What's up Earthlings!

I was already able to see some viewers of Earthlings looking away from scenes of disemboweled cattle and masochistic experiments gone wrong. Some reviewers on their review videos seemed to be fully persuaded that their video seemed like some kind of vegetarian propaganda video. Of course, there were also reviewers who showed the way opposite reactions to the video: Earthlings polarized and exaggerated the true image of our society. Yet, both side seemed to be overly obsessed with gruesome depiction of animal abuses and had peripheral point of views. I thought the film was something more than ordinary animal loving documentary; more like Henry David Thoreau’s naturalism, the film tried to persuade people that human-beings are part of the nature - something that is saying human-beings are neither can be compared to the nature nor conquer the nature.

When people first see the film or other texts, there are something called first impression – rather it is impressive, stirring, gruesome, scary, or even trashy. First impression for me was very clean: the movie was well organized into five different sub topics based on three stage of truth. Five stages - Pet, Food, Clothes, Entertainment, and Science - seemed to be well representing views and message that director wanted to imbue into the film. Though some, or many, of the scenes were equally gruesome and sometimes terrifying to me, at the same level of shock, the message the director wanted to convey seemed to be very clear to me: animals deserve at least minimum dignity, and humans are completely ignoring animals’ dignity.

Cute "But" - 0:47 lol  

Next thing that I learned from the film was not from the director’s message translated into the film but from the details of the movie, new facts that have totally shaken my stereotypes about the clinical demonstration with animals. Before watching this movie, I thought scientific research with the rats and all the other “high cost” animals was took in a very careful manner under move than clean condition which turns out to be untrue in the film; although it may be just some surprising fact to some people, for me, who once romanticized the scientists working in biology laboratory for animal clinical demonstration, this fact really had shaken my own little admiration towards the biologists. Furthermore, I thought vivisection would be more loathsome than animal slaughtering because simply saying, vivisection I thought was disintegrating animals into every single part while slaughtering was simply cutting off head under disinfected clean condition with highly mechanized clean cutting – cutting that is so fast that animal feels no pain at all. Again, this was false. Although I’m a devoutly staunch meat lover, at that short minute, the film showing reality of animal slaughtering, I doubted my belief.

Until now, based on what I have said, I cannot deny that I am positive with this film’s message or quality. Though aforementioned impression is faithfully based on my own feelings, I thought this feeling would be little insipidly predictable for some people. So, to balance the view, I researched for little fresh view toward the film. Adam Harrell, a local foodie and interactive marketer, commented on Earthlings:

I expected a greatest hits film of animal suffering with little subtlety and a complete lack of nuance. Unfortunately, that’s mostly what this film offers... The core flaw of this film is that Earthlings too often presents a flawed practice as the only possible alternative. They take the classic arguments of “Animal Liberation” and remove all the subtlety. They start the film by equating modern day human society with Nazis because of our treatment of animals. Instead of Jews, it’s Animals that we kill needlessly in a holocaust of massive proportions. The idea being that like the Nazis, human society has systematically built a world in which animals are tortured and eliminated because of their identity as the other.

Considering the fact that the film so blatantly portrayed animal slaughtering and all the other industries involving animal killing to inhumane and barbaric action, the film may contain an anticipated image of the reality rather than reflecting the reality itself. What was fresh about it was that Adam Harrell seemed to incorporate some objective economical view with his review of the factually based but banally emotional film. Though the idea and portrayal in the film may contain some biased perspective towards the animal industry, if what film has shown to us is majority of the animal industries are doing, the problem becomes little more than serious. Ironically, with all this disputes and conjecture, we will never know the truth unless we know everything. One thing that is clear is that this film is one way that some other people view our society.

Nonetheless, honestly saying, this film would never had premiered at the Artivist Film Festival, where it won Best Documentary Feature, followed by the Boston International Film Festival, where it won the Best Content Award, if the film was simply conveying the message that animal should deserve better condition than the current condition. There are something more than animal rights in this film in my perspective: Earthlings is not just the kind of seditious documentaries; it is a film dealing with universal ideology not only applicable to animals but also to any one of us. Like Life of Pi, through the lens of extreme metaphor, Earthlings reveals the fearful side of our society, an innate Speciesism. The director, at the very first part of the documentary, mentions about Speciesism: it is deeply rooted in our society as a form of Racism, one race to another race; Sexism, one sex to another sex; Speciesism, one species to another species. At the last part of the documentary, the director says that the importance of an issue “all comes down to pain and suffering…not social class or civil rights.” Although Speciesism is depicted by repugnant scenes of animal slaughtering in the documentary, the director implies that unreasonable conflicts and strivings for discrimination in our society are all the same gruesome truth that our world embraces. During the documentary, there is a line that says:

"Ignorance is the Speciesisits' first line of defense, yet it is easily breached by anyone to find out the truth...ignorance prevails only because people don't want to find the truth; it is not an inability to find out what's going on..."

Maybe, the truth, the director is referring to, is “Inconvenient Truth”: truth that is inconvenient because it is not only about the animal abuse but also about our society itself.

As I have mentioned, the reactions in all the review posts and the Youtube review videos are understandable: being a vegetarian or not, being a tenacious meat-eater or not. Even the director in his own interview clip mentioned that one of his intentions of his film was to persuade people to think about the animal rights, basically saying be a vegetarian; nevertheless, I believe the reasons the documentary touches so many people and is recognized by the world is not just because of its realistic portrayal animal abuse, but because of metaphoric “reality” inside. 

References:

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/MediaCenter/Earthlings-review.htm
http://www.foodiebuddha.com/2009/07/13/earthlings-an-animal-rights-documentary-that-preaches-to-the-choir-but-fails-to-advance-the-cause-guest-blogger/
http://drbenkim.com/earthlings-documentary.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Monson
http://worldnewsforlife.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/nation-earth-new-film-unity/