From the Old Testament’s Jonah to Herman Melville’s Great American Novel “Moby Dick” to the “Free Willy” film franchise to the 2002 Maori movie “Whale Rider” to the Maine lobster diver who claimed to be swallowed by a humpback last June, whales have loomed large in the human imagination.
Of course, these remarkable creatures include blue whales, who – reaching up to 98 feet long and 199 tons — are the largest animals known to have ever existed. And adding to these marine mammals’ mystique, whales also sing — as a means of often long-distance communications.
Since 1989, one whale in particular has captured the attention of scientists, media and members of the general public. This whale calls out in a frequency — 52 Hertz — that is different from the frequencies all whales as a species communicate at. As such, this mysterious individual, who researchers call “52,” is believed to have spent its entire life in solitude. The whale’s call was first recorded in 1989 by the Navy, which initially suspected the sound was coming from a Russian submarine.
No one has ever spotted this whale. Until now, that is (sort of).
In a new documentary, “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52,” filmmaker Joshua Zeman and executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio have assembled a motley crew of marine biologists, oceanographers, adventurers and documentarians to embark on a seafaring, cinematic quest to locate this elusive aquatic troubadour of the deep. Utilizing SOSUS – the Sound Surveillance System that the US Navy used to track Soviet submarines, and other high tech snooping techniques and devices — the team boards a ship named Truth to find, as the 96-minute nonfiction film’s title puts it, “The Loneliest Whale,” somewhere off the Southern California coast.
In doing so, Zeman goes from his urban legend-inspired doc about missing children, “Cropsey,” to cetacean searching. The cowriter/director – who appears onscreen as a character in the film himself – portentously references Melville’s “Moby Dick,” declaring: “We all have our great white whale – mine is 52.” And with the zeal of Captain Ahab, Zeman embarks on what his film’s subtitle calls “The Search for 52.” Only, he wields a camera, not a harpoon.
As a seasoned storyteller, Zeman cleverly conjures up archetypes and genre conventions. As a journey out at sea, The Loneliest Whale harkens all the way back to Greek legend, to Homer’s Odyssey. Zeman selects the bioacoustic team for his maritime mission like Lee Marvin recruiting WWII volunteers to go behind enemy lines in “The Dirty Dozen.” The sequence where the Truth goes out to sea is reminiscent of when the HMS Bounty sets sail in Mutiny on the Bounty. And so on.
The expedition has only one week to seek 52 as it traverses a swathe of what research scientist Chris W. Clark, chief marine mammal scientist for the US Navy’s Whales ’93 dual-uses program, calls, “the last great universe of exploration.” Highlights of this pursuit include stunning undersea cinematography of the behemoths of the depths gracefully gamboling about in their natural habitat. The filmmakers’ arsenal includes drones, which lens awe-inspiring aerial imagery of humpback, fin, and blue whales cavorting in the ocean. During their quest the Truth’s crew also glimpses whales breaching plus impressive pods of acrobatic dolphins soaring through the waves.
To help put its tale in context, The Loneliest Whale flashes back via several educational vignettes depicted with vintage footage. A history of whaling reminds 21st century audiences that in the 18th and 19th centuries, whales were hunted around the planet because their blubber provided the oil that lit the world’s lamps. Whaling was a major industry and many ships that stalked and harpooned these hapless creatures were called “floating factories,” because of their industrial equipment and precision in slicing and dicing the mammals to derive the coveted oil from their blubber.
The barbarous practice of whaling continued well into the twentieth century, until, according to the film, biologist Dr. Roger Payne’s recordings of cetacean singing was released in 1970. With 10 million copies ordered, “Songs of the Humpback Whale” became the bestselling wildlife record of all time, and helped change the public’s perception of these creatures, who we now know have complex cognitive and communication skills. By the 1980s commercial whaling was largely banned. Also glimpsed in archival footage are fabled French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and heroic Greenpeace eco-warriors standing in the way of whaling ships.
As the documentary’s title indicates, “The Loneliest Whale” is a philosophical meditation on loneliness. It’s interesting from a psychological perspective to ponder why Zeman, a director of documentaries featuring mentally disturbed people, such as his 2021 TV mini-series “The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness”— about a possible satanic cult linked to the notorious New York serial killer – would have such an Ahabian obsession with isolation. On the other hand, Clark sagely observes that for social beings, such as whales and Homo Sapiens, “the greatest joys are in connectivity with life.”
Does 52 actually live in a state of splendid solitude, emitting sounds on a frequency only understood by beings belonging to another species? (Some scientists already doubt that.) Or is such thinking a form of anthropomorphism, of humans projecting their own feelings and yearnings onto unwitting animals? After all, in the film the technically (if not emotionally) advanced humans blithely think absolutely nothing at all about spying upon cetaceans — which an Edward Snowden of the animal kingdom might not take too kindly to. The Truth’s crew also fasten tracking devices onto the whales – for all we know, these creatures may feel about them the same way humans do about intrusive ankle bracelets. Who knows? But such concerns don’t seem to matter at all to the humans behind the film, although, to their credit, they do ring alarm bells as to how shipping lanes can wreak havoc on whales.
Do Zeman and his intrepid crew actually succeed in their nautical chase? Your plot-spoiler-averse reviewer would never ruin the surprise for you, dear reader. But whale watchers will be able to see for themselves as “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” was released in theaters July 9. It was available on demand starting July 16.
The film’s jaw-dropping underwater and aerial photography alone makes this offbeat whale of a tale worth watching.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared in Earth Island Journal.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021
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