I saw ‘Whalefall’ … with a man who really got trapped in a whale
By David Mack, CNN
(CNN) — Michael Packard wants you to know he wasn’t swallowed by a whale — he was inside one. Yes, he knows what the crush of a whale’s jaw feels like as it clenches down, and how dark it is inside there once it does. He knows what a whale’s tongue feels like, how it writhes. He knows what it’s like to bang on the walls of a whale’s mouth and how futile that can seem as you stare down death, as if a fly were tapping on your flesh, begging for reprieve. But… “I wasn’t swallowed!” he explains to a Times Square movie theater audience that includes the actors Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams. “I was trapped in its mouth.”
“Seriously?!” Brolin asks with his jaw agape, seemingly stunned.
Surreal semantics aside, Packard, 62, is perhaps the only person in recorded history who can weigh in with any real authority on the new film “Whalefall,” in which Abrams plays a scuba diver trying to do what Packard did in 2021: escape from inside a whale. The premise of the movie, which opens nationwide on Friday, has been dubbed wild, insane and even dumb. Yet, here is Packard in the flesh — a living Jonah.
“Whalefall” isn’t based on Packard’s story, but in an unavoidable way it sort of is. There have been a couple of incidents in which kayakers believe they have momentarily been scooped up by a whale’s mouth, including a seconds-long 2020 encounter that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus said mostly inspired the 2023 book that has been adapted for “Whalefall.” (Kraus also co-wrote the new movie’s screenplay with director Brian Duffield.) But Packard’s is the only documented case in which someone diving underwater became engulfed and then trapped inside one of the largest and oldest animals on Earth for any real extended period.
“Whalefall” and Packard’s experience share a lot of the same DNA. They’re both stories of survival, of lives on the ocean, of fathers and sons, of the primitive fear we all hold deep down of being consumed by something bigger than us, as impossible as that might seem. They’re reminders of the ways in which our lives and deaths might have greater meaning than we’re aware. But after watching the movie, and watching the face of person after person try to process Packard’s story as he told them, it became apparent that what joined the two at the most fundamental level was the impactful power that storytelling can have on us as human beings.
“I don’t know what the word is, dude. I don’t make people happy, but I make them … amazed,” Packard says. “Amazed. It brings out a lot of emotion.”
The hunter accidentally becomes the hunted
Packard was on his second dive of the morning on June 11, 2021, having already hauled in a bag full of live lobsters from the waters off Provincetown, his hometown. Lobster-diving was a natural career choice for someone who’d been obsessed with the ocean since he was 12 when his single mother saved up enough to buy him his first small boat. Under the water, it’s peaceful. Packard can turn his brain off. The depression that plagues him in winters is nowhere to be found. All he needs to do is hunt. “It just brings me to that place — that primal place,” he says. Yet being down there, comes with a price. You get to hunt, but you’re prey, too. Great white sharks stalk the seas of Cape Cod, but even if he spots them occasionally, Packard needs to put the threat out of mind, or else he’d never be able to do his job.
From the water that morning, he handed the bag to his crewmate Josiah Mayo, who was onboard Packard’s boat, the Ja’n J, named for his two teen sons, Jacob and Josiah. (The numerous biblical J-names were nothing if not portentous.) Then, as he descended to the floor for another run, he was suddenly hit by what felt like a freight train. Water rushed around him and everything went dark. The shark finally got me, he thought, before realizing he couldn’t feel any sense of being bitten. Instead, he realized, he was being crushed.
As his arms flailed about, he could feel the hard, cavernous insides of what felt like a creature’s mouth. Its jaw was squeezing down on his trunk, with his legs sticking out of its mouth. Despite the incredulity of the situation, Packard knew there was only one creature in the area large enough to gulp him up: a humpback whale.
Weighing up to 40 tons and measuring as long as 60 feet, humpbacks are baleen whales that feed by using their massive jaws as fishing nets to scoop tiny prey — typically krill and plankton, and definitely not people — that they consume not with teeth but via keratin plates that allow them to filter-feed. Because this animal was thrashing wildly, Packard could sense he’d been picked up in error. The whale was just as confused as he was.
The force of the encounter initially knocked out Packard’s regulator mouthpiece, which supplies air from the oxygen tank, so he reached behind to locate it and shove it back in. Able to breathe again, he then tried banging on the walls of the whale’s mouth to push his way out, but quickly gave up when he realized it was immovable.
Amid his hopelessness, he could feel its enormous tongue pulsating over his whole body. “It’s contracting on my body, squeezing and letting go,” Packard recalls. “How did it feel? It felt like I was inside of a live creature that was trying to eat me.”
Packard knew the humpback couldn’t really swallow him because of the keratin plates, so there was no risk he’d move from mouth to stomach and be digested. But a terrifying thought soon entered his brain: “‘Oh my God, am I going to be in here for the next 45 minutes until my air runs out?’ That scared me even more. Forty-five minutes while this guy just swims around until I just suffocate.”
Convinced he was going to die, Packard thought of 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’d never had. He thought of his mother and how broken she would be. He thought — whoosh.
Suddenly, Packard was free. After between 30 to 45 seconds with Packard in his mouth, the whale had risen to the surface and spat him out, sending him flying through the air in a massive spray that was witnessed by his crewmate and another nearby mariner.
As Mayo hauled him aboard, Packard broke down in tears and shock, screaming from a pain in his knee and a deeper one in his soul: “I was like, ‘Josiah, I was in the mouth of a f—ing whale! Oh my God! And I survived! I’m alive!
‘I could totally relate’
Now, over five years later, Packard is standing beneath an enormous ad for “Whalefall” in the middle of tourist-filled Times Square. We’ve been invited to a preview screening with some cast members cohosted by Reddit and Disney, which gave the world the last big 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 reception before the screening. Again and again, I witness their awe. People waiting in line to pose inside a model sperm whale do a double take when we explain who Packard is.
Worried the film might prove triggering (especially given we are seeing it in a Regal 4DX theater, where the seats will move and water will spray us as if we were on a ride), I assure Packard he can leave at any point. He confesses that when he watched the trailer he had “shiver bumps,” but with a couple of beers in his system as liquid courage, he assures me he’ll be fine.
“Whalefall” is not an enjoyable film — in the sense that it masterfully portrays truly claustrophobic and primitive horrors. It follows Jay (Abrams), a young diver who sets out in the black waters off Monterey, California, to recover from the ocean floor the remains of his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The pair had a fractured, even abusive, relationship, depicted in a series of flashbacks, until Mitt chose to end his life in the sea rather than succumb to a terminal case of cancer. When Jay encounters a giant squid being chased by a mammoth sperm whale, he’s unwittingly entangled in the former’s tentacles and swallowed up in one extended, 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 contending with stomach acid that melts his hands, changes in air pressure that blow out his ear drums and gases that cause him to hallucinate and imagine the whale and his father as one. “Survivors survive,” Mitt says in one flashback that Jay must draw upon to figure out his impossible escape.
It’s a message that feels particularly appropriate for Packard, a survivor who has somehow cheated 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 lying injured on the jungle floor for two days before he was rescued. Oh, and the whale, of course.
The events of “Whalefall” are far more horrifying than what Packard endured, but after the movie ended, he said there were things to which he could still relate: the claustrophobia, the feeling of powerlessness, Jay’s will to live and his gradual acceptance that he may not. Other memories the film evoked were even more unique: “He was there where the tongue was contracting, and I could feel the tongue of my whale contracting on me, and the movements of this giant animal, so I could totally relate.”
After filming some promotional materials, Packard finishes his post-movie interview with me, because this is what Michael Packard does now: He shares his story. He went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show the week after the incident, posing somewhat unwillingly in a mock whale’s mouth. He made a reporter with Australia’s edition of “60 Minutes” cry in amazement. He participated in a documentary titled “In The Whale” that Packard hopes will now get picked up by a streaming platform. He tells his story again and again. He’s happy to. It’s part of what gives his life meaning.
As Brolin’s character explains in one of the film’s flashbacks, a whale fall is the marine biology term used to describe the death and sinking of a whale, and the delicate ecological dance that ensues. When it lands on the ocean floor, a whale’s carcass is stripped of tissue by scavengers. Its organic compounds enrich the nearby sediments for years. Its skeleton becomes a new home for other creatures that can live there for decades. There’s a cosmic beauty to the process: the idea that good can come from something dark.
Packard feels this, too. He knows what his story does to people, how it astonishes them as they try to wrap their heads around something so unfathomable, how the scale of it can feel overwhelmingly impossible — bigger than any movie. Biblical. Primal. A reminder of just how small, and yet just how big, we really are.
“I love to give people that sense of wonder and awe,” he says. “It feels good to make other people feel good.”
The-CNN-Wire
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