One night I had a dream wherein I analyzed the ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark in the context of Freud’s Theme of the Three Caskets and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. See, Freud believed that the reason the lead casket, as opposed to the gold or silver ones, is the correct casket in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is because boxes are representations of the womb, and therefore of woman; and that the gold and silver represent woman as mother and woman as mate respectively, while the lead represents woman as mother nature, or death. In other words, the hero must make friends with the necessity of dying, with dissolution.

Anyhoo, in my dream I realized that Freud’s analysis is complicated by the ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein the Nazis get their faces melted when they open the ark (a casket, or “womb”), while Indiana Jones and Miriam keep their eyes closed. In that moment, the Nazis have accepted the third casket, the casket of death, quite literally–too literally, in fact, as demonstrated by the aforementioned face-melting.

Yet Indiana Jones, by not staring into the third casket, isn’t immediately absorbed into the dust of the ark (I use the qualifier “immediately” because we are all going to return to the dust, “for dust thou art…” one day, and the hero must still make reconciliation with the necessity of dying), but by not looking he still hasn’t excepted the death that is his inheritance, and thus still does not inherit the riches of the ark–again, quite literally, for the ark is hidden up away in a warehouse for the film’s dramatic ending.

In other words, the Nazis wished to control the third casket (that is, they wanted to control death) while Indiana merely wished to contain the third casket, yet neither got what they wanted–death remains permanently outside our control or containment.

Raiders consequently reminded me of the ending to Moby-Dick; Capt. Ahab, you see, wished to kill the white whale because for him it represented “the inscrutable thing…which I hate.” Ahab, already maimed by the white whale, feared and loathed more than anything the inevitable dissolution of all things which perpetually threatens to swallow us all (as it had already swallowed his leg); Ahab’s solution, then, is to slay the dissolution itself, the “inscrutable thing,” basically, to destroy Freud’s third casket.

Ishmael, by contrast, actually wishes to be annihilated, to lose his identity and subjectivity, and be absorbed into the ineffable whole; on the crows nest feeling the waves, or squeezing the oil out of the blubber and thus being intoxicated by its fumes, Ishmael keeps imagining himself getting lost into the whole, merging into some sort of mystical unity with God, the world, Creation, his fellow man, in everlasting brotherhood. Yet each time he feels himself in this reverie, his foot slips, or he goes back above deck, and the spell breaks, and he realizes that he is as isolated and separate from the world around him as before.

The irony of Moby-Dick‘s ending, then, is that neither Ishmael nor Ahab get what they want–Ahab is slain by the white whale, annihilated by the “inscrutable thing” he wished to annihilate, while Ishmael is left more alone than ever, not united with his shipmates going down with the Pequod, but instead adrift alone on the lonely sea, the final line of the book reading “It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Ahab wished to be free from loss-of-self, while Ishmael desired to merge with it, but neither got what they wanted. Like the Ark itself, the dissolution defies our ability to either control or contain it.