Long-range Vocalizations and Why I'll Never Go Back to SeaWorld

We're sneaking up on the 100th anniversary of the death of Murderous Mary, whose life has become a cautionary tale on the abuse of animals for entertainment.  If you don't know the story, here it goes: Mary was an circus elephant who, after years in captivity, flew into a rage and crushed a handler.  The details of the death are vague, but in the days following the "murder" people in the nearby eastern Tennessee towns demanded her execution.  After attempting to shoot Mary, and seeing that the bullets had no effect on her massive body, the circus owner realized it's hard to kill a six-ton elephant.  He and the other handlers brainstormed numerous inventive and gruesome ways to kill Mary, finally settling on a public hanging with an industrial crane.  After breaking the first chain, Mary was successfully executed by hanging on September 13, 1916.

I thought about Mary last night as I left the Tennessee movie theater close to my house and seven hours from the place of her death.  I was there to see Blackfish, which tells the story of Tilikum, a 12,000 pound bull orca whale who was captured off the coast of Washington in the 1980s, and since has spent his entire life in captivity, most of it at Florida's SeaWorld.  Since then, he has been involved in the deaths of three people, most recently an experienced SeaWorld trainer in 2010.  Tilikum is not a murderous monster, but rather the product of industry that has damaged him physically and psychologically, rendering him dangerous.  After all, Tilikum is not the only orca in captivity known to be unpredictable.  The film describes some of the 33 other recorded incidents of orcas acting violently toward humans in zoos, yet there is no record of these whales doing intentional harm in the wild.  By the end of the film, the message is clear: orcas are brilliant, complicated creatures with full emotional and relational lives we do not understand, and to keep them in captivity is physical and psychological abuse.


According to Blackfish, one of the consequences of commodifying orca whales is the breakup of their family units, which have unique languages and cultures when left intact in the wild.  This film shows two scenes of baby whales being taken from their parents, and they are as gut-wrenching and disturbing as if it had shown a human child separated from her mother.  During Tilikum's capture from the wild, drag nets pull him and three other baby whales into a pen away from their mothers, where cranes then hoist them into boats.  The whole excruciating process is captured on camera, while the mother whales wait in a line on the other side of the drag net, their heads out of the water, screaming back and forth to the babies trapped in the nets.  The sound of grief and terror transcends all languages; even the boat's crew members cry in interviews years later when they recount the event.  The whole incident leaves three of the baby orcas dead, whose bodies are cut open, filled with rocks, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.  Apparently this brutal separation of families takes place in captivity as well.  Years later, when Florida's SeaWorld sells one of Tilikum's offspring to another park, the mother whale goes into mourning for her child.  She goes to the corner of her pool, refusing to eat or move, and then begins screaming.  When SeaWorld calls on a marine biologist to explain the cries, she reports the whale is making "long-range vocalizations," trying to get in touch with her lost child, wherever she was.

I watched both of these scenes with open-mouthed horror.  One of the critiques I've read about this movie is that it is one-sided, and at times emotionally manipulative, but this isn't a movie that is trying to give you both sides of a debate on animals in captivity.  This is a movie that wants to leave you in awe of the mind and power of these animals, and in awe of the evil we do against them when we act in ignorance and motivated by profit.  And does Blackfish ever accomplish this goal.  In another scene, an orca attacks his trainer by pulling him under water for as deep and as long as his body can withstand, then releases him to the surface, only to pull him back again.  Two things jarred me in this scene.  First, the whale seemed to know exactly how long he could show his frustration without killing the trainer, and second, that all the trainers left on shore did nothing.  This isn't to their shame.  After all, what could they do?  How do you stop a 12,000 pound orca whale from doing anything?  Could you even kill it if you wanted to?  These are the images that bring Murderous Mary to mind, another intelligent, relational animal whose story leaves us wondering what to do when you've captured and damaged an animal you can't control.

Go see this movie.  Yes, it's content is political; this is a movie with a clear platform against the captivity of orca whales and it makes no attempt to balance that message.  But it's also a cautionary tale that is deeply resonate in the years of the global warming debate: what happens when humans insist on asserting their dominance over nature, in all its complexity and intricacy that we do not understand and for which we lack the proper reverence.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

My Mom Herzog, Part 2

In a gated community in Texas in October 2001, a fifty-year-old nurse named Sandra Stotler was found floating in a retention pond wrapped in the duvet from her own bedroom. The bodies of her son, Adam, and his best friend were found in the woods nearby. The convicted killer, Michael Perry, was sentenced to death for the three murders, while his accomplice Jason Burkett was sentenced to life in prison. The motive was theft. The boys had wanted to steal the Stotlers' red Camaro. Werner Herzog's documentary Into The Abyss documents the last eight days of Michael Perry's life.

As Herzog interviews the shellshocked survivors of the ordeal -- Stotler's daughter, full of grief and anger, Burkett's father, serving a prison sentence himself and wracked with guilt, and Burkett's wife, who married him while he was in prison and remains convinced of his innocence -- it becomes quickly apparent that we, the arthouse audience, are seeing a part of America that we normally get to look past. It is astounding how many people touched by the murder have been in prison, suffered violence, or faced homelessness. Burkett's sobbing father informs Herzog that he is currently facing his fifth prison sentence, and believes that his addictions to drugs and alcohol are primarily to blame for Burkett's crimes. The brother of one victim broke parole to attend his brother's funeral (he was arrested at the service) and lost his other sister in an accident when she was walking on the freeway. Burkett's brother is serving a prison sentence as well, and a bar full of witnesses heard Perry bragging on the night of the murder about shooting someone to steal a car are barely ruffled. Violence, loss, waste, and harm seem to be part of the daily rhythm of life for these people. They are up to their eyes in it.

Which is why it is all the more jarring when we hear Herzog's genteel German accent from behind the camera, asking a grieving man about his tattoo. "What does that tattoo on your arm say?" he asks, politely.

"Brandy," says the man. "My girlfriend."

And just like that, Herzog channels the spirit of my midwestern suburban mother, and says, "You got your girlfriend's name tattooed on your arm? What if the relationship dissolves?"

Herzog wants you to think about the consequences of your actions. He feels strongly about your bad habit of texting and driving, and now he wants you to think about your tattoo choices. A tattoo is forever, right?

Which begs the question: can you make a documentary that treats its audience, and its subjects, like peers?

Herzog is a master-class documentarian and overwhelmingly, Into the Abyss is spectacular. It suspends judgement about the guilt of Michael Perry (Perry himself maintains his innocence) and avoids political conversation about the death penalty in favor of storytelling. It's a long, meditative look at the victims and perpetrators of violence themselves -- whether the perpetrators be homeless car thieves or employees of the state. It allows the subjects to tell, in their own words, what the homicide and its aftermath has meant for them. A prison guard who executes two prisoners a week for a year finally breaks down and quits his job when he realizes he can't do such work any longer. The daughter of Statler, whose life story is one long chronicle of disaster, shares her anger at Perry and the closure she got from his death. A chaplain opines that he can swerve his golf cart to save the lives of squirrels, but can do nothing to save the inmates he ministers to every day.

But you can never shake the feeling, when you hear Herzog's voice, that Herzog, and by implication us, are horribly out of place. Herzog asks questions that have apparently never occurred to these people. He tries to draw out the metaphysical side of a prison guard ("Do you think that there was a part of you, a part of your personality deep down, that believed this was wrong?") only to be looked at with confusion and stammering. The guard is practical, and concerned with consequences. Herzog is an abstract artist. The two are talking past each other. Herzog also has a hard time hiding his outsider's fascination with Burkett's wife, and her choice to marry a convicted felon. While his interest is understandable on several levels (the couple has never been permitted a conjugal visit, but Mrs. Burkett is pregnant with her husband's child), the questions he asks about their relationship seem a bit wide-eyed, and forward to the point of being rude. Mrs. Burkett is a kind of zoo animal to him, whose actions and desires are completely foreign to the filmmakers and audience.

For all its strong moments, those weird tonal moments of Into the Abyss, when Herzog shows off just how out-of-place an old liberal white man is in this world, make the experience of watching this documentary feel occasionally like cultural tourism. We interact with the people on and around Death Row, who are profoundly unlike us, and then we watch another Sundance movie while we drink a dry Cabernet and have quinoa salad for dinner. The people in this documentary become the objects of our study, and interest, and pity. They do not become our peers.

Herzog served as the quintessential suburban mom when he warned young motorists not to text and drive, and I stood by him in that film. I'm a cyclist and I like my brain where it is. But the tone that Herzog kept slipping into in this film reminded me of another kind of suburban mother: the kind who goes out of her comfort zone to volunteer at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and, no matter how well-meaning she tries to be, just can't help but alienate the people around her. She's not like the people around her, and she knows it. The result is, despite the best intentions, a deepening of the gulf between two groups of people that ultimately does more harm than good.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

My Mom Herzog, Part 1

Werner Herzog made a PSA about texting and driving.

It is thirty-five minutes long.

It seems sort of silly to evaluate From One Moment to the Next as a documentary project, even though it's filmed like one. After all, it was commissioned by AT&T to be shown in high schools and government agencies, and features several shots of people reading the message of the short film at the camera lens, after-school-special style: "Don't text and drive. Seriously, don't do it."

If this were a normal documentary, I would find this pedantic, but because Herzog is basically making a PSA he is unapologetically taking the role of your mother telling you to put down your damn phone and watch the road. We do not hear Herzog at all in this documentary, asking questions or providing voiceovers, unlike his feature documentary Into the Abyss. The result is thirty-five uninterrupted minutes of car crash victims giving frank, wrenching accounts of the damage of the accidents they caused, the accidents that the car next to them caused, and the way these accidents upended their lives. It's a glorified version of the anti-drug PSAs we used to watch as kids, and if that sounds like an insult, it's not. It's relevant, refreshingly straightforward, and honest. And like the best warnings, it lets the people who have made mistakes speak for themselves.

I'm linking this because I'm a cyclist and I see dozens of you nutjobs doing this every day. I like my skull the way it is. Don't text and drive.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Shut Up, Movie; or, What A Documentary on Child Killers Could Learn From an Australian-German Movie on War Criminals

I often end up thinking about movies in relationship to whatever movies I happened to watch immediately before or after it, so stick with me on this one. I'm about to compare two movies that have almost nothing in common.

But I think I have a good point here.

Earlier this week I came across the 2012 movie Lore, a striking, deeply mournful drama about a group of five siblings living in the Black Forest in the last days of WWII. When their Nazi parents are arrested by Allied forces, fourteen-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl -- keep your eye on this girl) must lead her siblings on a nine-hundred-kilometer journey to their grandmother's house across their decimated fatherland. Along the way, they encounter reports of, and witnesses to, the Nazi regime's brutality, and a survivor of Auschwitz named Thomas (Kai Malina) becomes their unlikely companion and protector.

I have no reservations about calling this movie a must-see. It is an extraordinarily shot, extraordinarily acted piece of cinema that ought to be required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in WWII. Primary credit here goes to the direction and cinematography, plus the extraordinary performance of Rosendahl as the title character. At its core, Lore is a character study of one girl bearing the weight of two terrible burdens. The first is the lives of her four siblings, whom she must protect and provide for as they travel without money and food through a war zone. The second is the growing awareness that the ideas and values she's cherished her whole life -- Nazi ideology, really -- are actually horrifying. In order to get food for her siblings at refugee camps, Lore must look at photographs of Auschwitz's emaciated prisoners and read the first-hand accounts of the camps' survivors. We hear the other German refugees around her responding to these pictures - "It's exaggerated." "It's a lie." "Those men are actors." And so forth. We don't hear Lore respond. We just see her watch, and look, and listen.


It's that silence surrounding the lead character that makes Lore work. Lore is a quiet, understated movie that rarely lets us get intimate with its lead character. Lore doesn't talk to her siblings about her feelings or experiences, so we never experience the story in her words. We are just unbearably close to her as she makes her way through the trials before her. Rather than telegraphing Lore's anxieties to us through the script, director Cate Shortland lets the camera linger on details that allow us to think Lore's thoughts along with her. Shots of the deep mud Lore pushes a baby carriage through (the youngest sibling is an infant) show us the exhaustion and frustration that accompanies caring for four children. A vat of clothes boiling in black dye show the deep national grief that accompanies Lore's growing antipathy towards her parents' values. The bloodied legs of a murdered woman convey the ever-present threat of violence and rape against a young woman left without any protection.

In other words, this is a movie that uses images and intimations to convey the experience of its characters. It is very, very quiet.

The 2009 American documentary Cropsey is not.

If Cropsey were a person, he would be the guy who sits next to you while you're trying to watch his favorite TV show and explains the plot to you even if you already understood it. The movie is about two Staten Island filmmakers who, recalling an urban legend about a child murderer named Cropsey that frighten them as children, discover that the story may have come to life when a drifter named Andre Rand is accused of kidnapping and killing developmentally-disabled children in their neighborhood.  After Rand is charged and convicted with two of the five disappearances originally linked to him, documentarians Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zemens explore the evidence linking Rand to the crimes of which he was ultimately convicted. These stories include the disturbing story of a now-defunct mental hospital where Rand was a custodian, Rand's own history of violence, mental illness, and vagrancy, plus hysterical rumors of an underground cult of Staten Island satanists who perform human sacrifices in abandoned buildings.

Cropsey, deeply reminiscent of other better documentaries like West of Memphis and Paradise Lost, gives the audience convincing evidence that the prosecution proved beyond reasonable doubt that Rand killed 13-year-old Jennifer Schweiger and 7-year-old Holly Ann Hughes. There was, for example, no physical evidence linking Rand to either crime. Hughes' body was never even found. What apparently convinces Staten Island of Rand's monstrousness is a combination of local folklore, moral panic, and Rand's own less-than-winsome public image. A front-page newspaper photo shows Rand literally drooling as police officers take him into custody, and his correspondence with the directors demonstrates that Rand is clearly unhinged. He is an outsider in the Staten Island community, homeless, and a drifter.

Rand could be, in fact, a real-life Cropsey. Or he could only be the victim of the strange set of forces that hold sway over this troubled community -- the instinct to protect children, the fear of unspeakable evil, the dynamics between insiders and outsiders, the need for a scapegoat, and above all, the overwhelming power of images, legends, and stories. In the face of such powers, is it possible to know the truth, or is the truth-seeker left only with the intersection between reality and story? Can we know anything about Rand, or can we only discover Cropsey?

"LOOK HOW SCARY THIS IS."

The problem with this movie is that basically everything I've just written is pedantically spelled out for us in tiresome voiceovers for the benefit of the idiots in the audience who just don't get it. Though the interviews with families, lawyers, and prosecutors more than speak for themselves, Zemens and Brancaccio insist on ending every sequence with a pan of old buildings and spooky forests while solemnly explaining the movie's message to you. They just can't trust you to look at the raw material and figure out what they're trying to tell you. Even as they explore the abandoned mental hospital Willowbrook and the forests where the homeless Rand made his home for years, Zemens and Brancaccio betray a strange concern that their topic and setting might not be disconcerting enough on its own. They insist, for example, on investigating Willowbrook in the middle of the night, Blair-Witch style. Why film in the middle of the night when the audience can't get a clear look at the facility that haunts Staten Island's history? Because it's so much creepier in the middle of the night, that's why. And then Zemens helpfully chimes in with a voiceover to remind us that This Facility Haunts Staten Island's History, and you might not have gotten it if he hadn't been here to tell you about it.

By the time Cropsey is over, you just want Zemens and Brancaccio to leave you alone. Everything is souped up, dressed up, talked through, walked through, explained, evaluated, and summarized. It's like being shown a delicious meal, then having Zemens and Brancaccio chew it up and spit it directly into your mouth. While all you want is to explore the facts, images, and stories in their raw and undoctored form, the filmmakers just can't stand to let you figure it out on your own. And this is where Lore's psychic distance and silence could teach Zemens and Brancaccio a thing or two about filmmaking. When Lore watches Thomas bathe and play with her young siblings in a creek bed, she doesn't turn to her little sister and say, "I don't know how to reconcile the closeness I feel like Thomas with the fact that he is Jewish."We don't need her to, and if she did it would be ridiculous. The director and actress trust us to have the awareness and humanity to see Lore interact with her environment, and to understand the turmoil and pain and changes she's going through. The director, in other words, does not think you are an idiot.

And Cropsey could have done the same thing. A description of the suspect evidence, plus an account of the crazed satanic-cult rumors, plus an interview with someone who remembers the Cropsey legends, all express the same theme that Zemens explains to you in his voiceovers. Lore's style of communication leaves the viewer feeling haunted and sobered. Cropsey's style of communication leaves the viewer feeling belittled and manipulated. Lore's style is better.

So shut up, movies. Let the viewer figure it out for once.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!