Jacobin staff writer and Michael and Us co-host Luke Savage joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander that’s also, inevitably, about Patrick O’Brian. Luke grew up with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His father handed him the books young, and a distant ancestor, Captain John Maude, commanded a Royal Navy warship in the same era. The connection to this world is personal in a way it rarely is for a guest.
The film drops you into the hull of HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Russell Crowe’s Captain Aubrey is chasing the French privateer Acheron, though in the novel the enemy ship was American. Hollywood made the swap. What survives the adaptation is Aubrey’s fixation. Paul Bettany’s Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and natural philosopher, sees it clearly enough to name it. He calls it pride. Aubrey calls it duty. “Whatever the cost?” Yes, whatever the cost. From there the Moby Dick parallel takes over. Aubrey drags his crew past the Galapagos, past reason, past a young, pampered officer named Holland who is scapegoated by a superstitious crew and eventually ties a cannonball to himself and walks off the deck. The ship reads from the Book of Jonah at his funeral. Then it rains.
Weir stages all of this with extraordinary physical detail. The amputation of a child’s arm, Maturin’s self-surgery on a beach, the violin duets between captain and surgeon. But the film is most interesting where it’s most ambivalent. Class barely registers. The violence of impressment and hierarchy gets absorbed into a story about character and fortitude. Maturin’s scientific curiosity, his blue-footed boobies and walking sticks, keeps getting sacrificed to Aubrey’s hunt. And the ending pulls a final trick. The French captain has been disguised as the ship’s surgeon the entire time. The hunt isn’t over. Like the flightless cormorant Maturin never gets to study, the thing that matters most keeps getting deferred.
Further Reading and Listening
“Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s Master and Commander at 22”, Cinephilia & Beyond
Mariners, Renegades & Castaways by C.L.R. James
Teaser from the Episode
Master and Commander Trailer
