Interpretations

I'm a little shocked nobody is trotting out any discussion of the meaning of this movie. I assume that it's not really about a whale. You could make a better case of saying Moby Dick is. My attempt:

I would say that someone from Hungary would tell you that it's not this movie that is surreal. Hungarian history for the last 50 years has been surreal, this is a way of making sense of it.

There's a great deal going on, but I would say one of the primary themes is the contrast between natural order and man-made order. This is discussed directly by the uncle who is distraught over the sacrifice of the natural scales to the Werckmeister Scales. In the man-made Werckmeister solution, the purer natural harmonies are sacrificed for a broader musical range. This is the downside of a man-made order. In the opening scene, Janos demonstrates a disturbing but temporary dark moment (an eclipse) that emerges from a natural order (de Revolutionibus). The opposing options are set up.

Relate this to recent Hungarian history where there were two significant political occurences. The first being the rise of Hitler. We can be pretty certain that the Prince is an easy stand in. This is also the eclipse, the temporary dark moment resulting from the natural tides of hate, opinion, and all the rest of our god-awfulness. The second major influence is the rise of Communism, which may be the darker of the two. This is the imposition of the Werckmeister Harmony, a disruption of the natural order to broaden the extension of music. Here, I assume the Aunty is the stand in for Stalin and his ilk. Hungary was ripped apart, first by Hitler, then by being subjugated to Communism, and this was a country with a long and proud history (and I don't mean that as a throwaway line, check it out, you'll be amazed by what the West ignores). During the past 50 years, it had been isolated, abandoned, and forgotten by the world. You see that mood aptly reflected through the movie.

In any case, the remaining figure is the Whale, which, while probably not God himself, reflects God's imagination, or, in an atheistic turn, the vastness of the natural order. If there is something to be known about Janos, it is his tendency to stand mouth agape and the wonder of natural order. This is established beautifully in the opening scene, further established in his first encounter with the whale, poigniantly counteracted when he is denied access to the whale by the mob, and puts him in the asylum when he sees the whale abandoned and desecrated at the end of the film.

This film is abstract, but I'm not sure a Hungarian would feel that way about it. The more irrational our situation, the more we need allegory to communicate. Is this any more of a bestiary than The Gulag Archipelago?