“The North Water” Limited Series, directed by Andrew Haigh, 2021
This is a tale of early capitalist England in the 1850s. Still a time of primitive accumulation, when murder, fraud and secrecy could lead to a great initial fortune. When colonial occupation and whaling were worth many pounds of sterling. When the Irish were suspect and class a heavy thing.
Filmed in Norway, far north of the whaling town of Svalbard, it is about an ill-fated whaling ship out of Hull, England traveling to the Arctic for seal pelts and whale oil in 1859. The ship is called ‘The Volunteer’ but the men aboard are only ‘volunteers’ in the lying sense, as they are desperate, ill-used and ill-paid. Ice flows, pack ice, barren rock outcrops, vast stretches of frozen, snowy land, crevasses, glaciers, a giant whale, helpless seals, the totemic polar bear and Inuit hunters populate this North. Blisteringly cold winds, shabby tents, hunger and possible frostbite haunt the crew.
The whaling ship’s captain has been secretly ordered to sail
as far north as possible and scuttle the ship between ice flows for the
insurance money. The first mate is an
accomplice but no one else knows – neither the ship’s doctor Sumner, who was cashiered
out of the military by a double-dealing superior officer; nor the brutal harpoonist
Drax, who leads the hunts. They find out
soon enough.
The show might remind watchers of Shackleton’s trip to the
Antarctic or bits of the Revenant; Call of the Wild, Titanic or Billy Budd, but it’s really a case study
in capitalism, writ small on a cramped, wooden sailing ship. Drax is an unrestrained sociopathic killer and
Sumner the Laudanum-addicted ‘intellectual’ he eventually hunts. The captain works with both Drax and his
first mate to cover up a rape and murder.
A stolen diamond ring from India plays the role of greed and an
incentive to murder. They join a ship of
proletarian men, all to be possibly sacrificed to the god of profit by a
silver-tongued, silver-haired gent in a frock coat living in a large row house
in Hull. Of course!
 |
| A northern fijord in Norway |
The rich and the bosses are dealt hard times in films
lately. If these movie portrayals are
any indication, their number is coming up soon.
After all, the CIA and the U.S. military don’t control all the movies
made in the world.
The brutality contrasts with the quiet and somewhat happy
hunting life of the local Inuit, who help the Europeans, then are punished for
that. A Christian reverend has found
himself a ‘cause’ – to ‘civilize’ the Inuit.
He has built a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere to do so. These money-grubbing
English, with their industrial scale whaling and seal-clubbing, their punitive
religion, their violence, seem to be the least civilized – except in
technology.
There is a great scene of a pagan May Day in Hull; a not so great pub
fight in a Shetland port, a polar bear playing the role of a protector. A bloody seal hunt and the butchering of a
whale is so real it makes you wonder if they really did kill those animals in
the process of filming. I understand it was CGI. Haigh framed the seal hunt as part of
history, but commercial seal hunting is still carried out en mass in places
like Canada. Sumner, the addicted ‘intellectual,’
is constantly reminded of his questionable status as an Irishman. The film was actually made only 22 miles from
the North Pole due to global warming, as they had to continue northwards to
find a suitable frozen environment. This is a howling trip to the North that
you will not forget.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box in
upper left to investigate our 15 year archive:
“The North is not the Mid-West!”
“Northland,” “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Seaspiracy,” “All is Lost,” “Kolyma
Tales,” “Polar Star.”
The Cultural Marxist
January 18, 2022
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