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In Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale, Moby Dick gets referenced a lot, but its subject isn’t an actual whale. Charlie (Brendan Fraser), the protagonist, is rather a monstrous human leviathan whose massiveness can easily disgust others, much like the monstrously-deformed John Merrick, who was depicted in David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man. Merrick had to live masked and wrapped in canvas so as not to shock people.