I recently watched Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (on Netflix), which features the return of the villainous penguin Feathers McGraw (from The Wrong Trousers). Like Blofeld, he is one of cinema’s great villains.
At one point, Feathers McGraw plays J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ, a clear reference to Captain Nemo‘s playing in the 1954 movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea — which I realized I’d never seen. (I had read the book.)
When I went to watch it, I immediately thought, wait, when did the first nuclear submarine get christened Nautilus?
On 12 December 1951, the US Department of the Navy announced that the submarine would be called Nautilus, the fourth U.S. Navy vessel officially so named.
[…]
Nautilus‘s keel was laid at General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut, by Harry S. Truman on 14 June 1952. She was christened on 21 January 1954 and launched into the Thames River, sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower. Nautilus was commissioned on 30 September 1954, under the command of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, USN.
The fictional Nautilus of the movie is apparently nuclear almost a century ahead of our timeline’s nuclear Nautilus, but the fictional Nautilus of the book is not:
Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) is the craft’s primary power source for propulsion and other services. The energy needed to extract the sodium is provided by coal mined from the sea floor.
Also, the book’s submarine has a less ornate, more practical hull design:
It’s a very long cylinder with conical ends. It noticeably takes the shape of a cigar, a shape already adopted in London for several projects of the same kind. The length of this cylinder from end to end is exactly seventy meters, and its maximum breadth of beam is eight meters. So it isn’t quite built on the ten–to–one ratio of your high–speed steamers; but its lines are sufficiently long, and their tapering gradual enough, so that the displaced water easily slips past and poses no obstacle to the ship’s movements.
Verne always sneered at Wells for failing to use plausible tech.
When I first went back and read Verne, I found his work rather dull, because it’s hard to get excited about a submarine with hatches lined with…India rubber!
His work is almost in the techno-thriller genre, but the near-future tech isn’t thrilling now.
Wells is much more of a Big Idea guy, and I found myself enjoying his less grounded stories much more, even though I consider myself pretty grounded and a big fan of plausibility.
I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when I was eight or nine years old. What a story! I was lucky enough to be reading it in Florida when my uncle visited. He was an officer on the USS Corporal, one of our older subs. He eventually served on the Simon Bolivar, one of the most modern subs of the 1960′s.
Unfortunately, I was too young to ask him any really good questions, and he took the idea of “loose lips sink ships” as seriously as you would want from the Weapons Officer.
Eventually, he joined the crew of the USS Blueback as the Executive Officer, prior to taking over command of the USS Bonefish.
Anyway, knowing that my uncle regularly served aboard submarines made my “voyage” into the world of Verne’s undersea fiction even more memorable.
My oldest post to mention the word “submarine” cited the late Steven Den Beste’s piece on the silent service, emphasizing this point that “loose lips sink ships”:
Speaking of Blofeld:
Back in 2009, Lexington Green listed ten books he wanted to re-read, and I made the same comment about Verne-versus-Wells then:
“Why, after the villain has fled in his private submarine, and while the high-tech palace crashes and burns, does the last unincinerated member of the villain’s private militia risk his life to take a shot at James Bond? Loyalty to Blofeld?”
Madness? Spite? Hatred of bourgeois morality?
The henchmen of a Blofeld might be good characters, full of dysfunctional motivations, if only there were time to hear their stories.
Consider the following protagonist, who might be an anti-hero:
With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword; the Blofeld henchman takes a shot at James Bond.
Louis Menand:
Human men form martial organizations for the dual purpose of establishing and retaining territorial and mate control, as do, to a lesser extent, the men of many other species. “Ideology” is not now nor has ever been a real motivator.
Calling Arendt a “philosopher” is hilarious.
One day soon, America will come to terms with the profound ethnonarcissism of Arendt, Menand et al.