Analysis of ‘Orca’

Orca: The Killer Whale is a 1977 film directed by Michael Anderson and produced by Dino de Laurentis. It stars Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and Will Sampson (whom you may recall as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). The film costars Bo Derek, Keenan Wynn (who had a small part in Dr. Strangelove), and Robert Carradine (who would later play Lewis Skolnick, the geek with the grating laugh, in the Revenge of the Nerds franchise).

Orca was a modest box office success, but it got mostly bad reviews from the critics who, as with audiences, felt it was too imitative of Jaws, which came out two years earlier. Certainly, de Laurentis wanted to capitalize on the success of Jaws, having called writer/producer Luciano Vincenzoni to tell him to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.”

Yet, as with Richard Harris, I must say that the claim that Orca merely imitates Jaws is unfair. Any similarities between the two films are only superficial. The differences between the two are far more apparent, if you’ve been paying attention while watching.

Jaws is essentially horror, while Orca is more of an adventure film. The shark is terrorizing people on a beach because it relentlessly wants to eat, but the orca wants revenge on the man who killed its mate and unborn calf. This second point leads us to the most important difference between the two films: while the shark in Jaws is a terrifying man-eating machine, the male orca is sympathetic.

In many ways, Orca is a kind of Moby-Dick in reverse, with a killer whale monomaniacally seeking revenge on the captain of a ship. Since orcas are monogamous and remarkably intelligent, the film could even be seen as a love story, with the male orca seeking his revenge out of love for his killed mate. All of these things make Orca much more than a mere ripoff of Jaws, and frankly, I’m surprised that moviegoers and critics at the time of the film’s release paid so little attention to these differences.

I’m not saying that Orca is an unsung masterpiece–it’s far from that; but it has deserved far better than to be so glibly dismissed as a lackluster copy of Jaws.

Why I decided to do an analysis of the film is because of the recent spate of news stories about orcas attacking yachts. Some of us on the left have joked, through the sharing of memes on Facebook, about orcas leading a kind of proletarian revolution against the ruling class!

Now, some reporters have claimed that the orcas ramming into yachts are just playing: I find this interpretation to be rather dubious, given the advanced intelligence of the animals, and the fact that I suspect that the ruling class, which owns the media, want to reassure themselves that there’s nothing to worry about. Other reporters have attributed the orcas’ attacks to some form of trauma. I suspect such an interpretation to be closer to the truth when we consider the awful pollution in the oceans and the hunting and killing of various marine animals like sharks.

Now, the intelligence of orcas is, as amazing as this might sound, comparable to that of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old humans! Their way of communicating seems almost to be a kind of language! When we accept these remarkable facts about orcas, we shouldn’t find it all that far outside the realm of possibility that their attacks on yachts could be a deliberate act of retaliation against the very wealthiest of people who enjoy the benefits of human domination and plunder of the oceans.

Orcas have the ability to communicate what they’ve learned (i.e., hunting skills) and pass it down from generation to generation. Though my speculation is far from proven, it isn’t inconceivable that they could have somehow linked fishermen’s boats, those who hunt and kill marine life, with those particularly beautiful yachts owned by the richest of us humans, and communicated this insight, or at least an inkling of this insight, to their young ones over time. “The ones in the yachts are the fish-killers’ leaders–attack them.”

Who knows? It’s an interesting thought to entertain, in any case.

As far as these ideas can be connected with the film, we learn that Nolan (Harris), Irish captain of his boat, the Bumpo, is in the waters around Newfoundland first hunting sharks, then orcas, to make enough money so he can go back to Ireland. As the captain of his crew, he’s the boss; as a killer of marine animals for money, he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist exploiting the sea for his personal gain, and his violence against the male orca’s mate and unborn calf thus drives the male to seek revenge by attacking Nolan’s boat in a manner comparable to the recent orca attacks on the yachts.

Here is a link to quotes from Orca, and here’s a link to the full movie, minus the opening and closing credits.

The film begins with the beautiful sight of two orcas–presumably the male and his pregnant mate–swimming about in the ocean, and on two occasions, we see them jumping up out of the water in graceful arcs with the setting (or rising?) sun in the background. The soft music we hear gives off an almost romantic atmosphere, of the monogamous pair as being deeply in love. This is far removed from the tense atmosphere of a young woman skinny dipping and being attacked and killed by a great white shark.

In the next scene, cetologist Rachel Bedford (Rampling) has tapes recording orcas’ communicating onshore while she is scuba diving and checking the recording equipment in the water. A great white shark appears, making Rachel try to hide from it. Nolan and his crew hope to catch the shark, while Ken (Carradine), a marine biologist and colleague of hers, is in a boat helping her record the whalesong.

The shark attacks Ken, but an orca intervenes just in time, smashing into the shark and killing it, saving Ken’s life (Is this our male orca protagonist?). Rachel, now on Nolan’s ship, points out that only an orca is powerful enough to kill a shark like that. The audience, apparently, is now supposed to think, Wow, move over, Jaws. Orcas are way more badass than great white sharks.

Still, this scene, with its brief tension, is nothing like any of the shark attacks in Jaws, with the E-F ostinato in the double-basses and bassoons to prepare us for the terror. The orca, as of this moment in the movie, isn’t the antagonist, as the shark in Jaws is: he’s a friend to man; and though he will want revenge on Nolan, since we have sympathy for the killer whale, it’s rather that Nolan is the antagonist, however remorseful he is over killing the orca’s mate and unborn calf.

In the next scene, Rachel does a lecture on the orca for a class of university students, with Ken operating slides. We learn of the orca’s power, speed, capacity for friendliness or vengeance–depending on how we treat it–but especially of its remarkable intelligence.

Rachel learns that Nolan has been attending her lectures; his learning about the orca is not for his personal enlightenment, of course–he wants to catch one and get a lot of money for it. She tries to warn him not to try, but of course, her words fall on deaf ears.

We note by this point in the film that Rachel is also the narrator of this story; her narration will have more significance in this reverse Moby-Dick in that, at the end of the film and with the outcome of the confrontation between Nolan and his crew on the one side, and the vengeful orca on the other, that she will be the only survivor left to tell the tale. Her expert knowledge of orcas parallels Ishmael‘s knowledge of whales. Call her Rachel.

Nolan’s wish to catch an orca for money is, of course, pure exploitation, the pain of which is especially keenly felt when we consider how the orca’s intelligence, ability to communicate, monogamy, and existence as a mammal makes it comparable to human beings, and therefore it’s an animal we should be able to empathize with. Still, Nolan smirks in contempt at the idea.

Notice that in this conversation between Rachel and Nolan, the fear isn’t of the marine animal killing people, as in Jaws, but vice versa. She knows he won’t succeed in catching a killer whale, but he might harm one or two in the attempt…which, of course, he soon will.

The next scene shows a group of orcas swimming about together. Soft music is playing in the background, reinforcing our sense of appreciation for the animals, since they look so peaceful together. It should arouse our empathy for them…more of a strong contrast with the fear and antagonism felt for the great white shark of Spielberg’s film.

As Nolan’s ship is sailing out to catch an orca, Annie (Derek) tells him that these animals are monogamous, and so catching and taking one away will separate it from its mate and family, a terrible thing to do. He, of course, has no interest in contemplating the consequences of his actions.

We see that group of killer whales again, and so does Novak (Wynn), who calls out to Nolan and the rest of the crew to get ready. All of this sympathy for the orcas has now built up to the point where, when Nolan attacks them, we really know that they are anything but the film’s antagonists, as the shark in Jaws is. These two films are clearly quite different from each other.

Nolan shoots a harpoon at the orcas, nicking the back of the upper fin of the male orca we’ll be seeing for the rest of the film. We’ll now be able to identify him by that injury, which is symbolic of the greater pain caused by Nolan that will drive the orca’s lust for revenge.

That greater pain comes when we see Nolan’s harpoon hit the orca’s pregnant mate. We hear her squeals of pain: even Nolan is disturbed by the expressiveness of her squeals. He notes that she sounds almost human.

The wounded female comes toward the ship, and Annie notes that the female, swimming into the ship’s propeller, is trying to kill herself. Her blood is mixing all over with the water. This, properly understood, is the true moment of horror in the film…though one must have sympathy for animals to understand.

Nolan tells Novak, “help me get this crazy fish onboard.” I’m reminded of when Ishmael insists that sperm whales like Moby Dick are fish, in spite of their status as mammals, like the orca.

More horror comes when, once the mother orca is taken onboard and raised up, she miscarries, and her unborn calf comes out. Nolan himself is disturbed by the sight, being reminded of a time when his pregnant wife was killed with their unborn child in a car accident involving a drunk driver.

As all of these horrors are happening, the male orca, of course, has been watching. He and his family are the victims of human rapaciousness motivated by the urge to make money, not humans victimized by a marine predator. The scene in Jaws, when the boy on the beach is eaten by the shark, we see the famous dolly zoom on Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) watching the killing in shock, and the boy’s mother searching for him and finding only his blood and mangled inflatable swimming float–this is the opposite of what we’ve just seen in Orca. This film is not imitating Jaws.

The male orca roars in grief at the sight of the calf falling from its mother onto the floor of the ship’s deck. This is too painful for Nolan to see, too, so he gets a hose and sprays the calf so it will fall off the ship and into the water. On the one hand, he’s sensitive enough to be horrified at the sight of the consequences of what he’s done, but he isn’t sensitive enough to dispose of the calf in a respectful way.

This is what happens when man treats animals with no respect. In what is now the US, when the Native Americans killed any bison, they were grateful to it for what it provided them with, wasting none of its body. In contrast, the white man recklessly killed almost all the bison before finally coming to his senses in the late 19th century. By the time Nolan realizes what he’s done, the male orca is already eyeing him with thoughts of revenge.

This callous killing of animals for commodities or for sport is the kind of thing that enrages animal rights activists, of course; but with our male orca here, wailing for vengeance against Nolan and having an intelligence comparable to that of humans, we can see this film as allegorical of the struggle of animal rights activists against capitalists like Nolan, however petite bourgeois they might be, who hunt and kill for money. With this allegory, we can see a connection between Orca and the recent killer whale attacks on yachts.

(And as a side note, it is interesting to see in this connection how Jaws, with a marine animal that is feared and must be killed, is the successful movie; but Orca, with a sympathetic marine animal that has been wronged by man, is the failed movie.)

As the Bumpo is sailing back to shore in the evening, the orca has been following it. He rams into the ship, causing Annie to fall, injure her leg, and need a cast. The orca continues attacking the ship, and Nolan gets a rifle, meaning to shoot it. Realizing the female is still alive (though only barely so), the crew decides to drop her and release her back into the sea.

Novak, up at the ship’s boom, cuts the female loose; but the male comes up out of the water, grabs Novak with his teeth, and drags the man off the ship and into the sea, killing him. The male orca and Nolan exchange antagonistic looks. The next morning, the male pushes the now-dead female ashore. Other orcas are with him. Sympathetic music reminds us of who the film’s hero is.

Nolan goes over to the shore where the female orca has been left. He’s feeling more and more remorseful over what he’s done. Though he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist killing marine animals for money, he has a sensitive side, just as many capitalists do, they who may try to make work more comfortable for their employees; but it isn’t their personal attitude that is or isn’t the problem–it’s the social relations of production that are the problem. So Nolan can have a heart and still be the principal wrongdoer of the film, because his wrongdoing stems from his livelihood.

Rachel, who is also at the shore by the dead orca, realizes that, since Nolan left his ship nearby, where the male pushed his dead mate, that the male followed him. A local aboriginal man named Jacob Umilak (Sampson) appears and agrees with Rachel. He tells Nolan of his people’s experiences with orcas, of the error of trying to kill them, and of how the orca will “always remember the human being who had tried to harm them.”

Nolan may be remorseful, but he still doesn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. Umilak advises him to stay away from this whole fishing area. Rachel insists that the male orca has seen him…and remembers him.

In his growing guilt, Nolan visits the local church, where after asking the reverend if it’s possible to sin against an animal, he’s told that one can sin against a blade of grass. The reverend’s answer is poignant, given how man has been sinning against the whole Earth, especially over the past four decades since the release of this film, all for the sake of maximizing profits and maintaining imperial power.

A particularly important point is made when the reverend says that one sins against oneself. Nolan’s killing of the orca’s mate and unborn calf, while reminding him of the drunk driver’s killing of his pregnant wife and unborn baby, is also the beginning of the chain of events that will lead to the death of his whole crew, the mutilation of Annie, the death of Umilak, and Nolan’s own death at the end of the film. And since Nolan is a petite bourgeois capitalist, his self-destruction from his misdeeds is also symbolic of how the capitalist will destroy himself in the end, the contradictions of his mode of production ultimately causing it to fall to pieces, through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

After church, Nolan and crewman Paul (played by Peter Hooten) are walking along the pier, where they meet Al Swain (played by Scott Walker), a member of the fisherman’s union. Al is very unhappy about the presence of ‘Nolan’s’ orca haunting the local waters, scaring away the fish and jeopardizing the livelihoods of the fishermen there.

In this discussion, we hear again, in allegorical form, the contradictions between the capitalist and the unionized working class. Nolan’s initial pursuit of a killer whale for money, though he regrets it now, has still caused difficulties for the money-making of Al and his fellow fishermen. All the same, Nolan is reluctant to do anything about it.

Right after Al’s discussion with Nolan, we see, in the nearby water, the orca fin with the nick in the back. It’s a tense moment, with tense music, but it only superficially reminds us of Jaws. The orca doesn’t go after and eat anybody: it rams into another moored boat, causing it to sink. Nolan’s misadventure is, however indirectly, harming the fisherman all the more.

That night, fishermen bring a killed orca ashore, in the vain hope that they’ve killed the right one. Rachel drives up there, finds Nolan drinking a beer, and gives him a book about “whales and dolphins in science and mythology,” thus linking her more with Ishmael. (A passage in the book that Nolan reads aloud even makes a reference to Herman Melville.) She is trying to cure Nolan of his ignorance of orcas.

Al reappears to tell Nolan that they’ve fixed his boat, the Bumpo. It’s been repaired so Nolan can hurry up, sail out, and kill the orca, which he of course is still unwilling to do. Al knows the orca is still around, recognizable by the nick in his fin, so he hasn’t finished tormenting the village in his quest for revenge. The symbolic contradiction between petite bourgeois Nolan and proletarian Al continues.

Later that night, Nolan is walking alone by the water. He senses the presence of the orca out there in the dark; the orca brings his head up above the surface to confront Nolan, letting out a ‘screw you’ squeal. Again, the two exchange hostile looks. Nolan thinks of the unborn calf falling out of the mother’s body, immediately linking the memory with that of the car crash that killed his wife and unborn child. He can’t kill the orca because he knows he’s in the role of the drunk driver in this situation.

Al gathers up all the fishermen to tell them that no marine organization, nobody, and especially not Nolan, is going to help them, so they’ll have to kill the orca themselves. Workers have never been able to rely on the bourgeois or their organizations to help them; they have to help themselves. Umilak is at Nolan’s home, to tell him that the fishermen all think Nolan is a coward for not confronting the orca, though Umilak believes Nolan is sincere when he says he has special, personal reasons for not wanting to kill the orca.

That night, having set up a kind of scarecrow on the pier to attract the orca, Nolan is thinking of shooting the animal; but having also read in Rachel’s book a confirmation that orcas can communicate, he wishes he could tell the orca that the killing of his mate and calf was an accident, and that he is sorry. He’s full of conflict.

The orca, however, is still single-minded in his wish for revenge. He rams into some pipes and knocks over a lantern, causing a huge fire in the area. Then he attacks Nolan’s house on the side of the water, causing much of it to fall into the water. Annie, still in a cast, is staying in his house, and she falls with the sinking house, her legs dangling in the water. The orca surfaces and bites her injured leg off.

This mutilation, reminding us of how Captain Ahab lost his leg to the white whale and drove him to his monomaniacal lust for revenge, now puts Nolan into a similar rage, calling the whale a “revengeful sonofabitch.” He finally has his motivation to sail the Bumpo out to sea and give the orca the fight he’s been provoking Nolan into.

In a phone conversation Nolan has with Rachel that night, just before the attack on his house, she tells him that, whatever the whale wants, if he’s anything like a human being, what he wants “isn’t necessarily what he should have.” In other words, the orca’s desire for revenge is as mad as Ahab’s is against Moby Dick. I’d have to disagree: losing one’s mate and unborn offspring to a whale hunter seeking money is a lot worse than a whale hunter seeking money losing his leg to the whale he tried to kill.

Rachel’s implying of moral equivalency between Nolan and the orca, between Nolan’s wrongs against the orca vs the orca’s wrongs against him and his crew, is typical of Hollywood liberalism. While Annie, having clearly shown empathy towards the suffering of the orca and his slain family, didn’t deserve to have her leg bitten off, she, as one of Nolan’s crew, still was involved in the orca hunt that led to all of this suffering. Nolan can’t expect to get away with what he’s done unscathed…be the scathing that of his own person or of someone associated with him.

Since I see the orca as representative of the proletariat fighting back against the bourgeoisie–be they the super-wealthy in their yachts, or petite bourgeois like Captain Nolan–their wrath and the destruction it causes is justified, even when it gets messy and spills over into areas outside the immediate perpetrators of the original outrages. It’s virtually impossible to mete out punishments in exact proportion to the extent of the original crime. Life is not so clear-cut when it comes to karma.

Though Nolan, Paul, Umilak, Ken, and Rachel go out in the Bumpo to confront the orca, the captain still has mixed feelings about killing the animal. His remorse over what he’s done to the orca’s family still tempers his rage against the orca’s destruction of his home and maiming of Annie. So he hasn’t the single-minded vindictiveness of Ahab or the orca; and while in Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Matt Hooper, sailing on the Orca [!], are determined to kill the shark, Nolan is still not so sure of his purpose: kill the orca, or let the animal kill him?

Again I must say: Jaws and Orca are quite different from each other.

With Umilak, an aboriginal, among the crew on their quest to get the orca, we see another, if slight, parallel with the multicultural crew of the Pequod–recall Tashtego, the Native American on Ahab’s ship.

Nolan has the ship sail to the exact same place where he maimed the orca’s mate, but the orca makes the crew follow him north to an area with icebergs. One is reminded of the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster up in the Arctic. Indeed, in wronging the orca, Nolan has created a monster of his own, which he too must confront in the icy cold.

Leading up to this final confrontation, Ken, leaning over to the side of the ship, is grabbed by the orca’s jaws, pulled over into the water, and killed. When the crew reaches the icy area, Paul, having gotten into a lifeboat, is knocked out of it by the orca, and he drowns. Umilak, having sent out an SOS so a helicopter can come and rescue any survivors, is crushed in an avalanche of ice.

Nolan manages to hit the orca with his harpoon, but the orca outsmarts him, having sunk the ship and isolated him on a large piece of floating ice. The orca tips the ice, making Nolan fall into the water. Delighting in the final achievement of his revenge, the orca swims a perimeter around Nolan, who is struggling to keep his head above water. Rachel can only helplessly watch from another iceberg.

The whale uses its tail to throw Nolan in the air, making him smack into an iceberg and killing him. Note how he not only doesn’t kill the orca, the way Brody kills the shark, nor does Nolan explode, as the shark does. We aren’t exultant over the death; we’re saddened by it, as we are by Ahab’s tragic self-destruction.

A helicopter soon arrives to rescue Rachel…and she only is escaped alone to tell thee.

Seriously, though Orca is no Moby-Dick–the film has no grand theme, and its black-and-white whale doesn’t symbolize something as awe-inspiring as the white whale does–Orca isn’t a poor man’s Jaws, either. To get poor Jaws imitations, check out the awful Jaws sequels, instead.

Meanwhile, the recent orca attacks on yachts should revive an interest in this film…and, I hope, a reevaluation of it.

ORCAS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!