The Boat, based on The Boat, written by Nam Le, adapted by Matt Huynh

A boundless media future

There’s a universe of art that occupies the space between traditionally recognised media channels: works that cannot be classified as film, as song, as lit, or as game, that have no home at Spotify, at Netflix, on Kindle, or on Steam. In the gulf between these behemoth platforms is a world of atomised journeys into the human imagination – web-based interactive literature, interactive story apps, visual novels, etc. – and the platforms on which those journeys are undertaken – your browser, your app store, Itch, etc. The optimist in me sees the potential for a boundless media future: one where a populace that’s more financially stable than today’s has easier access to a rich world of the arts, media, and entertainment: one where the boundaries between traditional forms of expression melt away. (There are clear and obvious threats to this technoartistic utopia, including the unilateral stifling of speech, economic anxiety, and socioeconomic inequity, but this piece isn’t about those challenges.) 

This medialess future will find antecedents in today’s genre-bending works of art, like some of the interactive web-based and app-based audiovisual graphic novels of today: Chris Ware’s 2011 iPad comic, Touch Sensitive, Homestuck, and the focus of this piece, The Boat, Vietnamese-Australian graphic novelist Matt Huynh’s 2015 adaptation of The Boat, a short story written by Nam Le. The story is a familiar – if harrowing – one. In the seventies, as Vietnam falls prey to the violence of a new communist regime that follows decades of a violent war of independence followed by a civil war exacerbated by colonisers and imperialists alike, refugees flee the country en masse to Australian shores. The Boat is a story of Mai, a sixteen-year-old aboard one of the several refugee boats that made the arduous journey across the ocean, and a mother and son she befriends on the journey. 

The Boat

Through what is a twenty-minute experience, scrolling through the story takes the audience through the trials Mai has escaped and the ones she experiences while on board the boat. It’s a powerful story, but one about which one could reasonably ask: does this need to be anything more than the text-based short story it originally was? I say yes. The transformation of the short story to a multimedia audio-visual experience more than reconfigures it, it reanimates it. After all, the medium is the message. 

Sam Petty’s sound design lends the story a thicker atmosphere, and heightens its central conflicts. When the boat passes through a storm, waves thrash, and the boat rocks: when the story’s flashbacks take us to Mai’s childhood in Vietnam, the folk music of a lost land injects her memories with melancholia. Matt Huynh’s panels are evocatively drawn, and complement Nam Le’s story perfectly. You feel for Mai, you feel for the mother, your heart goes out for her son. In the story’s storm, the panels rock like the vessel must’ve. When it tells of the songs Mai’s father sang, you slow down as you unpack their poetry, you linger on their imagery and slow down to take in the backdrop of Huynh’s paintings. This is unlike a movie or a TV show or any familiar audiovisual experience: it’s completely unique. You’re in a state of constant interaction: alert, immersed, invested.

In conclusion

The Boat approaches a story we’ve heard before in a way that both refrains from fetishising human suffering, and narrates it in a deeply meaningful but ultimately unique way. A large part of this comes down to its craft: the writing is accomplished, the music is sublime, the illustrations are incredible. But a large part of it also comes to its choice of medium, which elevates it beyond being merely a good story. To me, it’s an inspiration for how artistic ideas could potentially be explored in a future that’s unbounded by traditional definitions of media.