irish thespian turned action hero Liam Neeson, pitted man against a pack of wolves in the Alaskan wilderness.
Personally, I never thought I was afraid of wolves killing and eating me until I saw Adam Green’s horror flick Frozen, which does a lot with the simple premise of three people trapped on a ski lift chair for several days. After being invigorated by fear, I checked out reviews of Frozen online, many of which complained about the fact that wolves don’t inhabit the area depicted in the film and probably wouldn’t actually eat people in the first place. It didn’t matter; I was sufficiently terrified.
Granted, as an animal rights advocate I usually think featuring animals in films is a bad thing since I don’t think they should be used for human entertainment. This is part of why the new Planet of the Apes franchise is appealing to me. Still, I like Neeson and I’d heard good things about The Grey so I settled down to watch it. I never finished it.
Early on in the film, there’s a bunch of information about how wolves act delivered Neeson’s character in the form of some awkward exposition. Immediately my bullshit detector went off. I may not know a lot about wolves, but none of this sounded legit. Some Googling quickly revealed that it wasn’t. So why did The Grey piss me off but Frozen leave me a quivering mess?
The best horror films don’t over explain things. Sometimes it’s the unknowable that’s most frightening, something that In the Heart of the Sea mentions in its very first bit of dialogue, a voiceover from the character of Melville himself: “How does one come to know the unknowable?” Because the characters in Frozen don’t know what to expect from the wolves, neither do we. Even though there were clearly viewers who knew that wolves didn’t stalk humans for food, it’s never addressed in the film itself. They appear as ghoulish creatures, waiting in the dark with glittering eyes and sharp fangs. If The Grey had omitted those clearly spoken falsehoods, it might have been scary instead of infuriating.
This is where In the Heart of the Sea manages to succeed. Yes, the idea of chasing down whales to kill them for the precious energy source of their oil seems antiquated and cruel to most people today (and in fact, hunting whales for any reason is cruel and unnecessary). Yet during the first kill scene, the music doesn’t swell to a triumphant crescendo. It’s somber and sad, something that is reflected the in blood-spattered faces of main characters Owen Chase and Tom Nickerson. They need the oil, but they clearly realize it comes at a cost.
Later when the whale seems to be haunting the crew members, it seems as if it has otherworldly powers. It’s so far out of the realm of realism that we, along with Owen Chase himself, begin to fear it as some mysterious, possibly supernatural, creature. Even when he has a chance to try and kill the whale again, Chase holds back. It’s as if he finally understands that sometimes the unknowable is best left alone.