Last week, Tom Beer of Newsday quizzed actor Alec Baldwin on his love for Moby-Dick…and then the paper stowed the interview behind a paywall, more’s the pity. Here’s a (hopefully) fair-use excerpt:
Q: What does Moby-Dick have to say to us today?
A: We still live in a world where men are led by other men. And those men, the followers, have trouble distinguishing the membrane between the leader’s passion and his neurosis. You’re onboard that ship and you know that Ahab’s your man and you want to go get this whale, and then you find out the hard way that maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Well, isn’t that [Enron’s] Jeffrey Skilling? Wasn’t it a white whale he was after?
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
Sea-Fever blog 
A rather superficial interpretation of the novel, don’t you think so? Not to mention the interpretation of Ahab as a key protagonist in the human and metaphysical drama.
But that’s Hollywood for you.
“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab?”
Jeffrey Skilling was after money because he was a greedy, horrible person.
Aye.
Ummm, isn’t Alec Baldwin a bit fatter than that these days?
Aren’t we all? :(