“Homo homini lupus” or “a man is a wolf to another man,” or in the case of the BBC’s The North Water, a bear. The North Water is a five-part television series based on the novel of the same name by Ian McGuire. Starring Jack O’Connell as ship’s surgeon Patrick Sumner and Colin Farrell as a bear of a man, harpooner Henry Drax, the show follows a doomed-from-the-start whaling expedition into the Arctic. The North Water is a gruesome and bloody exploration of the imperialist psyche. Yet despite its setting, the Arctic is not the horror in and of itself, but rather the mirror through which humanity’s horrors are revealed. Is a man a beast? As inhumane and cruel as he may be, is he only acting futilely upon his own nature the same as any other animal? Or is a man a man, capable of thought and feeling, who chooses in no great or small parts what atrocities he shall or shall not commit?
In the penultimate episode, embittered, freezing, and starving, Sumner dreams of Henry Drax, mumbling beneath his breath as he closes in, “Homo homini lupus.” He wakes with a start to see a polar bear approaching in the place of Drax. Desperate for food, Sumner chases after the bear across the icy expanse right into the heart of a snowstorm. As he traverses the landscape through the snow, lost and alone, again Sumner has visions of Drax as the bear. It seems like all is lost, his world turning upside down. The ice has long since peeled back the layers of his soul, making him confront both the sins he himself committed as surgeon of the British Army in India — a tool of imperialism despite his own disenfranchisement from it — and the sins his superior officers got away with. Why shouldn’t it reveal just a little more?
That great beast lumbers towards him and, in his haze, Sumner fires off a shot, killing the bear. He runs his hands through its fur, still warm, pressing his cheek against the dying creature. Now face to face with death itself, Sumner cuts the bear open in one final attempt at surviving, shedding the layers protecting him from the cold to better bathe in the blood of the beast. This is not the cold hand of death, but rather a warm embrace. This is a religious experience, an epiphany, a revelation: there are no limits to what a man will do should it serve him.
For a man like Sumner, who prizes himself for his limits, for his civility, though his restraint is naught but a fraying leash, this not a welcome revelation. His soul has been bared and found wanting, despite how freeing embracing the beast may feel. He thought himself to be so different from Drax, but in the end, a man is indeed a wolf to another man, even if that man is himself.
Sumner crawls inside the bear, into the darkness, and waits for death. Only, he does not die, but is rather reborn. Rescued by a missionary there to colonize the Indigenous population, Sumner awakens to the harsh, cold light of day and starts to sob. Physically, Sumner has been saved; though, perhaps, his soul has not. Despite this, Sumner in equal parts shuns viewing himself as a man still, claiming he has no history anymore, and clings to his humanity, refusing to acknowledge that he has been reborn as a beast.
In the final episode “To Live is to Suffer,” Sumner returns to the society that had shunned him and tricked him and nearly killed him and had, in fact, killed a number of people he cared about, all in the name of profit and power. He murders Drax, his former foil, before setting off to confront Baxter (Tom Courtenay), the man responsible for arranging the sinking of the Volunteer to commit insurance fraud. Baxter first threatens Sumner, and when that does not work, he attempts to bribe him and then reason with him. At each pass, Sumner turns away from Baxter’s manipulations, though, even if accepting them might help keep his humanity intact. Sumner delves into the realm of the beast. He does not want Baxter to live, so Baxter must not live. In fact, not only must he not live, he must suffer the same indignities Sumner has suffered at the hands of men like him. Baxter must have everything taken from him.
“I am so very sick and tired of men like you! And tonight, I stabbed a man in the neck, and I watched him die. Do you really think that putting a bullet in your skull is gonna strain my nerves at all?”
Before he is killed, Baxter by turn cautions and condescends: “This won’t bring you the peace you desire[…]trust me, wealth brings its very own particular kind of suffering, one I don’t think you’re made for.”
Sumner ignores him, hoping against all hope that a few acts of beastliness can make him a man again. As he leaves Baxter’s mansion, gun and money in hand, his retreating figure is watched over by a towering taxidermied polar bear — killed and stuffed for the acclaim and social power it could bring. Sumner has used his own beastliness similarly.
In the series’ final sequence, one year later, Sumner, now dressed in the clothes of a man of distinction, visits a polar bear at the zoo. It has been captured and confined, pacing lethargically in circles around the tiny space it has been given in which to live. Its fur is dirty and clumped. Sumner gazes at the bear and the bear gazes back, startling him. Sumner has tried to cage the beast in himself, perhaps even making himself miserable in the process, but the beast has not gone, it has only shifted forms. After all, that which has been revealed can never be secreted away again.
Under the hand of imperialism and colonialism, though, cruelty and civilization are but two sides of the same coin. Whether a man is a man or a man is a beast, perhaps the greatest beast of them all is and always has been the society responsible for shaping his every action.
