Moby Dickhead

On epic classics, shitty theater patrons, and a bad inside joke.

Every eighth grade boy thought this nickname was hilarious. When Kayden first thought of it, he chuckled to himself for ten minutes before letting us know what he’d thought up.

“Tell me.”

“No, no way man. It’s too much.”

“C’mon just tell me.”

“I’ve got a new name for Kristine.”

“What? What?”

“Moby Dickhead.”

We laughed like this was genius, like it was as clever as any South Park gag we’d seen on TV. Kristine yelled and laughed when she heard the name, slapping Kayden on the shoulder.

“You fucker!” To this day I don’t know if she actually thought it was funny or if she was pretending to laugh, in order to hide how hurt she was. Kayden was her boyfriend. She didn’t seem too bothered by it that day though, as we hung out on the swings and ate more nerds rope. A weird childhood.

There was a copy of Moby Dick in our library. Why this was so is beyond me. No child should ever read Moby Dick, or perhaps any classic ever. I think back to the classics I read in my early years and I scoff at myself. Why did I read Pride and Prejudice at age seventeen? Why even bother with Crime and Punishment? I remember coming across some classics, A Tale of Two Cities springs to mind, and absolutely hating them. War of the Worlds was wretched in my seventh grader eyes, but I loved it when I re-read it at age twenty-five.

To paraphrase something I read by Nathaniel Philbrick, there are times in one’s life when a classic comes along at just the right age. Some stories require a certain amount of life experience to appreciate properly. While I can see an issue with this, I don’t entirely disagree. I cannot see myself reading Moby Dick and actually enjoying it at age thirteen. You need to have lived through your existential years before diving into the book. Austin told me how he was a teenager when he first read it. “I feel like a lot of things went over my head.”

That isn’t to say there aren’t things that are going over my head, even at age thirty-one. Perhaps I should have started this at age sixty. But then, if we don’t allow teenagers to start reading the classics when they want to, will they even grow up to become adults that read classics? It’s a messy predicament. Why even pick up a classic if you are just going to fail at comprehending it? “Sucking at something is the first step at being kinda good at something,” as Jake the Dog would say.

But I have finished Moby Dick now. It took a little over a month, when I had thought it’d take me a year. It frightened me. I steered clear of the novel. Even one of my writer heroes, Ray Bradbury, who wrote the screenplay to the 1956 film adaptation, once stated he “had never been able to read the damned thing.” (I don’t know if he finally did before writing the script.)

So I had told myself I’d never read Herman Melville’s great American novel. But after a friend lamented that she had never read it before, I had a change of heart. How hard could it be? Overdoing it, I formed a small book club around the novel, planning for us to read it within a year. But like a lone wolf, or a lone whale, I barrelled forward anyway, reading ahead of everyone like a Moby Dickhead.

I am convinced I failed to absorb a good twenty-five percent of this book. Sure, I technically read the words, and I have a vague idea of what happened. But it was so easy for my eyes to glaze over. I call this “vibe surfing,” where I just read the chapter and let the language wash over me. It is like watching Shakespeare - you don’t understand every word, but you understand the scene. You know the general shape and can follow. Supplemental details I may have lost were picked back up on reading blog posts and Reddit threads about each chapter.

And despite all these things going against it… I fell in love. So many wretched things happen in this book, it’s truly a product of its time. And yet I feel like I belonged on that deck. It made me want to go out onto a boat on the water. I have the urge to now join a whale nonprofit and see if I can lend my talents to whale conservation. The power of literature strikes again!

I feel empty now that the book is done. Like a great film that has ended, a sense of loss that I cannot regain has taken shape. This feeling is similar to a breakup or the death of a beloved pet. I continuously reach over for my book, only to not find it there anymore. It’s over. It’s done. It lives back on the shelf where it belongs. Our romance is over. The new book I am reading does not compare… although it does read easier.

Everyone has said everything that needs to ever be said about Moby Dick, probably, so I’ll keep my thoughts between myself and my book club. The most analytical response I could give was the piece of micro-fiction I posted the other week–a modern retelling of Jonah and the whale, and even then I don’t know if I said that much.

I feel like such small potatoes when I compare myself to Melville. He wrote his masterpiece at exactly the same age as me. Bored of the straight-up adventure stories he’d made a career of up to that point, Melville sought to write something deeper than what he’d penned before, and actually did end up writing the great American novel. Part of myself feels this longing as well. I look back on the stories I’ve written, that I’m writing, and I think “Is that it?” Although, I worry as a 2025 author I am too dumb to write anything deep, and the 2025 audience would be too dumb to understand it anyways.

You can never win.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever produce another thing for myself. I’m on the cusp of this–dare I say it–JOURNEY of mine, and all I can worry about is if my best years are behind me. I have not produced a movie or a book in two years, and really, I have not produced anything major in four. I feel myself slowing down. My best energies going toward other pursuits. And there is a part, in the back of my mind, that wonders if my most creative years are in the past.

When we look at it, most authors or filmmakers have about ten to twenty years of good stuff within them. They go through massive spikes of creativity, and seem to coast for the rest of it. Is this just me noticing this? Melville only wrote Moby Dick in one year. That’s crazy to me. Have I spiked? For some reason, as I was making film after film in high school and college, I believed it was leading up to something. A life full of creativity and projects out the wazoo. Today, it takes me years to finish a twenty-minute film. I worry. Even this pitiful blog post has taken me a few days of coming back and hacking at it.

But back to my main trouble: not being able to let go of this book. I believe the sign of an affective story–book, film, video game, or otherwise–is when you can’t get it out of your head after the fact. Even if it was something terrible, and you’re still ruminating on it days later, I would say that the work of art at least made an impact.

Weapons is a good example, and excuse me as I go off on a tangent, much like Ishmael does. I think I liked Weapons, maybe, although it’s hard for my to justify that one scene with the gay couple without questioning if some light homophobia was involved. We’re still talking about Weapons two months later, even though there were parts of it that were pretty dumb. (What was that floating gun sequence even about?) So it must have done something right.

I might’ve had a clearer opinion of Weapons had I not a terrible experience viewing the film. It was at the mall theater, so that was my first mistake. My good pal Frances and I like to catch flicks and spend $20 on small popcorns. We were having a discussion during the trailers, catching up, minding our business. A woman a few seats over turned toward us, anger in her eyes.

“For your information, you two are MUCH louder than you think you are,” she said loudly.

Frances and I stared at her, then back to the screen, then back at her mad red face.

“It’s the trailers,” I said.

This woman, a total WalMart-goer if you will–specacles, ponytail, probably still uses the R-slur and says “Fuck” too much–sneered back.

“Yeah, and I paid money to be here.”

I didn’t want to escalate things, so I just gave her a dirty look. Frances and I watched the rest of the trailers in silence. Well, mostly. The final trailer played, a boring poorly-written romcom called Regretting You. Allison Williams looks like she’s phoning it in for the check as everyone’s brains melt out their ears. It was truly the most uninspiring trailer I’ve ever seen. The trailer ended, and the screen cut to black.

Loudly, I said to the room: “She paid money to see that trailer.”

Sorry, I’ve lost the plot. Back to my main subject, I bet I would’ve hated Moby Dick if I had a bad experience reading it, say I was assigned to read it for a class or I had to read it with a “People of WalMart” person in the room. But that wasn’t the case. I loved reading this book. It felt so special to read something so grand that I held in my hands. I believe this was because of two factors, well, maybe three.

First, I had a very cute copy. I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but I do think cover art can make or break a book or music album. If I like the cover art of an album, I will possibly enjoy the music more. And the Signet Classics pocket paperback edition of Moby Dick I held in my hands only became more loved the more warped and tattered it became from constant usage. The spine began to crack, and I felt a thrill.

Before I get to my next point, I should let you know I am not a fan of audiobooks. I find them monotonous, dragging. I can read much faster myself without someone telling me the story, and more times than not I find the narrators to have annoying voices. But this wasn’t the case with the Moby Dick audiobook I checked out from Libby. A recording by Star Wars actor William Hootkins, I was floored by the drama and expertise he brought to the performance. Hootkins recorded this just a few years before his death in 2006, and he left behind a masterpiece of a masterpiece. He could render Melville’s dense writing into perfect sense with his voice. I am still considering buying the CD of this performance, and just having it play in the background at all hours of the day in my living room.

My final factor, is of course, the writing itself. Dense as it was, I was advised to approach Moby Dick as poetry, and it all clicked into place for me. Like audiobooks, I am usually not one for verse, but under circumstances when I am into it, I am INTO IT. I think I prefer novels in verse over poetry itself. Autobiography in Red and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous come to mind. Melville’s love for nature, even when it is being slaughtered, bleeds through as well. And I cannot pretend the final chapters are not basically an advanced monster story. Moby Dick may be one of the original kaiju, long before Godzilla came onto the scene.

So where do I go from here? Beats me. Herman Melville has inspired me, to say the least. But unlike him I am already tired after writing 2,000 words, so some stamina training may be in order. But at least, in theaters, I am not a Moby Dickhead to my fellow patrons.