"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the
World"
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
Encompassing elements of Patrick O'Brian's first and final
novels, Peter Weir's exciting but reactionary "Master and Commander: The
Far Side of the World" might strike one as the dialectical opposite of
Herman Melville's sea-going tales. Melville's anti-authoritarianism and
sympathy for workers and indigenous peoples is turned on its head. In Weir's
film, the sailors and the native peoples recede into the background, while the
officers and their reactionary values are basked in a kind of halo. This is all
the more surprising given Weir's history as a critic of the military-imperial
ethos in "Gallipoli."
Starring Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, "Master and Commander"
takes place mostly on the waters and islands of the Atlantic and Pacific as he
pursues a much larger and better armed French warship in 1805 during the
Napoleonic wars. The film begins with a surprise attack on Aubrey's ship and
concludes with his revenge. Since this period is so remote from 20th century
WWII and Cold War semiotics, it by no means can serve as a facile propaganda
piece for Anglo-American imperialism. Indeed, O'Brian's "The Far Side of
the World" pitted Aubrey against American warships during the war of 1812.
By substituting the French for the Yankees, Weir makes the film more
commercially viable although by no means more relevant to a modern audience's
thirst for easily recognizable villains. Indeed, after Aubrey's ship is nearly
blown to bits in the opening scene, he confides to his fellow officers that the
French were more skillful than they were, as if discussing a football match on
the following Monday morning.
In the climax of the film, Aubrey rouses his men with the cry, "Do you
want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? Do you want your children to grow up
singing the 'Marseillaise'?" Oddly enough, this evokes the climactic scene
in Shakespeare's "Henry V," when the British monarch also leads his
troops into battle against a far larger French army:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
You might recall that military historian and plagiarist Stephen Ambrose wrote a
book titled "Band of Brothers" that like all his books puts forward
an old-fashioned defense of martial values. Ambrose served as a consultant for
Stephen Spielberg on "Saving Private Ryan." In addition, Spielberg
directed a TV movie based on "Band of Brothers." The affinity between
O'Brian, Ambrose and Spielberg should be obvious. In contrast to Melville in
the 19th century, who lashed out at military injustice in "Billy
Budd," and Joseph Heller, whose "Catch 22" made WWII look like
the hellish madness that it was, they seek to restore war-making to the glory
it once enjoyed.
War-making of course requires blind obedience. In "Master and
Commander," the midshipman Hollum (Lee Ingleby) has lost the respect of his men, who view his
youthful sensitivity as a weakness. When one of the crew jostles Hollum as he passes by him on deck, Aubrey has the man
whipped in full view of the rest of the crew. Aubrey correctly observes that it
is necessary to use corporal punishment as a way of maintaining discipline
since the rank-and-file have little sense of
A character like Hollum showed up in "Saving
Private Ryan." Corporal Upham, a translator, is
not like the rest of the soldiers. He is a not a killing-machine, but a
hesitant intellectual. When he is swept up in a hand-to-hand battle between a
fellow soldier and a Nazi, he is reduced to a fearful puddle of tears and an
object of contempt in the audience's eyes. Clearly, he is not made of the same
mettle as those who took snapshots at Abu Ghraib or
who put a bullet into a helpless, wounded Iraqi insurgent.
In contrast to Aubrey, the ship's doctor is a man of breeding and sensitivity,
but far more useful in the scheme of things than the feckless Hollum. Whatever his reservations about Aubrey's crusade,
he knows how to stitch a wound (the film includes gruesome but realistic scenes
of on-board surgery.) Played by Paul Bettany, Dr.
Stephen Maturin is not afraid to raise criticisms of
his friend and commanding officer's relentless, Ahab-like drive to track down
and destroy the French warship. Ultimately, however, it is Aubrey's
bullheadedness that prevails.
Of some interest is
His passion appears totally intellectual in nature, but the real record of such
naval officers in the rise of the
"The voyages of Bligh on the Bounty in 1787 and on the Providence and
Assistant of 1791-3 aimed at bringing new food and economic crops to the botanic
gardens of St. Vincent and Jamaica. According to Banks, this project had been
planned by Pitt himself. Its particular target, breadfruit, long the object of
planters' requests and Society of Arts premiums, was meant to provide food for
the slaves, supplementing plaintains and cassava, and
replacing the flour which American independence now made foreign."
Drayton explains that the British were in a race with the French over who would
succeed in mass producing breadfruit. In February 1787, the British Secretary
of War wrote:
"it seems past a doubt that the Rima or
Breadfruit tree is arrived in the
This rivalry over slaves and the means of keeping them fed had much more to do
with the naval wars depicted in O'Brian's novels than whether children grew up
singing the 'Marseillaise.'