Chasing the Master and Commander

On Trying to Defeat Stories

In the spirit of experimentation, I’m trying out Wednesday as the day I send these out. I will continue to play around with timing, format, etc. As always, email me or get in the comments if you have any input or just want to roast me.

When Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World came out, I had been thirteen years old for less than two months. I saw it in theaters with my parents. I remember thinking that Russell Crowe was cool, the action scenes were exciting, and that I appreciated the lack of a perfunctory love story. It would be almost 17 years before I watched it again.

Something else that was very young when Master and Commander hit theaters: The Iraq War, which had begun that spring. I was in the eighth grade, and while I listened to a lot of NPR and read The New Republic (which famously advocated for the war from the august perch of its arts and culture section), my opinions weren’t sophisticated. I thought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were crass bad guys, and I wanted them gone. A year later, I’d let myself get excited about John Kerry.

I also wore baggy zip-off cargo pants and my hair was the size and shape of a bike helmet.

Rewatching it with my parents a few days ago, the first thing that struck me about Master and Commander was its credulity about empire. It comes as no surprise that Captain Jack Aubrey is a loyal, zealous servant of the British crown—your dashing warship commander has to be a patriot, unless the story is about him going rogue. But of course, Aubrey’s mission aboard the HMS Surprise is to intercept the French warship Acheron off the coast of Brazil. That’s a long, long way from Portsmouth. And the action of Master and Commander carries us around Cape Horn and all the way to the Galapagos Islands.

Aubrey keeps telling his men—and us—that England herself is under threat of invasion. In 1805, this may have been true. But what Aubrey is most precisely doing is protecting the global reach of the burgeoning British Empire. We’re told that the presence of a French warship as advanced and heavily armed as the Acheron in Pacific waters could “tip the balance” of the war. This is a war between two imperial powers trying to control as much of global trade as possible.

So there we have our opportunity to play a simple matching game: A movie comes out in 2003, and it extolls the patriotic heroes of an imperial war. It can only be interpreted as another narcotic lulling Americans to sleep as their empire began one of its bloodiest and most criminal wars. If Master and Commander did well at the box office in November of the year the United States invaded Iraq, that can only be because American audiences needed reassurance that what Captain Aubrey calls “the cause” is just and worth valiantly pursuing on its own terms, even when your map of the bigger picture washes out to sea through a hole opened by enemy salvos.

In other words, Master and Commander is cancelled.

You see this game being played a lot on Twitter, and across all the roiling, mucky ecosystems of online discourse. There’s nothing wrong with making use of the truth that social context helps explain art (and vice versa). But there is something dubious about making your first interpretive move a stab at debunking. That debunking may not even be political. YouTube is now full of channels that cover movie or TV or video game “plot holes” and other sinful threads that, if you tug on them, promise to unravel the whole narrative. Maybe the Star Wars reboot trilogy deserves this treatment. Does Master and Commander?

One day, I’ll do a longer piece about exactly this, but for now it’s enough to say that turning artistic interpretation into a contest between yourself and the work is a waste of time. You don’t have to defeat Captain Aubrey, and given his record in naval engagements, I wouldn’t advise trying. That’s not to say it’s bad to be critical. It’s just to say that there’s often little to be won by fighting against letting a piece of art work for you, if indeed it does.

On a 2020 rewatch, Master and Commander is about a lot of things other than a lionization of empire. Male friendship is a big one. Camaraderie even within strict hierarchy and thus outside the bounds of friendship is another. All of these threads worked for me, precisely because they’re simply, robustly woven into a propulsive story.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Master and Commander stands as one of Hollywood’s great visual effects achievements. The climactic fight scene is a classic, as are quite a few other moments aboard Surprise. But my favorite is the (tragic) scene in the storm the ship faces as she rounds Cape Horn. I can only imagine how much time and money and sweat and maybe blood went into making all of that feel as viscerally real as it does. Production involved sailing on a replica of a ship from that era, though I doubt they used a real vessel for any part of that scene. Yet even on a small screen, there’s something mesmerizing about the rollicking distress of a storm-lashed frigate. Watching it almost made me seasick.

Master and Commander is a straightforward-yet-well-crafted story told through bravura acting and attentive practical effects, with only a subtle smattering of early-generation CGI. This is the kind of movie Hollywood is very much able to make and mostly chooses not to, in favor of more CGI and world-building that fails to actually create convincing worlds. So Master and Commander is most significantly a movie about the form itself—and an unknowing elegy for it.

If only I could have told my cargo-pantsed thirteen-year-old self to savor it even more.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Calvin loves dinosaurs:

A lot of the time, the irony in a Calvin and Hobbes strip presents itself boldly, ruining the last panel or two for Calvin in particular. There are other victims—Calvin’s parents, Ms. Wormwood, Susie Derkins, and so on—but the butt of the joke is usually Calvin himself. More than half the time, he ends the strip even more frustrated and outraged at unromantic reality than he began it.

Not so in this one. No one ends up unhappier than they were at the start. Calvin and Hobbes’ shared naivety goes unpunished. They find what they let themselves believe to be dinosaur bones, and they make big plans about their reward. We know they won’t get it, but just like we’re charmed that they believe some old litter is a pile of T-Rex bones, we’re glad they extend the fantasy.

If it also works when Hobbes pushes the fantasy toward “babes,” that’s because there’s nothing crass about the notional sexuality of a stuffed tiger. Hobbes is always trying his best to be real, with an elan that those of who are real might envy.

Sometimes Calvin and Hobbes is about little more than feeling happy for Calvin and Hobbes.

Other fun things

— This went viral last week, but The Bread Essay is worth checking out if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s about coping with a sense of failure and inadequacy as the rules of reality shift around you. Apparently Sabrina Orah Mark does a whole column rooted in fairy tales?

— Friend of the newsletter Karlo Yeager Rodriguez showed me this charming little story about a free library that… well, you’ll see

— From S.L. Huang, here’s a piece that starts to sketch some genre boundaries—in this case, between sci-fi and “thriller”—which is a pet topic of mine

A poem

Adrienne Rich wants us to remember to talk about trees