Results

Do dolphins believe in Jesus?¹  Witness the poster for director Louie Psihoyos’s paean to victimless eco-terrorism, The Cove:  a diver, crowned by a corona of filtered sunlight, arms outstretched in cruciform pose, surrounded by genuflecting dolphins.  The poster outside my local theater sported ecstatic praise from various critics.  “Riveting… a classic espionage tale,” raves Peter Knegt of Indiewire.²   Poor Martin Grove of The Hollywood Reporter was simply cited, “I would be surprised if it doesn’t wind up being nominated in next year’s Oscar race,” which doesn’t speak to the film’s quality so much as Grove’s willingness to flaunt his precognitive abilities. Scott Weinberg of Cinematical is quoted, “A stunning, shocking story.  The film itself is an act of heroism.  The Cove takes us knee-deep into dangerous activities behind enemy lines — footage that you must see to believe… powerful and seriously well crafted.” High praise indeed. He’s correct to diagnose the film as a self-identified act of heroism, but utterly wrong to accept it at face value.  The Cove’s obsession with its own heroics is its most fundamental flaw.

Richard O’Barry, the main protagonist and its nominal hero, is the first person we meet in the film.  The former dolphin trainer for the TV show Flipper, O’Barry (as argued by the film) was one of the most influential people in putting dolphins on the map in popular culture, until the day when one of his trainees died in his arms.  He spent seven years living and working with the pod of bottlenose dolphins that collectively played Flipper, and when Cathy (one of those dolphins) breathed her last in his arms, O’Barry considered it a suicide stemming from a depression borne of captivity. Immediately afterward, he dedicated himself to eradicating the world of dolphin enslavement, practicing a kind of guerilla activism that has led him to harass Japanese fishermen much like Fred Phelps badgers homosexuals and the families of dead soldiers.

A glimmer of self-awareness ripples across O’Barry’s features when he acknowledges that suicide is a “strong word,” but he foolishly reasserts its validity in the same breath.  One minute, he denounces the anthropomorphization that has come with the world’s fascination with dolphins, and the next he employs the specter of suicide and argues that dolphins possess the same facility of self-awareness shared by humans.  He goes on at length about that intelligence when he deprecates the practice of humans teaching dolphins American Sign Language, saying in so many words that this one-sided education should be reversed — maybe humans should be learning from dolphins.  It should occur to any rational viewer that perhaps O’Barry’s judgment is impaired.  He’s not mentally unbalanced; O’Barry suffered the shock of a traumatic loss.  Instead of seeking professional help, he has treated the working men of Taiji, Japan, as the recipients of his own offshoot derivation of Primal Scream therapy.

The hub of O’Barry’s life is a certain cove in Taiji in which the local fishermen kill (“slaughter,” in the words of O’Barry and other pro-dolphin activists; a technically accurate term, but applied here in the most pejorative sense) thousands of dolphins every year.  They drive the marine mammals shoreward with a kind of makeshift sonar disruptor in order to put the animals on the auction block for international trainers and marine park representatives, and the lucky chosen few are taken away, with the rest used as prime cuts of meat.  The Cove’s entire narrative thrust is structured around the efforts of Psihoyos and his team to obtain footage documenting the killing grounds, which are heavily barricaded and patrolled by the local fishermen and law enforcement officials.

At the time of filming, it was legal for fishermen to kill dolphins and other small cetaceans in Taiji.  The cove was probably sealed off, as O’Barry claims, partly to prevent people from seeing the mass slaughter of dolphins; it was also probably sealed off partly to protect the work of the fishermen from people like O’Barry, who would interfere in any way possible with the job that puts food on the tables in that village.  Giant “no trespassing” signs and metal fences are erected all around the cove; the cops and locals would come and tell various eco-friendlies to keep away.  Any successful endeavor to document the killing in the cove would have to be done clandestinely.

Throughout the film, Psihoyos overtly invokes Ocean’s Eleven (pun intended?) and other heist film tropes as he assembles his crack team of infiltrators to carry out their all-important mission of getting footage of dolphins being killed.  From music and editing cues to the very jargon used by Psihoyos’s crew and their methods, the bulk of the film is like Mission: Impossible by way of JFK. As the team preps and executes its daring caper, Psihoyos weaves in interviews with various scientists, government officials, sea life advocates, and representatives of the International Whaling Commission.  There’s a bigger picture here, and it includes an apparently maleficent effort by the Japanese government to cover up the sale of mercury-laden sea food, often packaged as something other than what it is.  The entire industry of marine-based amusement parks is implicated as well in this international conspiracy, and it’s up to Psihoyos, O’Barry, and their tiny, elite cadre to combat this menace.

Ironically, the scenes exploring the consequences of polluted meat and overfishing are the film’s strongest, throwing into stark relief most of the rest of the film’s foolishness.  When The Cove finally gets around to the mercury in the meat, it’s at least a third of the way into the film, introduced more as an afterthought — a bone thrown to the utilitarian-minded omnivores (like myself) in the audience who don’t really give a flying fish about the lives of dolphins.  At best, Japan’s complacence about (or complicity in) the willful sale of tainted meat is short-sighted and dangerous.  At worst, it is a malicious, mendacious exploitation of ignorance on the part of the consumer and those along the supply route, from the fishermen to the fishmongers, all of whom will pay the piper long before the government is forced to do so — if it ever is.

Psihoyos cannily milks the specter of Minamata disease and the government’s role in its proliferation, buttressing the paranoid milieu of the eco-activist’s life in Taiji and thematically paralleling the whole Vast Government Conspiracy angle that informs his primary narrative arc.  Unfortunately, Psihoyos undercuts this inspired sequence by emphasizing O’Barry’s idiotic contention that halting the slaughter will nip the problem in the bud.  Psihoyos doesn’t really care that mercury in the meat may be poisoning humans.  This isn’t a film produced by the EPA. It’s produced by Ocean Preservation Society.³  The Cove is far more eager to expose the hypocrisy of the government and the soullessness of the fishermen than the danger of dolphin meat to human health.  If OPS (or its film) was truly concerned with the mercury in the meat, its target would be the companies and factories responsible for dumping toxins into our oceans, and those in the government who facilitate pernicious amounts of pollution.  Yet the film doesn’t climax with a confrontation with the executives responsible for the companies at fault for mercury-poisoning the planet; it climaxes with that footage of the slaughter at the cove — footage that Psihoyos wishes was truly as gorno-graphic as he seems to think it is.

Weinberg’s Cinematical review correctly identifies this climax as owing a debt to the horror genre.  Audiences who have been repeatedly assured that the dolphin killing is the most hair-raising spectacle they could ever witness are forced into the uncomfortable position of wanting to see this footage that Psihoyos’s team labors so hard to obtain, knowing full well that the catharsis they’ll experience is at the expense of real-life mammals being stabbed to death with harpoons.  By combining the horror and heist/suspense genres, Psihoyos undermines the seriousness of what he’s attempting to communicate.  All the gee-whiz gadgets and near-miss escapes from the hands of the law belong wholeheartedly to the movie Psihoyos is making, but he’s making the wrong film.  After going out of his way to make the (seemingly) straightforward case that dolphins are intelligent and self-aware enough to deserve the same protection as human beings, Psihoyos cuts his film with all the aplomb of a 1980s slasher flick assembled by a hack with just enough of a finger on the pulse of pop culture to inject his film with verve and style to appease the audience’s bloodlust without obfuscating his cheap purpose with an auteurist signature.

Much like the most disgusting bargain-basement exploitation fare championed by gorehounds who have discovered rare, hard-to-find gems,⁴ the footage of the killing in the cove exists as a trophy for Psihoyos and his team.  Having spent half the film turning the camera on himself and his compatriots, Psihoyos wants us to be impressed with the efforts they went through to get that footage for us, the audience.  This is where Weinberg’s review once again uncannily accurate.  OPS would love for the film itself to be perceived as an act of heroism.  The Cove is a perfect emblem of the egotistic paternalism that unites the fringe elements of both the political Left and Right.  A bunch of Westerners (mostly American) show up en masse in a foreign country and attempt to sabotage the indigenous culture in order to supplant it with a more enlightened way of life.  I have little problem with documentary films functioning as propaganda, but it would be nice if one of them had the decency not to pretend that it isn’t an out-and-out hegemonic ploy.  Indeed, the film crudely makes a direct call to action in its final moments, a transparent attempt to whip up nigh-patriotic fervor as David Bowie’s “Heroes” blasts from the theater’s speakers.⁵

Apparently, it’s been working.  The almost uncritical acceptance with which people are reacting to this film has already created a mythological aura around O’Barry and Psihoyos.  That suits Psihoyos just fine.  “I think that this is an important film, not just for Japanese people but for the environment and for every Western culture that there is. You know, we made a film that is, if not the most, is one of the most exciting documentaries ever made,” he said in an interview with The Gothamist.⁶  Not only did these guys miss the point about the origin of mercury poisoning, but they have the arrogance to flat-out tell both the local fishermen and the audience that dolphin hunting is not part of Japanese culture.

To prove their point, they take a camera to Tokyo to ask a bunch of urban-dwellers if they’ve heard of the dolphin slaughter in Taiji.  To no intelligent person’s surprise, none of the people included on camera in the film had heard of it, and several denounce it as a barbaric practice.  Of course, most people who live in America’s big cities probably don’t have the slightest idea about common fishing or farming practices in the heartland or on the coasts.  They live in a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner and parking your car costs five cents a minute.  Somehow, to the filmmakers, the lack of the Tokyonians’ familiarity with Japan’s fishing culture is evidence of a government coverup.  (Welcome to Planet O’Barry.)  If the people in this village depend on the income generated by dolphin hunting and capture for survival — and have done so for at least half a century — the dolphin hunting is part of the local culture (and it’s reasonable to extrapolate that it may be part of the culture of other Japanese villages whose economy is akin to Taiji’s).   A recent Guardian article notes that the tradition of whaling in Taiji (which presumably includes Delphinidae) dates back to the 1600s.⁷

These are people who claim to care about the environment, but only endeavor to understand it through their own fractured weltanschauung.  Early in the film, O’Barry sardonically laments the hypocrisy of a town building a tourist industry around cetaceans, with a museum dedicated to them, and their likenesses erected everywhere.  In fact, nothing could be more natural.  Many cultures throughout human history have totemized the animals upon which their existence depended.  A former IWC representative from the Dominican Republic flatly asserts that Japan’s refusal to kowtow  to international pressure regarding the country’s whaling and dolphin hunting practices stems directly from their imperialist culture (in other words, Japanese tradition).  In his opinion, Japan perceives itself as having taken too much crap from the Western nations, and has arbitrarily drawn a line on the sand on this particular issue for the sake of pride.  A rational person would inquire as to how harassing the local fishermen (or disrupting IWC conferences) is going to win over people in a failing economy that has already sacrificed so much of its cultural heritage to Western influence who are clinging to whatever traditions they have, however short-sighted they may be.  O’Barry and Psihoyos apparently lack that measure of self-awareness, or have chucked it in favor of very cheap agitprop.

Sloppiness of this sort infects The Cove through and through.  The basic question of why dolphins in particular were singled out as worthy of saving is never adequately addressed (or indeed which dolphins need to be saved). “Dolphins” include multiple species of the Delphinidae with different environmental needs, lives, and history but they are painted with the same rose-colored brush regardless of these differences. O’Barry insists that dolphins are every bit as sentient as human beings.  Psihoyos commented that they’re just as intelligent.  One surfer dude elicited howls of laughter when he earnestly described the connection of joy he shared with a dolphin while he was out hangin’ ten.⁸  He then related a story in which he noticed a tiger shark slicing through his wave, only to witness a dolphin attack it.  In his view, the dolphin attacked it with the intention of saving his life.  I found this egocentric comment every bit as speciesist as O’Barry and Psihoyos claim dolphin hunting advocates to be.  Did it never occur to this dimwitted, Endless Summer reject that the dolphin was simply preemptively dispatching a potential threat?

At one point, Psihoyos interjects a shot of a plaque reading, “Pray for the departed souls of the whales,” creating an analogue to the “Save the Whales” movement of the 1970s/80s.  This is a foolish analogy because he never makes the argument that dolphins are endangered as the whales were.  He can’t make that argument, because most species of dolphin are either not endangered or there isn’t enough data to make that kind of judgment.⁹  More foolishly, Psihoyos takes for granted that impressive photography of graceful, leaping dolphins will be enough to convince viewers of the justice of his argument.  In other words, dolphins are a priority because they’re cute, playful, and graceful.¹⁰  They’re perfect blank canvasses onto which humans can project a wide variety of traits that the dolphins may or may not possess.

Indeed, the main argument employed that dolphins deserve the same protection as humans is that they are so much like us.  In other words, the human standard of sentience and behavior is used as the benchmark to define the dolphins’ ultimate worth.  Of course, this is also speciesist.  It also makes the argument somewhat untenable.  If dolphins can be held to the same standard of self-awareness and intelligence as humans, it means that the film is eliding more inconvenient truths about dolphin behavior.  Like other mammals, dolphins can be very aggressive during copulation to the extent that male on female mating could be described as rape — especially when packs of males gang up on a female.¹¹  (But don’t worry!  The females give as good as they get!  Seems that our flippered friends are into BDSM, right down to the use of sex toys.)  Males sometimes kill their own young or other related species (such as porpoises) for no discernible reason.  The way pods sometimes hunt directly resembles the herding method of the Taiji fishermen (they are apex predators, after all — they will eat other sea creatures, just like humans).  If Delphinidae are to be extended the same right to life as humans, perhaps we should also issue rape kits and abortion services to the females, and prosecute hate crimes on behalf of aggrieved porpoises.  Then, of course, there’s the vaunted dolphin intelligence.  I’d like someone to tell me why, if dolphins are so damn smart, they don’t stay the hell away from Japan.

Obviously, Psihoyos and O’Barry are far less interested in presenting a clear and cogent reason for saving these dolphins than they are in wowing us with their own maverick exploits or inducing revulsion with the frankly underwhelming spectacle of Japanese fishermen turning dolphins into chum.

The most revolting thing about The Cove is how this reverent, hero self-worship may be ideogrammatic of the modern environmental movement.  Change — positive change — must be effected.  Without descending into a tree-huggeresque diatribe, it’s worthwhile to mention that humans must learn to achieve balance with the natural world better than they have done for the last two centuries.  This is absolutely necessary for our own survival.  What movies like The Cove accomplish (as well as people like O’Barry and the members of OPS) is to propagate a kind of cult of personality based on pathos and rhetoric, not hard facts or solid reasoning.  By positioning themselves as the avant garde in the legion of men and women who consider themselves stewards of the Earth, the “heroes” of The Cove lead by example, and thereby conscript new recruits into their service… which may not actually be in service of the Earth so much as the service of the human ego.

Long term balance doesn’t flow from half-baked sermonizing or charnel house footage.  It is effected by the thoughtful marriage of the personal and the political, the considered merging of pathos and ethos, utilizing logic to respect the awe of the illogical.  What we see in The Cove is a cabal of self-appointed messiahs who don’t care about how things are or how people really think.  The final shot of Ric O’Barry depicts him standing in the street with a TV screen mounted on his chest, endlessly looping the images of the dolphins being slaughtered in the cove.  He’s not out there making a genuine case that this is immoral, he’s using shock to stroke his ego, salve his own guilt, and intimidate people into falling in line with his naive, creaky ideas.¹²

While he rails at the dolphin trainers and Sea World parks for turning dolphins into a merchant industry, he remains blind to his own “fuzzy bunny activism.”  O’Barry vents his spleen at the very people doing the bulk of the work to get young boys and girls enrapt by the wonder and majesty of these still-mysterious creatures.  The next generation of Earth-savers won’t be cultivated by a crazy old man who stands around screening guerilla eco-snuff footage like an obsequious abortion protester marching back and forth outside a clinic with a placard showing the remains of an aborted baby.  The next generation of men and women who will work to preserve and understand the oceans and the creatures that live in them will be cultivated by the hardworking trainers who showcase the intelligence and adaptability of cetaceans and use that opportunity to educate youngsters about the alien world that covers two-thirds of this planet.  It’s not an ideal situation, but humans make do.  Psihoyos is certainly mesmerized by the dolphin, but instead of taking the extra step to understand it on its own terms, or understand the people who live off of it, he charges in with his camera, crowing about how his movie will change the world.  What he’s doing is teaching viewers how not to ask questions, how not to empathize with their fellow man, and how to exploit dolphins in every bit as  hypocritical a manner as any “speciesist” fisherman.  If dolphins aren’t an exploitable resource, must they be a golden calf?  If the next generation of eco-activists want to save the Earth, using “save the dolphins” as a rallying cry, as The Cove indirectly demonstrates, is definitely the wrong way to do it.

Edited by Ellen Schneider and Tracy McCusker.

_________________________________________