Are You Not Entertained?

A meeting of minds in Blackfish.

«««1/2  Blackfish.  Written by Gabriela Cowperthwaite & Eli B. Despres. Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. At select theaters.

           

It's easy to feel morally superior to people in the past. We tend to be less attuned to things we tolerate now that future generations will look upon with horror. Those benighted folks back there in the past, after all, will inevitably become us. Case in point is Gabriela Cowperthwaite's devastating new documentary, Blackfish. 

          The film concerns a particular entertainer at SeaWorld Orlando. A veteran of the theme park's live animal shows, Tilikum is a six ton male orca ("killer whale") who has killed three people in his checkered career. By all evidence he's not a rampaging monster. Like most orcas, he's intelligent, sweet-natured, and eager to please his trainers. In that discrepancy lies Cowperthwaite's problem: what is it about the way Tilikum was procured, housed, and treated that has made him liable to deadly spasms of violence?

          In a sense, the answer is as obvious as the fable about the fox carrying the scorpion across the river ("Why did you sting me?" asks the fox as they both drown. "It's in my nature," replies the scorpion.) Like tigers and lions, orcas are the top hunters in their world, and nobody makes exposes about big cats who turn on their trainers. It's in the nature of apex predators to sometimes kill.

          But Blackfish dives deeper. Bred over millions of years of evolution to range over wide swaths of ocean in tight, socially-cohesive groups, captive orcas are forced to live among strangers in comparatively tiny enclosures. Where female offspring in the wild spend their entire lives beside their mothers, captive-born orcas are regularly (and painfully) separated from their parents. Indeed, Cowperthwaite catches SeaWorld personnel systematically misinforming visitors about orca biology and psychology, maintaining that they live longer in captivity (they don't), and that wild whales regularly mutilate each other (which they seldom do). Their motive is not hard to guess: SeaWorld makes millions of dollars a year on its orca shows, and millions more in putting males like Tilikum out to stud.

          More dismaying is the way the park treats its human employees. Tilikum's trainers in Florida were allegedly kept in the dark about the whale's role in the 1991 death of a young trainer in Victoria, British Columbia. Accidents like the death of Dawn Brancheau in 2010 were blamed on the employees, who were no longer around to defend themselves. Cowperthwaite cuts contemporary interviews with the fatuous "party line" former trainers were paid to deliver in front of audiences. Looking back, the ex-employees cringe. In the end, the film is as much about the rendering of human beings into profit-making commodities as it is about the abuse of animals.

          This film is not so much an expose on its subject as an evisceration. For viewers who care about animals, it's difficult to watch. Anything as effective at wringing emotions from its audience as Blackfish deserves some scrutiny in its own right, and Cowperthwaite does commit some distortions of her own. Though she rightly observes that there are no documented instances of wild orcas killing humans, there have indeed been attacks, including the sinking of a 40-foot yacht off Galapagos in 1972, and a surfer bitten so severely off California he needed 100 stitches. One of her "experts" asserts that wild orcas have language—an extraordinary claim not supported by any reputable linguist or comparative psychologist. That claim is part of a pattern of anthropomorphism in the film—a likening of motives and emotions between humans and a species about as alien to our experience as any mammal can be.

          SeaWorld, after refusing to take part in what they perceived as an exercise heavily biased against them, did issue an eight point rebuttal. They argued that—unlike the impression Blackfish leaves on most viewers—the park doesn't sponsor the capture of wild orcas, and hasn't in thirty years. They claim never to punish their animals (engage in "negative reinforcement")—an impression that, again, a naïve viewer might gather by the casual use of the word "punishment" in the film. Nor was Tilikum's captive life quite as lonely as Cowperthwaite makes out: he had pod-mate named Taima (who died in 2010) with whom he was "friendly", as well as a grandson named Trua who is an occasional companion now.

          Then there's the question of proportion. Blackfish inevitably leaves the impression that the practice of keeping orcas for entertainment is a serious issue—or else why make the movie? Yet out of a worldwide population of 50,000 to 100,000 whales, a grand total of only 45 were in captivity as of June, 2013, with only 32 of those on display. Granted, if the practice is morally wrong, numbers don't matter. But when it comes to mobilizing attention, there are arguably bigger problems (such as the ongoing, wholesale decimation of Africa's elephants) to invest precious public sympathy than a few dozen captive orcas.

          In the background is the larger question of the moral standing of zoos and aquariums. That's too big an issue to cover here, but it would be a shame if the practices of for-profit corporations like SeaWorld got legitimate research institutions painted with the same black brush. SeaWorld itself helped save Keiko, the star of Free Willy, from his dismal prison in a theme park in Mexico City—a story Cowperthwaite doesn't bother to tell.

          To her credit, Cowperthwaite fairly observes that such places were instrumental in getting people to care about creatures like orcas (and elephants, and apes, etc.) in the first place. After all, not everybody can afford to travel to Puget Sound or Iceland to observe wild orcas. Much as their practices are questionable, SeaWorld and other parks have had a role to play in reconciling humans to the other species on this planet. Time will tell if they've done that job well enough to make themselves obsolete.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro