The Sea Wolf

The Sea Wolfⁱ is a remake of an older (silent, 1910s, meanwhile lost) cinematic reinterpretation of a Jack London bit of wankⁱⁱ, which (unsurprisingly) falls off the sides silently to reveal the fabulous, the phenomenal, the unmistakable Wolf Larson. Though a thick femsauce of "a brutal, callous and inhuman lot" is liberally pasted over by inept (if wilful) trowels at all available junctures, nevertheless the scum's secreted scum cakes off, cracks off, falls off and then blows in the wind as if it's never been. What remains, what stands eighty years later's the deeply human, yes brutal, yes callous, but absolutely, necessarily and unmistakenly human substance put into character by one of the greatest male actors that ever lived. Indeed, this is what's to be a man, this, not the effete bullshit of femtarded ulterior bowdlerization, but this, very much this.

It's true that the world arose around him is not the most comfortable of all the worlds that could ever be ; it's true all the same that it smells quite ill, indeed it stinks to high heavens. Nevertheless, the Sea Wolf's somebody, counterdistinct and in the starkest contrast to all the others, who aren't anybody, not could, nor ever will be. No matter what ; though Lupino's eternally-perennial cvasi-prostitute / mysteriousⁱⁱⁱ "convict" is, I suppose, about as acceptable as all the others^iv -- hers and all the others'.

A film worth seeing, definitely ; but for Robinson and for him alone.

1. 1941, by Michael Curtiz, with Edward G. Robinson and Ida Lupino. [↩]
2. Some fixated, amply verbose nonsense about an incipient "superhero" cca 1900, very masturbatorily self-picking at his own foreskin about "what ifs" and similar daydreamt challenges to his imaginary "manhood" and so forth. A boy learning to be a "girl", practically speaking, and for as far as that goes (not very far -- at most a boy can turn into a boi, true girlhood lays strictly outside his reach).

   Jack London is entirely and interchangeably Jane Austen & co for a "different" demographic : dumb cunts in pants, as opposed to the more common (at the time) skirts. [↩]

3. How come it's treated with such reverence, anyway ? Hurr durr, "female troubles", herp derp "she's a convict". Convicted doing what ? [↩]
4. Which isn't saying much. The only point where the cinematic production diverges from reality is in the treatment of the sea-fished wench. Contrary to what the gelded conventions of the medium at the time falsely depict, that loose woman on a ship'd have been raped sideways by that captain for a few days, then thrown into the pit to be mauled into a pulp by the sailors, in their own pecking order.

   Nor would've she succumbed to "the ordeal", hohoho, no, no. She'd have survived, missing teeth and all ; which is why and how and wherefore the fictive depiction even gets a pass in the first place : if you want cvasi-whores looking like Lupino, which is to say perfectly ahistorical, you'll have to admit they can't be treated historically either. An... eye for an eye, so to speak -- if you want the dollie depicted with all of hers you gotta admit she's not depicted in the process of losing some. [↩]