Michael Packard wants you to know that he wasn’t swallowed by a whale, but inside A. Yes, he knows what it feels like to crush a whale’s jaw when it clenches, and how dark it is inside once it does. He knows what a whale’s tongue looks like, how it twists. He knows what it’s like to tap on the walls of a whale’s mouth and how futile it can seem when you’re looking at death, like a fly tapping on it. your flesh, begging for reprieve. But… “I wasn’t swallowed!” he explains to a Times Square movie audience that includes actors Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams. “I was stuck in his mouth.”
“Seriously?!” Brolin asks, his jaw agape, seemingly stunned.
Surrealist semantics aside, Packard, 62, may be the only person in recorded history who can weigh in with real authority on the new film “Whalefall,” in which Abrams plays a diver trying to do what Packard did in 2021: escape from the inside of a whale. The premise of the film, which opens nationwide Friday, has been called wild, crazy and even stupid. Yet here is Packard in the flesh – a living Jonas.
“Whalefall” isn’t based on Packard’s story, but in an unavoidable way, it kind of is. There have been a few incidents in which kayakers believe they were momentarily caught by a whale’s mouth, including a seconds-long encounter in 2020 that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus said primarily inspired the 2023 book that was adapted for “Whalefall.” (Kraus also co-wrote the screenplay for the new film with director Brian Duffield.) But Packard’s is the only documented case in which a person diving underwater became engulfed and then trapped in one of Earth’s largest and oldest animals for a truly prolonged period of time.
“Whalefall” and the Packard experiment share much of the same DNA. These are two stories of survival, of lives on the ocean, of fathers and sons, of the primal fear we all have deep down of being consumed by something greater than ourselves, no matter how impossible that may seem. They remind us how our lives and deaths can have greater meaning than we realize. But after watching the movie, And Looking into the faces of person after person trying to process Packard’s story as he told them, it became clear that what connected the two at the most fundamental level was the power of impact that storytelling can have on us as human beings.
“I don’t know what the word is, man. I don’t make people happy, but I make them… amazed,” Packard says. “Surprised. It stirs up a lot of emotions. »
Packard was on his second dive of the morning of June 11, 2021, having already carried a bag full of live lobsters into the waters off Provincetown, his hometown. Lobster diving was a natural career choice for someone who had been obsessed with the ocean since age 12, when his single mother saved enough to buy him his first small boat. Underwater, it’s peaceful. Packard can turn off his brain. The depression that torments him in winter is nowhere to be found. All he has to do now is hunt. “It brings me to this place, to this primordial place,” he says. Yet being there comes at a price. You can hunt, but you are also prey. Great white sharks roam the seas of Cape Cod, but even though he sees them occasionally, Packard must forget about this threat or he will never be able to do his job.
That morning, from the water, he handed the bag to teammate Josiah Mayo, who was aboard Packard’s boat, the Ja’n J, named for his two teenage sons, Jacob and Josiah. (The many biblical J names were nothing if not ominous.) Then, as he descended to the ground for another run, he was suddenly hit by what looked like a freight train. Water rushed around him and everything became dark. The shark finally got mehe thought, before realizing he didn’t feel any biting sensation. Instead, he realized, he was being crushed.
As his arms flailed, he could feel the hard, cavernous interior of what felt like a creature’s mouth. Its jaw pressed against its trunk, its legs protruding from its mouth. Despite the incredulity of the situation, Packard knew there was only one creature in the area large enough to swallow him: a humpback whale.
Weighing up to 40 tons and measuring up to 60 feet long, humpback whales are baleen whales that feed by using their enormous jaws as fishing nets to catch tiny prey – usually krill and plankton, and certainly not people – which they consume not with their teeth but via keratin plates which allow them to feed by filtration. Because this animal was thrashing wildly, Packard could sense that it had been picked up by mistake. The whale was just as confused as he was.
The force of the encounter first destroyed the tip of Packard’s regulator, which supplies air to the oxygen tank, so he reached out to locate it and put it back in place. Able to breathe again, he then tried to punch on the walls of the whale’s mouth to get out, but quickly gave up when he realized it was motionless.
In the midst of his desperation, he could feel her enormous tongue throbbing all over his body. “It’s a contraction on my body, a squeezing and letting go,” Packard remembers. “What did that feel like? I felt like I was inside a living creature that was trying to eat me.”
Packard knew that the humpback whale couldn’t really swallow it because of the keratin plaques, so there was no risk of it passing from the mouth to the stomach and being digested. But a terrifying thought soon entered his mind: “‘Oh my God, am I going to stay here for the next 45 minutes until my air runs out?’ That Scared me even more. Forty-five minutes while this guy swims until I suffocate.
Convinced he was going to die, Packard thought about his sons and how his death would devastate them, robbing them of the father he wanted to be to make up for the one he never had. He thought about his mother and how broken she would be. He thought – whoosh.
Suddenly, Packard was free. After between 30 and 45 seconds with Packard in its mouth, the whale had come to the surface and spat him out, sending him flying through the air in a massive jet that his crewmate and another nearby sailor witnessed.
As Mayo hoisted him aboard, Packard collapsed in tears and shock, screaming through pain in his knee and a deeper pain in his soul: “I was like, ‘Josiah, I was in the mouth of a fucking whale! Oh my God! And I survived! I am alive!
Now, more than five years later, Packard stands beneath a huge advertisement for “Whalefall” in the middle of a Times Square filled with tourists. We were invited to a preview screening with some of the cast co-hosted by Reddit and Disney, which introduced the world to the last great movie about a character inside a whale: 1940’s “Pinocchio.”
Again and again, Packard tells the CliffsNotes version of his story to those he meets at a pre-screening reception. Again and again, I witness their admiration. People waiting in line to pose inside a model sperm whale do a double take when we explain who Packard is.
Fearing the movie might go off (especially since we’re watching it in a Regal 4DX theater, where the seats will move and water will spray us like we’re on a joyride), I assure Packard that he can leave at any time. He admits that when he watched the trailer he got “chills”, but with a few beers in his system for liquid courage, he assures me everything will be fine.
“Whalefall” is not an enjoyable film – in the sense that it masterfully depicts truly claustrophobic and primal horrors. It follows Jay (Abrams), a young diver who sets out into the black waters off the coast of Monterey, California, to retrieve the remains of his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), from the ocean floor. The couple had a fractured, even abusive relationship, depicted in a series of flashbacks, until Mitt chose to end his life at sea rather than succumb to a terminal case of cancer. When Jay encounters a giant squid being pursued by a mammoth sperm whale, he is unwittingly entangled in the former’s tentacles and swallowed up in a long and terrifying sequence. What follows is 60 minutes of pure terror as Jay must escape from inside the whale’s stomach before his oxygen tank runs out, all while battling stomach acid that melts his hands, air pressure changes that burst his eardrums, and gases that make him hallucinate and imagine the whale and his father as one. “Survivors survive,” Mitt says in a flashback that Jay must rely on to understand his impossible escape.
It’s a message that seems particularly apt for Packard, a survivor who escaped death three times, including a near-drowning when he was 14 and a 2001 plane crash in Costa Rica that killed several people and left Packard injured on the jungle floor for two days before being rescued. Oh, and the whale, of course.
The events of “Whalefall” are far more horrific than what Packard endured, but after the film ended, he said there were things he could still relate to: the claustrophobia,…
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