The Psychology of Master and Commander

For almost 40 years, the adventures of Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin have kept thousands, perhaps even millions, of readers on the edge of their seat and anxious for the turn of the next page. In 2003, three years after the death of Patrick O'Brian, the British author who penned the 20 novels featuring the two heroes, Aubrey and Maturin were brought to life in the Hollywood feature "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." While the movie follows the mission of the British ship of sail the HMS Surprise in 1805 and includes plenty of cannon fire and sword fight scenes, there are a number of psychological aspects at play throughout the movie. This paper will examine five of those aspects as they relate to social psychology, as described in the textbook "Social Psychology" by Baron, Branscombe and Byrne. Those aspects are: obedience (chapter 8), self esteem (chapter 4), stereotyping (chapter 6), conformity (chapter 8) and groupthink (chapter 11). Each of these aspects is displayed in various ways by the characters who make up the crew of the HMS Surprise.

In the movie, which is made up of segments taken from parts of several of the novels that make up the Aubrey-Marturin series, the Surprise, led by Capt. Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe, the only "name" actor in the cast), is ordered to the "far side of the world" to intercept a French ship during the Napoleonic Wars. During the voyage, one of the junior officers of the crew has a string of bad luck incidents and he is branded as a "Jonah" by a salty old hand. This idea quickly spreads to the entire crew. Eventually, the officer seeks relieve from his misery and commits suicide by jumping overboard. The ship finds and does battle with the superior strength French ship, only to be nearly defeated and to barely escape. Still, the Surprise must press on and seeks out the French ship again, seeking a way to defeat her. Aubrey's friend, the ship's doctor, Marturin, is injured in an accidental shooting, prompting Surprise to make a stop at the Galapagos Islands, where the doctors recovers and the ship finds the stranded remains of a crew of a whaling ship destroyed by the French vessel. Aubrey decides to masquerade his ship as a whaling ship and lure the French into a trap. After a desperate battle, Surprise is victorious.

Not surprising in a movie set in the milieu of military service, there are many examples of obedience in the film. To obey someone or something is to follow the commands or instructions of the other person or thing. By obeying, a person conforms and complies with the explicit directions of another. The movie is filled with examples of obedience. There are many instances when the hands - the ship's crew - are called to action to adjust the sails on the ship. These orders are obeyed without question, even without thinking in most cases. The men respond to orders given both verbally and by means of a whistle. The whistle call not only allows command to be easily heard, but is a symbol of the authority of the bosun, the man who relays the captain's order to the crew. During both combat and gunnery practices, the ship's gun crews do not fire their cannons until the command "fire" is given, which they obey quickly. A key issue in the movie is Aubrey's conflict over how to weigh his need to obey his command to seek out and destroy the French ship, after he has lost sight of it and has little hope of finding it again, against his friend Marturin's desire to stop at an uncharted island and embark on a season of discovery of new plant and animal life, never before documented by European science. Though he is thousands of miles away from the source of authority, Aubrey chooses to obey his command and to press on to find the French. The symbolic social influence of the Admiralty's instructions forces Aubrey to press on - until confronted with a new dynamic in the near fatal accidental wounding of Marturin. At that point, Aubrey's responsibility to his friend overweighs his responsibility to the Admiralty. This being Hollywood, the decision to stop to save Marturin not only saves Marturin but causes the Surprise to locate the French as well.

There are several instances in the movie where self esteem is a significant factor in the plot. Self esteem is the opinion one holds of him or herself. The term self esteem is essentially interchangeable with the terms self respect and self confidence. If a person holds a low level of self esteem, accomplishing even simple tasks are difficult. Too much self esteem, however, can also be problematic in that it can make a person difficult to be around or can lead to over an overconfidence that causes one to make mistakes. In the movie, the case of Mr. Hollom is a classic example of how self esteem can be influenced by the actions of others. Hollom is a midshipman on the Surprise and is studying to be an officer. Already nearly 30, Hollom is well past the age when a person should have been promoted to officer status. When he has the watch, the Surprise is surprise-attacked by the French. When Hollom is ordered to help a shipmate in the rigging during a storm, the other sailor falls to his death due to Hollom's timidity in responding. This and other actions prompt the men to label Hollom a "Jonah," based on the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale in which a group of sailors encounters bad weather and, believing Jonah to be cursed by God, cast him overboard. In the movie, each incident builds on the last, further eroding Hollom's self-esteem. As his self-esteem falls, Hollom becomes more timid and indecisive, prompting yet another problem: Hollom sees no way to escape this cycle. As his mental state deteriorates, however, he remains committed to his duty to the ship. In an act I believe Hollom feels is more a duty to his ship and his crewmates than it is personal escape, he decides to kill himself by jumping overboard, not only easing his own burden, but releasing the crew from the burden of having a Jonah in their midst. In the memorial service that follows, the captain comments that not all are able to become the man that the hope to be. Other examples of the role of self esteem comes when the captain bestows the honor of temporarily taking command of the ship on the crew's youngest midshipmen, prompting Mr. Blakely to beam with pride and excitement; and in the reaction of Dr. Marturin when his self esteem is boosted when Blakely tells Marturin, at the end of the movie, that Blakely hopes to be able to emulate Marturin as Blakely grows into adulthood.

Stereotyping is the act of making generalizations about a group of people and attributing a set of characteristics to that group, such as to say the all people with red hair have short tempers. While generally stereotypes are view as a negative thing, there are times when stereotypes can be neutral or even beneficial. We see examples of all three in Master and Commander. Marturin is a thin, well-dressed physician who wear glasses. He hardly seems like the adventurous, fighting type. Anyone who applies this stereotype to Marturin has fallen into his trap, however, Marturin is the ship's physician, yes, but he is also an undercover intelligence officer in His Majesty's service, a secret that is closely guarded and enhanced by the stereotype he affects. In the film, Capt. Aubrey masquerades his ship as a whale-hunting ship, knowing that the French captain will assume that the whaler is a slovenly vessel, filled with sailors with poor seamanship skills. This stereotype assumption is the French captain's undoing when the trap is sprung by the "whalers." In a stereotype that plays out as being neutral, we have the character of Warley, a routine seaman on the Surprise. We expect him to do his duty and perhaps to be motivated by the promise of an extra ration of rum. Warley does in fact do exactly that, turning in some extra effort at one point - creating a scale model of the French vessel which allows the captain to discover her weakness - in order to be rewarded with more rum by the captain.

Conformity is a response by a person to yield to the norms of the group, in order to fit in. It can relate to a change in behavior, attitude or both. The group pressure can be either real or imagined. Conformity can have both positive and negative implications, depending on the situation. In the movie, we see repeatedly how the men in the crew conform not only to the standards set by the officers above them, but to the standards and expectations of their shipmates. When Mr. Hollom is initially referred to as a Jonah, there is some reluctance to join in by some in the crew. Eventually, all of the crew and most of the midshipmen have come to conform to the thinking that Hollom is a Jonah. Eventually the officers are shown to have private wonderings if in fact this is true. In the movie, even the viewer is left to wonder if in fact there was some kind of curse or if God was out to get Hollom, as the situation facing the Surprise changes immediately upon the conclusion of the funeral service for Hollom. We see conformity in small ways throughout this movie: in the dress and mannerisms of the crew, compared to the officers, compared to the Marines on ship, compared to the rescued whalers. Twice during the movie, we see dinners where the young midshipmen join the captain and the officers for a formal dinner with the captain. The mid's conform to the actions of the officers at the dinner, laughing uproariously at jokes that are only moderately humorous, breaking out into song whenever one begins, knocking back full goblets of wine. The mid's are learning to conform to the social norms of life as an officer on one of His Majesty's ships.

One of the challenges that faces any group is allowing groupthink to overwhelm the group. This would be particularly true of a group in a situation like that aboard the HMS Surprise, isolated from friend, family and higher command for a year or more at a time. Groupthink refers to faulty decisions made when group pressure causes members of the group to ignore alternatives and take irrational behavior. As we have seen above, groupthink proves deadly in the sad case of Mr. Hollom. The crew cannot possibly conceive of another reason why a crewman fell from the rigging during a full force gale, why a ship disappeared in the fog or why the wind was calm for several days, other than that Hollom was a Jonah. This was groupthink in its most extreme form, led, clearly, by the beliefs of one superstitious old hand. In another case, during a council of his officers, Capt. Aubrey is faced with all of them saying that the French ship is too strong for them. They cannot possibly conceive of an alternative. The captain is able to break out of this groupthink and develop not one, but two aspects of a plan to lure in the French ship and then to defeat her. While Marturin is part of the ship's company and is clearly in the service of the king as both physician and spy, his first love is to the pursuit of the zoological sciences. He views as mere groupthink the single-mindedness with which Aubrey and the crew focuses their zeal on performing the mission to chase and destroy the French. Can they not see the greater good that can come from cataloguing dozens of new species on an uncharted island, he cries out in despair. What he views as groupthink on the part of the captain and the crew, they view as obedience. One man's trash is another man's treasure, in a manner of speaking.

This paper examined five aspects of social psychology in the 2003 movie Master and Commander. These aspects -- obedience, self esteem, stereotyping, conformity and groupthink - often overlapped and interacted. Though they might appear as separate, distinct concepts when viewed as terms in glossary, in the living of life, we often see this sort of interaction between different ideas and concepts. Each of these aspects impacted the fictional lives - and in some cases, the deaths - of the crewmen of the HMS Surprise. While we know that the actions of this movie are a work of fiction, these same types of actions are taking place all around us today, in our own lives. These five aspects and other concepts within the field of social psychology can easily be applied to the attitudes and behaviors we see displayed and demonstrated in daily living.

Bibliography

Baron, Robert A.; Branscombe, Nyla R.; Byrne, Donn. Social Psychology, Twelfth Edition. Parson AB, Boston: 2008

Weir, Peter (director). Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Performer: Russell Crowe. Twentieth Century Fox, USA: 2003