Aesthetics, Ethics and Empowerment in The Cove
Yalan Chang
Many literary and cultural texts discuss the issues of food production and
consumption and the unsafe and inhumane environmental effects of the industrialized
food change in the age of globalization. Under globalization it is often the case that new
inequalities and risks, often described as “food safety,” have made their way into
mainstream discussions of American culture, history and public health. A global
environmental food crisis, particularly in the meat, seafood and agribusiness industries,
and their use of genetically modified food crops, shackles the world with a chain of risk
that penetrates into people’s everyday life. In the face of implicit/explicit
environmental collapse worldwide, a number of popular writers, activists, scientists,
filmmakers and novelists, from Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Robert Kenner, Hubert
Sauper, Louie Psihoyos to Ruth Ozeki and Barbara Kingsolver make food-related
topics pivotal in their arguments. They often buttress their discussions with research on
how consumer eating habits have tremendous impact on the environment and
other-than human species.
Food documentary films attempt to represent food-related issues through
mediated representation of the “facts.” Among them, my paper here particularly
explores the grievous conditions of dolphins in the meat and seafood industries and
disclosures the impact and the dark side of consumption, shown in Louie Psihoyo’s The
Cove in 2009. The film such as this arouses emotional viewer responses through
documentation of the heartless treatment of dolphins massacred in Dolphin Bay in Taiji,
Japan. This essay examines how Psihoyos uses his film to arouse people’s emotional
responses to certain issues related to food and animals and argues food-related
documentary films such as this is using strategies and rhetoric to achieve affective
ethics and to arouse certain reactions or responses even repulsion in order to let out the
facts that people other than that area are unaware of. I will see what narrative or
rhetorical strategies and appeals, visual rhetoric including powerful images or
arguments that the director adopts in the film to make the ending scene of the slaughter
of dolphins display itself graphically and influentially so as to earn itself a prize (the
Oscar for Best Documentary Award in 2009), broadcast the whole event worldwide and
a practical political effect from other countries. From disclosing global food chain risks
(an anthropocentric point of view) to advocacy of animal rights or having empathy,
sympathy toward specific species dolphin (a biocentric perspective), and from
aesthetics to ethics, I will argue this film is successfully modeling global environmental
activism in its empowering people face the problems the film exposes.
With the hope that through mediated representation of the facts in documentaries
the power of witness and the power of words can make the influence of the film be
bolstered up. But how these facts are exposed by the film is involved with the issues
of narrative and visual rhetoric. Examining film narrative exploration helps to
understand how certain reactions will be achieved. The Cove describes how a group of
people assembled by the director Louie Psihoyos, including dolphin trainer and rescuer
Richard O’Barry, Olympic divers, Hollywood special effect designers, sneak into a
fishing village, Taiji, the Wakayama City in Japan and expose the slaughter of dolphins,
a regional activity held by local Japanese fishermen in Taiji every year beginning in
September for a period of six months and kept secret, hidden and concealed from the
general public. Psihoyos, as “an urbane eco-warrior” (NY Times) and a co-founder of
The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS), is regarded as “one of the world’s top
professional nature photographers” (The Jakarta Post). From photography to
filmmaking, Psihoyos fully makes use of the traits of the latter and draws audiences’
attention right at the outset of the film. It is a pity to say some documentaries have a
stigma in relation to preaching, didacticism, and lack of theatric elements that some
people have patience to concentrate on or finish them all. However, making it as an
eco-thriller with a mysterious car that tails and tracks and scenes viewed through a
thermal imaging camera, Psihoyos knows perfectly how to catch audience’s eyes in a
short time. He says this film is just like “a Trojan horse,” and comments on
documentaries: “I love documentaries, but I always start looking at my watch. It's like
taking medicine or eating your vegetables – you'd always rather eat your sweets first”
(qtd. in Catherine Shoard). He does create an eye-catching atmosphere at the beginning
of the documentary. This visual effect sends his audiences naturally approach the
aesthetic part of the film.
Food documentary-making not merely records the reality, it can be a study
concluded that, their practice, demonstrates the diversity of documentary aesthetics. As
Mark Cousins states, “Documentary is intrinsically aesthetic, . . . it is as much about
shots and cuts, structure and rhythm as fiction film.” Aesthetic elements, however, are
hardly differentiated with politics of films. Derived from eco-media and parallel with
and further Ecospeak, Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey in Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric,
Nature put emphasis on how rhetoric role of images interacts its environmental ideas.
For them, the environmental dilemma lies in the problems of representation, rhetorical
and visual-rhetorical choice (3). Aesthetic elements in Psihoyos’s The Cove are mainly
revealed in the aspects of the grace and beauty of dolphins and dolphin symbolism in
which people show how dolphins possess desirable characteristics, such as love,
friendship, harmony, peace, intelligence, grace, joy (smile-like mouth). Our
relationships with animals are involved with complicated feelings and our imagination
of the animals. Scenes in the film show typical images of dolphin jumping up above the
water or creating and playing with underwater bubbles with blowholes and nose. Apart
from their own beauties, the interaction between dolphins and human beings is
enhanced in the film. One of the divers recollects his experiences of being saved by one
dolphin from shark’s attack and the other diver is filmed beautifully dancing with the
dolphin and her embodied experience of touch with the dolphin is also presented
gracefully. These human-animal interrelationships evolving from emotional
identification are strengthened by some ecocritics. As E. N. Anderson expresses,
“Aesthetic experience indicates deep emotional involvement” (17). The emotional
attachment with dolphins beautifies the scene.
In this regard, Psihoyos’s aesthetics presented in the film not only uses light,
shadow, composition, and color to consider how to represent a beautiful scene but also
shows an internal, deep insightful consciousness flows naturally with its moving
storylines. As Gilberto Perez argues, “landscape has its own demands and its own way
of resisting an attempt to press into unwarranted service. . . . [L]andscape will seldom
countenance an importune display of its features in support of an undeserving story or
scheme” (242). Both landscape and story support each other. The beauty of the
picturesque seaside town Taiji’s landscape is in contrast to its bloody image of killing
zone. Psihoyos uses long take to display eerie silence of the cove, which consists of
secluded narrow lagoon and protected steep cliffs, to compose an atmosphere of hidden
secrets beneath its beautiful landscape. Grand vistas with dull stories cannot make a
blockbuster. The landscape with shaky stories can make everything fall flat and cannot
carry the film. Through both visual and narrative rhetoric, Psihoyos’s aesthetics go
hand in hand with his purpose of producing this documentary and his passion for
discourses surrounding humanistic concerns.
Aesthetics of food documentary film does not imply visually appealing only but
deeply and seriously involves with the relationship between the camera and the subject,
and then through the understanding of "relationship" process and “narrative” tactics,
leading the viewers to an engagement with information and affect, the emotions that are
produced in the viewer. The Cove proceeds from several angles to present its affective
ethics, in which ecocritic Simon C. Estok defines as “an ethics of praxis” (152). As
Dobrin and Morey point out, instead of exclusively analyzing “existing images,” films
that communicate environmental messages and issues are “toward making theories that
put forward ways of thinking about the relationship between image and environment,
nature, and ecology, as well as theory (or, more accurately, a number of theories) of
visual design for those who make images” (2). Through certain visual effects in scenes,
such as using zooming in and out the landscape of the cove and close ups to catch
dolphins’ anthropomorphized smile or beautifully jumping gestures, the film accents on
the close relationships between humans and dolphins and also reveals a transition from
aesthetics to ethics. As Bracha Ettinger comments on the relationships between
artworks and ethics, “The beautiful accessed via artworks in our era . . . carries new
possibilities for affective apprehending and produces new artistic effects, where
aesthetics approaches ethics beyond the artist’s conscious control” (Ettinger).
Although it is not Ettinger’s intention to specifically address the issue of film while he
refers to artwork, ethics and trauma, however, film taken as an art form is largely
involved with the discussion of film aesthetics, ethics and politics especially in
documentaries. In the eye of beholder, filmmakers of this film, beauty lies in mutual
relationships between humans and nonhumans. The sympathetic feelings for the
dolphins come from people’s empirical experiences with these animals.
Other than the engaged experiences the divers get with the dolphins shown in the
film, Richard O’Barry’s long-term relationships with dolphins exhibit he and dolphins’
close proximity. O’Barry, a former trainer of Flipper, works with dolphins for 50 years.
He spent first ten years training dolphins in the marine parks industry and decides to
tear down what he has built up because of one dramatic incident happening to his
dolphin. As a founder of The Dolphin Project, O’Barry discovers dolphins are very
intelligent beings and a special species with consciousness. As conscious beings, they
can decide whether they end their lives themselves if too much pressure upon them.
Kathy, a dolphin who most often played Flipper, committed suicide in his arm by
refusing to take next breath herself. Identified with Kathy’s suffering, O’Barry from
then on “came to find it ethically wrong to keep these intelligent animals in captivity
to do tricks for human entertainment” (JURGENSEN, JOHN). Changing from a
dolphin trainer to a dolphin rescuer due to Kathy’s death, O’Barry senses a kind of
interrelatedness and sympathizes with all enslaved dolphins’ conditions. Without
romanticizing dolphins with the symbolized smile, the film shows sufferings of
dolphins’ captivity in the aquarium, in which noise pollution and pressure can lead to
a group of dolphins’s death. The other uniqueness of dolphins that the film introduces
is dolphins’ auditory systems which make them tactile animals and very sensitive to
noise.1 Sound device also discloses dolphins’ sufferings. In order to show dolphins
having capability of suffering, the team that Psihoyos assembled gets underwater
sound of dolphins to show when dolphins feel pain, they feel fear, scream and suffer.
Like human beings, dolphins are conscious, intelligent, and capable of suffering
(Peter Singer). From animal rights perspectives, dolphins should be set free instead of
capturing for entertainment and killing for meat. It is mutuality that creates
partnership between humans and dolphins to bring the food-animal issues to
“Dolphin: Senses.” Marine Mammals. n. d. Web. 26 May. 2011.
http://www.sarkanniemi.fi/akatemiat/dolphin_senses.html
1
ecological movement.
Health risk of mercury poisoning from dolphin meat is an ethical issue that The
Cove attempts to expose. Peter Singer and Jim Mason in The Ethics of What We Eat
contend that eating is a matter of ethical choice (3-4). Being aware of the risk created by
global industrialized food production and illustrating the omnipresent risks in the
dolphin meat, The Cove uncovers the collusive relationships among the government,
interest groups, bureaucracy, and free market. In The Cove, dolphins, like human
beings, being top predators in the ocean, eat out all the fishes under them, so dolphin
meat has high concentration of mercury, higher than what is safe for human beings to
consume. Dolphin meat has been intentionally mislabeled and sold as whale meat in
order to reap huge profits. Under the global food chain reaction and unaware of risk of
mercury-contaminated dolphin meat, the meat has been consumed both locally and
globally. Commerce is no excuse for murder. Sushi restaurants in Los Angles and in
Seoul also found mercury-contained dolphin meat. If dolphin meat is locally produced,
through global economic systems, its toxicity circulates in other countries and they are
not poor ones. The local problems may be a result of global processes in today’s climate
of globalization.
The risk of mercury-contaminated dolphin meat found in Japan is like what
German sociologist Ulrich Beck terms “boomerang effect,” in which Beck argues,
“Risks display a social boomerang effect in their diffusion: even the rich and powerful
are not safe from them. The formerly ‘latent side effects’ strike back even at the centers
of their production” (Beck 37; original emphasis). With Japanese government’s
intentionally cover up the truth and conspiracy among interests groups, The Cove
intends to expose mercury poisoning risk especially in Japan. Most of Japanese public
do not know the incident of dolphin hunting and mercury-tainted dolphin meat sold in
Japan. In order to inform and draw more Japanese people’s attention, Psihoyos
connects Minamata disease, an environmentally related health disease related to
high-level acute mercury poisoning and introduced in 1956 in Minamata, Japan, with
mercury tainted dolphin meat in order to raise Japanese people’s awareness. Two
Japanese officials, risking their job loss and even life loss, back the film up to express
their worries about children eating mercury poisoning dolphin meat. Packages of
dolphin meat are seen in supermarkets in Japan. Mercury-laden dolphin meat has
actually sold to Japanese schools; students eat high concentration of mercury dolphin
meat as lunch. The Cove official website also shows how mercury enters the food chain
and the dangers of eating seafood contaminated with mercury.
However, some accuse food documentary of causing unduly food fear among the
public and make the suffering of food workers comparatively neglected under the
situation. Still others argue that the documentary, like The Cove, only presents a partial
“truth.” Questions like these address the issues of boundary, authenticity, fiction, fact,
and aesthetics in the food documentary films. It is true when the killing-zone scene is
filmed with surveillance cameras hidden at fake rocks produced by Hollywood
designers to see what happens exactly because the whole area is blocked accidentally
by Japanese government and local fishermen, documentaries here seem to match the
definition that is “about reality; they’re about something that actually happened”
(Nichols 7) and it is not fiction or made-ups. Nevertheless, documentaries are not
exclusively about recording and presenting, editing and selecting with the filmmakers’
aesthetics, ethical concerns and politics makes the clips a whole different movie. In
the era of postmodernism or deconstruction, following Max Oelschlaeger’s
interpretations (5), “realities” and “facts” are words that increasingly find themselves
between quotation marks and in plural forms. Yet, as Oelschlaeger comments, “if
deconstruction is interpreted as denying legitimacy to scientific truth, it is, in the
context of ecocrisis, self defeating” (7). Climate change, extinction of species, and the
slaughter of the whales/dolphins in the cove in Japan and in another corner of the
world are undisputable facts.
People in Taiji claim that the massacre of dolphins is Japanese cultural practices
and the film is displayed one-sided and racist-bias. Using “local cultural practice” as an
excuse to fight against global environmental concerns is what people in Taiji adopt.
However, culture is possible to conceal corruption, accept wrongdoings and aid and
abet wicked deeds. Maintaining cultural traditions may be equal to maintaining
speciesism, misogyny, prejudice and discrimination. Same examples can be seen in
other countries and cultures when issues like human rights (China), women’s rights
(genital mutilation in Africa) and animal rights (Feroe Island, Denmark) have been
brought out to confront global concerns. Specific culture or particular country is not a
target in this representation. The Cove does not depict Japanese fishermen as villains.
What they concern is about larger scope, larger impact and long-term solutions. As
Jason Mark argues, “The Cove, then, isn’t just about a single atrocity. Rather, its raw,
gruesome images carry a larger message, a reminder of how we must work together to
protect our common oceans by fighting pollution, overfishing, climate change, and
other threats to dolphins and whales” (IMMP Staff & Jason Mark, “International
Marine Mammal Project”). In face of the conflict between global environmental ethics
and local human rights, I argue The Cove reveals a globalized ecocritical view; that is
an ethical response to both animals’ and people’s position within the global context.
Taken together, far away from didacticism and preaching, food documentary films
are more effective than other media in changing people’s perception on the food they
eat and the traumatic situations that both human and nonhuman encounter through the
power of words and images, and anticipate the possible establishment of alternative
communities, the formation of public opinion and conscience of environmental
citizenship.
Getting media’s attention indicates media coverage facilitates the disclosure of
atrocity when it is involved with huge profits, interests, and conspiracy that one
vulnerable individual cannot battle against. If Richard O’Barry is a man on a mission,
then this documentary is a film on a mission. Its politics has been revealed through
visual images and narrative rhetoric with ethical concerns in order to contend with
another rhetoric that is built up by the Japanese government: killing dolphins is a form
of “pest control,” in which dolphins are accused of eating up all fishes and this
endangers Japan’s fishing industries according to Japanese government. Measured by
deep ecologist Arne Naess’s ideas, a line between hunting for vital needs (Devall and
Sessions 70) and the grievous conditions of dolphin in the meat and seafood industries
should be kept. In the final killing scenes, fishermen use sound trap to herd dolphins
into the secret cove, make the cove a site of slaughterhouse, and select the good ones
for selling alive to aquariums throughout the world. Once the dolphins cannot sell, they
have been speared and harpooned mercilessly until water turns red and sold locally and
globally with labeling as whale’s meat. The unbearable killing methods are accused:
“as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly
primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy” (NY Times). The images
of inhuman treatment of dolphins are also seen in other films as food processers cut
food animals before they die because of loaded assembly line, such as The Animals
Film and Fast Food Nation. Except for repulsive feelings, the film successfully arouses
an ethical concern through documentation of the heartless treatment of dolphins
massacred. As Meisner comments, “Psihoyos and O’Barry . . . know how to craft a
message and tell stories that will help build compassion and care for our fellow
creatures, rather than simply treating them as spectacular entertainment at any cost”
(Mark Meisner, Alternative Journal 36.4 (2010): 6-6).
Nevertheless, it's “not only an animal rights film, it's a human rights film,”
Psihoyos tells CNN (qtd. in Grace Wong). Animal health and food safety are two
correlated issues. Allowing toxic-tainted seafood to be sold worldwide is also not
ethical for people in/out of Japan. Although disclosures the impact and the dark side
of meat consumption shows that the reason for stopping killing dolphins is mainly
from the viewpoint of anthropocentrism, as Psihoyos explains, “In fact, . . . this thing
may get stopped because of the mercury levels, rather than because killing dolphins is
wrong.” Getting rid of the presumption as compassion at its stance, an anthropocentric
rhetoric strategy sees the cruelest thing is not to slaughter dolphins brutally (for some
it surely is) but to put food animals in an assembly line and hid toxic facts from
consumers. Whatever the perspectives are, the senseless slaughter of the dolphin as
well as the health risk of eating mercury-tainted dolphin/whale meat have made waves
worldwide; distinguishing which perspective is more persuasive does not fit the film’s
intention. Only with its message to convey to the world can the film stop the atrocity.
Repulsive images as this film displays in the end, Psihoyos still suggests optimism:
“This movie is extremely hopeful at the end of this story, because you realize that one
person or a team of like-minded people, can make a difference.” He said, “Film is the
most powerful tool in the world for change” (qtd. in JURGENSEN, JOHN).
Advocating a ground-up spirit, the film also quotes Margaret Mead’s argument,
“Never ever depend upon governments or institutions to solve any major problem. All
social change comes from the passion of individuals” (The Cove). The problem lies in
how to “rework existing social constructions into new forms” (Oelschlaeger 7). The
team of activists in The Cove shows an example model of new forms. Taiji, obviously,
becomes the target of widespread environmental and animal rights activist criticism
since The Cove had been released in 2009. However, this is not one single country’s
problem. The film successfully draws people’s attention to environmental issues in
relation to food-animal production and consumption. Psihoyos tells CNN that after
this film, he “receives e-mails every day from people around the world who want to
help raise awareness.” From nature photographer to filmmaker, he discovers the
power of documentary: “With this film I wanted to create a legion of activists, and it's
working!” (qtd. in Grace Wong).