Context? Where we're going, we don't need context

The Other and animal cruelty

I saw Blackfish the other day.

A blackfish is another name for a killer whale, and the film concerns itself with captive whales held at theme parks. The thesis of the film, in short, is that keeping killer whales in captivity is cruel.  I think the film makes its case well, but the nature of the argument shows the difficulty of getting a general audience to care about animal cruelty. There are two main avenues the film takes in arguing against captivity for killer whales:

(1) Killer whales are extremely intelligent animals with highly developed emotional lives, local culture (!), and familial bonds. When taken from the wild, whales are separated from their pods and families, and are placed into unfamiliar social groups which can be dangerous and threatening. Whales are stored in small tanks that cannot hope to approximate the open ocean, and not given near as much attention or stimulation as they would have in the wild. Captive whale life expectancy past infancy is much lower than for wild whales.

(2) Captive killer whales put humans at risk. There is imminent danger to human trainers of killer whales, and many trainers have been injured (and some killed) by aggressive or unpredictable whale behavior. In addition, humans are brutalized by the cruelty they must do to whales to keep them in captivity and ready to perform.

Number (1) focuses on animal cost of animal cruelty. It suggests that animals cruelty is bad because cruelty is, independent of circumstances, bad. Number (2) focuses on the human cost of animal cruelty. It suggests that animal cruelty is bad because is it cruel and dangerous to humans. 

Both (1) and (2) are good reasons for ending whale captivity, but, for me, number (1) is enough. I think it's wrong to inflict suffering and death on animals for our pleasure. I think cruelty is bad, should be avoided wherever possible, and should definitely be avoided when cruelty occurs in the name of entertainment. Reason (1) is given a fair amount of screen time, and it's clear the film-makers care about the cruelty done to the whales. But reason number (2) dominates the narrative of the film, which is structured around the death of a SeaWorld trainer in 2010. Much of the film plays like a story of a faceless, greedy corporation tricking eager trainers who love animals into risking their lives for corporate profit. It's compelling, and the obvious disillusionment of the interviewed trainers is heartbreaking and sometimes hard to watch. The film shows that the deaths and injuries suffered by trainers could have been avoided, because the dangers of working with killer whales in captivity were well-known. The risk was kept obscure from trainers and the general public. Blackfish ends on a triumphant, if somber, note: OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), following a lawsuit brought against SeaWorld after a trainer was killed by a whale in 2010, has forbidden whale trainers from entering the water with captive whales (SeaWorld is appealing). 

But what if there was no risk to humans in keeping captive whales? What if trainers had always been fully advised of the risks posed by captive whales, and never swam with them? In all likelihood, the movie would not have been made. Blackfish's wikipedia page notes that the filmmakers' interest in captive whales stemmed from the trainer's death in 2010. The cruelty and violence done to that trainer is what made the animal cruelty visible to the filmmakers, and, ultimately, visible to the film's audience. 

Animal cruelty arguments are in a difficult spot: where animal cruelty coincides with cruelty or violence done to humans, arguments against animal cruelty are often made, and heard. Otherwise...?

The fact remains that animals--their bodies, their minds, their lives--are so different as to make their suffering nearly incomprehensible to us: animals are the Other. Historically, the Other has taken many forms, depending on who and when you asked, and Others have suffered always cruelty because they were other. Cruelty is almost always done for expediency as well as xenophobia, which is why it seems like a good idea at the time, but cruelty never looks good with enough historical distance. Because animals are so different from us (as opposed to people qualifying as Other, who at least are regarded [though not always] as part of the "human race," which implies some commonality), the empathetic effort to care about animal suffering and life is greater. A killer whale might be "intelligent," but what does intelligence even mean if it doesn't refer to a human?

This has turned a little rambling, so let me get to the point: to end animal cruelty, people must take an empathetic leap. Blackfish shows how cruelty and violence have been done to people in the name of corporate profit.  But that's not a reason to end killer whale captivity. For that, people have to consider the film's other argument: consider the mind and body of the whale. To end whale suffering at human hands, the whale has to become something other than Other in human minds.

Books I read in July

A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin. I began reading these books after the third season of Game of Thrones on HBO, and somewhere in the middle part of A Storm of Swords I zoomed right by the show, plotwise. The Red Wedding was one of the most brutal scenes of fiction I've ever read. While the show uses the RW as the climax of its third season, in the novel its the beginning of a devastating sequence of events that wipes out or changes the fortunes of virtually every POV character we have. The genius of the novel is its willingness to alter or destroy characters to force them (and others around them) to surprise themselves (and us) by reacting in fresh ways.

Danerys is no exception to the last, but she's separated from all other characters, and her problems are different. There are certainly problematic aspects to the way her Breaker of Chains aspirations are written. Take, for example, this line, appearing after Danerys declares the slaves freed in one of the cities she takes:

"Mhysa!" a brown-skinned man shouted out at her.

Mhysa means mother. Martin walks the dangerous line of turning Danerys--with white skin, and plantinum blonde hair--into the easy savior of thousands (millions?) of brown people, who have no POV characters, and virtually no agency. But there's something more complicated going on here, too:

"Your Grace, the slavers brought their doom on themselves," said Daario Naharis.
"You have brought freedom as well," MIssandei pointed out.
"Freedom to starve?" asked Dany sharply. "Freedom to die?"

By the end of the novel, Dany resolves to stay in Meereen after freeing its slaves, determined to reconstruct and rule the city. I'm eager to see how she handles it, and how much autonomy and thought Martin gives the freedpeople of Meereen (and Astapoor, and Yunkai). At first blush, Mhysa sounds bad. But freedmen in America commonly referred to Lincoln as Father Abraham. 

Romeo and Juliet at Cal Shakes

I am not the biggest Shakespeare fan. I think I understand his charms as a poet, but the poetry doesn't translate well to stage, for me. I find many of the words too obscure to process quickly, so while I'm puzzling out what a line means, three more have gone by. For me, seeing one of Shakespeare's plays is doing battle with sometimes impenetrable language. So much of the meaning has to come through the actors--when I don't understand a word, or a phrase, or even an entire paragraph of dialogue, I have to rely on body language, gesture, and blocking to help me understand what's going on. Obviously, those things are always a part of communication, and in every play the way characters act clues you in to the meaning of their dialogue. But when I hear Shakespeare, the meaning the actors imbue to a line with their acting is often completely divorced from the words themselves, because I have no idea what the words mean.

I went to Romeo and Juliet at Cal Shakes on Saturday night.

The production was great. I loved the cast, especially Juliet and Mercutio. The two of them blew me away with energy and wit, which fit the production's aesthetic perfectly. The scenes and the characters felt important and vital, and the set design (minimalist) coupled with the costuming (generally simple, modern garb) focused attention on the acting. That worked, because the acting was great. The play itself was not what I expected.

I had not seen Romeo and Juliet before, and knew about the play only what I'd picked up through high school and cultural osmosis (the outline of the plot, several famous phrases). The thing that struck me about the play was just how young its central characters are. In the CalShakes production, Mercutio and Benvolio dial up the crass action pretty high (at one point, Mercutio moons the audience), and their characters are certainly written as some crude dudes. Juliet can hardly stop thinking about sex long enough to fall in love with Romeo. Romeo falls in love with Juliet after spending the first scenes of the play crippled by love for another girl. All these characters are children, which--to me--was the great tragedy of the play. The tragedy was not that Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers, could not be together. The tragedy was that none of the adults in the play payed enough attention to the children to prevent them from making some very stupid decisions. I left wondering why these children felt they had to kill themselves for love.

Is the love between Romeo and Juliet "true" love? What does that even mean? Romeo is obviously infatuated with Juliet, and Juliet with Romeo. They pledge love to each other, then decide to marry less than 24 hours after meeting, mostly, it seems, so that they can have sex without pissing off God (or a devout audience?). What are their parents doing????

To return to my first paragraph, complaining about obscure language: the language doesn't just obscure the immediate meaning of words, but also Romeo and Juliet's youth. Their language--measured, careful, beautiful, mature--connotes a capability for serious thought which I doubt Romeo or Juliet could really have at their age. It leads us to trust their judgment more than if they spoke in uncertain sentences broken with awkward pauses as they picked at pimple scabs on their foreheads.

A few scattered thoughts from the last few days

I flew back to San Diego from New York yesterday, and tomorrow I leave for San Francisco. Tomorrow's my birthday. A week and a day from tomorrow is my wedding. Things are speeding up. Here are a few assorted links, and thoughts, from the last few days.

1) I watched Retreat, starring Cilian Murphy, Thandie Newton, and Jamie Bell, a few nights ago. It was a disaster, and I wouldn't recommend it, but it had a good premise: a couple (Murphy and Newton), their marriage foundering, take a vacation to save their relationship on an isolated island on which they are the only people. After a few days on the island, an unknown, wounded man (Bell) turns up. He tells the couple that a global pandemic has hit, and everyone on the mainland is infected. Their only chance is to board up the house and refuse entry to anyone finding a way to the island. The couple distrusts him, which makes some amount of sense, given that his story is fantastic and the couple can't even trust each other. The movie had the chance to have its theme (distrust and poor communication in marriage is toxic) align perfectly with its larger story, but it overthought itself. Retreat could have ended with the stranger's story proved true just as the couple's distrust consumes them all, so the audience can see how the couple's personal flaws doomed them. This would make something of a classical tragedy. Instead, the film provides a twist ending, in which the stranger has been lying the entire time, but the truth is much less plausible than the lie. The plot and thematic resonance is destroyed, and the movie is ruined. Blech. The lesson? Twists suck.

2) On the plane home I read "How Junk Food Can End Obesity," the cover story in this month's Atlantic. The piece suggests that the obesity epidemic is much more likely to be solved by reducing the calorie counts of McDonald's sandwiches (and other junk food items) than by anything else. Instead of expecting people to change where and how they eat, the author thinks it much more practical to make minor, calorie-conscious changes to what people are always going to eat. This strikes me as, well, sorta plausible, and not a bad idea. It doesn't require any major cultural shift to achieve, even on the part of fast food restaurants. The author already reports on some of lower-calorie options (which are still savory, meaty, cheesy, and sometimes eggy) that McDonald's already offers. But none of the suggestions are actually about nutrition, although the article expends many words talking about nutrition. The suggestions are simply about scale. Less calories means less obese people. Unhealthy people who are not obese are beyond the scope of the article.

3) I read an item in New York magazine about "The Boxer at Rest," the sculpture currently on display at the Met. The boxer is, above all, vulnerable. He's wounded; he's suffered cuts and bruises in the fight, yes, but his body also bears the marks and wounds of his occupation. He has cauliflower ears, a smashed nose, and his foreskin has been sewed shut. The sculpture fits right into a contemporary conversation about sports (especially violent sports) and exploitation. The boxer has suffered wounds and mutilations for his sport. In the moment captured here, after the fight, does he seem to believe it was worth it? It's rare to have a dialogue about sports entirely concerned with something other than the Big Game. Here, we see pain and vulnerability divorced from glory. It makes glory look different.

Hello, No Irony

When I was in D.C., about three months ago, I went to see Hello Dolly at Ford's Theater. I like musical theater, though I'd never seen Hello Dolly before. It was jarring. The musical was first produced on Broadway in 1964, and the story is set around the turn of the 20th century. The society portrayed in the show is not modern--it reflects the prejudices of the time the show was written--and the show is a comedy, whose premise and jokes are generally anti-feminist. That the show was anti-feminist is not particularly interesting--I imagine that Hello Dolly isn't much worse on that score than the rest of America's pop-cultural output in 1964. But it's not 1964 anymore.

The production at Ford's presented the show without irony, or cynicism. The laugh lines were delivered as written, told without comment from the director or actors: punchlines were directed at women, instead of at those who would seek to curtail women's freedom. Watching the play was strange, as though I had been transported to 1964, when these jokes were funny (most of the crowd was laughing along. The actors sold the jokes well.).

I get why the show might still be produced in 2013: the music. People love the music. And the music is good, I guess. But does a modern production need to mimic the historical context of the original production just to showcase its music?

Performing Hello Dolly might always be problematic, no matter what sort of direction is given. But a healthy dose of irony couldn't hurt. It was deeply strange to be audience to a show unabashedly asking me to laugh at jokes with women as the punchline. With irony, the punchlines might sound different, and the object of all those problematic jokes might change enough to make them palatable. This, of course, means modernizing the show. It means updating the show to appeal to a modern audience, and changing the way the play comes across--contravening the intent of its authors. Doing this adds a directorial meta-comment about the show's worldview.

I love history and, in a sense, what I saw was history. I saw a production as it might have been given in 1964--a sort of reenactment of a musical in an earlier time. But why? Reproducing Hello Dolly this way is sort of like remaking any movie from 1964 shot-for-shot and line-by-line. Why do that?

The production, otherwise, was mostly good--great acting, awesome costuming, though there were a few moments of incoherent blocking near the end. Still, despite the quality of the production, I'm not sure why it was done. Was the music and the costuming enough to justify a production selling retrograde society?

This is it

This is it: the beginning of a month of traveling. First a bachelor party in New York, then a few weeks in San Francisco for my wedding (!), then a slow, week long drive up the coast before stopping at Portland for another wedding.

I don't intent to neglect the blog. I've got some posts queued, and I'll find time in the coming weeks to write some stuff about marriage and the wedding, I'm sure. For today, I'll just say: I'm excited. I'm excited to travel, excited to see family and friends, excited to celebrate my wedding, and, most of all, I'm excited to be married. I feel very lucky to have my partner.

A note on the programming: I'm going to post regularly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. (Unless I don't feel like it.) So, see you Monday. Here's a cat picture.