The Whale

I don't understand The Whale. I didn't understand it as a play, and I didn't understand it any better as a Darren Aronofsky film. This is, by the way, a very Darren Aronofsky film. It hates people and hates the god just as much as Mother! and Noah. The Whale is, in many ways, a perfect companion to these two very religious films, because this film is also about religion and horrible, horrible human beings.

The part that makes no sense to me, though, is the point of all of these portraits of horrible people. And I don't understand the purpose of the portrait of the delusional person at the film's center. (Aronofsky films are always about delusion.) This person is delusional about how wonderful people are. He somehow simultaneously believes that people are "amazing" (he uses this word more times than I could count) and wonderful while also willfully deciding to commit suicide. What does it mean to want to die but also to believe that the world is filled with people who are incapable of being unkind?

And of course one could say "I am large, I contain multitudes", as a poet the film cites once said, and one would be right. The film's protagonist can want to die while also believing in the inherent goodness of even the worst people in the world. But surely this is stretching things a bit.

For me, this film felt phony from start to finish. It doesn't strike a single true note. The situation that poses as a plot feels totally manufactured, and the backstories of the characters as they are revealed to us feel like theoretical feelings that people might have had rather than actual ideas thought by any real people.

As with the other two recent Aronofsky films, The Whale, although it's actually not a film about Jonah, is very, very angry at the god. But it also believes that the god is real. These two ideas can go together, and I understand their coexistence. Neither one, however, is at all interesting to me.