The Devil is in the Details: Defining the "Boater"

Having never been excited by, or curious about, ships, and afraid of the sea, it is strange then to find that I do indeed have an affinity for movies that take place on them. This specific genre, or rather sub-genre I informally call a “Boater”, is a variation borrowed from the western so often warmly referred to as the “Oater”. Like the Oater/Western, the Boater is an ongoing thread moving non-chronologically across time, describing and depicting a period of sea faring, and in some cases a post-period, where a romantic celebration of said period takes place. They share thematic signposts and archetypes as well, repeated and reinvented intermittently by a new eye, a new hand. The Boater is as equally concerned with western expansion as it's cousin is, and the best of them find cruising alongside or underneath the “manifest destiny” of their expedition, a subtext of varying guilts that extend forth from the knowledge of their crimes, (past, present, and future) and of violations of material and immaterial bonds.

In Ridley Scott's 1996 document of disaster on the sea White Squall, those violations haunt the boys, their fathers, and their trip through the world of dominion. Superficially, White Squall is a coming-of-age film covering the rites of passage for young wayward boys still unsure of who they are into the ritualistic reproduction of the white men that came before them. On a deeper layer, a cinematic repetition of the past, and an act of god to reckon with it. It is certainly amongst the most thematically agile of these films, functioning as mainstream entertainment precisely because it understands the allure of these rituals, and then adheres to them and abides by them, but artful where it questions and interrogates the effect and benefits of the core tenets propelling the rituals. Such is the case with Jeff Bridges “Chris Sheldon” when he forces one of his young charges (Ryan Phillipe) to climb a mast as a twisted form of exposure therapy. Despite the lack of any explicit violence, the scene plays similar to whipping scenes in both 1962’s Billy Budd and 2003’s Master and Commander, dragging the horror in a very similar fashion meant to underline the act as dubious and inhumane. These films understand if only on a sub -conscious level that humiliation rituals are part and parcel to the project of expansion. When dealing with expansions into territory, commodities, and peoples, it requires violence as a control, and control is one of the necessary tenets and objectives of the project. Whether shooting at feet, whipping, walking the plank, or in this case being forced to climb a great height when you are deathly afraid of heights - any rejection of the violence is the beginning of an interrogation into the act, and then possibly, the worth of the entire project as a whole. Ryan Phillipe’s character ends up urinating on himself, and down the boat, he's so afraid, and as the scene sits a moment with what we have witnessed, it's fair to say whatever theoretical good could possibly have come from the invention was lost in the severity and cruelty of the ignorance. We do not feel Phillipe’s character has overcome his fear, (as we do in so many other films that depict extreme exposure therapy) he’s merely been introduced to another. Maybe the film’s strongest line, and delivery then, (and certainly it's strongest statement of thesis) comes midway through, when Caroline Goodall’s “Dr. Alice Sheldon” snaps back at her husband “Chris” (Jeff Bridges) “What good is Control?!”.

As these films are often in relationships with the military, they are also often layered with modes of power and authority legitimized through intricate structures and hierarchical positioning, which means “control” as a theme comes standard. Who has it, who is lacking it, and how hard they fight each other and/or “others” to maintain it, or get it, - are moving gears, propelling action from one scene to the other, individually, by group, or culture. In Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea, a move for control of the market followed by exploitation of demand creates chaotic conditions for those who are paid to fulfill it as laborers. In particular, Chris Hemsworth’s “Owen Chase”. Chase is a family man who is impeded from being dedicated to his family by conditioned ambitions that stem from familial obsession with legacy. This same familial obsession directly impacts Chase when his employers retract and delay the Captain’s commission they promised in favor of another, George Pollard, a choice rooted in nepotism. The hierarchy designed and set, the exploitation in place, the artificial text of man vs nature gives way to a new text of these men's ability to work with, and respect each other with the old goats of manipulation and control bleating in the background. From there, who does and doesn't have power in any given situation becomes exceedingly clear. Pollard has power over Owen, but not over the men, Owen has power over the men, but not his own destiny, the men all exert some control over sea life, (save one) the whales hold some sway over these folks ability to light their province, and no one has any power when pitted against the needs of empire and governance. The control (or lack of it) is over the history of your name, over the finances of your household, and certainly over the sea, and the life in it.

Beyond empire and exploitation there is another devil in the Boater, and the “devil “ is in the details, and the beauty of the details is in the devil's “work”.. quite literally. There is a decadent obsession with craft and work in the technical aspects of the filmmaking, and in the context of these films' life beyond said filmmaking. In most of these movies the soul of soulless people is found in their daily work. These films take unusual and exceptional pride in the process. The romance of work and the worker, dubiously set apart from function. There's a cohesion there, between the “wind” carrying the creator, and the wind carrying the creation, so that as the characters do the work, the camera gazes closely, in rapture as they work through their damnation, - capturing a sense of poetry in the expectation of cinematic rhyme. Repetition of beats followed by elaborate outbursts entail the design of convention, and conviction. Ropes are pulled and dragged across sound design in concert with mechanics. Pulley-lever systems are shown in detail, so that from A, to B, to C and beyond, we are shown the language of production and enterprise. Subsequently, in these films, something such as raising the flag of a ship as it arrives to a port or “undiscovered isle, and the subsequent work that goes into it is then less a signifier of an imperial narrative of dominance, than a consequence or reward for hard work in the lens of the camera. The suggestion in the subtext being that it may be their salvation. When in Roger Donaldson’s 84’ film, The Bounty, the men arrive on the inhabited island and immediately start about the work of making homes, they are not colonizing, “oh far from it!”, simply joining in, and doing what needs be done for the day. This creates the inevitable contrast-conflict between the inherent value of work, and the obscene perversion of its exalted place in their lives. Thereby exposing the consequential suffering in western culture as gratuitous when placed in contrast to the cultured abundance and sharing of the island. Exposure to an entirely different culture and natural settings tears along the seam of the mandate that any good life must be earned and validated by these overseers, and is as responsible for the titular mutiny as the undeniable madness of their own version of King George (Hopkins's Captain Bligh). If only that critique were matched by a thoughtfully fuller and honest depiction of the island's indigenous population it would be a remarkable film indeed! But, Alas, the “Boater” like the Oater, is a white project, invested in reliving its glory as much as, (and sometimes far more than) any interrogation of the actual value of that project to history. This is not by necessity, but rather selection. The chosen narratives dictate the chosen subjects. What would “Amistad” look like if the point of the film was not to race through the mutiny, but to linger on it. What that action took, the rage, the plotting, the planning, who would do what, and what if that work was looked at as their salvation and not John Quincy Adams and the lengthy court battle? What would boating tales of the histories of other great seafarers look like? Tales of the Chumash, Inuit, Maya, Polynesian, Asian, Aksumite, Egyptian populations? Where would their romance lie? Especially now that most are contemporarily involved in some way with the western project within the confines of varied and complex capitalist industry? In the Boater as constructed, its romance is in its isolation, a moving, roving white stag enclave, living and keeping its own record and mythology under constant threat of interference from the encroaching mystery of land and new opportunities for expansion of the record and legend.

The last major theme of these films, as maybe a consequence of their homogeneous on-screen populus, and certainly of their isolation - is that they are quite often if not consistently in possession of a kind of queer coding, not active and conscious, but rather unconscious and passive. It is the result of consciously forced societal morality in direct opposition with what could be said to be natural instincts, be they actually queer, or merely what has been socially ascribed to being “feminine”. Socially constructed ideas like lingering adoration or admiration of same sex bodies being inherently queer or homosexual don't jive with any actuality, and the camera as an unconscious extension of the subconscious, captures the dissonance between the two. Where the subjective individual man cannot long, yearn, desire, linger, or be unimpeded in their impression, the objective camera can do any and all of those things. In Ridley Scott's White Squall we have a heterosexual couple leading a special (and privileged) group of assumed heterosexual boys on a training voyage that doubles as a prep course for college. During the expedition the more time spent away from those shores and everything found in them, or on them, the less straight the boys seem. They begin to become curves, they start to bend, a slip begins to show, then unravel. The spectrum of human behaviors, of human intimacies, opens itself to them and they to it. This is at least in part the allure of the “Open Sea”. The Scott brothers - as the preeminent visual stylists of their generation, were no strangers to films that depicted these ambiguously queer relationships. Top Gun, Black Rain, Days of Thunder, Thelma and Louise, and G.I. Jane, could all be argued to at least infer on a spectrum varying modes of queerness. White Squall in all Ridley's scenic glory features a group of young men literally on a journey to find themselves, and they “find” themselves in various states of undress, swimming naked, exchanging long glances and stares, in various expressions of flirtatious play. Wet shirts cling to the glimmering bodies of these burgeoning young men. Muscles contract and constrict in work, beads of sweat form maps of their conviction. As they share in the rewards of their collaboration, the camera sits almost salivating over the scene. Forced either by nature or man into situations demanding enough, they must reckon with the absurdities of the policed proximity of their bodies in relation to one another, with what it means to be close without borders, and what it doesn't mean, with what intimacy is, and what it isn't, with who or whom they desire, and who or whom they don't - unlearning the boundaries placed on their compassion and emotional intelligence by their fathers and father figures.

In the case of Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd, the titular Budd’s good looks are inextricable from his metaphorical power over the ship. The antagonism he receives from Master at Arms Claggert, (Resoundingly played by Robert Ryan with spirit and tragic conviction) who sees in Budd everything that he's not, and everything that he wants to be, is a representation of Budd’s power over him, which could also read as a representation of latent sexual desire. In a late night conversation that takes place on the top deck when the two are alone, Budd almost breaks Claggert’s stone wall of impenetrable self hatred. As the conversation goes on, Budd parries and repels Claggert's clumsy attacks and jabs with genuine sincerity, and Claggert can feel it. That authenticity moves Claggert, but may also remind Claggert too much of his attraction. There are ambiguous bits of language that combined with performance cues from the two actors reveal the possibility of attraction beyond hetero-social bonding. “It's good to hear you laugh” is delivered by Terence Stamp warmly, with a hint of yearning, and that hint is reciprocated in Ryan's reaction and line reading -“you dare know me?”. A little later in the conversation Budd says this, “The nights are lonely, perhaps I could sit and talk with you between watches”, followed by “Can I talk to you again then? It would mean a lot to me”. Claggert's response is telling.. -“Perhaps to me too”. Robert Ryan's face betrays something here, a profound longing to take some action not yet defined to us that he dare not admit. This “something”, this damning mystery, is not by any means evidence that Claggert or Budd are queer in strict terminology and identity, but rather that it is through a queer lens that these emotions are best defined, rather than the rigid confines of socialized heteronormativity. The possibilities for open ended interpretation lives not only in the lack of specific belonging in the emotion, but in the pregnant pauses of the performances, especially Ryan's. Surely the Boater’s cousin the western and all film categories in general engage in this kind of implicit seduction, but the “Boater” with its cramped spaces, and mostly unisex male members stuck for large amounts of time in high stress situations that force many of real life's subtleties into explicit representation - make for a unique consistency of explicit and implicit depictions of male bonding that at the least seem unsure about the idea that these socially imposed boundaries are somehow inherent to our identity or function. As Robert Aldrich argues in his 2012 book “Gay Lives” - “Sex does not provide the key to everyone's life”, nor in this context everyone's film. Aldrich continues; “Because sex forms only a part of a person’s sense of his or her place in the world, sexual orientation should be a matter of “intimate affinities.” Unfortunately, these transgressive ideas are funneled through a straight lens that at least consciously agrees to these boundaries, so as in real life there is almost always a threshold, and in cases where it might be too easily construed as unambiguous, there has historically been some kind of on screen punishment to correct that perceived error.

Movies on boats can be about a great many things, more for sure than I have listed here, but to be a Boater is certainly to have these things present, if only in subtext; a complex relationship with the perceived glory and sins of empire or western expansion, detailed depictions of the beauty of the intricate work needed to fuel it, and subtle (and not so subtle) depictions of homosocial bonding outside the purview of the social mores on land. The mysteries and challenges of the sea in its vastness and depth belittles and mocks our self importance, and by literal nature calls into question the simplifications of our ordered lives. The Boater then, reminds us of the reality of chaos as inextricable from nature, and as a result there are things that appear in larger quantities and qualities than that of an “Oater”, where firm land seems to affirm the rigidity and order we've imprisoned ourselves in, boldly going where few Oaters have gone before in exploration of a spaces that offer few places to hide either person or myth.