Risky Flicks: American Sniper

American Sniper (2014):

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by Jason Hall

Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

The Challenge: 

It’s an annoyance that I even have to talk about this one at all, but I guess since this is apparently some huge earth-shattering fucking deal that the whole culture lost its goddam mind over and it made piles of cash and was nominated for a raft of awards (it won only one, best sound editing) and made everyone on the internet go all gamergate all over each other, I’ve gotta step in and set you people right. So let’s get to it.

What’s the risk?

• Conservatives loved it, and they let their love be known in the most unappealing way possible: subliterate bloodthirsty tweets, a phrase so profoundly unpleasant that just by forcing me to write it, the movie has one strike against it.
• It has American in the title, the preferred go-to hustle of dull, pretentious people trying to distract from their moronic pablum by insinuating their drivel is really about something. (exceptions: AMERICAN MOVIE and AMERICAN SPLENDOR, both of which preceded the trend)
• Disease-of-the-week melodrama about PTSD and patriotism? What is this, the Lifetime network?

Possible Mitigating Factors:

• Clint? His classical, reserved and actor-focused directorial style can be dynamite when he’s working with a good script. Which is, you know, a good 30-40% of the time.
• Hello? Best sound design?

The Case:

So, the liberals called this bloodthirsty, xenophobic, dishonest, flag-waving war-justifying unapologetic Bush-era propaganda. The conservatives agreed, but said that was a good thing. To some extent it may be those things, but mostly its ambitions are more modest. It wants to be a good war movie (it mostly is) and also seems to feel obligated to be a persuasive melodrama (it mostly isn’t). Unfortunately it had the misfortune --or bad judgement-- of undertaking those goals with a story about a war which is still painfully present in people’s lives, and believing there was be no need to actually make a clear statement about that war. And that’s where the trouble started.

See, the movie is about a bull-riding, God-and-country lovin’, modern country-music listening, polo-shirt-tucked-into-jeans wearing, red blooded simple kind of man honest American American Sniper type guy, Chris Kyle, who, depending on who you ask, is either everything that is good and upright about America or a sociopathic racist murderer. Actually if you ask him, by way of his autobiography, he makes it pretty clear that he at least aspires to be the latter, with his open xenophobia (he calls the Iraqis “Savages”) and claims to shooting looters during Katrina -- but even so, screenwriter Jason Hall (minor recurring character “Devon MacLeish” in seasons 2-4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) disagrees, saying that he spent time with Kyle and felt his autobiography misrepresented him. An odd claim, I know, but if there’s one thing not in dispute by anyone, it’s that Kyle’s four tours in Iraq and his 255 claimed kills (160 officially confirmed) kinda messed the dude up a little. It’s not entirely inconceivable to me that, as Hall claims, the book was a bit of self-mythologizing by a bitter, unstable guy who had just returned home from a decade at war and was putting up an angry tough guy facade.  

So what’s the real truth here? The movie’s big problem --and its most interesting quirk-- is that it either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Just like his autobiography, the movie lets Kyle tell us what he thinks --he’s in Iraq to kill the bad guys, he isn’t bothered by all the killing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a coward or a traitor--, and then lets us judge for ourselves how much he really believes his own story and how much is just a cover for the immense psychological damage this war has done to him. Kyle gets plenty of time to offer his opinions about what he’s doing and how it’s affecting him, and the movie mostly never contradicts him. In fact, it sometimes even twists the facts a little to better fit his right-wing point-of-view, most notably when the movie cuts from Kyle’s horror over 9/11 to his serving in Iraq, as though the two were related. That obviously raised a lot of hackles among the lefties, and maybe rightly so. But of course, the movie is from Kyle’s perspective, and it’s not surprising that the connection made perfect sense to him and a lot of other people at the time. Besides, if people don’t get that those two things were not connected by now, we can hardly blame the movie for not enlightening them, that one’s on us.

Freedom, justice, the American way.

So we know what Kyle thinks, and we also know that what he thinks isn’t going to sit real well with a lot of people, myself included. The question is, what does the movie think about all this? To both its credit and its detriment, it simply refuses to say conclusively. Of course, there’s not much in the film’s style to suggest that Kyle’s somewhat warped perspective is merely the subjective interpretation of one man. The film is shot with a clear eye towards realism, not subjectivity, and moreover the movie tends to set things up to prove him right when the chips are down. Still, while there are many things here which present Kyle in a positive light, there are also some pretty noticeable details (mostly in Bradley Cooper’s macho but sad-eyed performance) that suggest that maybe there’s more going on here than Kyle is either willing or able to admit. There’s a provocative opaqueness to his character and a general layer of ambiguity about the whole enterprise; Eastwood seems to have been bound and determined to make a movie which could be seen either as a love letter to wartime jingoism gilded in passion play martyrdom, or a searing indictment of an ethos which takes people with good intentions and turns them into emotionally ruined, ideologically rigid killers. By never directly challenging Kyle’s conflation of militarism with patriotism and warfare with morality, it dares us to either accept it as correct (as, it turns out, a lot of people did) or to critique it by way of its obvious destructiveness on Kyle’s psyche. On balance, it probably leans more towards the former (little wonder, since Hall would hardly have been able to pitch a script criticizing the guy after spending so much time with him and his family and then having him, spoiler, die) but there’s just barely enough room in Cooper’s portrayal of him to allow for some doubt.

In theory, that sounds like kind of an interesting idea, but unfortunately it’s severely undermined by two important factors. The first is that it’s probably a terrible idea to try and make an ambiguous film about an issue that it’s pretty much impossible for people to not have a strong opinion about from the start. I know every single fucking asshole with some jackass opinion these days feels like what the world needs is “starting conversations,” (translation: “I’d like an opportunity to lecture you about why you’re wrong”) but honestly this is not a very good conversation starter. There’s not really much conversation to be had which hasn’t already been run into the ground over America’s painful decade and more at war, and even if there was, this movie probably doesn’t have much to contribute to it. Especially since they have sanded a lot of Kyle’s more unpleasant tendencies off in order to make it “fair and balanced” to both sides, just like reality is. I know Hall thinks he was a nicer guy than his autobiography made him out to be, but come on man, he said that stuff. Even if you don’t believe it, you gotta try and explain the character well enough that we could understand why he would make it up. I mean, I don’t think Charlie Kaufman believes that Chuck Barris was actually a superspy, but by the end of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND we understand him well enough to get why he’d lie about a thing like that. Not so here. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Cooper’s humble, stoic movie Kyle saying the things that real-life Kyle said in his book, regardless of the circumstances. So not only does the movie not have a lot of real insight into the war, it also doesn’t really offer much insight into this real historical person, does it?

I mean, if we’re not going to be honest about who this guy was and his own claims about what he did… what are we even talking about here? Do we really feel like we can have a meaningful conversation about this topic by sanitizing this guy’s own autobiography so he seems nicer and more reasonable? I don’t think it needs to judge him or present him as a villain, but if there really is something to be learned about this man, I don’t think we can really learn it by turning him into a sanitized, fictionalized Hollywood version. You gotta either tell it like it actually was, or you gotta just change the name and admit that you’re making up a new character to tell the story you’d rather tell. Nothing wrong with that either; I imagine the fictionalized movie Kyle probably resonates with a lot of real soldiers who really did feel more conflicted than he (claims he) did. But you can’t have both — you can’t do a character study about a real person and then change the stuff you find unappealing about them. It’s no longer an actual character study then, more like wish fulfillment.

If this view makes you feel a little uncomfortable, don't worry, this is mostly done by robots now. Whew!

And that leads us to the second problem, and one which is probably much worse for the movie itself: even if we generously assume the most interesting possible interpretation (Chris Kyle is the product of a brittle, spirit-crushing way of thinking that he’s impossibly ill-equipped to overcome, and he’s gradually crushed by it)... he’s still not a very interesting character. He’s just kind of dull and pedantic in the most broad possible way (actually, it’s frankly a little surprising that conservatives weren’t more offended by how completely the character plays into every possible stereotype about them). There may be something kind of tragic about how his iron-clad ethos prevents him from effectively dealing with the messy, complicated real world, but even at that we spend entirely too much time with him for this to be consistently engrossing. If there’s anything interesting here, it’s what he’s not saying, which is a pretty thin thread to hang an entire movie on, and never explicitly drawn out enough to be a genuine conflict.

The real Kyle seemed full of contradictions -- in reality, he praised the anti-war letter written by his colleague Mark Lee that he fumes about in the movie, even as he seems strongly in favor of the conflict; he repeatedly uses the word “savage” to describe the Iraqis in his book, but seemed to take his responsibility to protect their civilians seriously, even categorically refusing to kill children (a stance the film version of him doesn't share). Watching his interview on Conan O'Brien's show, he seems a little squirrely, even goofy, talking his way through his work with a professional’s ease, but with a little kid’s equal parts enthusiasm and embarrassment at being the center of attention. It’s a weird, somewhat awkward conversation -- Conan is trying to make light TV out of the experience of a guy who is famous for killing more people than any other sniper in history-- but it’s also sort of impossible to not find Kyle likable. He has a winning, self-effacing sort of smile, a wide, open face which veers between unselfconscious earnestness and sheepish bemusement. Even on an O’Reilly Factor clip unencouragingly titled “Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle Enemy are Savages/ www.RightFace.us,“ he comes across as sincere and nuanced, which is especially interesting since the story he’s telling --punching out Jesse Ventura in a bar-- seems likely to be total fiction, and, in fact, Ventura sued him for slander and won. It’s hard to know what to make of this Kyle, but I have to say, even in these pandering talking-head TV interviews, he seems vivid and alive in a way which sad-eyed, glowering Cooper’s movie version of him never does. The real Kyle was, as we all are, a messy, tangled web of contradictions and conflicting impulses, but the movie turns him into something much more dull: a symbol, a symptom.

Lacking an ability to probe Kyle’s inner conflict, a huge chunk of this story is just the normal subplot from an action movie where a tearful wife (Sienna Miller, “the military science fiction action film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” as her wikipedia page eloquently puts it) wants her husband to stop being so awesome and badass and stay home with her in placid domesticity, but he’s restless because he’s a man of action and knows that evil will prevail unless he personally stops it. This conflict is in every action movie ever made, so it’s no surprise it’s in here too. Except that instead of wasting 5 minutes of our time like a normal action movie, AMERICAN SNIPER makes it arguably the central conflict, without really adding any depth to this rather banal disagreement. Seriously, probably half the movie is two kind of shallow, uninterested characters played by terrific actors arguing about why he’s never around and it’s hard to raise kids as a single mom and it’s scary to never know if he’s gonna live or die etc etc. While obviously this is a real hardship for families of people serving abroad, the movie version of this conversation finds nothing interesting to explore that couldn’t have been covered in an obligatory 20-second montage. It just goes on an on, around and around again, without revealing anything new about the characters or resolving in any way.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the plastic babies they use in this are a little stiff and apparently it's some kind of big deal for the internet. I can't say I noticed it while watching, but yeah, looking at this image, that is one plastic baby, all right.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t a total loss because the scenes that aren’t about that are pretty good. Not in an interesting, thought provoking way, but definitely in a gripping war movie kind of way. They’re generally pretty kinetic and exciting, especially for Eastwood (who doesn’t usually go in for fancy editing and big setpieces). The military parts combine a sense of lived-in-realism (particularly the very convincing cast) with some legitimately harrowing gunfights and a healthy dose of entertaining Hollywood bullshit, right down to the black-hatted enemy sniper who provides some narrative structure as a main villain. Unlike most of the movie, these scenes seem to find the right tone -- respectful enough of reality to want to get the details right, but clearly designed to be exciting. And they are exciting; there are at least three fairly elaborate street-battle sequences, including an adrenaline-soaked sandstorm escape during the finale. Again, maybe you don’t like the idea of such a recent national tragedy being milked for entertainment, but you gotta admit that as pure cinema, these sequences work well.

In fact, if the ratio of battle scenes --or even military scenes in Iraq-- to domestic ones had been even a little higher, this one might have actually managed to overcome the obstacles stacked against it and won me over. Sadly, it was not to be. The military scenes are clearly where the film’s strengths lie, but it is stubbornly committed to its idea of itself as a weepy, repressed melodrama, and that’s where it ends up again and again, every time without any real idea of what to do with it. It's so relentless and repetitive that I'd almost be convinced that in itself is the point, if I were even a little more confident the movie has any clear point at all.

That weird sense of a film lacking in any kind of concrete conception of why it exists is heightened immeasurably by the epilogue, which features a happy ending for Kyle so exuberantly overblown and unearned that it borders on parody, and then immediately fades out to text stating that he got murdered by a disturbed ex-vet later that day, and then rolls credits! It's so stunningly poorly thought-out that it borders on the amateurish. Some other movie might find this turn of events ironic, or tragic, or infuriating -- or, it might simply find it unimportant to Kyle’s journey and not worth including. AMERICAN SNIPER, however, seems to feel it’s important enough to warrant mentioning, but not important enough to make any kind of comment about or to connect to the narrative, as apt an example as any of the film’s clunky narrative ambiguity and undercooked perspective.

The Verdict:

Well, I ended up being right that I wouldn’t much like this one, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought. I wasn’t much offended by it. I think lovers on the right and critics on the left both saw what they wanted to see; the movie might have a slight ideological bent --depending on how you want to interpret its view of the intentionally ambiguous central character-- but even if it does, there’s really not much there. And that’s the big problem: it’s a movie about a real person which doesn’t have much to say about that person, and it’s a movie about a real war which doesn’t have much to say about that war. It’s got some fiercely intense battle scenes and a clear-eyed realism about military life, but frankly it’s a little light on actual content for a 132-minute movie about a hugely controversial topic. If we weren’t living in such a toxic swamp of bitter culture-war nonsense, I can’t imagine anyone would have gotten too excited over this glum and unfocused wartime melodrama one way or another. Oh well, hopefully it’ll inspire Clint to make a better sequel focusing on the other side of the conflict like he did with FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS / LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. I’m sure Twitter will like that a lot better.

Demolition Derpy.

Blackfish

Blackfish (2013)

Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Outcast?

Here’s a little lighthearted fun for ya: A slick, lugubrious bit of documentary muckraking about a SeaWorld killer whale who seems to have humans pretty high up on his kill list. Following the death of one of his trainers, Sea World took the stance that it was an unavoidable tragedy which was caused by trainer error. BLACKFISH director Gabriela Cowperthwaite disagrees, and instead offers a counterargument that starts decades ago and leads along a twisted path of animal abuse, willful ignorance, corporate greed, and violent death. It’s basically the HANNIBAL RISING of whale docs.

SeaWorld begs to differ, of course, and has offered a detailed point-by-point refutation to the film, which the filmmakers subsequently refuted themselves. SeaWorld claims to have lost 15.9 million bucks last year in declining attendance, the filmmakers take credit for a job well done while SeaWorld gets to work suing them and anyone involved with the film. Meanwhile, the family of the poor trainer who ended up whale food meekly points out that their daughter saw her work and her employer pretty differently than the movie which revolves around her death does.

Who’s telling the truth here? Hard to say. The movie is devilishly effective at constructing a convincing and emotionally gripping narrative to make its case, and it’s hard to ignore. And of course, SeaWorld is a big corporation which can almost certainly be counted on to be up to no good, with a huge media machine to fire up in its defense. But predictably, the filmmakers aren’t exactly playing fair, either. Several of the people interviewed as experts were previously in a PETA lawsuit which attempted to legally force the release of the killer whales under the auspices of the 13th Ammendment. That’s right, whale slavery. So suddenly I’m not so sure their testimony in this movie represents anything which might be called “informed” from a technical standpoint.

That's right, I'm out here and you're stuck in a cage. What're you gonna do about it, eat me?

Whenever you see this kind of public battle over the basic facts, things get a little weird. The film begins with a 911 call, in which you can hear an EMT guy describing the state of trainer Dawn Brancheau’s corpse upon his arrival to the scene. The dispatcher asks about her arm, he says that it has been removed by the whale. But SeaWorld says: “the film includes a recording of an EMT technician, subsequently proved to be mistaken, suggesting that Tilikum swallowed Ms. Brancheau’s arm during the incident. This is false.“ Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in medicine, but usually it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 100% clear to me if someone’s arm is or is not attached. That’s not the kind of thing you can really be “mistaken” about, assuming you have two eyes or at least a working pair of hands. Clearly, something about one of these stories doesn’t quite add up.

The typical bullshit media thing to do in this kind of situation is to go for the, “well, the truth is somewhere in the middle” safe zone. I’m against that, because of course the truth is an objective thing, if someone’s lying it doesn’t make it any truer because someone else is actually telling the truth to balance it out. This approach has turned our media landscape into a nightmarish mess of spin, distortion, and shameless narrative-building by those who are best served by obfuscating reality from the people who might object to the truth. But in a case like this, it does become pretty hard to know exactly what to believe. Clearly, BLACKFISH is playing as much of a PR game as SeaWorld is, they barely even make an effort to appear unbiased. It’s mudslinging, emotionally manipulative propaganda, but that also doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth here, too.

SeaWorld wants to debate the details, i.e. whether the arm was literally severed and eaten or not. Fair enough, I’m certain there are instances in the film where it plays somewhat loose with the details. One of the most heartrending sequences --in which an old hippie is nearly reduced to tears remembering his role in capturing a baby whale and basically kidnapping it while its mother attempted to protect it-- definitely implies that this practice, not used by SeaWorld in more than 30 years, still represents an industry standard. It’s misleading, although to be fair not exactly untrue, since that is, indeed, how the killer whale in question entered the whale-display industry. Some of Seaworld’s criticisms of the film seems valid in this way, particularly since the SeaWorld employees interviewed in the film have repudiated it, saying the filmmakers took their comments out of context. It’s pretty easy to see how that would be the case.

Yeah, and it didn't help that the acid started to kick in right then.

If that was all there was to it, we could fight about the minutiae all day long and in the end, SeaWorld would almost certainly win purely based on the possibility that someday an Alien probe may come to Earth and demand whalesong or the Earth will be destroyed, and it’ll really be handy to have a couple of the big fellas conveniently located in a tank with speakers. Shatner’s getting a little old to do that much swimming, so in terms of protecting the Earth from alien menace, keeping whales in captivity seems like a good plan. But what all this quibbling over the details misses (or perhaps tactfully avoids) is that the film’s central message is more philosophical than muckraking: the film makes a claim that whales are intelligent, social animals with a complex familial life, and that keeping them in tanks is cruel to the point of causing severe psychological damage, tantamount to locking a human being in a tiny cage with two or three other strangers and expecting them to be happy.

That opens a whole different can of sardines, because it asks us to try and judge what circumstances make a killer whale happy, and, indeed, if that’s even a meaningful question to ask about such a creature. I mean, it’s abundantly clear that these whales are highly intelligent by any metric that we want to put to them. Of course, so are octopuses(i?), so are pigs. Whales have a highly complex social structure, but so so ants. Heck, so do dogs. Is keeping a dog in a smallish backyard really that different from keeping a whale in a tank?

The question becomes, does the fact that whales are highly intelligent and social (as defined by people, of course) entitle them to special treatment? I mean, I doubt that most of the people interviewed in the film would object to swatting an annoying mosquito*; probably most also don’t object to at least some variety of animal domestication; a few are probably not even vegetarians. So why and how do we create our sliding scale of responsibility to animals? Insects can be killed with impunity, pigs can be kept in pens, dogs should be treated better than we treat a lot of humans, and whales are exempt from the whole lot: you can’t kill ‘em, cage ‘em, or domesticate them, at least as far as BLACKFISH is concerned. Intelligence is clearly a factor here: the movie panders to our empathy for how a human would feel in the same situation, kidnapped from its home and forced into a tiny cage with frightening strangers. But that only raises further questions: can we meaningfully deduce the way these events are interpreted by killer whales and correctly assume the parallels are at least on some level analogous to human experience? It’s clear that whales protect their offspring, for example, and become stressed when parent and child are separated. But would their experience of this scenario be psychologically similar enough to a human for us to call such an act cruelty?

OK lady, geez, we won't make you perform in a circus environment anymore.

I sometimes get irritated with my lefty friends for anthropomorphizing their animals in a way which feels a bit intellectually dishonest to me. Ascribing human emotions to animals is such an easy, natural thing to do, because animals so clearly do display different emotional states, just like we do, so it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that it’s the same thing. It’s so easy to say, “my dog is happy because she loves me!” and believe it, because you feel affection in that way. But let’s take a moment to also consider that your dog will spend hours on end barking incessantly at a mop. The point is, animals see the world in a radically different way which --to me, anyway-- is probably so entirely alien to us that it’s a mistake to imagine we can identify with it. Wolves, after all, have complex familial pack structures and obviously nuanced interpersonal relationships. But if they sense weakness in one of their own, they will kill the shit out of him or her and not give a good god damn. Whatever it was they “feel” for each other, it’s not something that you or I would experience as “love.” That doesn’t mean it’s inherently not important just because it’s not comparable to a familiar human experience, but I still think its an important distinction to make. Pretending otherwise, and --indeed-- imagining you can really know what an animal is experiencing and why… well, that seems starkly wrongheaded to me. It’s funny, because the anti-SeaWorld people in this documentary rightly criticize the SeaWorld trainers for believing they have this intense, positive personal relationship with the whales (who go on to kill several of them). But then they also claim to know what the whale is thinking, and that it’s depressed, traumatized, even psychotic**. Clearly someone is wrong here, if not both parties; but the real reason we’ll never know is that there’s no way to measure it, since they both stubbornly couch all this in terms of human thought and emotion, asking “How would you like it if…” questions. Jeez, I don’t know, dude. I’m not a whale.

Free Willy... before he frees you. From being alive.

So OK, animals do not experience the world in the same way humans do, and although they do clearly have “feelings” they’re likely so alien to a human way of thinking that comparing them is probably not productive. They’re also less intelligent than us, by any metric we want to put to them (although of course, it probably helps that we get to define what intelligence means, and measure it by human standards in comparison to humans. Kinda convenient that the people who designed the measurements just happened to end up the highest scorers). But that doesn’t exactly let us off the hook when it comes to our responsibilities towards animals. It just means that it can sometimes be unclear how other species are best served, what a proper relationship ought to be.

So where does that leave us with the SeaWorld folks? I’m not sure. I do know that any time you keep a gigantic predatory animal in close contact with humans, there is some inherent risk. The movie suggests that the trainers are somehow not aware of this, which I find hard to believe but not absolutely outside the realm of possibility. If they really don’t know, let me settle this for them right now. SeaWorld trainers, and, indeed, anyone who works training massive animals which are vastly stronger and larger than you: YOU ARE DEALING WITH A MASSIVE ANIMAL MUCH STRONGER AND LARGER THAN YOU. ALTHOUGH YOU MAY BE LABORING UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU CAN PREDICT ITS ACTIONS, IT IS A LIVING THING AND THEREFORE YOU CANNOT, AT LEAST NOT WITH CERTAINTY. IT WILL NOT SPARE YOU BECAUSE OF LOVE, THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WORKS. Somebody needs to get these guys a copy of GRIZZLY MAN. Or at least ZOO. That shit ain’t 100% safe, and it ain’t ever gonna BE 100% safe. But. Then we need to also remember that lots of stuff we do is unsafe. Driving racecars is unsafe, touring the country with a metal band is unsafe, walking on a highwire between the two world trade centers is unsafe. But we still do those things, because we like them, and we like watching them

BANNED FROM THE INTERNET!

OK, so the safety issue is taken care of. But what about poor Tilikum, then? People can choose to work around dangerous animals, but the big guy doesn’t really get a choice about whether or not he’d like to be in whale prison. And he can’t really tell us one way or another what he thinks about it (unless eating his trainers should be taken as a hint). But as much ambiguity as there is around what exactly whales are thinking and what our responsibility to them is, there is one thing which is definitely clear in my mind: there may be a fuzzy gray area in the middle, but there is still a clear distinction between responsibly using animals for food and labor and subjecting them to horrific torture. I mean, I eat animals, I don’t feel bad about it, it’s nature. But on the other hand, if to get to my plate you had to take a chicken and rip off its beak to prevent if from mauling the other chickens stuffed into a tiny box with it and then drown it in antibiotics to prevent sickness from the appalling sanitary conditions resulting from the crowding… well, I got a pretty big problem with that. And I don’t even like chickens, but I know horrific torture when I see it. That’s blatant, brazen cruelty and frankly there’s no other way to see it. I don’t have to know what the chicken is thinking to know it doesn’t like that. So while I’ll allow for a good bit of personal leeway, there’s got to be some point where it just becomes obvious that we’ve gone way too far.

Obviously, the whales at SeaWorld are treated better than factory-farmed chickens. Even so, BLACKFISH offers some pretty shocking footage: whales “raking” each other with their teeth and turning the water into a bloody mess, and then being kept separated in tiny cages to prevent further injury. Even setting aside the filmmaker’s other points about severely shortened lifespans and troubling physical changes (drooping dorsal fins, for example, which they assert occur only in captive whales) as potentially misleading (though I notice SeaWorld does not refute those claims) I just can’t help but feel like the basic scenario doesn’t survive the “horrific torture” test. We moved past concrete boxes decades ago in zoos, how come Seaworld didn’t get the memo? The lady who describes it as essentially a "circus environment" is pretty hard to argue with, and I don't think anyone really continues to labor under the impression that circus animals are happy with their lot in life.

Then how do you explain that you've captured... my attention?

I don’t think SeaWorld is inherently evil, and in fact I think they do a lot of good to get people excited about nature and to spread positive messages about conservation. But there’s enough evidence in this movie for me to concede that at least on some level there’s a compelling responsibility to pressure private whale owners to give their wards a significantly better living environment. You can still train them to jump and touch a red ball and whatnot, just give them more room to live and a bit more stimulation when no one in a wetsuit is around. Give them a bit of life beyond their utility to humans. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, guys, right? I think that’s a practical solution which ought to please everyone and address the concerns of all relevant parties, and as such will almost certainly make everyone involved angry.

It’s funny, though, because even with that judgement, I feel like the biggest flaw of BLACKFISH is not a claim that it makes, but rather something it doesn't address. There are, what, maybe a hundred or so captive Killer whales in the whole world? Yeah, we oughtta take better care of ‘em, but one thing the film oddly never seems interested in is the whales in the wild. They’re the ones I’m really worried about. I have no idea if performing before crowds is psychologically healthy for captive Tillikum, but I can damn well tell you that the world’s oceans are in absolutely shameful shape. Overfishing is spiraling further and further out of control every day, chemicals and climate change are bringing the fragile reef ecosystems of the world to the brink of utter disaster, large-scale pollution has turns thousands of miles of ocean into fetid garbage dumps, and many kinds of marine life are being pushed towards extinction. If we can’t bring ourselves to deal with the horrific way we’ve treated the natural world and all the creatures in it, it’s gonna end up a moot point if Tillikum is emotionally satisfied by the size of his cage, because that’s gonna be the only option for him. We’re going to be facing irrevocable losses of sealife on an absolutely monumental scale which will require significant changes in human behavior. It’s important to be good stewards of animals on a small scale while they’re in captivity, but unless we can come to terms with the deplorable conditions we’ve tolerated for the world writ large, it’s not gonna mean much in the long run. For better or worse, human are now stewards of the planet as a whole, not merely the animals we keep in cages. If we’re morally responsible for those animals who depend on us for their care, we’re equally responsible for the well being of those whose entire environment we’re reshaping in our own image, and it’s time we started acting like it.

Anyway, my point is that BLACKFISH is an interesting movie, but it would be a better name for a death metal band. Thank you for your attention, there will be no encore.

*Would they draw the line at a Mansquito?

**Perhaps taking a cue from Herzog’s questions about psychotic penguins in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Surviving Progress

Surviving Progress (2011)
Dir. Mathieu Roy, Harold Crooks
Written by Roy and Crooks, from a lecture series by Ronald Wright

Yes yes, we're all doomed. Is that really reason enough to make a movie? 

This disappointing Lefty doc is long on style, but eschews the fascinating history in Ronald Wright’s lectures to focus on the same old dog and pony show about wealth concentration, resource management, and global trade that you always get from this sort of thing. Yes, we know corporations have too much control and we’re running out of oil. Is that all you got?

As an introduction to ideas like this, SURVIVING PROGRESS is a pretty good primer. It’s deftly edited, well-structured, and entertainingly produced considering that at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of academics and retired officials talking about macroeconomics. But if you’re already familiar with this stuff, it’s fairly dull going. A film which is just about ideas probably needs more groundbreaking ideas than this; if you’ve heard this kinda stuff before, the film becomes little more than a slickly produced hollow shell. Though ostensibly focusing on the same topics, 2009’s COLLAPSE is ultimately a much richer film, offering the same trenchant insight but also taking the time to surreptitiously explore the human side of it’s lone talking head. It’s stylish minimalism is both more impactful and more subtle than SURVIVING PROGRESS’s flashy apocalyptic editing, too.

I’m all for exploring these issues, but frankly I’m not sure what a film like this is for, other than a spiffy self-congratulatory package for people who already think they know what’s going on. Those yet ignorant of these problems just don’t seem likely to watch a documentary about them --however entertainingly assembled-- and are unlikely to be won over by it’s alarmist tone and one-sided barrage of statistics and loosely-fitted historical anecdotes. Which is not to say that it’s not a persuasive, generally correct argument; it is. It just seems more interested in lecturing you about a conversation that’s been going on for decades now than it is in joining that conversation itself. That might be cause to celebrate it’s commitment to smartly-crafted reporting. But jeez, who wants to watch a re-run of the news?