**An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka's "Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk"**

#### **Kári Driscoll**

Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht 3512 JK, The Netherlands; k.driscoll@uu.nl

Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 28 March 2017; Accepted: 26 April 2017; Published: 3 May 2017

**Abstract:** In *The Animal That Therefore I Am*, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse of the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a "flat"—a "blue note" in other words. The task would be to render audible "an unheard language or music" that would be "somewhat inhuman" but a language nonetheless. This essay pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading Kafka's "Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk," paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine's vocalizations, which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the ultrasonic songs of mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible? And furthermore, how might we relate this debate to questions of narrative and above all to the concept of narrative "voice"? I explore these and related questions via a series of theoretical waypoints, including Paul Sheehan, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with a view to establishing some of the critical parameters of an "animal narratology," and of zoopoetics more generally.

**Keywords:** narrative voice; inoperativity; singing mice; zoopoetics; anthropological machine; community; music

> *Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on* —Keats

#### **1. The Songs of Mice**

In 2015, a study published in the journal *Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience* reported that not only do male mice sing songs to attract females, but that these songs are syntactically complex and vary according to social context, placing mice in the same category as songbirds (Chabout et al. 2015). The principal difference is that, unlike birds, mice sing at ultrasonic frequencies (30–120 kHz), and so their songs are inaudible to the human ear. Later that same year, another study found that female mice also sing (Neunuebel et al. 2015). Both studies were widely reported in the online media (e.g., (Devlin 2015; Feltman 2015; Farrell 2015; Miller 2015)). This was not the first time singing mice had been in the news, however: in fact, ever since the pioneering 2005 study by Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo first established that mouse vocalizations have the characteristics of songs—i.e., that they consist of several distinct syllables or phrases "uttered in succession and so related as to form a recognizable sequence or pattern in time" (Holy and Guo 2005, p. 2178; cf. (Arriaga 2014, p. 85))—the media have picked up on a new discovery concerning the songs of mice every few years. Evidently, there is something about these studies that captures people's imagination. In 2011, for example, the *Smithsonian Magazine* published a piece on a North Carolina project aiming to record and study these

ultrasonic songs, remarking that "the world of rodents, long thought mostly quiet, may be full of songs, broadcast short distances, from one animal to another, songs that we still know very little about" (Dunne 2011). The comments section below the article is filled with notes by readers who either claim to have experienced the singing of mice or are simply charmed by the idea of this unheard music. One reader in particular thanks the author profusely for writing the piece because it reminds them of Franz Kafka's final story, "Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse People": "Thank you, thank you," they wrote, "for giving Josephine a real voice!" (Dunne 2011).

There have been reports of such singing mice since well before it was possible to record them, and indeed before Kafka wrote his story. Alfred Brehm, in his compendious *Life of Animals* published in the 1860s, describes the phenomenon in some detail. Some people, Brehm notes, compare the singing favorably to "that of a Canary or even of a Nightingale" whereas others are less enthusiastic, for instance a certain Herr Schacht, "a well-known educator and reliable and well-informed observer," who claims to have had a singing mouse for some time (Brehm 1895, p. 338). "Its song did not bear the slightest resemblance to the bright song of a Canary or the deep trills of a Nightingale. It was nothing but 'a twittering, a mixture of long-drawn, squeaking, piping sounds,' which in the quiet of night could be heard at a distance of twenty paces. The song of another Mouse, observed by Herr Mueller, another tutor, consisted of 'soft, whistling sounds, uttered slowly or in a more lively manner, in the latter case reminding one distinctly of a bird's song, but being much weaker'" (Brehm 1895, p. 338). In any case, Brehm concludes, it would be "more congruous to speak of 'twittering' Mice than of 'singing' ones" (Brehm 1895, p. 338).

Brehm's evidence is mostly anecdotal, but some mice do indeed appear to sing at a pitch audible to the human ear, though it remains unclear why this should be. In a 1932 article published in the *Journal of Mammalogy*, Lee R. Dice provides a comprehensive bibliography on the subject, and concludes with the speculation that perhaps all mice sing, but that their songs are "ordinarily too high in pitch for our ears to hear," so that we can only hear "certain rare individuals" whose vocal apparatus has been changed or deformed in some way (Dice 1932, p. 193). One such case had been described in 1912 by Charles A. Coburn, then a Harvard graduate student, who had captured a singing mouse in his home and taken it to his lab. "The sound is best described as a rapid whole-toned trill involving the tones *c* and *d*," he writes, even supplying a musical transcription, before adding that "the quality of the tone resembled somewhat that of a fife or flute, but each tone ended with a slight throaty click" (Coburn 1912, p. 366). The mouse was captured in December 1911 and continued to sing until June of the following year. "She died in August, apparently of old age" (Coburn 1912). "During May 1912," Coburn writes, "'singing' was again heard in the room in which the 'singing' mice had earlier been captured, but efforts to capture the 'singer' failed" (Coburn 1912).

Throughout, as we can see here, Coburn dutifully places the word "singing" in inverted commas, no doubt to guard against allegations of anthropomorphism. This is a practice which continues to this day, e.g., in the media coverage of the songs of mice, where every reference to 'songs' and 'singing' is routinely placed in 'scare quotes,' as if to indicate that these designations 'really' apply only to human beings, despite the fact that most people do not feel the need to mark birdsong as similarly improper. Why should this be? No doubt the aesthetic quality of birdsong is a decisive factor. Like Herr Schacht, we humans have always marveled at the beauty and precision of the nightingale's song, and, indulging in our species narcissism, we have been able to imagine that the nightingale or the blackbird are singing *for us*. This is simply a further iteration of the general ideology of metaphysical anthropocentrism which arranges the natural world in terms of its utility for humans: cows and pigs exist only to provide us with meat, whereas songbirds provide us with aesthetic pleasure.1 Within this worldview, the very

<sup>1</sup> As Justin E. H. Smith observes, this conception of animals as having a specific telos or purpose "for us" hinges on a "theory of animals" that reduces individuals to interchangeable instances of a kind. "At its most anodyne," he writes, "this conception of animals permits us to see entire species as manifesting a single psychological trait of the sort we would ordinarily ascribe to individual human beings (e.g., slyness, laziness), but it is fundamentally no different than the conception that enables us

idea of mouse song must appear as a scandal. Not only are mice a nuisance, traditionally serving no useful function (excepting their comparatively recent use in laboratories), but their songs are inaudible to us. If they do indeed sing, it is not for our benefit or enjoyment. Or, as T. S. Eliot might have put it: I have heard these rodents singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Thus, the singing of mice points to a world beyond human perception, which science is only now beginning to be able to detect, but which has given rise to a cultural imaginary surrounding mouse song that hovers perennially at the boundary between sound and silence. There are several layers of ambiguity surrounding the singing of mice: first, whether it should be characterized as singing at all, and, second, whether all mice sing or only certain exceptional individuals. It will be noted that these very questions provide the narrative impetus of Kafka's "Josephine" (Kafka 2007a), the last story he wrote and the last to be published in his lifetime. There is evidence to suggest that Kafka was well-acquainted with Brehm's *Tierleben* (cf. (Middelhoff 2015)), and so it is not unlikely that he knew about singing mice—he may even have experienced them first-hand at his sister's farm in Zürau (cf. (Driscoll 2014)). When he wrote "Josephine," Kafka had essentially lost his voice to tuberculosis, and the narrative follows a trajectory from sound to silence, ending with the disappearance of Josephine's voice. Like most of Kafka's late animal stories, it has a first-person narrator, who in this case is not Josephine, but rather another mouse, presumably a male, who is describing the relationship between Josephine and the other mice. The entire narrative can be seen as an example of what Gerhard Neumann called Kafka's "gliding paradox" (Neumann 1968), a peculiarly Kafkaesque rhetorical figure whereby an initial affirmative statement—for example, "Our singer is called Josephine" (Kafka 2007a, p. 94, trans. mod.)—is gradually negated, whereupon that negation is itself negated, and so on, until all certainty has been eroded. In this story, the central tension concerns the nature and definition of Josephine's singing: having announced that Josephine is "our singer" the narrator then proceeds to question whether it really is singing, whether it isn't more of a whistling (*Pfeifen*), and then paragraph by paragraph the opening statement is questioned, qualified, and negated until there's nothing left: it's singing; no, it's more like whistling; but no actually it's not whistling; in fact it's less than the ordinary everyday whistling of all the other mice; her voice is really "nothing" (Kafka 2007a, p. 100); there is nothing musical about it, or if there is "then it is reduced to the lowest possible nothingness" (Kafka 2007a, p. 102); no of course it is whistling, "[h]ow could it be anything else? Whistling is the language of our people" (Kafka 2007a, p. 103), and so on, until at last we learn that Josephine has disappeared, at which point the narrator asks whether there will be any noticeable difference between Josephine's absence and her presence, and whether the gatherings where she used to sing weren't in fact completely silent all along.<sup>2</sup>

to see cattle as 'beef on the hoof'" (Smith 2013, p. 79). Earlier in the same article, Smith notes with reference to Roald Dahl's *Fantastic Mr. Fox*, that while "Fox" appears to serve both as a surname and a generic species designation for the protagonist, the human characters are not for their part named "Mr. Man." This, he writes, is because even in children's stories "men are always individuals, each with his or her own irreducible uniqueness, while individual animals are instantiations of a kind" (Smith 2013, p. 77). This, in turn, raises intriguing questions, which I cannot fully address here, regarding the relationship between Josephine, who, as the only named character in Kafka's story, is presented as a singular individual, and the nameless, collective "mouse folk." As Margot Norris writes, this ambiguous relationship calls into question the very possibility of telling Josephine's story at all: "If [Josephine] can be distinguished from the mouse folk [ ... ], she becomes anthropomorphized, individualized, significant, and her story can be told. If not, she becomes appropriated by the mouse folk, animalized, obliterated, her story prevented" (Norris 1985, p. 122; cf. (Danta 2008, p. 161)).

<sup>2</sup> The constitutive uncertainty surrounding Josephine's vocal performances is compounded in translation, specifically with regard to the narrator's use of the word *Pfeifen*. The Muir translation, until relatively recently the only English version of the text, renders it as "piping" (Kafka 1971, p. 361), which is of course cognate with *Pfeifen* and applies to sounds produced by birds as well as musical instruments, and hence resonates nicely with the descriptions put forward by Brehm and others, but sounds rather antiquated and above all awkward as a counterpoint to "singing." Among the more recent translators, Michael Hoffmann gives it as "whistling" (Kafka 2015, p. 229), as does Peter Wortsman, who otherwise takes extraordinary liberties with his translation (Kafka 2016, p. 103). Stanley Corngold, on the other hand opts for "squeaking," explaining in a particularly revealing footnote that "the German word translated here as 'squeaking' is *pfeifen*, which, *for human beings*, means 'whistling'" (Kafka 2007a, p. 95n1, emphasis added). He thus gratuitously enforces the human–animal binary in a way that I would argue is at odds with the story itself. In most other respects, however, Corngold's translation is the closest to Kafka's text, and so in what follows I will refer to that edition, silently substituting "whistling" for "squeaking" throughout.At

The text as a whole resonates powerfully with questions concerning language, music, sound, and voices both human and nonhuman—questions which bear directly on the issue of "animal narratology," and of zoopoetics in general. The animal narrator speaks on behalf of the "mouse folk" (*Volk der Mäuse*), and it is in the mode of a collective "we" that he questions Josephine's status as the voice of the people. The text thus revolves around not only the ambiguous distinction between singing and whistling, speaking and falling silent, but ultimately also the question of narrative authority: in a sense, the text stages a conflict between the figure of the voice and the function of the *narrative* voice. Here it is certainly significant that the former, as embodied by Josephine, should be on the side of music, childishness, and femininity, all traditionally associated with the body, the sensuous, and the irrational (cf. (Gross 1985; Lubkoll 1992; Cavarero 2005)), whereas the latter presents itself as implicitly masculine, paternalistic, rational, "unmusical" (Kafka 2007a, p. 95), etc. The text itself appears to invite us to conceive of the relationship between Josephine and the community of mice in just this way, namely as that between a child (Josephine) and its father (the people) (cf. Kafka 2007a, p. 99). Within this schema, i.e., within the logic of carnophallogocentrism, the narrative voice would be the embodiment of λóγo*ς* (*logos*), on the side of the Father and the Law, while Josephine, embodying φωνή (*phon¯ é*), would be on the side of the animal, excluded from political life, "outside the law" (*außerhalb des Gesetzes*) (Kafka 2007a, p. 103). Yet this dichotomy is itself immediately undermined ("all of this is simply, absolutely, untrue" (Kafka 2007a, p. 103), not only because the mice themselves are repeatedly characterized as childlike and because, in Kafka, there is nothing outside the law, but also, I would argue, because the narrative voice is itself also that of an *animal*. But can one even imagine a narrative voice that is anything other than human?

#### **2. Who Is Squeaking?**

Certainly, within classical narratology, the concept of the "narrative voice" has always been implicitly human, and indeed humanist, invoking a presence and stable point of origin for the narrative, "a subjectivity intimately inhabiting the text" (Gibson 1996, p. 143), speaking to us. This is somewhat surprising, given how narratology has in almost all other respects sought to distance itself from hermeneutics and the humanist legacy. At the same time, it is perhaps understandable, at an intuitive level, given that humans, as far as we know, are the only animals that write (and read) literary texts. Even if we accept Roland Barthes's famous objection that "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" (Barthes 1977, p. 142) and that therefore "in the text, only the reader speaks" (Barthes 1974, p. 151), even this voice, the voice which the reader lends to the text, will be a human voice. It is no doubt for this very reason that (literary) animal studies has for the most part ignored or avoided the term "narrative voice" when discussing the presence and agency of nonhuman animals in literary texts. And yet, the seemingly unassailable, always-already-human identity of the narrative voice causes problems on multiple levels—indeed, a salient characteristic of Kafka's animal narratives is how they exploit these problems to their advantage.

On the one hand, *voice* (φωνή) is neither synonymous nor coextensive with *speech* (λóγo*ς*) (cf. Cavarero 2005). Hence even if the latter has served as a privileged marker of the anthropological difference, the former is shared by all sensate beings and hence not reducible to the human—nor does every human vocal utterance constitute speech.<sup>3</sup> On the other hand, the status of language as a distinguishing feature of the human is itself highly problematic and ultimately untenable—unless, of course, one consents to define "language" in such a way that it automatically excludes "the animal."

the same time, on a more fundamental level the difficulty of finding an adequate translation for "Pfeifen" highlights the inherent difficulty of interspecies translation in general. For more on this complex issue, see Jacques Lezra's essay on "the animal in translation" (Lezra 2014). On the representation of animal voices in texts, see also Ben de Bruyn's recent article on "polyphony beyond the human" (De Bruyn 2016) as well as the discussion of onomatopoeia in Anastassiya Andrianova's article in this special issue (Andrianova 2016, pp. 9–10).

<sup>3</sup> As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, "there's no speech without voice, but there *is* such a thing as voice without speech. And not just for animals, but for us as well. There's voice before speech" (Nancy 2006, p. 38).

But there is essentially no good reason to accept such a definition, since, as Derrida, for example, insists, the "network of possibilities" that make language possible in the first place, i.e., the trace, iterability, *différance*, etc., "*are themselves not only human*" and hence do not "give rise to a single linear, indivisible, oppositional limit" between the human and the nonhuman (Derrida and Nancy 1995, pp. 284–85, original emphasis). So-called "human" language would thus need to be considered as fundamentally inseparable from other "forms of marking" including "the complexity of 'animal languages,' genetic coding" and so forth (Derrida and Nancy 1995, p. 285). Indeed, as posthumanists like Cary Wolfe never tire of emphasising, what we call human language is itself a form of prosthetic "technicity or mechanicity" (Wolfe 2010, p. 88), meaning that "'we' are always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very being—not just in the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalian existence[,] but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity" (Wolfe 2010, p. 89). In other words, "speech" is not reducible to the human any more than "voice" is; "speech" is not and never has been constitutively or exclusively "human" at all.

What does this mean for our conception of narrative and of the narrative voice? Perhaps we should begin by asking what we mean by "narrative," a term which is by now so ubiquitous as to have lost all specificity. In order to counteract this diffusion, in his book *Modernism, Narrative and Humanism*, Paul Sheehan proposes the following basic definition: "Narrative, the process of storymaking and storytelling, is language arranged meaningfully over time" (Sheehan 2004, p. 9). The relationship between these three key elements—language, meaning, and time—is complex, and it is this complexity that constitutes the narrative. In narrative, disparate events are joined together to form a series through a logic of causality and mutual implication—one thing leads to another—and through this process, otherwise known as the "plot," the events narrated become imbued with meaning. Referring to Frank Kermode's definition of plot as "an organization that humanizes time by giving it form" (Sheehan 2004, p. 9), Sheehan concludes that narrative "is *human-shaped*. It is a uniquely human way of making order and meaning out of the raw material of existence. [ ... ] Put simply, we tell stories about ourselves to give our lives meaning and purpose, and about our kind to maintain the crucial human/inhuman distinction" (Sheehan 2004, p. 9, original emphasis). The human, in short, is a storytelling species—an "autobiographical animal," to coin a phrase—whose self-image and identity is constituted in and through narrative practices. This applies to myths and folktales just as it does to the discourse of Western, humanist anthropocentrism.4 In other words, the "human shape" that Kermode attributes to narrative as such is itself a product of particular narratives that have emphasized certain aspects while suppressing others in order to produce a sense of necessity and order. Narrative, then, is itself a version of what Giorgio Agamben calls the "anthropological machine" (Agamben 2003), a mechanism for producing the recognition of the human, via the "inclusive exclusion" of the animal.<sup>5</sup> In this case, narrative is a machine for transforming contingency into necessity, chaos into meaning.

And yet, as Sheehan goes on to observe, in order for narrative to appear "human-shaped," there has to be something in it that pushes against the suppression of contingency and difference that lies at the heart of narrative logic. Otherwise, all stories would be the same. In order to account for this, Sheehan reintroduces the concept of voice, proposing a model of literary narrative as "a composite of voice and machine," where "machine" refers to the mechanics of plot and causality, while "voice" refers

<sup>4</sup> The work of Sylvia Wynter, particularly her conception of the human as *homo narrans* (Wynter and McKittrick 2015) and her insistence on counteracting the historical "overrepresentation" of particular "genres of the human" (Wynter 2003), is an important and productive intervention into this debate, though it is beyond the scope of this essay to engage with her thought in the sustained manner it requires.

<sup>5</sup> Let us remember that the inclusive exclusion of the animal within the human, of ζωή [*zo¯é*] within βίo*ς* [*bíos*], which is the founding gesture of politics, is structurally identical to the inclusive exclusion of φωνή [*phon¯ é*] within λóγo*ς* [*lógos*] (cf. Agamben 1998, pp. 7–8). By the same token, Josephine cannot be said to be "outside the law"—at most she is 'exclusively included' within it, as an exception.

to "difference, variation and irregularity" (Sheehan 2004, p. 11). Narrative would thus be characterized by an oscillation between necessity (machine) and contingency (voice). The more "successful" a narrative is in eliminating randomness and contingency, i.e., the more perfectly it conforms to expectations and generic conventions, the less "human" it begins to seem (Sheehan 2004, p. 11). After all, we tend to privilege stories that are not entirely predictable, that seem to depart from the norm in unexpected and innovative ways. On the other hand, if "voice" takes over, then the sense is lost. The "voice-machine complex" can, Sheehan writes, also be thought of in terms of the "play between 'difference' and 'sameness'" (Sheehan 2004, p. 174). It is important to note that at *both* ends of this spectrum represent the end of meaning and signification: either through pure automatism and the "smooth functioning" of mechanicity which eliminates all difference (roughly equivalent to what Roland Barthes calls the "rustle" of language, of which more later), or through the total contingency and randomness of pure vocality, which would eliminate all sameness. Only in the interplay of these two extremes can narrative and meaning emerge.

The narrative innovations of modernist literature, Sheehan's principal object of study, can thus be read in terms of experimentation with the "voice-machine complex." And indeed, in order to see this complex at work, one need only open a page of Kafka, where both machines and voices play a crucial role, invariably posing a threat to narrative order, coherence, and meaning. Sheehan's conception of narrative can thus help us to account for the internal tensions and discontinuities at work in Kafka's writings. Nevertheless, I find it surprising that in his effort to configure both "human and nonhuman claims" (Sheehan 2004, p. 10) about language and narrative, Sheehan consistently equates "voice" with the human and "machine" with the nonhuman. Why would the contingency and disruption that he identifies with voice be uniquely human? Or, to put it another way, why would Sheehan, whose entire project runs counter to Cartesian humanism, place the animal on the side of the machine? In doing so, he runs the risk of affirming precisely the assumption that he and the modernist authors he reads call into question, namely the constitutive anthropomorphism of narrative as such. "Because narrative is voice *and* machine," Sheehan writes, "its human countenance is complicated by a nonhuman infrastructure" (Sheehan 2004, p. 175, original emphasis). No doubt, but this supposedly human countenance is *also* complicated by the constitutively a-, in-, or more-than-human nature of the voice itself. In other words, much like Agamben's anthropological machine, Sheehan's voice-machine complex presents as a binary what is in fact better understood as what Dominic Pettman calls a "cybernetic triangle," i.e., an "unholy trinity of human, animal, and machine" (Pettman 2011, p. 5). This would go some way toward liberating the voice from its unquestioned association with human(ist) agency and subjectivity.

With this in mind, let us now revisit Sheehan's minimal definition of narrative as "language arranged meaningfully over time," and compare it to the definition of "song" employed in the aforementioned studies of ultrasonic mouse vocalizations: "a sound of animal origin that is not both accidental and meaningless," consisting of "a series of notes or syllables, generally of more than one type, uttered in succession and so related as to form a recognizable sequence or pattern in time" (Holy and Guo 2005, p. 2178). The resemblance is quite striking. In fact, the two definitions are practically identical, to the extent that, *mutatis mutandis*, the latter could plausibly serve as a definition of human narrative, particularly if we clarify *to whom* this purposeful (non-accidental) utterance is supposed to be meaningful (or at least not meaningless). Moreover, the rather awkward negation/conjunction "not both...and," with its implicit distinction between intentionality and interpretation, is basically a hermeneutic theory in miniature. Conversely, if we apply Sheehan's definition to the songs of mice, the question arises: can we identify a "voice-machine complex" there as well? Arguably, this is precisely what the 2015 study mentioned at the outset (Chabout et al. 2015) revealed: namely that the songs of mice are not, in fact, simply mechanical and repetitive, but rather vary according to complex social cues and environmental circumstances. Moreover, these ultrasonic vocalizations seem to comprise both innate and learned elements (cf. (Arriaga and Jarvis 2013)), meaning that the individual singer is able to introduce variations and permutations into the mouse song 'canon.'

Now, to be clear, I am not claiming that there is *no difference* between an ultrasonic mouse vocalization and a literary text written by a specific human being, e.g., Franz Kafka. Nor do I wish to imply that these diverse practices exist on a scale or within a hierarchy that would once again place human modes of *poeisis* and narrative 'above' those of other species. Rather, I am proposing merely that the structural similarity of these two definitions should serve as a further reminder, to quote Derrida again, that there is no "single, linear, indivisible oppositional limit" between the human and the nonhuman to be drawn on the basis of language, and that the growing scientific knowledge surrounding "the complexity of 'animal languages' [ ... ] does not allow us to 'cut' once and for all where we in general would like to cut" (Derrida and Nancy 1995, p. 285). Negotiating this zone of indeterminacy, while still paying careful attention to the specifically literary character of particular texts, or indeed, to quote Susan McHugh, how animals and animality function in those texts "as a function of what we think of as their literariness" (McHugh 2011, p. 7)—that, I would say, is precisely the task of an "animal narratology," or, more broadly, of zoopoetics as I conceive of it, namely as both a mode of writing and a method of reading (cf. Driscoll 2015b). In other words, while it is crucial to acknowledge that human and nonhuman modes of communication, including speaking and singing, are evolutionarily related processes, existing on a continuum and not as a strict binary, this does not ultimately tell us very much about the specific ways these processes are at work in any given literary text. Kafka's "Josephine" is not just a story about mice: it is also, importantly, a story about *art*, about language and music; it is a literary text that is fundamentally about its own status as literature. Moreover, this self-reflexivity is inextricably bound up with its engagement with the question of the animal. This is what makes it a zoopoetic text.

This is important to keep in mind, especially because Kafka chooses to approach the essentially poetic problem of literature and writing in terms of music, and, indeed, an unheard, inhuman music. As Burkhard Müller observes, in order to grasp the core of language, Kafka must seemingly "transpose it to a place where it loses its potential to communicate and is reduced to mere sound" (Müller 2010, p. 113). The text is thus predicated on a double transposition, first from the world of humans to the world of mice, and, second, from speech to song. This double transposition is then followed by a third, namely from sound to silence, and this silence, crucially, is a silence of *writing*, a silence in words. Strictly speaking, there is no voice, either human or nonhuman, *in* the text. What the text does is take this absence of voice and transform it into a (zoo)poetic principle. Hence, although music is a central motif in his late animal stories, "Kafka is at pains to prevent it from entering the realm of audibility":

The language Kafka employs attests to the overpowering force of music without giving a hint of what it would sound like—and does so by assuming that quality itself. It plays on syntax like a musician plays on keys and strings; their mechanical properties, however, tell you nothing of the notes that stream forth. (Müller 2010, pp. 113–14)

Although he does not employ this idiom, what Müller is describing here is ultimately quite close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean by a "minor literature" which deterritorializes language and puts it to "strange and minor uses" (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 17). As Deleuze writes in a late essay, authors like Kafka "invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize this language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium" (Deleuze 1997, p. 109). Language thus modulated into a minor key (or mode) is always at the limit and on the verge of breaking down. It "stutters," as Deleuze puts it; it introduces a disturbance into the smooth functioning of language by tapping into

a line of variation or subtended modulation that brings language to this limit. And just as the new language is not external to the initial language, the asyntactic limit is not external to language as a whole: it is the outside of language, but is not outside it. It is a painting or

a piece of music, but a music of words, a painting with words, a silence in words, as if the words could now discharge their content. (Deleuze 1997, pp. 112–13)

One of the principal ways that Kafka achieves this "stuttering" is through the asignifying sounds and unheard, inhuman music that pervade especially his animal texts. In Deleuzian terms, the series of transpositions Müller describes could be conceived as successive stages of deterritorialization. First, speech is stripped of signification, "reduced to mere sound," whereupon that sound is itself reduced to silence, but this silence is a silence *in* and *of* the text and of language itself: "a silence in words."

#### **3. Josephine Sings the Blues**

In order to pursue this elusive, mute music that inhabits Kafka's text further, I would like to return now to Derrida and the "question of the animal." Near the beginning of the second part of *The Animal that Therefore I Am*, having reeled off a long list of questions concerning what is "proper" to "the animal," Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to reimagine the discourse on the animal in musical terms, as a score or stave, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a "flat" (-)—a blue note, if you will:

I wish only to indicate a tonality, some high notes [*une hauteur des notes*] that change the whole stave [*toute une portée*, also 'litter (of animals)']. How can the gamut [*la portée*] of questions on the being of what would be proper to the animal be changed? How can a flat, as it were, be introduced in the key of this questioning to tone it down and change its tune? [*Comment, en quelque sorte, mettre un bémol à la clé de ces interrogations et changer la musique?*]. (Derrida 2008, p. 63)

The goal of this transposition or modulation, which he says would be "contradictory" or even "impossible," would be to "render audible" (*faire entendre*, hence also 'comprehensible') "an unheard language or music" (*une langue ou une musique inouïe*) that would be "somewhat inhuman," but a *language* nonetheless, "not those inarticulate cries or insignificant noises, howling, barking, meowing, chirping, that so many humans attribute to the animal"—and here we should of course add 'whistling' and 'squeaking'—but "a language whose words, concepts, singing, and accent can finally manage to be foreign enough to everything that, in all human languages, will have harbored so many asinanities [*bêtises*] concerning the so-called animal" (Derrida 2008, p. 63, trans. mod.). The first *bêtise* to eradicate would thus be the one that reserves language and singing exclusively for human beings.

The idea of the "unheard"—*l'inouï*—is a recurring figure in Derrida's work, going all the way back to the inaudible distinction between the *e* and the *a* in "difference" and "*différance*" (Derrida 1982, p. 22). It is thus, fundamentally, allied with the *trace*, with the movement of *différance* and differentiation, in short, the entire "network of possibilities [ ... ] without which there would be no language" (Derrida and Nancy 1995, pp. 284–85). As a consequence of this, the "unheard" or "unheard-of" (both meanings of *inouï*) refers to an alterity or exteriority that cannot be assimilated to the text of philosophy, or which philosophy cannot domesticate and organize under the established rubrics of "the Other" and "the Outside," but which could in some way occupy a position outside, beyond, or prior to the classical dichotomies of self and other, man and animal, male and female, λóγo*ς* and φωνή—but also, importantly, beyond the very distinction between audible and inaudible, intelligible and unintelligible. The dream of rendering audible [*faire entendre*] this unheard language is "impossible" and "contradictory" precisely because, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, the philosopher is "someone who always hears [*entend*] [ ... ], but who cannot listen [*écouter*], or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize" (Nancy 2007, p. 1). The "impossible" task thus involves not only finding a new mode of expression, but also teaching philosophy to hear and understand (*entendre*) the question (of Being, of the animal, of language) "otherwise": "that is," as Derrida puts it in *Voice and Phenomenon*, "within the openness of an unheard-of [*inouïe*] question that opens itself neither onto knowledge nor onto a non-knowledge as knowledge to come. In the openness of this question,

*we no longer know*" (Derrida 2011, p. 88, original emphasis). And it is within this space of openness and indeterminacy that an unheard, inhuman language or music might, perhaps, become audible. This unheard language thus appears to be aligned with the unheard(-of) questions that deconstruction has always sought to open up, and, in this regard, we may observe an affinity between it and that which Derrida had, in the first part of his lecture, referred to as *la pensée de l'animal*—translated as "thinking concerning the animal" (Derrida 2008, p. 7) but which could also equally refer to the thoughts *of* the animal itself; a thinking, in other words, that would not hinge on the a priori exclusion of "the animal." This animal thinking, he writes, "derives from [*revient à*, also: 'comes back to'] poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially [*par essence*], had to deprive itself of. It is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking [*une pensée poetique*]" (Derrida 2008, p. 7). Poetic thinking, by implication, is in some sense synonymous with 'animal thinking,' and both are *essentially* at odds with philosophical knowledge. Thus, if this unheard, inhuman language is to be made audible anywhere, it will be through literature, not philosophy.

It is not altogether surprising, then, that throughout this passage, Derrida appears secretly to be talking about Kafka. Just a few pages earlier he has reminded the audience that it was in this very *château* that he once spoke of "Freud and Kafka" (Derrida 2008, p. 55), by which he means the Château de Cerisy-la-Salle, where the conference on the "autobiographical animal" was being held, but which also clearly recalls the title of Kafka's final novel, *Das Schloss* [*The Castle*; *Le Château*]. This leads him to ponder the question of the subconscious and whether animals dream, which in turn leads him to his own dream of this unheard and inhuman music: "Before even beginning to dig into the burrow of words and images on the basis of which, in this château, I would dare address you, I dreamed for a long time" (Derrida 2008, p. 62). And then, just after imagining how you could sneak a "blue note" into the musical score of the question of the animal, he repeats that he is "dreaming, therefore, in the depths of an undiscoverable burrow to come" (Derrida 2008, p. 63). This is clearly a reference to another of Kafka's late animal stories, namely "The Burrow,"<sup>6</sup> but I wonder if his references to music and singing aren't also a subterranean nod to Josephine, whose voice is thus literally "unheard" even in Derrida's text. The "dream," then, would be to make Josephine "sing the blues," as it were, in such a way that it would be meaningless to dispute—because *we no longer know*—whether this is singing or whistling, but that she might nevertheless be heard.

Like Derrida, the animal narrator of "The Burrow" has a dream, namely of reconstructing his burrow (which, of course, can be read as referring to the text itself), "altering it completely, swiftly, with titanic powers, in a single night, entirely unobserved, and that now it is impregnable" (Kafka 2007b, p. 168–69). This too is an "impossible" dream, as becomes clear when he is rudely awakened by "a barely audible hissing" (Kafka 2007b, p. 177)—which may in fact be more of a "whistling" (Kafka 2007b, p. 178, trans. mod.). At first he takes this noise to be produced by the small, industrious rodents—presumably mice—with whom he reluctantly shares his burrow. Ultimately, however, it proves impossible to locate the source of the disturbance because, essentially, it is the sound of the "limit," the "outside of language" which "minorization" lays bare, and which, crucially, is not located *outside* language, but rather *inside* it, pervading the rhizomatic burrow of language to such an extent that the very distinction between inside and outside is rendered inoperative. As I have suggested elsewhere (Driscoll 2015a), the noise in the burrow can be read as a form of what Roland Barthes calls the "rustle of language" [*bruissement de la langue*]:

The rustle is the noise of what is working well [*Le bruissement, c'est le bruit de ce qui marche bien*]. From which follows this paradox: the rustle denotes a limit-noise, an impossible noise, the noise of what, functioning to perfection, has no noise [*pas de bruit*]; to rustle [*bruire*] is to make audible [*faire entendre*] the very evaporation of noise: the tenuous, the

<sup>6</sup> Cf. Denise Reimann's fascinating article on Kafka and "animal phonography" (Reimann 2015), in which she also makes this connection.

blurred [*brouillé*], the tremulous are received as the signs of an auditory [*sonore*] annulation. (Barthes 1986, pp. 76–77)

The "dysfunctions of language," Barthes writes, are encapsulated in the "auditory sign [*signe sonore*]" of stammering [*bredouillement*], whereas the smooth functioning of the machine of language "is displayed in a musical being: the *rustle*" (Barthes 1986, p. 76). Without viewing these systems or models as simply or wholly compatible and coterminous, we may nevertheless note the parallels between Barthes's binary opposition of "stammering/sonorousness/sign" vs. "rustling/music/being" and Sheehan's voice–machine complex. Both extremes, as we noted earlier, result in a loss of meaning and narrative coherence; too much signal or too much noise. By the same token, Deleuze's "stuttering" [*bégaiement*] would correspond, roughly, to Barthes's "stammering" [*bredouillement*], occupying the position of linguistic "deterritorialization" and difference, working against the "reterritorializing" tendencies of the machine of language and narrative.

Do Kafka's animal narratives "stammer" or do they "rustle"? Does Josephine "sing" or does she "whistle" (or "pipe" or "squeak")? The point, surely, is that *we do not know*: the force of the unheard, inhuman music is such that these binary oppositions have been rendered inoperative; the voice-machine complex has broken down. The "rustle" of language is the sound of the limit, the impossible noise of the linguistic machine functioning to perfection, which means that we do not hear it: hence it is "the noise of an absence of noise" (Barthes 1986, p. 78), the sound of silence. Consequently, it is also impossible for the animal in the burrow to determine whether the noise is a hissing or a whistling, or something else, until finally he asserts that it is neither the one nor the other, but rather "a nothing" (Kafka 2007b, p. 181). (The same verdict, we will recall, is issued by the narrator-mouse with regard to Josephine's voice.) Since it is impossible to represent this 'rustling' directly or, rather, to represent it in *positive* terms, in writing, Kafka's gliding paradox overloads his narratives with negations, pushing the sentences to the limits of sense and signification, until they begin to deconstruct themselves: "Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has *not* heard her does *not* know the power of song. There is *no one* who is *not* carried away by her singing, a fact deserving of all the more appreciation since, by and large, people of our kind are *not* music lovers [*als unser Geschlecht im Ganzen Musik nicht liebt*]" (Kafka 2007a, p. 94, emphasis added, trans. mod.).

In addition to this general rustling or stuttering of the narrative machine, the aforementioned antagonism between the *voice* and the *narrative voice* at the heart of the narrative has significant implications for how we read both the "The Burrow" and "Josephine." Whereas the narrative voice, even in the case of extra- and heterodiegetic (or so-called third-person) narration, is always ultimately conceived as that of an individual, speaking to us in the first-person singular,<sup>7</sup> the voice, by contrast, particularly when it is associated with "rustling," is collective and impersonal. We can see this clearly at the end of Barthes's essay, where he describes a scene in Antonioni's documentary *Chung Kuo, Cina (1972)*, in which a group of Chinese children all read aloud from different books. This, he says, is a perfect example of rustling: "the meaning was doubly impenetrable to me, by my not knowing Chinese and by the blurring of these simultaneous readings; but I was hearing [ ... ] the music, the breath, the tension, the application, in short something like a *goal* [*un* but]" (Barthes 1986, pp. 78–79, original emphasis). At the risk of seeming paranoid, here it seems to me that Barthes is also secretly referring to Kafka's *Castle*, specifically to the scene when K. tries to call the Castle, in which the sound of the telephone line is described as "the humming of countless childlike voices" or not really humming, but rather "the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant, voices—as though a single, high-pitched yet strong voice had emerged out of this humming in some quite impossible way [*in einer geradezu unmöglichen Weise*, also: 'tune' or 'melody']" (Kafka 1998, p. 20). This would be a fitting

<sup>7</sup> "Every narrating is, by definition, to all intents and purposes presented in the first person" (Gérard Genette, qtd. in (Gibson 1996, p. 145)).

description of Josephine's voice as well, particularly given the way she is associated with youth and childhood throughout the narrative.

In what is to my mind still one of the most compelling readings of the story, Margot Norris draws attention to the rather surprising punctuation of the title: "Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk." Ordinarily, you would read the "or" as separating the two titles,8 but in view of the ambiguous relationship between Josephine and the rest of the mice as thematized in the text, there is also the intriguing possibility of reading "Josephine" as not only "the Singer" but also "the People" [*das Volk*]. Or, to quote Norris: "the opposition is not between Josefine and the mouse folk but between Josefine's identity as a singer and her membership in the pack. The story poses the conundrum, *Is Josefine singular or is she plural?*" (Norris 1985, p. 120, original emphasis). Is hers an individual voice, or is hers the voice of the people? In keeping with the general subversion of binary oppositions, the space of indeterminacy opened up by the 'unheard' language or music, it seems that the only possible answer is that we do not know, and that she can and must be regarded as both singular *and* plural. In fact we might so far as to say that this is the irresoluble tension that drives the entire text.

There is one point in the narrative where this tension comes close to resolution, namely when the narrator describes the dreams of the mice—which, in fact, come quite close to Derrida's dream of making Josephine's singing audible by rendering the distinction between singing and whistling inoperative. In the "scant pauses between battles," the narrator says, the mice dream of being united, "stretch[ed] out in the big, warm, communal bed. And here and there into these dreams comes the sound of Josephine's whistling; she calls it sparkling [*perlend*], we call it stuttering [*stoßend*]; but whatever it is, this is where it belongs more than anywhere else, in the way that music hardly ever finds the moment that is waiting for it" (Kafka 2007a, pp. 102–3, trans. mod.). This passage is remarkable, since the narrator effectively (albeit only momentarily) concedes that this is music, no matter what you call it, because of the *effect* it has, namely that of establishing a community, where everyone may find solace in their neighbor's fur (Kafka 2007a, p. 100). "Naturally, it is a whistling," he says, "how could it be anything else? Whistling is the language of our people." They all whistle, but Josephine's whistling is the voice that emerges, impossibly, out of this collective.

The nature of Josephine's singing and her relation to the collective are not the only paradoxes of the story. At the end, the narrator says that Josephine will be forgotten, because "we [the mice] practice no history [*da wir keine Geschichte treiben*]" ((Kafka 2007a, p. 108, cf. p. 100): "in general we completely neglect historical research"), but this too is a paradox, of course, since he is indeed telling a story [*Geschichte*], even if it is a self-effacing one. And hence the foundation of the narrative, and by extension the community of mice, cannot be seen simply as "silence" or as the "absence" of voice and history, but rather history *under erasure*, preserved in its negation: a "no-history." By the same token, at the beginning of the story, the narrator informs us that even though the mice are thoroughly unmusical, they nevertheless have an "inkling" [*Ahnung*] of what song is, and that some ancient songs have been preserved, although, of course, "no one can sing them anymore" (Kafka 2007a, p. 95). But in any case, Josephine's singing bears no resemblance to these songs of legend. The entire narrative is thus framed in terms of a forgotten or erased communal history, which is nevertheless preserved as an "inkling" that can only be described in negative terms: it is *not* like Josephine's singing, but *no one* can say what it *is* like.9

#### **4. Mouse, Interrupted**

In conclusion, then, I would like to suggest—all too briefly—that Josephine's ambiguously singular-plural identity and her status as the singer of her community resonates quite powerfully

<sup>8</sup> And, indeed, with this exception of Corngold's, all the aforementioned English translations 'correct' or normalize this unorthodox punctuation.

<sup>9</sup> In this context, we may see how what Derrida refers to as "Kafka's vast zoopoetics" relates to what, a couple of lines later, he calls his own "negative zootheology" (Derrida 2008, p. 6).

with Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of founding myths (or legends) in *The Inoperative Community*. All community, he writes, is founded on myth, and all myth is "the myth of community" (Nancy 1991, p. 51), which is to say that it carries with it a sense of completion or fulfillment. This is true both of ancient myths and folktales as well as the more modern myths or "grand narratives" of humanist anthropocentrism: "Myth, in short, is the transcendental autofiguration of nature and of humanity, or more exactly the autofiguration—or the autoimagination—of nature as humanity and of humanity as nature" (Nancy 1991, p. 54). In modernity, this form of immanent, totalizing community has become impossible, co-opted by fascist totalitarianism. The only alternative, however, seems to be liberal humanist individualism, which is synonymous with capitalist exploitation and the myth of progress. Thus, the only hope, as Nancy sees it, is to "interrupt" the myth of community, but to do so without negating it entirely, i.e., without turning it into complete silence, say, since this too can be appropriated and put to work for the dialectical progression towards totality. The term he gives to this interruption that forestalls the putting to work of myth is "inoperativity" (*désœuvrement*): not total silence, but rather the absence or the interruption of sound.

In the interruption of myth something makes itself heard, namely, what remains of myth when it is interrupted—and which is nothing if not the very voice of interruption, if we can say this.

This voice is the *voice of community*, [ ... ] of the interrupted community, the voice of the incomplete, exposed community speaking as myth without being in any respect mythic speech. [ ... ] When a voice, or music, is suddenly interrupted, one hears just at that instant something else, a mixture of various silences and noises that had been covered over by the sound, but in this something else one hears again the voice or the music that has become in a way *the voice or the music of its own interruption*: a kind of echo, but one that does not repeat that of which it is the reverberation.10 (Nancy 1991, p. 62, emphasis added)

"A name has been given to this voice of interruption," Nancy continues, and that name is "literature" (Nancy 1991, p. 63). Here we seem to encounter an aporia in Nancy's conception of the inoperative community. On the one hand, he insists that community, as he conceives of it, which is ontologically prior to the theme of man as a *zoon politikon*—and hence prior to the distinction between *logos* and *phoné*—is not limited to "man" and does not exclude "the animal" (Nancy 1991, p. 28). On the other hand, he appears to exclude "the animal" once more by placing "literature" at the heart of this inoperative community. Nancy is the first to admit that he "[does] not reserve any special place for animals" in his world (Derrida and Nancy 2014, p. 84), but only because for him the relevant category is "living beings," which includes both so-called 'human' and 'nonhuman' animals as well as trees and plants. Hence, the apparent anthropocentrism of his emphasis on literature can be at least partially remedied once we understand that "literature" for Nancy does not mean specific "literary texts" or the literary canon, or anything that is clearly specific to human cultures and practices. Rather, the point is that the "literary" as such, its singularity, *is* the interruption of the myth of community. Nothing can follow from it: "this inaugural act founds nothing, entails no establishing, governs no exchange; no history of community is engendered by it" (Nancy 1991, p. 68). Or, in other words, through the "singular eruption" (Nancy 1991, p. 68.) of this "nothing" of a voice, "we" practice "no history." Hence this voice does not found a new myth or a new homogeneous community, but is always at the limit (Nancy 1991, p. 67), and this limit can and must also be read as the "abyssal limit" (Derrida 2008, p. 12) between "man" and "animal." Hence, perhaps we can risk positing that in order for literature to be the "voice" of a community that does not exclude "the animal," in order for this inoperative community to call into question precisely that distinction (without, however, claiming

<sup>10</sup> As I have argued elsewhere (cf. Driscoll 2011), this kind of echo that is not a repetition is itself a foundational principle of Kafka's poetics.

to have overcome or abolished it, which would, again, plunge us into the realm of mythology), this literature must be *zoopoetic*. Perhaps this is what Kafka's story reveals: Josephine's voice is the silent voice of an inoperative, inhuman community, singing the music of its own interruption. And what is this other than the unheard, inhuman music Derrida was dreaming of? Perhaps, then, it is not a question of inserting a *flat* into the score, but rather a *rest*. And if we listen closely, if we learn to listen "otherwise," we may be able to hear that the rest is not silence, but the interruption of song.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References and Notes**


Wolfe, Cary. 2010. *What Is Posthumanism?* Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **'In The Empire of the Senses' and the Narrative Horizons of Comics**

#### **José Alaniz**

Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-4335, USA; jos23@uw.edu

Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 11 January 2017; Accepted: 19 April 2017; Published: 14 May 2017

**Abstract:** With their 1980s independent comics series *The Puma Blues*, writer Stephen Murphy and artist Michael Zulli presented a foreboding scifi vision of ecological catastrophe in a near-future USA, where mutated manta rays fly the skies, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roam the desert sands of the southwest and imminent nuclear devastation looms. Yet for all its pessimism, the series (in 2015 expanded, completed and reissued through Dover Press) has rightly earned critical accolades for Zulli's extraordinary nature drawing, in particular of animals. The chapter "In the Empire of the Senses" puts Zulli's stunning nature work most fully on display, utilizing comics techniques such as line work, framing, panel progression and sound effects to create the illusion of a puma's nighttime hunt, often from its perception-rich point of view. Throughout the series, animal and non-human experience/umwelt receives a degree of attention rarely seen in comics, a genre more popularly known for superheroes and anthropomorphized "funny animal" stories. Through a close reading of "In the Empire of the Senses," the paper explores Murphy and Zulli's bid to depict animal ontology through comics' unique capacities, contrasting their approach with that of cinema, viz. Bill Viola's avant garde ethnographic documentary *I Do Not What It Is I Am Like* (1986). My analysis has implications for narratology, the potential of comics' representational strategies and for the depiction of non-human experience more generally.

**Keywords:** comics; animals; narratology; cinema; sound effects; science fiction

"[M]oral philosophy functions, by and large, within an implicit anthropocentric, subject-centered model, and in order to make a case that can gain a hearing within that model, one has to speak its language and accede to its demands. Of course, it is precisely that moral model, language and demands that have been used to deny animals basic moral standing for centuries . . . ". (Calarco 2008, p. 9)

"If the animal is celebrated it is as a sign but not as a body". (Burt 2012, p. 26)

#### **1. Introduction**

With their independent comics series *The Puma Blues* (1986–1989), writer Stephen Murphy and artist Michael Zulli presented a foreboding scifi vision of ecological catastrophe in a near-future USA, where mutated manta rays fly the skies, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roam the southwest desert sands and imminent nuclear devastation looms. Yet for all its pessimism, *The Puma Blues* (in 2015 completed, expanded and reissued through Dover Press [see (Murphy and Zulli 2015)]) achieved legendary status among knowing fans as a cult work *par excellence* for its lyricism, fractured experimental narrative and Zulli's extraordinary nature drawing, especially of animals. As *Rolling*

*Stone* put it, "*Puma Blues* is John J. Audubon listening to Crass and dreaming about the Book of Revelations" (Rolling Stone 2014).1

But the series' achievements transcend the artistic. As the first project from maverick publisher Dave Sim's Aardvark One International, whose alternative publishing model challenged the monopolist comics distributor Diamond—eventually leading to the series' premature cancellation2—*The Puma Blues* served as full-fledged community space for a sort of gonzo environmentalist politics.3 The paratextual content regularly included in its 23 issues, such as "Notes on the Environment," "Blue Notes" and "The Fraying Weave," reported on deforestation, species extinction and problems related to global warming (just then seeing its first glimmers in US public consciousness).<sup>4</sup> On its letters page, "Blahblahblah," eco-warriors clashed with enviro-skeptics while animal lovers and concerned comics fans voiced their worries over the planet.<sup>5</sup>

Throughout the series, animal experience saw a degree of attention rarely vouchsafed in comics (a medium more popularly known for superheroes and anthropomorphized "funny animal" stories), in particular through a recurring, unnamed puma character. The early episode "In the Empire of the Senses" (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #5) puts Murphy and Zulli's commitment to the representation of non-human ontology most fully on display, deploying comics techniques such as line work, framing, panel progression and sound effects for a bravura depiction of the mountain lion's nighttime hunt, often from its own perception-rich point of view. In so doing, the authors demonstrate not only how a comics focalization on an animal protagonist alters the representational stakes. Their experiment in overwriting readerly preconceptions about how graphic narrative communicates (including "across" the species barrier) carries implications for the capacities of the medium itself, at the same time that it reasserts the very real limits involved in representing a non-human *umwelt.*

In exploring such implications and limits, this essay carries out a close reading of "In the Empire of the Senses," contrasting its approach with those of ethology, Japanese manga and experimental cinema.

#### **2. Empire of the Ghost Cat**

*Puma concolor,* the most successful and adaptable land predator of the Western hemisphere, thrived there until the conquest and settlement of the 'New World'. By the 1930s they were believed eradicated from Eastern North America, despite anecdotal reports (Hunter 2006/2007, p. 20).6 Their impressive size (specimens often exceed 200 pounds), solitary nature and unmatched stealth have led to a legendary reputation as "ghost cats," both among native peoples and their conquerors.

<sup>1</sup> Critical reviews uniformly echo the fan discourses. Tim O'Neil of *A.V. Club* calls it "an environmental fable," effusing: "It seems almost lazy to call the work *sui generis,* but nothing really serves to adequately summarize such a surpassingly odd but also supremely affecting work... it eventually grows to encompass pseudo-autobiography, New Age mysticism, conspiracy literature, UFO-logy, and natural history" (O'Neil 2016). *The Comics Journal's* Alex Dueben calls it the "missing link—a pop culture precursor to DC's Vertigo line, *The X Files, Twin Peaks* and a thousand other creative works" (Dueben 2016b); while Nerdy Show also emphasizes the series' wide-ranging influences: "*Transmetropolitan* meets *Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep*, liberally dipped in the grittier side of the 1980s and paired with John Audubon-style nature art" (Nerdy Show).

<sup>2</sup> See the series' own coverage in *The Puma Blues* (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #16, March 1988) and "Aardvark-Diamond Chronology" (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #20, September 1988), and (Bissette 2015, pp. 532–35).

<sup>3</sup> Zulli called *The Puma Blues* "sort of a shot across the bow to wake the fuck up" (Dueben 2016a).

<sup>4</sup> In a section called "Blue, Blue Oceans," Murphy sets down a list of sobering statistics, e.g., "lifespan of a plastic six-pack ring, in years: 450" (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #15, February 1988, emphasis in original); "Notes on the Environment" informs: "The United States Supreme Court handed down a decision limiting the ability of citizens to sue polluters for past violations of the Federal Clean Water Act, thus giving industrialists a measure of protection against suits brought by environmental groups . . . " (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #14, January 1988).

<sup>5</sup> "Blahblahblah" (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #16, March 1988) devoted a section to reader responses to a previous letter-writer's contention: "I think environmentalism is a lost cause."

<sup>6</sup> Despite occasional sightings of specimens crossing over from other regions, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct in 2011 (Bolen 2013, p. 37). In part due to increased sightings in Ontario, the Canadian government in 1971 proclaimed the species "endangered" after earlier saying it had disappeared entirely. "There was a time that if you reported a cougar, it was like you reported a flying saucer," declared an official of the Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources in 1968 (Hunter 2006/2007, p. 19). An ironic statement, considering *The Puma Blues'* ufological predilections.

"Even its name defies confinement: Generations of hunters have dubbed it cougar, panther, puma, painter, catamount, and more," writes *National Geographic* (Dutcher 1992, p. 42).7

As far back as the 19th century, naturalists were observing the "American lion's" shyness around humans. "The puma does not ordinarily attack men, but, on the contrary, when surprised attempts to flee from them," noted Frederick True in 1892, adding, "The puma seeks his prey chiefly at dawn and twilight and under cover of night ... " (True 1892, p. 170).8 More recent researchers have supplemented and augmented that picture. An observational study in California's Cuyamaco Rancho State Park found "pumas generally showed opposite activity patterns to human visitors," likely because "puma activity is most influenced by the activity patterns and periods of vulnerability of deer, the major prey of puma" (Sweanor et al. 2008, pp. 1080–82).9

Between 1890 and 2005 only about 117 puma attacks on humans were officially documented across the US and Canada. However, over half those attacks had occurred in the previous 16 years. Prior to the CRST study, the park had recorded 18 aggressive puma incidents, including two attacks and one human death, all in the 1990s (Sweanor et al. 2008, p. 1076). Presumably due to human encroachment into the cat's habitats, the number of dangerous encounters was increasing. (And of course, ranchers had long vilified the animal for taking its cattle, sheep and even horse colts, and had actively sought to eliminate it.)10

All the same, Sweanor and her collaborators insist that most pumas most of the time will retreat from people; in another field study, they reported that "only 9 percent of approaches to within 50 m resulted in a threat response" (Sweanor et al. 2005, p. 911). They did caution against unwarranted generalizations, however:

Some individuals never showed a threat response, even though they were approached multiple times; others gave threat responses during the first and only approach. We could not predict whether a puma that behaved one way during an approach would behave in a similar way during a subsequent approach (Sweanor et al. 2005, p. 912).

Despite sensationalistic accounts in the mass media, human-cougar run-ins remain rare, deaths from same exceedingly so. A portrait emerges of a quiet, unobtrusive killer, leery of people, content to hunt its preferred quarry of deer, antelope and sheep, though prepared to react with deadly force if cornered, a "ghost" living an unglimpsed existence parallel to that of humans. A portrait not unlike that painted by wildlife journalist Ben East:

A pioneer farmer, walking a woods-bordered wagon road on the way home to his isolated cabin in the dark of night, could never be sure that a cougar was not keeping pace with him in the timber a few yards away, slinking through the undergrowth with no more commotion than drifting smoke, itself unseen but measuring with its big yellow eyes each step the man took. It was a chilling thought (East 1979, p. 20).

The setting and circumstances described by East oddly mirror those found in the early portions of *The Puma Blues—*albeit without the science fiction sheen. Gavia Immer,<sup>11</sup> a government agent stationed by the Quabbin Reservoir in rural Massachusetts in a future 1997, spends his days monitoring the water for signs of acid rain and searching the forest for mutated airborne manta rays and other fauna.

<sup>7</sup> Disagreements persist even among scientists on the proper designation for the animal. See (Hunter 2006/2007, p. 21).

<sup>8</sup> Human-on-cougar violence of course occurred much more often than the reverse. Then-president Theodore Roosevelt killed a Tom weighing 227 pounds in Colorado in 1901 (East 1979, p. 51).

<sup>9</sup> The study did indicate a variation in movements based on sex: "Male pumas in CRSP traveled 1.7–2.8 times greater distances than females (mean of means) during crepuscular and night periods, when pumas were most active" (Sweanor et al. 2008, p. 1079).

<sup>10</sup> Throughout the text I elect to use the pronoun "it" when referring to animals, as a marker of their non-human status. I wish to express my thanks to the article's anonymous reviewers who helped me clarify my own position on this and other relevant issues.

<sup>11</sup> Latin for "common loon"; see (Dueben 2016b).

The animals have been altered by lingering nuclear radiation from a blast which destroyed the Bronx, New York. When he finds them, he uses a matter "transducer" to teleport them to an undisclosed location. Most of the time, however, Gavia has little to do. Suffering from a melancholy disposition, he falls into something like full depression while mourning his deceased father.12 The series in its first phase shows Gavia in his lonely cabin, speaking to his mother via a video-phone; drinking; listening to Iggy Pop's *Cry for Love* on headphones; interacting with Jack, a trespasser on the grounds; and watching his late father's paranoid, UFO-obsessed experimental videos.13 Unbeknownst to our young hero, a puma lives and stalks the environs, virtually under his nose (at one point standing immediately behind him) (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 7).14 Gavia never notices his "ghost" companion.<sup>15</sup>

Here and throughout "In the Empire of the Senses,"16 the anonymous cougar adheres to the broad behavioral parameters for its species sketched in the ethological discourses we have sampled. Indeed, the episode deserves its reputation as a groundbreaking "hyper-real" comics exploration of animal subjectivity. The authors produce an immersive reading experience grounded in a "direct" engagement with the natural world, effected through the unique communicative capacities of graphic narrative. As Murphy explained to an interviewer:

Night. What happens at night in an island wilderness like the Quabbin? That was the starting point. The issue, like certain others, was an experiment with narrative. Could we answer that question while using wildlife and their various vocals as a means of telling a story? As a starting point I used an experience of mine where I'd snuck up on and scared a beaver, prompting the beaver to immediately slap its tail against the water surface in a loud clap in order to warn other beavers of my presence. I then wrote a script centered on the puma making its way through a very noisy night in the Quabbin watershed—an empire of the senses. If you've ever spent a night out in true wilderness, especially in spring, it can be really loud. That's what we were trying to capture (Dueben 2016b).

Apart from a brief framing sequence (addressed further below), the episode remains steadfastly within a non-human milieu for 17 unbroken pages. We follow the puma figure as it strides through a nighttime forest alive with sound and movement, encountering chirping crickets, warring raccoons and a splashing beaver, which spoils its hunt of two deer. The cat seems to lash out at the interloper, who vanishes underwater. The cougar ends up sating its hunger with the scavenged carcass of some unidentified animal. The simple plot belies Murphy and Zulli's remarkable technical achievement with "In the Empire of the Senses." I will examine three key facets of their representational strategy: Time, Sound and Agency.

Comics scholars have long noted an irreducible ambiguity involved in the medium's depiction of time. Briefly, they tend to describe the comics panel's immediate function as one of conveying a temporal "unit" of a highly flexible and subjective nature, which combines with other panels (both contiguous, on the same page and throughout a given work) to produce narrative flow. In this

<sup>12</sup> Many of these details, including the late father, follow Murphy's own biography. See (Bissette 2015, p. 531) and Murphy's blog *Contains Traces Of* at http://containstracesof.blogspot.ca.

<sup>13</sup> Other characters, including the patrician Ms. Malcolmson and her android chauffeur Ernest, and a loose plot which eventually takes Gavia to a nuclear facility in the deserts of Nevada, and in the conclusion, to Alaska, lie beyond the scope of this essay.

<sup>14</sup> All further references to *The Puma Blues* come from the 2015 Dover collected volume.

<sup>15</sup> East reports a cougar following a man for over a mile and even watching him have lunch for an hour, unnoticed (East 1979, p. 19).

<sup>16</sup> Murphy and Zulli derived the title from the British musician Bill Nelson's song of the same name, which appears on the 1982 album *The Love That Whirls (Diary of a Thinking Heart).* It features these relevant lines: "Is there life beyond the curtain?/All these things are so uncertain ... /in the empire of the senses,/in the empire of the senses ... " The phrase also recalls the morbidly erotic arthouse film *In the Realm of the Senses* (Oshima 1976).

process, textual as well as graphic elements together impart a sense of reader-determined duration.17 For example, as Scott McCloud writes, "For sound effects, we extrapolate from our experiences of sounds in the real world—the panel lasts at least as long as the sound to which the effect refers" (McCloud 2006, p. 109).18 Thierry Groensteen puts it perhaps more lyrically:

[C]omics, in displaying intervals (in the same way as persistence of vision erases the discretization of the cinematic medium) rhythmically distributes the tale that is entrusted to it. To ignore speed—its images are immobile and no voice imprints a delivery in dialogue—does not suggest any less of a cadenced reading, or an operation given rhythm by the crossing of the frames ... Each new panel hastens the story and, simultaneously holds it back. The frame is the agent of this double maneuver of progression/retention (Groensteen 2007, p. 45).

"In the Empire of the Senses" very much partakes of comics' "progression/retention" dynamic, though here premised on a non-human consciousness modality. The lack of dialogue (in the conventional sense), repetitive page designs, nighttime setting and narrative languors evoke an ambience of suspension, even as events unfold. Most panels take up the entire length of the page, in four- and five-tier arrangements, creating a cinematic "wide-screen." Zulli's black and white pen technique, supplemented with zipatone and other graying effects, renders the puma's hunt mysterious and sensual, an atmosphere accentuated by unusually wide gutters between panels, which accommodate sound effects. For long stretches, nothing and everything happens in a world only partly glimpsed through nocturnal murk, but filled with noise.

The "timeless" mood manifests from the first frame of the "hunt" sequence, as we observe a manta ray gliding above the Quabbin Reservoir, full moon casting shadow-reflections of coniferous trees and mountains onto the ripples. The mutant has an airborne close encounter with an owl before darting off, its body momentarily obscuring a curious puma who looks on from shore (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 100). The imaginary flying creature (not seen again until the end of the episode) thus frames and "reveals" the naturalistic milieu opening up before our eyes.

The cougar, still looking up, starts to move off but stops short, seeming to contemplate some crickets chirping in its path. It dangles a paw at them and leaves the shore, loping into the forest, closely watched by what appears to be a weasel (Murphy and Zulli 2015, pp. 101–2). The panels grow progressively larger and more square; we see the puma in a half-page frame discovering deer tracks, lowering itself to the ground (it could also be stretching). A landscape of the moon over the reservoir,19 which punctuates the action, here brings the opening "chapter" to a close (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 103).

How long does the cougar regard the flying manta ray? How much time does it accord the crickets at its feet? How many minutes or hours pass before it stumbles on the deer tracks?20 The comics reading experience, fueled by the psychological engagement of a (human) reader, offers no set answers; the effect is very much heightened by the lack of a *homo sapiens* protagonist, or even narrator.<sup>21</sup> Neither the content of the panels nor the spaces between them (the gutters) supply definitive clues as to timeline or a chain of actions—we don't even know for sure if we are witnessing the same night,

<sup>17</sup> Of course, panels act in conjunction—and often in tension—with myriad other devices, as Charles Hatfield has written: "the single image functions as both a point on an imagined timeline—a self-contained moment substituting for the moment before it, and anticipating the moment to come—and an element of global page design" (Hatfield 2009, p. 140).

<sup>18</sup> For a similar, if more complicated, view, see (Cohn 2010).

<sup>19</sup> The first of these landscapes depicts the reflection of the moon unrealistically high, so that it encroaches on the mountains' reflection (the effect is not as stark in subsequent landscapes). Zulli presumably drew it that way to underscore the sequence's subtle irreality (?) in light of the conclusion.

<sup>20</sup> As McCloud writes, "Silence has the effect of removing a panel from any particular span of time ... Silence also allows readers to step off the twin conveyor belts of plot and dialogue long enough to let their eyes wander and explore your world, instead of viewing it as nothing more than a passing backdrop" (McCloud 2006, pp. 164–65)

<sup>21</sup> For example, Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and Zulli's short story "Act of Faith," set in the *Puma Blues* universe, achieves a very different, more human-centered effect through a narrator commenting on the rays' behavior. See (Alaniz 2008).

or following the same puma! Put in the position of contending with a non-human focalization, the consumer of "In The Empire of the Senses" must draw their own conclusions about such matters much more so than when reading, say, *Donald Duck.*

Murphy and Zulli augment the defamiliarization still further in moments when they seem to abandon narrative altogether. At one point, they present eight adjacent portraits of various fauna—weasel, raccoon, frog, wolf, moth, owl, katydid, cougar—once more set off by the full moon/reservoir landscape (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 107). Though the reader understands some of them to be vocalizing (the owl *"hooo hhooos"),* their sound effects appear separate from the image, beneath them in the wide gutters. Consigning the sound to a separate "track" allows for the panels to remain paradoxically "silent." While, in conjunction with the preceding page, the "portraits" can be read as reaction shots (which I address in my conclusion), nonetheless these "frozen" panels bear a striking resemblance to nature photographs or even postage stamps (a similarity enhanced by their juxtaposition on (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 107)). They congeal into a sort of visual poetry made up of what McCloud calls "aspect-to-aspect" panel transitions (McCloud 1993, pp. 72, 80–81) which retard story flow in favor of some "natural" tempo.

Even in more narrative-driven "sub-plots" to the puma's wanderings, like the dramatic instant when a life ends, the authors break down the action in such a way as to confuse a straightforward linear continuity. In one bottom panel/tier, we see stylized "sonar" waves22 wash over a dragonfly perched on a stump. At the top of the next page, a bat swoops down to snatch it, claws mere millimeters from prey (Murphy and Zulli 2015, pp. 109–10). Murphy and Zulli's "death by page-turn" interrupts the action in mid-kill, taking the reader momentarily out of the storyworld for the duration of the page-flip (or if you will, the "hypergutter"), casting even more doubt on the precise time allotted. A bat zeroes in on its meal, then grabs at it, all over the course of turning the page, the dragonfly's final milliseconds captured in "snapshot." I maintain that such sequences in *The Puma Blues* do much to, as Steve Bissette puts it, "steep the reader in the rhythms of animal lives" (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 529). In so doing they pose numerous challenges to the anthropocentric norms of comics reading—while tapping techniques unique to the comics medium for precisely those effects.

"Empire" utilizes another psychologically engaged, highly immersive narrative strategy: sound effects. The use of the wide gutters as an ambient "soundtrack" renders creatures seen and unseen, onand off-panel, uncommonly "alive": the calls of birds, the splash of fish, the sniffing of deer, the grunt of the cougar. This running soundscape appears as phonetic spellings, mostly machine-printed,<sup>23</sup> highlighting the repetitive nature of those sounds which form a backdrop to the puma's hunt throughout the night. The onomatopoetic "tsip tsip" of crickets and the "peep peep" of birds, especially, pervade the chapter, and the authors vary the quality of their din through capitalization, as for example on page 111: "tsip TSIP tsip TSIN peep tsip TSIP tsip TSIP tsip TSIP peep" (emphasis and spelling in original). By contrast, the animals *not* making sounds stand out: the spying weasel, the hiding rabbit.

Variations of the unusual sound effect "KKSCHH!" bookend the nocturnal hunt sequence, at pages 100 and 116—these signal the presence of the flying mutant manta.<sup>24</sup> But the stylized letters of this effect (inspired by Japanese orthography) strongly hint at the provenance of "Empire's" approach to sound: Japanese manga comics. In fact, the chapter seems a consciously transnational attempt to replicate the representational conventions of the world's most developed comics culture for domestic, "documentary" goals.

Indeed, as argued by pioneering US manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt, "It is in the realm of sound effects that the Japanese language performs magic ... [manga] artists have wrought miracles of

<sup>22</sup> They resemble the "radar" grapheme from the Marvel superhero series *Daredevil* (launched Lee and Everett 1962).

<sup>23</sup> Most mainstream comics at the time used hand-lettering, as did *The Puma Blues* for its word balloons and sound effects in chapters other than "Empire." As Murphy explained: "It was the only time that I had a hand in the art, in that I helped Michael paste in all those various sound effects over the course of a very long afternoon. But it was fun" (Dueben 2016b).

<sup>24</sup> Though it remains unclear whether the sound effect conveys the glide of the manta through the air, or the flap of its wings. Such indeterminacy underscores the creature's "unnatural," imagined status.

paradox: the use of sound to depict silent activities and emotions" (Schodt 1983, p. 23). Strategies that marry Japanese's extravagant number of onomatopoeic forms (far more than in English)25 with the visual pliancy of the language's writing system produce a rich descriptive field in manga storyworlds, which as Robert S. Petersen writes, "convey the essence of lived sensations by using the sound-like experience to fuse the sign/icon into a single sensation" (Petersen 2007, p. 578). Writing on the "acoustics" of manga, Petersen maintains that works which fully exploit such aesthetic potentialities yield what he calls a Narrative Erotics—moments "when the narrative becomes embodied through a sensual experience," often prompting the reader to slow down to savor the full effect. "Narrative erotics create an animated interior for the story to live within, allowing it to become more evocative and memorable" he writes. "This presence is not in opposition to meaning; rather it creates a space for meaning to accrue" (Petersen 2007, p. 580).

Petersen's insights on sound in manga have an especial relevance for "Empire," in which the soundscape lends depth and vividness to innumerable actions, from the plain ("SHLAPP!" of a beaver's tail on water, deer loudly escaping through underbrush (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 112)) to the more subtle (the puma panting, then regaining its breath after exertion: "HHUF HHUF hut-hut uf" (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 114)) to the barely "heard" (the beaver's near-silent response ["wff"] to the cat's approach, before it quickly slips underwater ["SSPLLIICH"] (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 113)). As noted, Murphy and Zulli also deftly deploy the *absence* of sound: the "page-turn death" of the dragonfly has no sound effect attached (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 110); the weasel seems to silently catch the rabbit (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 113). Finally, style, size and positioning of the sound effects text has a close relationship to such physical/spatial characteristics as loudness and nearness: the "wff" of the beaver accompanies a panel of the animal in close-up, while its "SSPLLIICH" of underwater escape we see in long shot from "afar"—consequently the text beneath appears smaller. The authors take the reader's relative "distance" from the proceedings into account, inflecting the perception of events on a near-subliminal level.

But for all its incorporation of a transnational "manga" sensibility, I want to emphasize, "Empire" deviates sharply from most manga proper in that its sound effects, as mentioned, are not visually incorporated into the panels themselves, but remain in the "gutter track." This leads to, firstly, the oxymoronic effect of "silent" panels suffused with sound. At the same time, such a design invokes an earlier, more "primeval" stage in the historical development of comics, to an era before dialogue appeared in speech balloons within the panel, but instead as text beneath. (In a dangerously broad generalization, we can trace the change to turn-of-the-20th century US newspaper comics.)<sup>26</sup> The chapter thus yokes its representation of nature to both national and historical "others"—a point which will come up again further below.

We may take the "raccoons" sequence as emblematic of both the breakthroughs and shortcomings of "Empire's" manga-derived approach to sound. The puma comes to an overlook, as the cricket sounds intersperse with "hhiiiissss" and "rrrooo." The cat sees two raccoons circling each other in a clearing, about to come to blows. The soundtrack reads: "RROOowll GGGrrllll HSSSt." In the third panel, the cougar interrupts the contretemps, enunciating "mmrrooowwsssss uuurrf." Panel four shows the raccoons wide-eyed, in shock at the interloper; the gutter beneath signals not sound but emotion: "'!?' '!??'" (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 104). The next page presents, unusually, a top panel filled with various sound effects, including "CRUNCH," "crac," "RUN," "SNAAP," "CLIMB" and "WAEET." The panel/tier below that places the raccoons atop a tree, clinging to its branches and looking down, partly-clouded-over moon in the distance (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 105). The "empty" gutter beneath the image indicates no one dares make a sound.

<sup>25</sup> Kodooka notes upwards of 1600 in the Japanese language (Kodooka 2002, p. 267). See also (Huang and Archer 2014, p. 474).

<sup>26</sup> On the historical development of word balloons in comics, and in particular on animal representation's role in the process, see (Smolderen 2006, p. 104).

This comical sequence (seemingly making light of the procyons' terror of the cat) engagingly depicts actions through close-ups, sound effects and McCloudian closure (the reader deduces that the "sound effects panel" conveys the raccoons' frantic climb to escape a predator). As Petersen holds, "The presence of sound gives force and dimension to the dramatic action" (Petersen 2007, p. 583).

But as mentioned, the vignette goes beyond the onomatopoeic (what the Japanese refer to as *giseigo/giongo*), into the realm of non-mimetic or affectual representation (*gitaigo* aka phenomimes and psychomimes).27 And here *The Puma Blues* inches into the same ethically problematic territory as so many previous depictions of animals in comics: anthropomorphism. The delegation of an interior state via punctuation and humor through "funny" sound effects<sup>28</sup> works at cross-purposes to the series' professedly "testimonial" and unsentimental approach to non-human representation.29

#### **3. The Empire Gazes Back**

The British historian Jonathan Burt, in his study on animals in cinema, identifies the matter as one of whether or not a given work should

entail or inspire a sense of the real animal uncluttered by the emotional and psychological links that allow for human-animal relations in the first place. The visual animal is caught in an argument over whether the animal should be considered on its own terms or understood through a network of human-animal relations (Burt 2012, p. 188).

What Burt calls "multiple metaphorical significances" lead to "a kind of semantic overload" (Burt 2012, p. 11): the animal figure "means" whatever the reader/beholder alights on (e.g., "patriotic" American bald eagle), while the animal as animal risks becoming fully suffused into the human, disappearing altogether. Numerous scholars, most famously John Berger, thus warn against the colonizing effect of the human gaze; speaking of the denizens of zoos, he declares, *"you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal"* (Berger 1980, p. 24, emphasis in original). For Akira Lippit, visual/electronic media form nothing short of "a vast mausoleum for animal being" (Lippit 2000, p. 187). Non-human life in our representations, these scholars attest, is doubly dead: as physical body in an age of mass extinctions and as self-determining agent.

"The Empire of the Senses" presents us with a tantalizing test case for such surmises; do the puma and the creatures it encounters reflect, not an "accurate," or even plausible, but *subject-driven* approach to animal life? Readers give the benefit of the doubt easily enough in the case of human-focalized graphic narratives; but a non-human protagonist, as noted, throws up myriad challenges to this sort of "realism."30

<sup>27</sup> Huang and Archer describe *giseigo/giongo* as words that mimic the actual sound of an object or action *(giseigo* for animate objects, *giongo* for inanimate), while *gitaigo* conveys a state or abstract quality or condition, for example a sound effect to denote something being done quickly (Huang and Archer 2014, p. 475). Schodt offers these examples of the latter: sound of a penis standing erect (BIIN), the sound of silence (SHIIIN), the sound of milk being added to coffee (SURON), slurping noodles (SURU SURU) (Schodt 1983, p. 23) Petersen adds such phenomimes and psychomimes as "noro noro" for moving quietly and "peko peko" for bowing humbly (Petersen 2007, p. 583). Beyond Japan, Joost Pollman cites the invented sound effects of Dutch artist Jeroen de Leijer (e.g., "Kazwierp" for the action of a ticket-dispensing machine); the French artists Dupuy and Berberian ("Pschhrrrllooo" for a flushing toilet); as well as those of US artists Ben Katchor and Walter Simonson as comparable to the Dada poetry of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara (Pollman 2001, p. 14).

<sup>28</sup> On different kinds of sound effects and their affectual content, see (McCloud 2006, pp. 146–47). On the use of sound effects for explicitly humorous ends, see Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood's *locus classicus* "Sound Effects!" (Kurtzman and Wood 1955). See also John Byrne's parodic depiction of superhero action via sound effect in *Alpha Flight*, (Byrne 1984).

<sup>29</sup> See for example such critical responses as Dueben's: "the nature drawings in *Puma* especially, but so much of the detail in the book feels like an act of witness" (Dueben 2016a).

<sup>30</sup> One may object that readers of science fiction and fantasy comics routinely engage with non-human characters. These figures (whether Marko of *Saga* or DC's J'onn J'onz), however, mostly behave as humans. Even Lockjaw, the Inhumans' gigantic dog, acts in ways that meet the expectations for such a long-domesticated species. See comments on "ani-drag" in Alaniz (2017).

In attempting an answer, I proceed from the assumption that full-fledged animal consciousnesses fully divorceable from human expectations and representations exist,31 along the lines of philosopher Thomas Nagel's well-known formulation for bat-being as something very real (albeit inaccessible):

Thus we describe bat sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception; we believe that bats feel some versions of pain, fear, hunger, and lust, and that they have other, more familiar types of perception besides sonar. But we believe that these experiences also have in each case a *specific subjective character,* which it is beyond our ability to conceive (Nagel 1974, p. 439, my emphasis).

The presumption of a grounded material reality for non-human being, even if one not fully graspable due to the limits of human empathy/mind, seems to me a firm foundation for an ethical project of animal representation. Premising his own argument on Actor-Network Theory, Burt offers a model of animal agency which privileges reciprocity between agents, both within and across species. This approach would

redress an imbalance in the theorizing of human-animal relations by seeking, instead, to outline the impact animals have on humans rather than always seeing animals as the passive partner, or victim ... [I]n film human-animal relations are possible through an interplay of agency regardless of the nature of animal interiority, subjectivity or communication (Burt 2012, p. 31).

Burt's formulation thus assumes that animals have interiority, without seeking to delimit it. In short, animals "act" in films (true, partly in fulfillment of training, but also for their own inscrutable ends), in turn provoking responses in the human viewer—a transpecies chain of affectual sway. "It is in the context of these unintended effects by the animal itself," he concludes, "that we best understand what it means to talk about the manner in which the animal, *pace* Lippit, does regulate its symbolic effects" (Burt 2012, p. 32).32 In film, humans and animals share a sort of leveling fictional space, through which they interact and influence each other, all the time regarded by a human audience which projects its symbolic presumptions onto the animals (and humans), but is also put in the position of accepting them as agents of their fates, and even falling under their "influence."

To pick a cinematic example with surface similarities to "Empire," the US artist Bill Viola's experimental documentary *I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like* instantiates a network of missed mutual gazes (Viola 1986). The camera focuses obsessively on close-ups and long takes of animals: fish in water, birds at the San Diego Zoo, bison on the range. Yet none of these creatures seem particularly invested in returning Viola's look. As the title suggests, the video enacts both a quest for identity in the body of the other and as Catherine Russell puts it "an exploration of the undisciplined gaze" (Russell 1999, p. 183), culminating in an oft-cited sequence: a slow zoom into the face of a disinterested owl followed by a series of shots showing the filmmaker's own reflection in the creature's eye.33

Clearly Viola himself in this intensely personal work, but also the viewer of *I Do Not Know,* is "influenced" by the non-human creatures depicted; she is left to ponder their inner worlds, poignantly seeking a connection, affirmation, recognition which of course never comes. Through the animal scenes, the audience is thrown back to a contemplation of its own bewildering humanity. In Russell's words:

<sup>31</sup> A historically controversial notion, as is Cary Wolfe's in *Animal Rites:* "[W]e share our world with non-human others who inhabited this planet before we arrived on the scene and will in all likelihood far outlast the tenure of *Homo Sapiens* but also that *we*—whoever "we" are—are in a profound sense constituted as human subjects within and atop a nonhuman otherness that postmodern theory has worked hard to release from the bad-faith repressions and disavowals of humanism" (Wolfe 2003, p. 193, emphasis in original).

<sup>32</sup> The animals' "unintended effects" in Burt's model clearly link it to the concept of excess in cinema; see (Thompson 1986).

<sup>33</sup> The sequence seems a literalization of the anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley's adage: "One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human" (Eiseley 1978, p. 16).

The naked state that Viola develops strips the gaze down to its scopophilic structure: the desire to see, which is indulged fully, but is always unsatisfying, always leaving a gap of unknowing, of desire that sustains itself through lack. In Viola's portraits of bird, fish and animals, the gaze functions as a form of containment and a site of excess<sup>34</sup> (Russell 1999, p. 120).

The question arises: would such a form (of both containment *and* excess) obtain in a non-photographic work of comics such as *The Puma Blues?* Does the absence of sound, motion and measurable time retard the represented non-human subjects' influence? What "unintended effects" on the reader could Zulli's exquisitely-drawn animals bring about?

Despite the obvious objection (cinema and comics "involve" readers in very different ways, leading to different forms of viewer identification), I will insist that some version of Burt's "agency" argument holds in *The Puma Blues,* most potently through Zulli's animal portraiture and "Empire's" various alienating effects (a comics analogue to Viola's long takes and narrator-less imagery). The non-human "acts" through the artist's pen—Zulli, a wildlife illustrator for several years before embarking on a comics career (Dueben 2016a), avidly studied his subjects and their behavior, the better to represent them in a static medium—a first-order agency whose traces pervade the text, transmitting its "influence" on to the reader. Zulli's closely informed drawings thus mirror the "unintended effects" of the film animal "actor." And though Burt emphasizes animal-human interactions, "Empire" exemplifies how we may dispense with the second part of the equation, whether through "missed" gazes (Gavia's blithe unawareness of the puma which stalks him) or by eliminating the human from the visual field *in toto.*

Indeed, the puma's hunt is a tightly choreographed dance of gazes, actions and reactions between non-human species, some of whom affect the lives (and deaths) of others without realizing it. At one point, the feline predator silently closes in on two grazing deer, so intent on its prey that it fails to register a rabbit hidden by rocks and foliage, under its very snout—a situation wryly analogous with that of the clueless Gavia and his elusive ghost cat. Two panels show long-shot and close-up views of the scene: the "objective" and "subjective," the latter emphasizing the lapine quarry's terror as a huge clawed foot passes within inches (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 109).

At the conclusion to the night's hunt, a carefree bathing beaver splashes loudly with its tail ("SHLAPP!"), frightening the nearby deer, who scamper off. Their frantic "snaps" and "crunches" through the undergrowth in turn flush a rabbit from hiding (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 112), make a weasel pause over the body of another rabbit (or perhaps the same one, killed between panels)35 and "enrage" the cougar, whose prey has escaped. Growling, it approaches the beaver, who seems confused by all the clamor. Sitting placidly in the water, it utters a non-committal "wff" and disappears beneath the ripples (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 113). An impressive leap by the puma comes to naught: a bottom-tier panel shows it catching its breath, surveying the empty shoreline, all other actors vanished. The crickets soon resume their chirps (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 114). Whatever else these animal figures express, they decidedly deport themselves with a supple agency generative of manifold "unintended effects"—on themselves and on the reader. It seems no coincidence that reviewers tend to reference "In the Empire of the Senses" more often than any other chapter of *The Puma Blues;* for many readers it conveys something truly visceral and "real."

<sup>34</sup> As Russell goes on to say, "The visual economy of *I Do Not Know* is reduced to its purest voyeuristic structure within the context of a crisis of subjectivity" (Russell 1999, p. 187). See Russell for a much fuller treatment of Viola's video art. The more conventionally ethological documentary *Kestrel's Eye* (Kristersson 1998) also makes for a good cinematic comparative case to "Empire."

<sup>35</sup> We never know, in fact, if this is the same rabbit that was hiding from the cougar before (it seems to be), or whether this is the same weasel that was previously observing the cougar. Murphy and Zulli leave such questions open.

#### **4. Conclusions: A Tree Falls**

But of course, for all its agential "authenticity" and narrative erotics, Murphy and Zulli's fictional facsimile of the natural world in "Empire" never operates outside an inescapably anthropocentric frame, its depiction of a puma's nocturnal wanderings as man-made as the Quabbin reservoir and the mutant mantas that ply its skies. One might say such a frame is built into the comics reading experience itself.

Take as an example the horizontal panels which accommodate the cougar's body (see (Murphy and Zulli 2015, pp. 102–3) for a representative sequence). They mimic the animal's shape and posture; Zulli also often depicts the cat from a low angle, i.e., from its or other forest creatures' perspectives (such as the weasel's). Yet, as Thierry Groensteen reminds, the panel has far from a neutral value, it "can connote or index the image that it encloses. It can go so far as to instruct the reader on what must be read, or even as far as to supply a reading protocol, or even an interpretation of the panel" (Groensteen 2007, pp. 49–50). In other words, the very act of representing the animal in comics—regardless of the artist's "egalitarian" aims—enframes it within an ideological no less than an aesthetic space. Zulli is choosing which moments of the puma's hunt to illustrate, choosing how it appears, where it gazes, what it does, how far or close it moves, choosing even the amount of visual space above, below and to its sides. All of this seems, even accounting for Burt's "agency" argument, a profoundly colonizing practice in regard to non-human life.36

It seems too to risk what Steve Baker calls modernity's "disnification" syndrome, whereby "common sense" is applied to the animal image, "render[ing] it stupid by rendering it visual" (Baker 2001, p. 174). He elaborates:

[W]hen the animal is put into visual form, it seems somehow to incline towards the stereotypical and stupid, to float free from the requirements of consistency or of the greater rigor that might apply in other non-visual contexts. The image of the animal here seems to operate as a kind of visual shorthand, but a shorthand gone wrong, a shorthand whose meanings intermittently veer from or turn treacherously back upon that of the fuller form of the text (Baker 2001, p. 175).

Particularly at points when the animals in "Empire" appear to express familiar and plausible emotions (the "enraged," "bemused," "disappointed" cougar, the comically panicky raccoons), the hand of a human maker most discloses itself. Other such instances include the selectivity of sound effects and their rather arbitrary phonetic renderings, while the representation of a katydid's call as *"katy-*did *katy-*did" (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 107) adheres more to cultural convention than verisimilitude.<sup>37</sup> Moreover, the use of a "Japanese" font exclusively for the sound of a mutated ray (Murphy and Zulli 2015, pp. 100, 116) invokes troubling associations between animal alterity and ethnic/racial otherness.

The imposition of narrativity itself (even one as fragmented as that of *The Puma Blues)* onto non-human experience also jeopardizes a project to "steep the reader in the rhythms of animal lives" (Bissette 2015, p. 529). Though superficially free-flowing and temporally ambiguous as related above, the cougar's story essentially adheres to a three-act structure, with rising/falling action and a denouement of sorts.<sup>38</sup> Such narratival "press-ganging" of the animal figure subsumes it

<sup>36</sup> The authors' dilemma has a correlate in ethological debates over the use of remote camera traps for wildlife observation. Despite their aleatory nature, they too enframe the animal subject, artificially removing context. Among other things, the very act of introducing the man-made camera trap into the environment risks altering the findings: "Behavioral responses by animals to camera traps potentially introduce biases to ethological and population ecology investigations" (Meek et al. 2016, p. 3217).

<sup>37</sup> On the at times vast gulf between different languages on the onomatopoeic interpretation of animal sounds, see (Nunn 2014).

<sup>38</sup> I would go so far as to say the "happy ending" to the hunt (the cougar finds a carcass to dine on, apparently just before dawn) also constitutes an "anthropocentric" narrative arc.

within another fundamental attribute of graphic narrative, what Groensteen, ironically enough, calls "anthropocentrism":

The narrative drawing privileges the character, the agent of the action; it successively accedes to each character the level of protagonist, in the etymological sense of "he who plays the primary role." Moreover, the format of the panel often appears calculated to be married to the body of the character represented in the frame, as if the panel constituted its natural habitat, its vital space, delimiting the space of its immediate behavior<sup>39</sup> (Groensteen 2007, pp. 161–62).

To present the cat as protagonist of its story privileges subject-object relations and biases clearly carried over from a human ontology/ideology; its logic comes to pervade the proceedings even if consciously resisted. We never cease, in sum, "to consider the animal as a visual image in a network of cultural and social associations" (Burt 2012, p. 39), even in fictions such as *The Puma Blues* which seek to meet the animal "halfway."40

"Empire's" largest cougar portrait, in the top panel of page 109, encompasses these various fraught contradictions of animal representation. Referred to previously, it shows the cat crouched (possibly stretching) over a set of deer tracks. It faces forward, in the center of the frame, picturesquely surrounded by woods, rocks, still water. Tail lowered, it displays no legible emotion. Crickets chirp on the sound effects "track." Though no human appears in the panel, everything here seems composed, arranged and stilled to put the puma on display for *a human viewer* (the effect enhanced by the animal's Friedian absorption). "We" are not there, the picture says, yet everything has been calculated to make *there* accessible to "our" colonizing gaze.<sup>41</sup> The image, in fact, could easily adorn a Nature Conservancy calendar.

The foregoing restates in aesthetic terms the anthropocentrism quandary of much recent animal rights discourse, how its parameters are often shaped by human-based models (as articulated in the epigraph by Calarco to the present essay). But the problem long antecedes the current debates, as elaborated by naturalist Konrad Lorenz in 1935:

The observer who studies and records behavior patterns of higher animals is up against a great difficulty. He is himself a subject, so like the object he is observing that he cannot be truly objective. The most "objective" observer cannot excape [sic] drawing analogies with his own psychological processes. Language itself forces us to use terms borrowed from our own experience (quoted in (Lehner 1979, p. 44)).

And yet, crucially, *The Puma Blues* (despite the inevitable shortcomings described) does not wish away the problem, but engages with it. As if in recognition of its own anthropocentric lens, "Empire's" framing sequence hints at the invented character of the sensual world laid out for our perusal. We see Ruth, Jack's partner, indoors (we might say, "completely cut off from nature"), before a fireplace, silently examining the photograph of a ray. In a rather startling sequence, her eye in close-up "morphs" over three overlapping panels into the eye of the manta which glides over Quabbin

<sup>39</sup> Burt discusses a cinematic correlate to Groensteen's "anthropocentrism," emphasizing the highly illusionistic construction of most filmic animal portrayals: "Just as the animal image is divided by cultural contests over its status, so the image is made up, technologically, by a process that usually depends on some form of montage. More than most other forms of filmmaking, animal cinematography invariably requires considerable editing to fit the different shots into the required narrative structures" (Burt 2012, p. 87).

<sup>40</sup> In fact, "Empire" bears striking resemblances to the episode "Puma Pass" of the TV nature documentary series *Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom,* which aired in December, 1963. The episode shows a cougar hunting mule deer in Colorado, and even an extended encounter with a beaver.

<sup>41</sup> Such "romantic sublime" imagery instantiates what Kai Mikkonen describes as "the central role of ambiguous and doubled focalization in the medium" (Mikkonen 2012, p. 87). The reader enjoys the fantasy of their own absence from a "wilderness" which they can nonetheless still witness. On the romantic sublime and the deeply-rooted appeal of wilderness in US culture, see (Cronon 1995).

Reservoir, initiating the nocturnal hunt portion (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 99). At its conclusion, we return to Ruth, sitting on her couch, lost in contemplation. Jack returns,<sup>42</sup> interrupting her reverie (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 117). This turn casts into doubt the "reality" of the entire forest episode (puma, crickets, deer, raccoons, beaver)—we could read it as Ruth's dream, fantasy, or telepathic vision. The "eye-match" panel sequence tantalizes with an even more radical possibility: that Ruth carries some sort of genetic link to the mutated rays, that the borders between humanity and animal have blurred drastically.<sup>43</sup> Thus, in a self-conscious moment, Murphy and Zulli's scifi comics-ethology acknowledges its highly-subjective, romanticized conception of nature and one of "Empire's" chief underlying themes: the utopian impulse to "become" animal.<sup>44</sup>

In so doing it isolates a "bio-escapist" strain in late capitalist life, given voice in recent memoirs such as Charles Foster's *Being a Beast* (2016), Thomas Thwaites' *Goat Man: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human* (2016) and Helen MacDonald's *H is for Hawk*, in which she writes: "Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human. Then it took me past that place to something where I wasn't human at all" (Macdonald 2014, p. 195).

*The Puma Blues,* what Bissette calls a "'jazz-like' comic book meditation on our culture's headlong rush toward ecological disaster" (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 530), functions as just such a fantasy of escape into nature—only to return the reader to an awareness of that escapism's roots: a pessimistic postmodern environmentalist angst. The cougar's immersive milieu, with all its rich details, offers a defamiliarized, oblique view of a better place—but accessible, we're reminded, only through imagining oneself (like Ruth) beyond the human.

"Empire's" imagined "hybrid" reader—apprehending a work focalized through an animal's perceptions—suggests the extraordinary potential of a verbal-visual medium for reorienting cognitive engagement. At its best it unlocks the embodied nature of the text, what the phenomenologist Gail Weiss terms the "narrative horizon" of reading. "[T]he body is ... the omnipresent horizon for all the narratives human beings tell (about it)," she writes. "As such, it grounds our quest for narrative coherence" (Weiss 2008, pp. 70–71). Murphy and Zulli's quixotic gambit to break through anthropocentric biases—to rebuild the master's house, using the master's tools—vicariously "re-horizons" the reader along transpecies lines.45

To close: a particularly compelling instance of "Empire's" "re-horizoning." Let us return to the eight adjacent portraits of amphibian, mammal and insect life alluded to earlier, which I likened to a visual poem (and to postage stamps) (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 107). The page opposite is dominated by a very different four-panel sequence: a dead tree creaks, sways and tumbles down with a loud crash (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 106). We may thus read the resulting two-page spread as a series of action-reaction shots: the tree drops, the animals bear witness.

A droll revision of the old saw "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?",<sup>46</sup> the scene answers, "Yes." Eight times.

<sup>42</sup> The previous chapter established that Jack had gone to the bathroom, leaving Ruth to regard the photo alone (Murphy and Zulli 2015, p. 95).

<sup>43</sup> *The Puma Blues*, even in its completed 2015 version, never definitively confirms or denies this possibility. Consider also the gendered implications of a feminine figure with a deeper "connection" to the natural world than the flailing Gavia or the utilitarian Jack.

<sup>44</sup> Such human/animal "blurrings" find expression in many turn-of-the-21st-century discourses. The Russian author Viktor Pelevin's short story "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" (first published in 1991), posits a protagonist who transforms into a wolf; the heightened awareness brought on by the change makes him dread ever returning to human form (Pelevin 1998, pp. 15–16). See also "Words of Prey" by Jonathan Menjivar, a 2014 segment on the radio program *This American Life,* which chronicles the intensely anthropocentric reactions of viewers to an "osprey cam" at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts (Menjivar 2015). See also Herman's contribution to the *Humanities* special issue on Animal Narratology (Herman 2016).

<sup>45</sup> Other episodes in *The Puma Blues* saga imaginatively re-enflesh the reader as animal. See Murphy and Bissette's short story "Pause," told from the point of view of a dog, in *The Puma Blues* (Murphy and Zulli 1986–1989, #20, September 1988).

<sup>46</sup> A philosophical conundrum, variants of which have been attributed to the British philosopher George Berkeley and others. A 2011 National Public Radio report complicates the question for the modern age (Messenger 2011).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **The Function of HumAnimAllegory**

#### **Sean Meighoo**

Department of Comparative Literature, Emory University, S410 Callaway Center, 537 Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA; sean.meighoo@emory.edu

Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 27 July 2016; Accepted: 16 January 2017; Published: 22 January 2017

**Abstract:** This article presents a critical reading of the function of the animal-human allegory or the "humanimallegory" in both the animated films *Animal Farm* and *Chicken Run*. Based on George Orwell's novel of the same name, *Animal Farm* provides an allegorical representation of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union by relaying Orwell's story of a revolution led by a group of farm animals and its aftermath. *Animal Farm* ultimately reduces its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects, thus serving the most common function of the animal-human allegory in literature as well as film. In contrast, improvising on the many prisoner-of-war films that were produced during the first few decades following World War II, *Chicken Run* tells the story of a group of chickens who attempt to escape from an egg farm. *Chicken Run* complicates the function of the animal-human allegory, though, by resisting the allegorical reduction of its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects. By presenting a critical reading of these two different films, this article suggests that the literary concept of allegory itself remains circumscribed within the philosophical tradition of humanism.

**Keywords:** allegory; humanism; literary theory; film studies; animal studies; George Orwell; *Animal Farm*; *Chicken Run*

The neologism that I have coined for the title of this paper is what we might call a second-order neologism—a neologism that is composed of other neologisms—the word "humanimallegory" formed by crossing the words "humanimal" and "animallegory" with each other, neither of which word I can claim to have coined myself. The word "humanimal" was coined in the film *You Never Can Tell*, directed and co-written by Lou Breslow and released in 1951 [1].1 This word has become quite ubiquitous within popular culture as well as the academic field of animal studies itself over the past few decades, largely aided, I would venture to guess, by its use in the theatrical trailer for the film *The Island of Dr. Moreau*, directed by Don Taylor and released in 1977 [2].2 The word "animallegory" seems to have remained

<sup>1</sup> *You Never Can Tell* is a comedy about a pet German Shepherd named King who inherits a fortune of six million dollars from his deceased owner, Andrew Lindsay. When King is poisoned under mysterious circumstances, the primary suspect is Lindsay's former secretary and the trustee of King's estate, Ellen Hathaway, who stands to inherit King's fortune. The word "humanimal" is introduced in an odd scene that is set apart from the rest of the film by its narrative voice-over, its musical score featuring electronic instrumentation, and its various special film effects including negative-image cinematography. During this scene, it is explained that all animals who have died must pass through "Beastatory" before they finally ascend into "the happy fields of Fauna." Any animal who has sinned and thus "betrayed the name of 'animal'" is condemned to return to earth in a form "not animal, not human, but humanimal." Having entered Beastatory himself, King makes the unusual request to return to earth voluntarily in order to reveal the true identity of his killer. The rest of the film unfolds as King returns to earth as a private investigator, Rex Shepard, accompanied by a former racehorse named Golden Harvest who becomes his secretary, "Goldie." Both Shepard and Goldie appear to be human, but they retain many of their animal qualities like Shepard's taste for dog kibble and Goldie's ability to run at great speeds. Toward the end of the film, we discover that many of the characters who had seemed human were actually humanimal all along, although they do not realize it themselves. The implication, of course, is that any one of us film viewers might be humanimal as well.

<sup>2</sup> *The Island of Dr. Moreau* was the second film adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel of the same name originally published in 1896 [3], the first film adaptation having been *Island of Lost Souls*, directed by Erle C. Kenton and released in 1932 [4].

much less widespread, though, despite its equally surprising long history. This word was coined in the 17 January 1955 edition of the weekly news magazine *Time* in a review of Halas and Batchelor's recently released animated film, *Animal Farm* [5]. Based on George Orwell's novel of the same name, *Animal Farm* provides an allegorical representation of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union by relaying Orwell's story of a revolution led by a group of farm animals and its aftermath [6]. Besides offering an expedient piece of political propaganda for the capitalist interests of the Western Bloc, *Animal Farm* ultimately reduces its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects, serving the most common function of the animal-human allegory in both literature and film—what I am calling here the function of humanimallegory.

Almost fifty years after the release of *Animal Farm*, Aardman's stop-motion animated film *Chicken Run* was released, marking yet another appearance of the humanimallegory. Improvising on the many prisoner-of-war films that were produced during the first few decades following World War II, *Chicken Run* tells the story of a group of chickens who attempt to escape from an egg farm [7]. I would like to argue that *Chicken Run* complicates the function of humanimallegory, however, by resisting the allegorical reduction of its fictional animal characters to simple metaphors for real human subjects. While *Chicken Run* certainly does play on many anthropomorphic representations of nonhuman animals, the film nonetheless also calls attention to the irreducible heterogeneity among its various animal characters—hens, roosters, rats, and dogs, not to mention human husband and wife—in some significant ways that *Animal Farm* does not. Reading these two different films in my paper, then, I want to suggest that the literary concept of allegory itself remains circumscribed within the philosophical tradition of humanism—which is to say, in so many words, that the theoretical distinction between the referent and the symbol that grounds the concept of allegory is a reiteration of the fundamentally metaphysical distinction between the human and the animal that grounds the tradition of humanism.<sup>3</sup>

It is fair to say that the concept of allegory has permeated the modern field of literary theory so completely that it is difficult if not impossible to cite any standard definition of this term. For our purposes, though, we may cite a working definition from Angus Fletcher's classic treatise *Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode*, which has remained widely available since its original publication in 1964. In his introduction to the text, Fletcher offers us a definition of allegory by contrasting it against the "open and direct" speech of "normal" language: "In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words 'mean what they say'. When we predicate quality *x* of person Y, Y really is what our predication says he [*sic*] is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into something other (*allos*) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader" ([11], p. 2). In a note to this passage, Fletcher further provides us with an etymological derivation of the term itself: "*Allegory* from *allos* + *agoreuein* (*other* + *speak openly*, *speak in the assembly or market*). *Agoreuein* connotes public, open, declarative speech. This sense is inverted by the prefix *allos*" ([11], p. 2, n. 1). Following this definition, we could say that allegory introduces a discordance between "meaning" and "saying" that is not present in ordinary speech or language.

The word "humanimals" is used in the theatrical trailer for *The Island of Dr. Moreau* to describe the genetically mutated animals on whom Dr. Moreau secretly conducts his scientific experiments.

<sup>3</sup> For some substantial scholarly works on film in the field of animal studies, see Akira Mizuta Lippit, *Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife* [8]; Jonathan Burt, *Animals in Film* [9]; and Paul Wells, *The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture* [10]. Lippit, Burt, and Wells all make a claim on the special status of the animal in relation to the specific cultural forms in which they are interested—modern media, film, and animated films, respectively: in *Electric Animal*, Lippit argues that "[m]odernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio" ([8], pp. 2–3); in *Animals in Film*, Burt asserts that "[t]here is no doubt that the animal is a key figure in the history of filmmaking though, curiously, it is a fact that has been virtually ignored until recently" ([9], p. 196); and in *The Animated Bestiary*, Wells suggests that "[a]rguably, the animal is an essential component of the language of animation, but one so naturalized that the anthropomorphic agency of creatures from Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur to PIXAR's Nemo has not been particularly interrogated" ([10], p. 2). In *The Animated Bestiary*, Wells also discusses both the animated films *Animal Farm* and *Chicken Run* at some length ([10], pp. 54–59, 164–65). However, neither Lippit, Burt, nor Wells critically addresses the function of the animal-human allegory in literature or film as such.

But if we were to question the humanist presuppositions that are entailed by this definition of allegory instead, then we would have to say that this discordance marks ordinary speech or language as well—breaching from the very start, as it were, any original accordance between meaning and saying, between the subject and the predicate, between the person and his or her personal quality or qualities. The function of humanimallegory is thus to restore order to the literary or filmic representation of the human by the animal as much as it is to restore order to the representation of the referent by the symbol. Yet insofar as this order has never been established or installed within language, literature, or film, this function is bound to fail—or, perhaps, to work only far too well.

§

*Animal Farm* was directed and produced by John Halas and Joy Batchelor for Louis de Rochemont and released in 1954, becoming the first British animated feature-length film to receive a public theatrical release. Halas was a Hungarian-born animator and Batchelor a British-born animator who formed the Halas and Batchelor animation studio together in 1940, marrying each other the same year. De Rochemont was an American filmmaker who was best known for his work as the co-producer and co-writer of the newsreel series *The March of Time* from 1935 to 1943. The film *Animal Farm* was "based on George Orwell's memorable fable," as the opening credits put it [6], and its story development credited to Lothar Wolff, Borden Mace, and Philip Stapp as well as Halas and Batchelor themselves. De Rochemont was also instrumental to the film's story development, however, apparently forcing Halas and Batchelor to change the rather bleak ending of Orwell's novel for the film adaptation. Produced during the first decade of the Cold War, *Animal Farm* obviously served the ideological agenda of anti-communism quite well. Yet it would not become public knowledge until half a century later that it was the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who had orchestrated de Rochemont's procurement of the film rights to Orwell's novel from his widow Sonia in 1951. Although it is not at all certain whether Halas and Batchelor were aware of the CIA's involvement in the film, it is not very surprising that they were hired to direct it given that they had produced animated propaganda films for the British war effort during World War II in addition to their short commercial films. On its release, *Animal Farm* was met with both critical and commercial success, spawning a serialized newspaper comic strip and even a line of merchandise.

The film opens on Manor Farm, which is owned and operated by the alcoholic and abusive farmer Mr. Jones. Late one night after Mr. Jones has returned from the local pub in a drunken stupor, the prize boar hog Old Major calls a meeting of all the farm animals in the main barn where he delivers a rousing speech, calling attention to humans' egregious exploitation of farm animals and culminating in the dictum, "All animals are equal." Old Major leads the farm animals in a stirring song before he suddenly keels over and dies. The next morning, the farm animals band together in revolt and forcibly drive Mr. Jones from the farm. When Mr. Jones returns with more men from the pub armed with various tools and weapons, the farm animals successfully repel the men's attack under the courageous leadership of the white pig Snowball. Over the next few days, the animals take control over the operation of the farm, destroying Mr. Jones's tools of coercion and slaughter and declaring his house forbidden to all. Under the continued leadership of Snowball, the animals change the name of Manor Farm to Animal Farm, and Snowball himself writes the laws of Animal Farm on the side of the barn for all to see: "No animal shall sleep in a bed—No animal shall drink alcohol—Four legs good two legs bad—No animal shall kill another animal—All animals are equal" [6]. Meanwhile, the dark-mottled pig Napoleon has secretly adopted the puppies who were orphaned during the men's attack on the farm, raising them for his own purposes. Some months later, when Snowball presents his plans for the construction of a windmill to the rest of the farm animals at one of their regular meetings in the barn, Napoleon summons the now full-grown dogs to chase Snowball from the farm and dispose of him. Napoleon assumes leadership of the farm with the support of his obedient follower Fat Pig Squealer, branding Snowball a traitor and discontinuing the farm animals' meetings.

As the rest of the farm animals begin working on the construction of the windmill, the pigs begin sleeping in Mr. Jones's house and drinking alcohol which they obtain from the trader Mr. Whymper. When Squealer asks the hens to surrender all their eggs for the continuation of trade with the outside world, the hens stage a protest for which they are sentenced to death by Napoleon. Disgruntled by Mr. Whymper's commerce with the animals, the men from the pub decide to attack the farm again but this time without Mr. Jones. Although the farm animals successfully repel the attack under the leadership of Napoleon, they suffer a great setback when Mr. Jones manages to demolish the windmill with explosives. The farm animals begin working on the construction of the windmill again when the largest and strongest horse Boxer, who was wounded during the men's second attack on the farm, is permanently injured in the course of his selfless efforts to rebuild the windmill. While the rest of the farm animals expect that Boxer will be rewarded for his labors with a comfortable retirement, Napoleon and Squealer arrange to have him taken away in what first appears to be an ambulance but what turns out to be a truck in the service of Mr. Whymper's glue factory. Years later, after the construction of the windmill has been completed, Napoleon hosts a delegation of pigs from all the surrounding farms to which the Animal Revolution has spread. Now wearing suits and walking on their hind legs, the pigs have come to resemble Mr. Jones himself. Under Napoleon's dictatorship, Old Major's song has been forbidden, and the laws of Animal Farm have been rewritten. The farm animals are dismayed to discover that even Old Major's dictum has been altered: "All animals are equal *but some animals are more equal than others*" [6]. In a conclusion to the film that departs entirely from Orwell's novel, the rest of the surrounding farm animals finally converge on Animal Farm to overthrow Napoleon and all his fellow pigs in what is presumably the last revolution to be won.

But if we follow the allegorical reading of *Animal Farm* that the filmmakers seem to have intended for us, following Orwell himself—the allegorical reading of *Animal Farm*, moreover, that has totally dominated the critical analysis of both the novel and the film to date4—the story is not about any "animal revolution" at all. Rather, each and every character or event in *Animal Farm* only represents some particular human character or event in historical reality: Manor Farm represents Imperial Russia; Mr. Jones represents Tsar Nicholas II; Old Major represents Karl Marx; Old Major's song represents "The Internationale," also known as the International Workers' Hymn; the farm animals' revolt represents the Russian Revolution; Snowball represents both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky; the renaming of Animal Farm represents the creation of the Soviet Union; the laws of Animal Farm represent Lenin's April Theses; Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin; the windmill represents Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution; the dogs represent the Soviet secret police; Squealer represents Vyacheslav Molotov and the Soviet propaganda machine; Mr. Whymper represents unscrupulous capitalists; the execution of the hens represents Stalin's Great Purge; the men's second attack on the farm represents Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II; and the sale of Boxer to the glue factory represents the Soviet Union's betrayal of the workers. Now, I certainly do not want to deny that this allegorical reading of *Animal Farm* offers us a very interesting interpretation of the story. What I do want to point out, however, is that this reading is tightly regulated by the function of humanimallegory inasmuch as all the animals act as symbols for human referents. Although there are human characters in *Animal Farm* who also act as symbols, all the referents remain human. The animal as such never exceeds its purely symbolic function. Indeed, within the strict economy of the humanimallegory, the animal *is* a symbol and the human the transcendental referent. The distinction between the human and the animal thus reiterates the distinction made in linguistics and literary

<sup>4</sup> Both Orwell's novels *Animal Farm* and *1984* have long become standard references in the scholarly body of work on allegory; in *Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode*, Fletcher mentions both novels during his discussion on what he considers the basic allegorical form of battle ([11], pp. 157–59). Similarly, Halas and Batchelor's film *Animal Farm* has been unanimously viewed as an adaptation of Orwell's original allegory, however faithful or not this adaptation is judged; in *Time* magazine's review of the film, it is affirmed that "[t]he story holds pretty true to Orwell...and the audience is asked to look the Soviet horror square in the eye" ([5], p. 74).

theory alike between the signified and the signifier, between substance and form, between inner thought and outward expression. All of this is to say that metaphor is a metaphysics5—or, if you prefer, allegory is a humanism.

§

*Chicken Run* was directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park and produced by Lord, David Sproxton, and Park for DreamWorks Pictures in association with Pathé. Released in 2000, *Chicken Run* was Aardman's first feature-length film. The British animators Lord and Sproxton were longtime friends who formed the Aardman animation studio together in 1972. Their fellow British animator Park joined Aardman in 1985 while he was still working on his short film *A Grand Day Out*, the first film featuring the characters Wallace and Gromit on which he had begun working as a student at the National Film and Television School. Before the release of *Chicken Run*, Aardman produced many award-winning short films including *Creature Comforts* directed by Park as well as *The Wrong Trousers* and *A Close Shave*, two more films featuring Wallace and Gromit and also directed by Park, in addition to their commercial work and their assorted contributions to various television series and music videos. *Chicken Run* was "based on an original story" by Lord and Park, as the opening credits indicate [7], and its screenplay written by the American screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick. Much like Park's short films, *Chicken Run* is marked not only by its dry and typically British sense of humor and its continuous stream of puns and sight gags but also by its distinctively animated and richly entertaining characters who usually cross the line between the human and the animal in some way. After the critical and commercial success of *Chicken Run*, Aardman went on to produce many more short films as well as feature-length films, including their first feature-length film featuring Wallace and Gromit *The Curse of the Were-Rabbit* and their first computer-animated film *Flushed Away*.

*Chicken Run* opens on Tweedy's Farm, an egg farm in the English countryside that has been owned and operated by the Tweedy family for generations. In the dark of night, amid high barbed-wire fencing and a roving searchlight, Mr. Tweedy patrols the farm with his two guard dogs as a small group of hens attempt to escape, led by Ginger who digs a trench under one of the fences with a spoon. The other hens fail to make it under the fence, however, and Ginger is cornered by the guard dogs at the farmhouse door when Mrs. Tweedy appears in the doorway, ordering Mr. Tweedy to put the hen back behind the fence. Mr. Tweedy throws Ginger into solitary confinement inside a yard bin before turning to the rest of the hens behind the fence and loudly declaring, "No chicken escapes from Tweedy's Farm!" [7]. The opening credits then roll over a series of other failed escape attempts by the hens, each one of which ends with Mr. Tweedy throwing Ginger into solitary confinement again. The story resumes as Mrs. Tweedy begins her weekly inspection of the chickens one morning. Ginger lines up with the rest of the hens, including Bunty, Babs, and Mac, as well as the old rooster and former Royal Air Force (RAF) officer Fowler. During the inspection, one of the hens who has failed to produce any eggs for the week, Edwina, is removed from the line-up and slaughtered by Mrs. Tweedy herself. That night, after Ginger and Mac present yet another escape plan at one of the chickens' secret meetings held in the sheds, Ginger witnesses a rooster flying through the air in a cape. He makes a crash landing onto the farm and injures one of his wings, while a torn poster reading "Rocky the Flying Rooster" floats down from the air into Ginger's hand-like wings. After he is brought into the chicken sheds, the rooster introduces himself to the other chickens as Rocky the Rhode Island Red, or "Rocky Rhodes" for short, further boasting that he is a freedom-loving chicken who they call the "Lone Free Ranger" back home in America. When Ginger learns that Rocky has escaped from the circus, she forces him to make a deal with her, promising to hide him only if he teaches all the chickens on the farm how to fly. Meanwhile, Mrs. Tweedy discovers a plan to make the farm more profitable.

<sup>5</sup> On the relation of the literary concepts of metaphor, allegory, and symbol to the philosophical tradition of metaphysics, see Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy" [12].

Although Mr. Tweedy is convinced that the chickens are "organized," as he puts it [7], Mrs. Tweedy remains incredulous toward both Mr. Tweedy and the chickens.

After Rocky has begun to teach the chickens how to fly with little apparent success, a large truck mysteriously arrives on the farm, unloading heavy machinery and other equipment. Then, during Mrs. Tweedy's next inspection, she spares Babs's life despite the hen's failure to produce any eggs for the week and orders Mr. Tweedy to double the chickens' food rations. Ginger realizes that they are all being fattened for slaughter, and the rest of the chickens despair of ever escaping from the farm. When Rocky tries to cheer them up with a dance party that night, Ginger notices that his wing has healed and asks him to personally demonstrate how to fly the next morning. At the same time, Mr. Tweedy finishes assembling the machinery, and Mrs. Tweedy explains to him that instead of producing eggs, their farm would produce chicken pies from now on, using a fully automated production method. Mr. Tweedy captures Ginger in order to test the new machine out, but Rocky rescues her and sabotages the machine in the process. The next morning, Ginger finds that Rocky has gone and left the remaining piece of the torn poster behind, revealing that he is shot out of a cannon for his "flying" act at the circus. As the rest of the chickens turn on each other in frustration, Ginger devises a new plan to escape from the farm by building an airplane, inspired by Fowler's constant anecdotes about his RAF service. The chickens begin to build the airplane with the help of the scavenging rats Nick and Fetcher, but when Mr. Tweedy manages to repair the machine, Mrs. Tweedy orders him to load all the chickens into it at once. The chickens attempt to launch their unfinished airplane immediately, and Rocky returns just in time to help them escape from both Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, destroying the machine and most of the farm itself. The chickens fly away from the farm in their bird-like aircraft, while Ginger and Rocky finally kiss. The film concludes as Ginger, Rocky, and the rest of the chickens start their new life together in a grassy paradise, accompanied by Nick and Fetcher and surrounded by many young chicks as well.

Although *Chicken Run* certainly lends itself to an allegorical reading in which the chickens' series of attempts to escape from Tweedy's Farm represents the Allied prisoners-of-war's attempts to escape from their Nazi-run prison camps during World War II, I want to argue that *Chicken Run* cannot be reduced to this allegorical reading. In other words, although there are some elements within the film that do seem to serve the function of humanimallegory, there are also many elements within it that serve other quite different functions. Aardman's animated characters, both human and animal—and Park's characters in particular, like Wallace and Gromit—are well known for their expressiveness or, more specifically, for their very human facial expressions. While this anthropomorphic representation of nonhuman animals might be taken as evidence of the animal's purely symbolic function in *Chicken Run*, I would rather suggest that this highly stylized animation technique undermines the humanist assumption that the capacity for thought, emotion, or "face" itself<sup>6</sup> is possessed by human beings alone. What I am suggesting is that anthropomorphism does not invariably function in the service of humanism. Some forms of anthropomorphism may even threaten the humanist order of representation. The question of whether the representation of nonhuman animals in *Chicken Run* is anthropomorphic or not, then, becomes much more interesting once we begin to ask what sort of effects—artistic, political, or otherwise—such an anthropomorphic representation of nonhuman animals produces.7 Furthermore, while *Chicken Run* is largely based on World War II prisoner-of-war films, many of which were based on true stories themselves, it remains a comical parody or spoof whose own story does not neatly

<sup>6</sup> On Levinas's concept of the face in relation to the question of the animal, see Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley, "The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas" [13].

<sup>7</sup> For a critical intervention into the scholarly debate on anthropomorphism within the field of animal studies, see Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. *Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism* [14]. In their introduction to the volume, Daston and Mitman argue that "anthropomorphism sometimes seems dangerously allied to anthropocentrism...[b]ut anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism can just as easily tug in opposite directions" ([14], p. 4). While I might challenge Daston and Mitman's strategic distinction between the "fact" of anthropomorphism and its "value" ([14], p. 6), I remain nonetheless sympathetic to their efforts to "decouple" anthropomorphism from anthropocentrism (see [14], p. 4).

correspond to real human characters or historical events. Indeed, the film derives much of its humor from its sly sense of intertextuality. In addition to its repeated references to the classic prisoner-of-war film *The Great Escape*, produced and directed by John Sturges and released in 1963 [15]—the most amusing of which is perhaps the reference to the solitary confinement scene in *The Great Escape* where the troublesome American prisoner Hilts bounces a baseball against one wall of the small cell to which his Nazi captors have confined him by an early scene in *Chicken Run* where Ginger similarly bounces a Brussels sprout against one side of the yard bin into which Mr. Tweedy has thrown her—there are many allusions in *Chicken Run* to other popular visual texts as well, including the Western-comedy film *Maverick*, the action-adventure film *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, and the science-fiction television series *Star Trek*.

Finally, the function of humanimallegory in *Chicken Run* is greatly diminished if not entirely shut down by the film's attention to species difference, sexual difference, and cultural difference among its various characters, both human and animal. Whereas all the farm animals in *Animal Farm* speak a common language, allowing them to unite together against Mr. Jones and the rest of the men, *Chicken Run* focuses on a group of chickens on an egg farm. These chickens are "organized," as Mr. Tweedy puts it, by their own particular language and not by any common language as such that would lump all nonhuman animals together in an undifferentiated mass. Of course, the chickens do speak to the rats Nick and Fetcher in some kind of common language, but this language is formed by their ongoing economic relations with each other on the farm. It is very telling, I think, that neither the chickens nor the rats speak to the guard dogs who help Mr. Tweedy patrol the farm in any sort of common or universal language for nonhuman animals. And whereas all the female characters in Orwell's novel, whether they are human or animal, are sidelined or simply cut from the film *Animal Farm*, the very plot of *Chicken Run* hinges on sexual difference while overturning some of the most common gender stereotypes in popular film. The story concerns the contemporary practice of hen farming, to be precise, and the main conflict arises when the farm makes a shift from its traditional method of egg production to a more modern method of meat production, transforming the "layer" hens into "broiler" hens all at once. Moreover, the central protagonist of the story is the courageous and resourceful hen Ginger, who is acknowledged by all the chickens on the farm as their leader, while the principal antagonist is the domineering farmer's wife Mrs. Tweedy, who dictates the operation and direction of the farm to her "hen-pecked" husband Mr. Tweedy. Although the film does run the risk of reinforcing certain gender stereotypes in order to challenge more dominant ones, its critical attention to sexual difference among both its human and animal characters is far more interesting than *Animal Farm*'s utter neglect of it. And again, whereas cultural difference plays a negligible part in *Animal Farm*, *Chicken Run* is populated by characters with very diverse and distinctive English accents denoting important social and political divisions, an element of the film that is not likely to be lost on any British audience at least. This is not to mention the American rooster Rocky, to whom the older English rooster Fowler takes an immediate dislike, and the Scottish hen Mac, whose strong vernacular Rocky can hardly understand himself in a running joke throughout the film. While both Rocky and Mac serve as references to some of the main characters among the Allied prisoners-of-war in *The Great Escape*, they also provide the occasion for further intertextual references to *Maverick* and *Star Trek*, respectively.

What I am arguing, then, is that the irreducible heterogeneity of *Chicken Run*'s various human and animal characters—a heterogeneity that is articulated by their species, sexual, and cultural difference—limits or curbs the function of humanimallegory insofar as the animals in the film do not act as mere symbols for human referents. Although an allegorical reading of *Chicken Run* is possible, it cannot dominate or exhaust all its other possible readings—not because the film remains disengaged from the practice of representation altogether, but rather because it is engaged in a multiform set of representational practices that cannot be reduced to the single function of allegory. Exceeding the strict economy of the humanimallegory, the animal is thus neither a pure symbol nor a transcendental referent. It should be needless to say that this also goes for the human. *Chicken Run* may tell the story of an ambitious escape attempt made by Allied prisoners-of-war during World War II, but this does

not prevent it from telling another story as well—a story about another ambitious escape attempt, whether real or fictional, made by a group of chickens on an egg farm.

§

Yet we must not jump to the conclusion that *Chicken Run* is "really" a story about an animal revolution, either. Although Aardman's film cannot be exhausted by any allegorical reading, the humanist compulsion to read it as an allegory persists nonetheless—a compulsion that is clearly displayed by one of the film's most authoritative sources, Peter Lord, the cofounder of Aardman and the co-director and co-producer of *Chicken Run* himself. In the short documentary feature "Poultry in Motion: The Making of *Chicken Run*," after both the actor Mel Gibson who voices Rocky in the film8 and one of the film's executive producers Jeffrey Katzenberg have explained that *Chicken Run* is based on World War II prisoner-of-war films like *The Great Escape*, Lord comments on the film: "The thing about chickens is of course they're such stupid animals, so immediately there's this incredibly rich vein of absurdity [running] through it" [16]. Even Lord, then, favors an allegorical reading of *Chicken Run* in which the animated chickens only act as symbols for human prisoners-of-war. It seems that while the function of humanimallegory is only one function among others, it is marked by a particularly authoritarian bent, striving to assimilate all other functions into itself. But Lord is not the sole "author" of *Chicken Run*, and I like to think that Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Lord's co-director and co-producer, would never have claimed that the film draws its humor from the "stupidity" of real chickens. However, even if Park were to agree with Lord, it would remain all the same that our reading of *Chicken Run* is not determined once and for all by the author's or coauthors' "intent."<sup>9</sup>

It thus follows that we *can* read *Animal Farm* as a story about an animal revolution, after all. For despite John Halas and Joy Batchelor's intent, despite Louis de Rochemont and the CIA's intent, and even despite the author George Orwell's intent, not only does *Animal Farm* tell the story of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, but it also tells another story about a revolution led by a group of farm animals and its aftermath. Although the CIA certainly intended the film *Animal Farm* to serve as a cultural piece of anti-Soviet propaganda, I would say that this intention was thwarted by de Rochemont's insistence that Halas and Batchelor change the ending of Orwell's story. The film ultimately redeems the Russian Revolution itself, let me point out, by concluding with the farm animals' last revolution against Napoleon and the rest of the pigs—a revolution that, far from destroying the legacy of Old Major and Snowball, preserves and completes it. Ironically, this final redemption of the Russian Revolution in the film *Animal Farm* is absent in Orwell's own novel.

Yet Orwell's intent does not necessarily determine our reading of the novel, either. Of course, Orwell did intend *Animal Farm* to be read as an allegory, calling it a "fairy story" himself in the subtitle of his original text. And Orwell's novel has indeed been read as a rather simple animal-human allegory ever since its initial publication. In the review of Halas and Batchelor's film in *Time* magazine where the word "animallegory" was first coined, it is Orwell's novel itself that is described by this neologism:

<sup>8</sup> Gibson voiced the character of Rocky in *Chicken Run* some years before he would direct, co-produce, and co-write the controversial film *The Passion of the Christ*, further going on to make some widely publicized anti-Semitic and racist comments that have greatly damaged his professional career. In any case, it is undeniable that our present viewing of *Chicken Run* is inflected by its close association with the film *Maverick* in which Gibson plays the title role, Bret Maverick, as much as it is—for better or worse—by its association with the actor Gibson himself.

<sup>9</sup> Neither is our reading of *Chicken Run* determined by the viewing audience or by the visual form of animation itself. For although it might be tempting to suggest that adult viewers are more inclined than younger viewers toward a reductive allegorical reading of this film or that animated films in general are more amenable than live-action films to the allegorical representation of human beings by nonhuman animals, I would resist any such categorical assumptions. The point that live-action films are amenable to the most reductive forms of allegorical representation as well is proven by the crassly ideological and nearly unwatchable made-for-television film *Animal Farm*, another adaption of Orwell's novel featuring both live and "animatronic" animals, directed by John Stephenson and released in 1999 [17].

"George Orwell's political fable, the famous animallegory about Communism, has been rendered as an animated cartoon..." ([5], p. 74). Not only are both Orwell's novels *Animal Farm* and *1984* widely cited and discussed throughout the existing body of scholarship on allegory, but in Angus Fletcher's work *Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode*, he even proposes that there is a peculiarly "Orwellian" structure to allegory as such. Immediately following the passage from his introduction to the text which I have already cited in this paper, Fletcher extends his definition of allegory by referring specifically to *1984*:

Pushed to an extreme, this ironic usage [of language by allegory] would subvert language itself, turning everything into an Orwellian newspeak. In this sense we see how allegory is properly considered a mode: it is a fundamental process of encoding our speech. For the very reason that it is a radical linguistic procedure, it can appear in all sorts of different works, many of which fall far short of the confusing doubleness that made Orwell's newspeak such an effective brainwashing device. ([11], pp. 2–3).

But again, if we were to question the humanist presuppositions that are entailed by this definition, then we could say that Orwell's species allegory in *Animal Farm* is not protected against this subversive force or "doubleness" of language any more than his political allegory in *1984* is protected against it. Although Orwell certainly intended *Animal Farm* to expose Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, can we not also read his novel as a political exposé of humanism itself? Does Orwell's novel not also indict the benevolent tyranny of a humanism that continues to thrive in a post-Darwinian world by conceding that humans are animals, all the while maintaining that they are not? Does the last remaining Commandment, which has been corrupted from its original form given in the Seven Commandments of Animalism, not define the governing logic of this post-Darwinian humanism: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" ([18], p. 134, cf. pp. 23–25)? While the function of humanimallegory thus aims to reduce all animal symbols to their human referents, it only does so by breaching the very distinction that it sets out to maintain between the human and the animal, between the referent and the symbol, between the real and the fictional. Far from calling for some sort of return to a literal reading of the text, then, what I am suggesting is an allegorical reading of the function of humanimallegory in *Animal Farm* itself—an allegory of allegory, a hyper-allegorical reading of the text in which Orwell's allegory for the Russian Revolution may be read in turn as an allegory for the Animal Revolution. Is this kind of dysfunctional or malfunctional reading not finally "authorized," so to speak, by the function of humanimallegory itself?

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Seeing Beings: "Dog" Looks Back at "God": Unfixing** *Canis familiaris* **in Kornél Mundruczó's Film** *Fehér isten/White God* **(2014) †**

#### **Lesley C. Pleasant**

Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures, University of Evansville, Evansville, IN 47714, USA; lp84@evansville.edu

† I have had to rely on the English subtitles of this film, since I do not speak Hungarian. I quote from the film in English, since the version to which I have had access does not give the option of Hungarian subtitles.

Received: 6 July 2017; Accepted: 13 October 2017; Published: 1 November 2017

**Abstract:** Kornél Mundruczó's film *Fehér isten/White God* (2014) portrays the human decreed options of mixed breed, abandoned dogs in the streets of Budapest in order to encourage its viewers to rethink their relationship with dogs particularly and animals in general in their own lives. By defamiliarizing the familiar ways humans gaze at dogs, *White God* models the empathetic gaze between species as a potential way out of the dead end of indifference and the impasse of anthropocentric sympathy toward less hierarchical, co-created urban animal publics.

**Keywords:** animality; dogs; film; *White God*; empathy

#### **1. Introduction**

*Fehér isten/White God* (2014) is not the first film use mixed breed canine actors who were saved from shelters1. The *Benji* films starred mixed breed rescued shelter dogs (McLean 2014, p. 7). Nor is it unique in using 250 real screen dogs instead of computer generated canines. Disney's 1996 *101 Dalmations* starred around 230 Dalmation puppies and 20 adult Dalmations (McLean 2014, p. 20). It is also certainly not the only film with animal protagonists to highlight Liszt's *Hungarian Rhapsody # 2* in its soundtrack. *Cat Concerto* (1947) as well as a host of other animated cartoons featuring anthropomorphized animals use this piece of music. *White God* also fits into the tradition of "lost dog come home" films, although the idea of home in this film is destabilized, and the dog in question very clearly does not "consent" "to be mastered", which Fudge explains in the Lassie Come-Home story "makes natural the hierarchy inherent in that relation"(Fudge 2008, pp. 29–30). By making the effort to see the dogs as animals, as intelligent, communicative, individual non-human beings in a specific context, by destabilizing the normative animal categories, the narrator shows the inadequacy and unsuitability of the current normalized terms and images in which humans try to confine animals as pets, as consumable and disposable objects, as dangerous and thus killable threats, and as metaphors for human characteristics. Jonathan Burt explains that "the ways in which the animal is seen and not seen—the connection between presence and absence—" are implicated in how the animal is represented (Burt 2001, p. 207). "[W]e choose to find a place for them in a well-organized cultural logic that divides the animal world into categories like pet, vermin, threatened species and expendable species" (p. 204). All of these easily lead to another human construction of animality, because all of them are based on the idea of human dominance (Fudge 2008). As a film, *White God* already has the

<sup>1</sup> The brothers Luke and Body, so the story goes, were found by Theresa Ann Miller in a trailer park in Arizona just in time before they were to go to a shelter (Ventre 2015).

potential to model what Vivian Sobchack terms "actively seeing 'the' world or a world through the eyes of an 'other'" (Sobchack 2016, p. 88), here as a caring and curious narrator who makes visible "their normal *invisibility*" (Berger 1972, p. 16). By pushing us to imagine a non human-centric urban space we could co-create with dogs outside of the film, it reminds us, that "dogs have been watching human beings for a long time"(Williams 2007, p. 104). It emphatically concludes that it is time for us to pay attention.

#### **2. Synopsis**

The "brave and tantalizing" (Nelson 2015, p. 68) *Fehér isten/White God* (2014) is the sixth feature film of Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó2, earning the 2014 Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and the Golden Octopus at the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival. In addition, Luke and Body won the Dog Palme for their performances as Hagen. The film follows how one mixed breed dog, Hagen and his benevolent thirteen-year-old companion, Lili (Zsofia Psotta) come to terms with their forced separation, a separation that occurs after Lili's mother (Lili Horváth) leaves her daughter with her estranged husband, Lili's father, Daniel (Sandor Zsoter). Having lost his wife, his job as a professor to now work as a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse, as well as the affection and respect of his daughter, Daniel acts out by refusing to pay a fictional tax<sup>3</sup> levied at owners of what animal control terms "mixed breed street dogs" and tosses Hagen out of the car on the side of the highway in Budapest. Hagen, separated from Lili, experiences the streets of Budapest alone. He finds a dog companion, a terrier, Marlene (Ally and Stella) with a rope leash around her neck, and a dogland in a no man's land, part abandoned building site, part garbage dump. He is caught by a homeless man (János Derzsi), who sells him to a fighting dog seller, who sells him to a dogfighting trainer (Szabolcs Thuróczy), who renames him Max, and proceeds to turn the pet into an animal. Hagen/Max becomes a dogfighting champion, kills another dog, escapes, and refinds dogland and the terrier. The ever-present animal control (Gergely Bánki, Tamás Polgár, and some uncredited others) catches them. Hagen witnesses the euthanasia of another dog. He stops eating. He snarls at the hand of a girl (Orsolya Tóth) and is sentenced to death a second time (the first because of a wound). He rips open the neck of an employee who is trying to put him in the cage of dead dogs waiting. They escape, run freely through the streets of Budapest. Widespread panic ensues on the streets and in the concert hall, which the dog pack enters and disrupts. There is a curfew. The fighting dog trainer, the fighting dog seller, the butcher (Ervin Nagy) who threatened to kill Hagen with a cleaver when the dog was looking for scraps in the garbage, and the nosy neighbor (Erika Bodnár) in Lili's father's house, who called the authorities on Hagen the first morning, are killed by the dogs in seeming acts of revenge. The pack ends up at the slaughterhouse, presumably looking for the Lili's father. There they find Lili—who plays her trumpet—leading to the re-relating at the end.

While Hagen is experiencing a new Budapest to the one he had previously known, Lili bikes and then runs through the streets putting up signs looking for him, hating her father, then reconciling with him, and playing a solo in the orchestra. When the dogs disrupt the performance, she leaves to look for Hagen, feeling that their presence there is a message for her. She witnesses the bodies of the fighting dog seller, the body of the butcher, and the body of nosy neighbor. She goes to save her father from Hagen's revenge. She sees Hagen in the "canine beast" before her and asks him to see Lili in the "human beast" before him. She plays her trumpet. They share silence and a gaze; re-relate, "become with".

<sup>2</sup> Mundruczó films include *This I Wish and Nothing More* (2000), *Pleasant Days* (2002) which won the Silver Leopard in Locarno, *Johanna* (2005), *Delta* (2008) and *Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project* (2010).

<sup>3</sup> A dog tax was proposed on all "mutts," but did not pass a few years before the film was made (Taubin 2015, p. 87).

#### **3. Alternative Globalizations**

Haraway suggests that the process of "becoming with" is "a practice of becoming worldly", that is a potential shared "retying" of what she calls "the knots of ordinary multispecies living on earth" into a " more just and peaceful other-globalization" (Haraway 2008, p. 3). The film *White God* imagines this retying between street dogs and humans in the courtyard of a Hungarian slaughterhouse, defying the usual association with the place as one of "finality" and death". To get there, however, the narrator first presents the current normative animal categories/"knots" as defined by humans: street dog (free-roaming but hunted and successfully contained as shelter dog), pet, wild beast, pest, disposable object. By having a single dog, Hagen, represent all categories throughout the course of the film, the narrator attempts to destabilize these categories and open up the possibility for alternative ways for humans and dogs to share urban space, ways " for getting on together with some grace" (ibid, p. 15), "in specific difference" (p. 16). Both Haraway and the film's narrator call for "companionate relations" (ibid), but leave "becoming" room in the term. Both urge viewers to look respectfully at the other, "[t]o hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem" since "all of this is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet" (p. 19).

#### **4. Why Dogs?**

McLean structured her edited volume *Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film* around the question: "Why dogs in film now?" (McLean 2014, p. 10). Mundruczó has stated: "*White God* is "a dog movie, but it's not about dogs" (Dollar 2015). I argue that the answer to the question: why dogs in a Hungarian film in 2014? Is that dogs help represent the instability of the idea of home, of Hungarian national identity in the 21st Century. According to the director, "Europe's current fear [is] the uprising of the masses". Since the 1990s, Hungarian national identity has had several iterations from being a member of the Eastern Bloc, to becoming a transit country for migrants from the Eastern Bloc, a member of the EU, and a transit and sometimes destination country for migrants from Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc. Even before 2015 put Hungary in the international news due to Prime Minister Orban famously proclaiming that the refugee crisis is "Germany's problem" (BBC News 2015); before the Budapest Keleti train station became the site of "stuck" migrants; and before Hungary's anti-immigrant border fences were erected, there was a growing sense of displacement in Europe in general and Hungary in particular. The film alludes to this identity "crisis" not only through the fictional dog tax that urban officials have put in place to prevent the "self-selected breeding" (McHugh) of the "non-Hungarian purebred dogs" in Budapest, but also through the film's repeated use of *Hungarian Rhapsody 2*, a product of Hungarian nationalism of the 19th century, one which Mundruczó considers "an emblem for Hungary and also for something has passed" (*Fehér isten/White God* 2014). Much like the mongrel dogs who are not seen as individuals, the migrants are embodied by the negative and flat figure of "the Afghan" (as listed in the film's credits) restaurant owner who is not viewed with compassion, but simply as a consumer (he is shown and heard eating, he owns a grill, he buys and sells dogs whom he mistreats, and is shown counting money while eating—i.e., he is the stereotype of the migrant who simply takes from his adopted country4). Anti-Roma racism is present directed

<sup>4</sup> Here is not the place to discuss this figure in detail. While one could of course read the director's vague statements about the masses rising up as alluding to nationalist masses who feel that they are in the minority, I choose the read the film as one which critiques subjugation of one group by another. I think this very one-dimensional figure, one of the one-dimensional figures killed by the one-dimensional construction "wild beast", appears in this film to remind us that humans do not only "flatten" and have "low expectations" of "mutts" but certain people, too. Smuts describes "dog-human relationships" until now "have more to do with ... [his] limited expectations and mistaken assumptions than with who they really are" (Smuts 2006, p. 124). The same could be said about our expectations and assumptions about other others. It seems significant that the only figures that Hagen the Beast kills are completely one dimensional. We never see the dead body of the trainer, although, it is clearly implied that he will die from being torn apart by the dogs. Similarly, although we do not know for certain whether the pound director dies from being knocked down and run over by the dogs, we do not see her "dead." She,

toward the marginalized figure of the dogtrainer, whom interestingly the narrator does not portray as one-dimensionally as the "Afghan". Mundruczó makes no bones about using dogs as symbols in his film, declaring that"the dog is the symbol of the eternal outcast whose master is his god" (*Fehér isten/White God* 2014). He justifies his choice of "animals as the subject instead of minorities", because he wanted to "focus [...] as freely and with the least amount of taboos possible" on what he terms "a caste-system [which] has become more sharply defined", "parallel to the questionable advantages of globalization" (ibid). While he seems to use "animals", "dogs", "minorities" and "masses" almost as synonyms, Mundruczó clarifies that his "intention was to demonstrate that mankind and beasts share the same universe. [...] [I]f we are able to position ourselves in the place of different species do we have the chance to lay down our arms" (ibid). Like Haraway, he seems to also hope for a type of "autre mondialisation."

#### **5. Homing Dogs**

Dogs are often associated with home. Fudge goes so far as to say that home is "where the pet is" (Fudge 2008, p. 23). Franklin credits canines with giving humans "ontological security" (Fudge 2008, p. 17). The "story of the return of the lost dog" represented by the *Lassie Come Home* novel is "an important interrogation of the role of the pet in the construction of the human home and thus of the human" (Fudge 2008, p. 27), one whose "constant re-use and revision" (p. 15), indicates an important connection between the figure of the lost dog and the idea of home. Indeed, this film is a version of this come-home story, one fitting to the current instability many feel. If home has become unfamiliar, what better way to represent displacement than to destabilize the figure of *canis familiaris*? If one can find ways to communicate with a *canis unfamiliaris*, then perhaps one can find ways of feeling at home in a home that has become unfamiliar.

*White God*'s narrator appears to agree with Horowitz, that "[f]amiliarity is both a boon and a bane to the domestic dog, *Canis familiaris.*" It "prevents us from seeing dogs for who they are" (Horowitz 2014, p. 219). Horowitz claims that "[m]ovies using dogs represent various manifestations of the use of dogs as props, as veritable family members, or even as nonindividuals, instead of animals"(Horowitz 2014, pp. 219–20). For her, seeing dogs as animals is necessary to stem our misreadings of dogs, that is seeing them as animals defining themselves specifically and in context, not subsumed under a generalized human term. Erica Fudge agrees, believing that "we need to try to find an alternative way of engaging with the presence of the animal that emphasizes its status as *animal*" (p. 39). Indeed she goes so far as to describe pet dogs as "animals out of place" (Fudge 2008, p. 19). To see a pet, then, as an animal "the pet would need to have a status that has not yet been traced" (p. 40), a status which incudes the "recognition that pets themselves can make meaning" (p. 41), and thus that they can "escape our understanding" (p. 46). For Fudge and Horowitz, seeing dogs as animals, allows a "humbled" (p. 46) viewer to reengage with them differently, to "reimagine their place and his/her own space in normally human ordered spaces. In *White God*, the pet Hagen is defamiliarized by not choosing to come home. At the end, however, Lili is "humbled" and sees Hagen as an "animal" though not as a figure of human defined "animality." In a world in which "movement is the common state of humanity after globalization" (Fudge 2008, p. 35), a world which for Berger in the 1990s already was a world in which "being homeless is becoming a norm" (ibid, p. 34), an unfamiliar dog might help one create a sense of home. If "home" is no longer a "space under control", as Mary Douglas defines it (Fudge 2008, p. 19), then the pet is no longer associated with a place that is controlled. This opens up possible new ways of relating to dogs in an unstable world in which "[e]migration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis is the quintessential experience of our

too, although certainly not a positive figure, is not as one-dimensional as the others. Both she and the animal trainer claim dominance over the dogs, but both also to some extent show a type of "affection." In some sense these two figures embody Tuan's "dominance with a human face ", or "[d]ominance [...] combined with affection" (qtd in Fudge 2008, p. 21).

time" (Fudge 2008, p. 34). If Lassie no longer has a home to come home to, she is open to creating a home anywhere and with anyone. In some sense, the idea of home, is always that of a lost stable and unchanging idyll. It never existed. As Fudge admits "in reality the human is never made secure by the existence of a pet. But that does not mean [...] that we do not search for stability, that we will stop telling ourselves the story of Lassie" (Fudge 2008, p. 38). She also reminds us that "[t]he story of the come-home is also its other: the story of the forever lost" (p. 33).

#### **6. Mood Cue: Displacement**

The narrator's basic mode is to disorient the viewer, even if only slightly. The film manipulates our moods particularly through its music and through the progression of images that relate to each other not only in terms of the plot, but in terms of normative categories for dogs/animals. As Carrol explains: "Moods are incorporative and inclusive." (Carrol 2003, p. 527) As such they "pervade perception rather than focusing it" (ibid, p. 528). He points out that "pre-title sequences [. . . ] are often used to establish the mood in the audience that the filmmaker supposes will best suit the reception of the film" (p. 542).

The pre-title sequence certainly establishes the mood that stays with the viewer throughout the film, a mood of displacement and disorientation, of being discomfited, unsettled. There is a certain fear, but it is not overwhelming. The narrator provides an extreme long shot, showing an eerily empty Budapest. A bridge splits the image longitudinally at an angle and empty highways stretch out horizontally. The music is very muted at first, plaintive, then becomes foreboding and ominous. Then one spies a lone figure on a bicycle coming towards the viewer at an angle on the bridge. One also sees a white bird land on a lamppost next to another bird. Unsure what to make of this little bit of life in this barren and unfamiliar because empty urban landscape, the viewer is tense. Indicated is a post-apocalyptic space of sorts, but one without dead bodies or building ruins. I associated it with a city vacated because of some environmental toxin. When the dogs arrived, I thought of the dogs left and roaming the streets of the abandoned towns of the Fukushima prefect. The scene is enigmatic, slow; we are given time to see the girl approach, to see the emptiness as the music builds up. We hear the car blinker of the abandoned car on the bridge very loudly; we hear the bicycle chain as it moves; we hear an eerie windswept sound motion as it were. The girl in a green hoodie is shown from a low angle in slow motion. She is clearly looking for something, some sign of life, which appears unexpectedly with a tense and dramatic crescendo which is followed by galloping, panting, and barking. We see a pack of dogs running through the streets. The camera gives us time to see this pack, to see the individual dogs in the pack from a low "dog" level angle, from the side, and from above. While at first the music and the sudden appearance of a huge pack of dogs was frightening, when we look at the pack, especially at the individual dogs in the pack, our assumptions that this galloping pack of panting and barking dogs is threatening and ominous, that this is pure "animality" unleashed, is replaced by the realization that many of the dogs are wagging their tails, that they seem to be enjoying their freedom, that they are focused but not intent on prey. The girl, too, does not react as expected. She looks back at them, but her face, although perhaps showing awe at this incredible life force coming toward her, does not necessarily show fear. She does not pedal faster does not seek shelter in one of the buildings, but keeps pedaling. For a while it almost appears as if they are following her, but then the dogs part and move past her, they are moving with her, sharing this space. It is unsettling and enigmatic. Is this a dream? Before we can decide, it cuts to the title *White God* written white on a black background as the credits had been, tying back to the credits and joining the next scene, similarly bright in the afternoon sun, an idyllic park scene this time, in which the same girl plays with her dog surrounded by other dog owners. Both figures are full of life, running and actively playing. There is a big black dog to the side of the shot. The girl tells her dog to give her the toy, that "it is not yours." (*White God*) and then pets him praising him for being "a good boy" (*White God*). All seems well and whole in the world, except that a voice calls Lili and the girl puts her dog on a leash and talks to her mother about her mother's imminent departure for three months to Australia. The spell of solid, stable home is broken, not only by the talk of the mother leaving for an extended period of time, but more strongly by the unexpected cut from this safe place to an image of blood pooling on a white tile floor. We then see what we later find out is the meat inspector looking out of place and slightly sad/unsettled and then we see what he is looking at: a cow carcass whose feet and head have been cut off being slowly skinned. There is no music, just the sound of the knife scraping the skin, then later the heavy sliding sounds and overpowering sight of the cow being disemboweled. The disemboweled cow is then sliced in half by a giant machine. The meat inspector takes a tiny knife and cuts open the heart—we see and hear this clearly, and announces that the cow is "suitable for consumption" (*White God*). Then he stamps the carcass that is then electronically transferred to other hanging cow carcasses. Then we cut to the girl and her mother sitting in the car in the parking lot of the slaughterhouse seemingly oblivious to the carcasses that are being moved into the waiting truck. Even the dog lies quietly on the girl's knees, not at all responding to the smells of the place, as if this were just any old interchangeable parking lot. Inside the slaughterhouse, Daniel, the meat inspector for whom those in the car are waiting, tries to wipe off blood that dripped onto his shirt, gives up when he simply makes more of a mess, and then blows bubbles from a bubble blower he has in his pocket into the mirror in the bathroom. Similarly as incongruous as dropping your daughter off at a slaughter house is the act of a grown man blowing soap bubbles in a slaughterhouse bathroom with blood on his shirt. The slaughterhouse foreman interrupts him and hands him a package of meat now wrapped in brown paper for the daughter. The inspector signs one more piece of paper outside as a giant muscle man waits and other meat pieces are transferred to a truck. And then the "handoff" of the daughter occurs in the middle of the slaughterhouse parking lot as if this is a completely normalized space for such an exchange. When the mother drives off after some tense words with the father, the narrator watches Lili and Hagen standing where the mother's car had been, the distance between the father and the pair seems to grow. When they drive off after another strange exchange, the camera shows us two cows being led orderly on the crosswalk by two old men leading them to their slaughter. Then we cut to the girl and her father opening the door to the building and being immediately accosted by a neighbor woman who is affronted that he would bring "that mutt" in here, that such mutts "need to be reported" (*White God*), that there is a list "now". In hindsight, the enigmatic pre-title sequence seems almost idyllic compared to how people treat each other and non-animals in this crowded city.

I do not have space to discuss each scene, but this description of the beginning shows how the film makes surprising cuts and how important diegetic and non-diegetic sound is. The diegetic sound often seems overloud, as if the narrator is focusing on the sound. The soundscape of the film is significant in setting the mood, of making the viewer seem slightly displaced even as many of the images of animals and social behaviors shown on screen are familiar. This soundscape includes the sounds of dogs—barking, whimpering, howling, breathing, running, hitting the pavement as part of the sound world of the city—cars, buses, church bells, bikes, doors opening and closing, TVs running, money bills being counted, parking brakes being pulled, water dripping from faucets, sirens firing, gunshots, bike chains, television newscasts, meat being cut, cooked, and chewed, rain, wind, thunder, people bickering, screaming, crying, putting down others, the cries of victory, the lulling sounds of pity, the barking of commands, the sounds of dismissal and of praise, diegetic music of connection and loss, and non-diegetic music. There are many scenes that do not include non-diegetic music. These are often long, but they are not silent. The narrator is attuned to the sounds around it. It makes us hear what we might normally (like to) drown out, makes very present that which we might (like to) "over" hear as it were. Perhaps it does this because it is trying to imagine how the world sounds and looks not just from a human perspective but also from the "invisible" dogs, whom it also makes very visible and audible. The film cannot provide a smell scape, which is so significant to canine experience, but at least invokes a soundscape that sometimes competes with the visuals. The running faucet in the bathroom in which Daniel locks Hagen is an example of this. Lili's loud footsteps in a city under curfew also help create the experience of emptiness and loneliness. The "real" sounds also link the fictional space

to the outside world, to the cars in the background of the space in which the viewer is watching the film, for instance.

In a relatively short amount of time, enough to establish the relationships between the main characters, we have been confronted with dog categories of pack, pet, meat, and mutt. This fairly quick succession from one category to the next destabilizes the categories, especially since, with the exception of being seen as meat, (although Daniel and the neighbor see him as disposable), Hagen ends up embodying all of them. He signifies the pack because he is the "leader" of the pack. The narrator sometimes keeps his distance, sometimes is very present as embodied by a handheld camera that sometimes moves jerkily or shakes. Everything seems a bit over the top—the mean father, the mean neighbor, the mean conductor, the sounds, the pristine white uniforms of everyone in the slaughterhouse (except for Daniel's shirt) etc. Although we empathize with Lili and with Hagen, the narrator always keeps us distanced by moving our focus, whether because suddenly we hear a loud sound, or the camera cuts to something unexpected, or the music does not quite fit the actions of the scenes. It also lets us see Hagen give the "same" expression in very different circumstances—he gives the cocked head, quizzical look when looking at the father in the slaughterhouse courtyard as he does to Marlene, the terrier, he meets at the butcher, as he does to the director of the pound after he has just killed a man. Additionally, the pack's meaning is ambiguous, portrayed as it is as both individualized and as spectacle. Thus while destabilizing, unsettling Hagen's meaning for the viewer and for Lili, the narrator also shows how others stabilize his meaning by forcing him into their constructions.

#### **7. Spectacular Pack**

The pack of dogs which appears in the pre-title sequence, then in the middle after we have learned the context, and which remains prominent to the end of the film is filmed as spectacle. According to Nick Browne, the "the rhetoric of the spectacular" includes three things: it must be big, it must be viewed often or for a long time, and it must be at an angle which highlights the force of the thing being filmed, but "not its meaning" (Murray and Heumann 2006, p. 47). The pack of dogs certainly fits these requirements: it is very big—250 dogs; it is shown repeatedly and for a long enough time to experience its force from the side, from overhead, and low angle face on. Our automatic assumption that a pack meant "unbridled animality" was unsettled in the pre-title sequence. When the pack appears again, this time in context, and accompanied with similar urgent, throbbing, ominous, rhythmic music, it is almost disappointing, because this time the human reactions seem somewhat comic, somewhat out of place and extreme for the reality of what the dogs are doing. Indeed, the humans disrupt the beauty of the moving spectacle. On the one hand, it seems natural that when faced with a pack of running dogs one would run and feel threatened. Yet, the dogs for the most part ignore the people screaming and stumbling as if in a different movie. Those dogs who do "attack"- attack bags and hoses. A few bark at specific people, but in the specific context it appears as if the dogs are "putting on a show", as if they have decided to "act" the part they have been labeled, since the people are already responding to that part. It is almost as if they are enjoying the chaos—Hagen snarling at a particular person and another big black dog who hit a car door barking into the window of the woman who is screaming her head off. The narrator witnesses the human reactions to the dogs in a way that keeps the viewer from identifying with those screamers. Since the film here seems to be a combination of slapstick and horror genres, we are unsettled, but not necessarily scared. What is under scrutiny here, is our automatic assumptions, and our automatic relating to particular animals, here particular dogs, based on general assumptions. In addition, the dogs playing the "pack" here are not aggressive dogs. They really are just running and playing and snarling/barking on command. This destabilizes the image of the pack as dangerous threat to humans. As Sheehan explains, "[t]he recalcitrant actuality of animal being inevitably stymies all attempts at complete anthropomorphosis" (Sheehan 2008, p. 123). Burt agrees: "any form of [animal] representation will be either a fiction or in some way *falsely motivated*" (Sheehan 2008, p. 128). In this way the dog pack, a normalized human category to refer to animals as threat "signifies a node of resistance" not just "to the technological goal of complete image control" in terms

of film, but also against the goal of containing the animal other in clear categories. As Burt explains, "the animal is caught in an uncertain space between the natural and the contrived. The elements that make up the response to animal imagery appear to compose a similarly ambiguous space" (Burt 2002, p. 10). The narrator portrays the entire city as this ambiguous space, a space in which "the animal" is meant to follow "contrived" human orders, orders which the street dogs refuse to obey.

In *Dog*, McHugh gives the history of the mongrel dog as a figure of tension or resistance. She explains that by the 19th C the "urban stray dog" "embodying freedom of movement and especially the ability to move (and mate) among different classes [. . . ] actively threatens bourgeois notions of stability." As an "alternativ[e] to the status quo", she notes, the "non-breed dog initially served as a figure of ironic contrast or chance, especially random public violence" (McHugh 2004, p. 134). Later, the stray mutt was used "as an exemplary victim" in literature demanding social change (McHugh 2004, p.135). Surprisingly constant, the stray dog today, "has become a cross-cultural trope", one that "symbolizes even as it stakes out the limits to this process of seeing ourselves as well as other people in dogs" (McHugh 2004, p.136).

#### **8. Lying Knots**

"At one extreme, terms like mongrel and mutt make breed a kind of measuring stick, according to which most dogs fall short. Paralleling their use as ethnic racial epithets among humans these words imply degeneracy, degradation, and ultimately social chaos" (McHugh 2004, p. 129), precisely those things that according to the director not only Hungary fears but all of Europe. Mongrel, Mutt, fleabag, mixed breed street dog are all used in the film by those characters who degrade Hagen, the father, the butcher, and the nosy neighbor. The father is not thrilled with the news that he has to live with a dog for three months, but he truly turns against the dog after the neighbor humiliates him, implying that that his allowing that mutt to enter the building, that he is degrading the building. For the nosy neighbor, a mutt is a threat to order. She has no problem lying to animal control that the mutt "bit" her. The father and the conductor, too, see "mutt", "fleabag", disrupting presence as synonymous with social chaos and thus with animality. In order to be allowed back into the orchestra which she left when Hagen didn't stay in the closet in which she put him during practice, the orchestra conductor not only expects an apology but also an admission that a "dog like that" conforms to his idea. He prompts her in her father's and in the rest of the orchestra's presence to "admit" that a mutt like Hagen belongs at the shelter because he bit her father. While it is clearly difficult for her to say this, she does so in order to be allowed back into the "community" of musicians. This is the second time in the film that Hagen has been accused of biting those who in fact have hurt him. It will occur one more time, after which, Hagen then does turn into a biter. I argue that the repetition makes the meaning. Hagen has been accused of biting three times and therefore in the eyes of the white god he is a biter. Of course, he never had a chance since a "mixed breed street dog" by definition needs to be "contained" by the urban authorities for their "non-Hungarianness." The film shows how the dissemination of animal types regardless of accuracy ends up "producing" that those types. It doesn't matter that Hagen does not bite, or that it was humans who goaded him to violence first as a fighting dog and then in order to save his life. He was a "dead dog" simply by being labeled a mutt, a mongrel, and thus a violent dangerous presence. In fact, the first time we see him playing with Lili in the park, the very picture of beloved pet, there is a large black dog off to the side sharing the space. Perhaps this is an ironic nod to Seurat's painting which contrasts the black urban street dog with the little pug pet as McHugh describes in Chapter 3 of *Dog.* In this particular park, the big black dog and the mixed breed Hagen are both pets, but in hindsight, the black dog seemed to warn of the Hagen's impending sinking into "street dog status". The black dog, particularly the big black dog, has the tendency to be used by humans as symbols of outliers, of possible chaos, even death. In the film's "pack" there are a lot of big black dogs, as indeed (Woodward et al. 2012) reveal- there are more big black dogs in shelters than nonblack dogs. However, they find that the "Big Black Dog Syndrome", like other labels, does

not need empirical evidence to be repeated. The film's narrator reveals the damaging power of such labeling, and how it can actually engender the very "animality" which it names.

#### **9. Mirror Beasts**

Chauduri explains that "the human descent into primitive emotionality is figured as animality" (Chaudhuri 2003, p. 654). In part this is indicated by the fact that Hagen becomes what he has been labeled, i.e., literalizes the animal construct with which he has been defined: beast, animal. "The Animal" is visualized in the film when at the moment Hagen kills a man, he becomes the leader of a pack. The moment Hagen kills the employee, he becomes animal and Hagen the animal is not separate from the pack. Similarly, the moment that the dog seller sees Hagen as an uncontrollable "beast," he sees the rest of the pack appear. The news reporter (Csaba Faix) reports that, "The city's biggest shelter has become a battlefield. According to eye-witnesses the most alarming sight was how the dogs acted not like animals but like a well-organized army (*White God*)." As if on cue, the dog trainer who had been watching the news sees the pack in his house. While being pulled apart by the pack in front of his TV, he beseechingly looks for mercy from a powerful Hagen looming over him and snarling, who becomes the mirror image of the "beast" the trainer had impersonated by dressing up in a black hoodie, with a black bandana over his face and dark sunglasses. Much as the bum who first rescued him "turned" on him and declared that "I will show you who is master here" (*White God*) and like the trainer who at first seemed to gaze at Hagen respectfully but then grew ever more abusive, Hagen "turns" on humans by becoming less "doglike" and more "human." Lili only sees the pack after Hagen has snarled at her and has refused to "fetch." Yet, she is capable of moving past this and is able to see not only Hagen as an individual if unfamiliar dog but also the individual dogs in the pack. For her, the pack is not "the animal." At the end of the film, Hagen is one of an individualized pack of dogs, each dog with his/her own story, even if this story is as "invisible" to us.

Even before we see the pack and pet as images of dogs, we see them as words. While many films that use animal actors begin with a declaration that "No animal was harmed in the making of this film," this film begins with the declaration that "All of the untrained dogs who perform in this film were rescued from the streets or shelters and placed in homes with help from an adoption program" (*White God*). The former, as Rule following Lippet points out, "betrays a view of animals as collective beings not individuals." And that in so doing, "cinema reassures its spectators that they are singular and animals are plural" (Rule 2010, pp. 539–40). *White God's* white-worded declaration reassures its spectators that the dogs in the pack are singular, too, since each was "individualized" by finding a home. Indeed, the film begins with the claim that all the untrained dogs were adopted (*White God* 0:00:06) and ends with the same claim, after a list of names of "our dog friends" (*White God)* who made up the pack. In short, in becoming a pet who has found a "new famil[y] after the shoot" (*White God*), an invisible, thrown-away "Dog" is reanimated into this dog, this dog with a name and a person. A study found that "people ignorant of shelter dogs' outcomes rated dogs who had been adopted as more attractive than dogs who ultimately had been euthanized" (Hecht and Horowitz 2015, p. 154). Perhaps it senses that the many black shelter dogs in the film might not elicit positive responses from the viewers since, "[r]egarding coat color, a yellow-dog picture received a higher rating on 'agreeableness,' 'Conscientiousness,' and 'Emotional Stability' than an identical picture of the dog with a black coat" (p. 155).

#### **10. Terrier Bridges to Dogland, a Self-Selected Home for Peopleless Dogs**

now, somewhat arbitrarily, you are considered very cute by us humans ... and we put you in television shows, and movies, and . . . and" (*Beginners* 2011)

As Lili is tentatively building a "home" connection with her father, Hagen escapes from the dogfighting arena and returns to dogland, that is, to the space Marlene had brought him after the two elude the butcher's cleaver. This place seems known to Marlene, who barks as she does periodically throughout the film to communicate to Hagen that he should follow. Here dogs run freely with no

humans in sight or on site. They run through the water and the mud. They urinate, run, sit, lie where they want to and when they want to. Marlene and Hagen, the two "character" dogs except for a brief initial running into the middle of dogland and thus into the space of the other dogs, stay separated from them, but by their own choice. Both find a spot on top of a hill and observe the other dogs. The narrator shows a long shot from behind them overlooking this noman's land where it seems all dogs are equal. The dogs running around in the water are free and do not appear to be acting, that is performing for a trainer and thus for the camera. They appear to be simply doing what they want. Marlene and Hagen, however, are set apart from these dogs, in part because they form their own group, but also because both have a history of being pets in the film's story. While we do not know Marlene's story, Marlene has a rope around her neck, which resembles the leash the homeless man tied around Hagen's neck. Visually at least she is associated with having been "owned," that is tied to a particular person. In addition, being a terrier, she is a familiar dog type in the movies, TV, and advertisements, indeed, like Asta in The *Thin Man* series a "guide" (Ross and Castonguay 2014) between worlds, here, not between human classes, but between petland and dogland. While Hagen and Marlene share the space with the other dogs, they are also removed from the others by their perhaps more recent ties to humans. The other dogs have no collars like Hagen and no ropes like Marlene. They are "freer" as it were, perhaps more at ease in this dogland. Marlene and Hagen do not appear ill at ease, but they choose a thrown out sofa on which to lie at night instead of the mud on which other dogs lie. Visually they are set apart from the other strays, in an "elsewhere" between "petland" and "dogland". However, they seem perfectly content, having found "home" in their companionship. They communicate with the other dogs. Marlene even warns them when the animal control since from her vantage point she sees their arrival sooner than the other dogs. While the film showed dogland without accompanying music, by only giving the natural sounds the dogs might hear—them splashing in the water, barking, the sound of cars and car alarms, ominous non-diegetic music is added when animal control arrives. This is similar music to the music that accompanies the "pack" when it runs through the streets normally labeled "human" (or at least human vehicle space). The music lends a mood of tension, of fear, or disorientation. Here, however, it is the humans who are encroaching, who are breaching an "animal" space.

Animal control arrives by opening the green doors that close off this site where houses used to stand, doors that are similar to the shelter's outer green doors. This no-man's land, however, is much more of a "shelter" than the shelter, much more of a home space, that is a secure canine space than the "shelter" is. It is humans who enter this dog space and attack the dogs, rounding up these peaceful dogs as if they were vermin, ridding this human empty, human unused space of canine life. Although Marlene and Hagen escape from animal control the first time; they are hunted down and are found and rounded up by 6 animal control officers, as they are playing on the banks of the Danube. Unlike the dogs in dogland, Hagen and Marlene play tug of war, as Lili and Hagen had played when they were introduced. While Hagen in the course of the film is presented in the guise of dangerous beast, Marlene never is. She is always associated with pet, at least for the viewer, even if the animal control officer who kills her sees her and every dog that night as beast. She still plays the traditional sidekick role, although here, she choses to be Hagen's sidekick, not a human's.

Often associated with screwball comedy, the terrier plays an important role in bringing the film's main couple together. In this film, Marlene provides glimpses into how *White God* could have ended happily as part of a screwball comedy film, in which chaos leads to a happy end. Yet, a happy end would imply a return to human order, to clear categories of pet. In the rationale of this film, then, such a happy end would not be desired. Her murder makes clear that no dog in this film will be coming home. The home the terrier is associated with at least traditionally in movies, is one the film is criticizing as well. Indeed, *White God* asks the viewer to re-see the terrier not only as reliable "quasi-human" side-kick and quirky companion, but also as animal in Horowitz' sense. Although Marlene and the dog euthanized on the table in the shelter are victimized, there are brown terrier

mixes in the pack, who are very present running with the pack and at the end, in this temporary space of seers being seen.

Like Asta, whose image in six films of *the Thin Man* series was used to approach "charged issues that are salient in the screwball comedy, such as class, labor, gender, romance, and marital dynamics" (Ross and Castonguay 2014, p. 80), Marlene the terrier alludes to how pets, specifically terriers have been used in films, and how these images have informed constructions of dogs outside of film. The narrator asks us to examine our response to her on-screen murder and compare it with our response to the on-screen murder of many pack dogs in the tunnel, dogs whom we see dying individual deaths, but whom we have not engaged with on a personal level before their deaths. Do we respond less to the yelps and falling of the "unknown" dogs than to Marlene's quivering, bleeding body? Do we feel differently toward the anonymous police shooters behind the barricade than we do towards the one animal control man who responds to Hagen licking his hand, positively? If so, why? The narrator makes visible the death of the "invisible" dogs that happen daily in shelters. It also visibly kills Marlene, the more "visible" dog in human society, that is, the pet. It asks us to consider both the stray and the pet as equals, not in death but in life. Killing those pack dogs in the tunnel, the narrator argues, is equivalent to killing Marlene. Each dog is an individual even if we do not know the backstory.

At its extreme, the chaos that Asta embodies threatens to overwhelm social order, write Ross and Castonguay (2014, p. 91). "Somewhere between rigid and utterly anarchic lies the irreverent balance that is at the heart of the screwball comedy" (ibid), a between space that is also to a certain extent promoted in the film White God, despite its not being a screwball comedy. I argue that this space is represented by dogland in the film.

#### **11. Saved for Dogland**

The butcher then notices them and since for him, the dogs are vermin/pests that threaten his business, he defines them as the expendable enemy. Not only that, but the narrator shows him treating dogs as meat; when he threatens Hagen with a cleaver he tells him "I'll gobble you up" (*White God*). We not only see, but hear him hacking through bones, seeing all animals as containable if cut up into pieces. The narrator also implicates the unseen but heard customer, who asks for the piece of meat which the butcher then divides. In short, as in the slaughterhouse scene the narrator focuses on the violence of butchering.

In this scene, the butcher is shown as the villain, shown from a lower angle in a medium shot wielding a huge weapon and cornering Hagen into a small space. Marlene prevents his demise, by biting the butcher as he is about to strike. Non-diegetic music suddenly is heard and the potential horror film turns into buddy movie as the two dogs run through the streets and end up in dogland. The music, however, bridges this low angle scene of dogs running through the streets together with the earlier scene of the pack of dogs running through the streets. While different, the tone is similar, or the mood that it creates. The music is foreboding and ominous. It would have fitted the scene from which the two dogs are escaping. We might expect music that seems more uplifting since they have escaped the enemy. Of course, it could indicate that there is only worse to come, and yet the dogs look do not look menacing. While people scared of dogs, might react by being frightened at the site of these two running dogs, and while terriers can of course bite, the terrier running with the bigger dog, deflates the possible danger of the image of a big dog running through the city streets. Plus, we already know the dog and that he is friendly. However, by using music evoking a similar mood for the scene of two dogs running through the streets as it does with the images of 250 dogs, including terriers, it asks us to consider how numbers affect how we read dogs. In that scene, the music seemed fitting; what was unsettling was that the dogs did not seem to be in attack mode, they seemed just to be running not attacking. There seems a mismatch between the images and the music as there is in this scene. Here as Marlene and Hagen run away from the butcher, most viewers will be rooting for them.

The narrator takes us gently into dogland as it were, by giving "it" a familiar "face"—that of Marlene. In contrast to the "big black dogs" with whom she is first seen outside the butcher shop, Marlene the terrier is familiar and seemingly "safe." It is she who brings Hagen to dogland, to the land that is full of "big black dogs." Yet, then *White God* shows us Hagen rejecting Marlene, becoming more like the "big black dogs"—less familiar, less "safe; , and then finally her being shot in front of us. Without the terrier, has Hagen finally crossed over to the side of animality? In the clear categories of the white God, yes, he has. Why is it necessary to kill the terrier; to leave us with Hagen as leader of the unfamiliar mongrels? The narrator is tearing away the bandaid as it were, bringing us into unfamiliar territory at the end without the crutch of the familiar terrier dog so associated with pet. It does this to test us, to see if we will engage with these unfamiliar dogs assembled in the *abbatoir* courtyard.

Described by a critic as "a scene-nibbling Jack Russell terrier named Marlene" (Dargis 2015), her terrier looks are familiar to those interested in films with dogs or to many from advertisements5 seemingly more "readable" than those of Hagen perhaps, or the other street dogs because the terrier-type, especially Jack Russells, have performed as sidekicks, eliciting sympathy, mirroring their "owner's" emotions, a kind of shorthand or gauge. Sometimes a foil, pitting his will against that of the owner or another human, but in the end loyal above all else. The film expands and diversifies the cinematic dog figure not only through the diversity of dogs in the film but also to a large extent by not anthropomorphizing these dogs. There remains a distance between the dogs and the viewer, even with Hagen. In a sense Hagen and the other dogs remain closed off, maintain a distance.

Interestingly, although we are never given Marlene's name during the film, we find out that the nameless terrier has the name Marlene and is played by Stella and Ally. Her lack of name at least while we were watching the film does not prevent her from being a character despite not having a name, despite being personless in the film story. Giving the fictional dog performed by two real dogs, a name outside of the film, that is in the credit frame of the film draws attention to how important naming dogs can be for our perception of them as individuals. The character on screen was individualized because of her ability to communicate with and befriend Hagen; a name did not individualize her any more than the list of names of the adopted dogs helps us to visualize which dog the name refers to. Also striking is that Pimpa's whelps are named Pimpa's whelp 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5; and that another six whelps are named whelp 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The lack of "human" name for these puppies seems to call into question that they were truly adopted; that outside of the film they are seen as individuals.

The "generic" terrier is the type of dog one is used to in films in which dogs play the cute "almost human" role; it is anthropomorphized like Tom in *Tom and Jerry* cartoons, and like them reappears again and again portrayed by different dogs, often several of a generation (Asta was played by several dogs, as was Eddie in Frasier). Significantly, it is this dog whom we see get killed, away from the pack. She is given an individualized death, is not killed as one of many like the dogs in the tunnel.6 Like the dog seller, the trainer, the butcher, the animal control officer, the nosy neighbor, this particular terrier is difficult to separate from its role, here as "being cute."7 Indeed, this one is visually linked to humans by a noose-like rope leash, which she wears even as a street dog. When this leash is finally removed in the

<sup>5</sup> Terriers, whether Boston Terriers (see Mastercard's Lost Dog ad available at http://www.businessinsider.com/advertisersare-obsessed-with-boston-terriers-2013-8) or Jack Russells (see McDonald's 1995 Lost Dog Television Commercial, available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9to3kVTCPY or the VW ad available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nLTh6PhCCmQ) are popular in advertisements.

<sup>6</sup> Even the dog who gets the lethal injection while Hagen is watching seems to be a terrier-type dog. However, other terrier mixes are part of the pack, like the one given an unanthropomorphized moment in the end, as the narrator focuses on another unnamed terrier-type lying down in the last scene.

<sup>7</sup> The AKC (American Kennel Club 2017) "often link[s] physical appearance to temperament characteristics" (Hecht and Horowitz 2015, p. 255). On the akc.org/dog-breeds/groups/terrier, for instance, the terrier group as a whole is described as having "the distinctive terrier personality. These are feisty, energetic dogs [. . . ]. In general, they make engaging pets, but require owners with the determination to match their dog's lively characters." The site describes the Parson Russell Terrier as "bold, friendly, athletic, and clever;" the Rat Terrier as "friendly, lovable, inquisitive, fearlessly game for just about anything;" and the Russell Terrier as "alert, lively, inquisitive, and friendly." The nameless terrier in *White God* exhibits these characteristics.

pound, she is symbolically cut of from generic "cute" terrier to become just another generic street dog. In short, she is always generalized. Individual, small, cute, "white"8 dogs are usually labeled "suitable for human consumption" (entertainment), that is, if they have an owner. This is made clear in the white god language of the film that alternates generic breeds—"Speciality Rottweiler Trainer" (*White God*)—and generic street dogs—"all of the *untrained* dogs" (*White God*)—with named "dog friends" (*White God*) and the very broad "animal" objects of the "animal trainers." The credits state that the "[p]rincipal dog characters supplied by Teresa Ann Miller" and that "Hagen is owned and trained by Teresa Ann Miller (*White*)." It is clear that Teresa May Miller, is not only the trainer of Luke and Body, their dual identities erased by the character name, but also that she is the owner and provider of the professional canines in the film, that is of Luke, Body, and Stella and Ally (ibid). Of course, terriers can bite, and were bred to kill what humans deemed "vermin," but shooting this dog at point blank range to take control of the "pack" that is taking revenge elsewhere is an empty gesture of human revenge. Not that the killing of the other dogs in the tunnel is not revenge, but the fact that a single dog is equated with the pack is telling. Granted, this animal control officer is now out to kill animal control officer killers, i.e., dogs. For him and for most of the Budapest populace in the film shown as frightened for their lives, even this little dog is just a "figure of animality," just one more dead dog object to kill and throw in a body bag.

Significantly, when Hagen turns into the "beast" he is separated from the "pet" Marlene. The terrier had disappeared from Hagen's side after Hagen killed the pound employee. Separated from the pack, she had reappeared after the dog pack's revenge is already in progress, where we (and Hagen) first encountered her at the meat market. She remained behind at the butcher shop now no longer hampered by the butcher. The horrified Lili has just come upon the dead butcher, throws up in response, and calls her father to warn him that he might be Hagen's next target. It is then that the little terrier barks at and leads Lili on her bike in her search for Hagen. The terrier is guide dog to death (for the butcher) and guide dog to Lili and to Hagen (in terms of helping Hagen survive and acclimate to life on the streets). She is faithful companion, playmate, guide—positive roles often associated with dogs. But there is no room for her as representative of the domesticated cute companion in the "beast pack." And so the little dog keeps running toward *mal* (Steeves 2011). As the terrier shakes in pain, bleeding from a shot wound, the man stands over her and delivers the kill shot up close and personal. This terrier is expendable, since she does not "hear [her] master's voice." In the white god's world a street dog is a street dog is a street dog.9

#### **12. Inconsiderate Sympathy**

We have witnessed a bloody dogfight; we have witnessed a trainer beating, injecting, and goading Hagen into "beast." In the shelter examination/killing room scene, we see a dog being put to death. And shortly after this scene, the narrator will show us Hagen's bloody face with a piece of a man's neck hanging from his teeth, as well as the blood-spattered windows of the restaurant, and the bloody bodies of the butcher and the neighbor. In including this piece of the cartoon, the animation of a cat dressed in a Tux mimicking a performance of a piece of High Culture, the film not only emphasizes the trappings of "civilization," but recognizes its own acts of mimicry. Tom mimics the expected "deep" feelings of a pianist interpreting Liszt's music, dressed in the proper attire for the part. The shelter director is dressed as the authority figure that she is, here in a white coat, usually associated with doctors or vets who are meant to heal. In this white coat, with Liszt's music turned into "dying room"

<sup>8</sup> When potential adopters are looking at the dogs in the pound, the pound director tells an older woman, "There are white ones (*White God*)," implying, that at least for this woman, a white dog might be more desirable than the other "mutts" in the pound.

<sup>9</sup> I am making the assumption that the terrier did not participate in killing and mauling the dead butcher, in whose establishment Lili finds her. At that time, however, she is not with the body and she is not bloody. The butcher's wounds look to have been made by a larger jaw, but, I still am just assuming this. Even if the dog did participate, she is not attached to the pack at the time that the man shoots her. That man has no idea that this dog was associated with the "killer" dogs.

musak as it were, the woman plays the role of caring, pitying, benevolent "god" who kills in order to save the "object" from more pain. Yet, while Lili's authoritarian orchestra conductor had praised her playing by saying "play that at my funeral" (*White God*), these euthanized dogs get no personal memorial; they are not remembered, but are wrapped in garbage bags and incinerated. Intriguingly, when the employee comes with the bag for the body of the dog the pound director has just killed, she asks, "Last one?" He answers, "Yes. The rest is routine." (*White God*) What exactly he means by this remains unknown. As she pets the dying dog with the hand holding the empty syringe, she promises "You won't have any enemies where you're going. No one will hurt you anymore. It's not lie. I mean it" (*White God*). Legally (Tasker 2008, p. 9), euthanasia is prohibited according to Hungarian national law, except in "mercy killing of animals in order to avoid or prevent the unnecessary prolongation of their suffering" (Zoltan n.d.). Aggressive dogs can also be killed (Tasker 2008, p. 9). In this shelter, the director seems to be the arbiter of what constitutes "suffering." This role, however, when witnessed by another dog, seems to cause her shame.

The five dogs are watching a cartoon that features an anthropomorphized cat, prone to violence against a mouse, who gazes at them. They gaze back (sort of). The music is the same music that Lili had played Hagen in the bathroom to calm him, to commiserate with their new unfamiliar situation in the apartment of her father. In the cartoon, the part she plays on the trumpet is played on the piano. The narrator first focuses the shot of the cartoon, we see the the frame of the TV around the image of the cartoon, but what is on view is the cartoon not anything outside of it or the TV. This in itself is destabilizing, since the previous shot was of Hagen walking through a row of caged dogs to be placed separately, since he has been deemed unadoptable and thus a "goner" (*White God*). The next shot is of Tom. Then we see Hagen and the other dogs watching. The narrator calls attention to the position of these dog spectators. First it shows them in a long shot from a high angle looking up. Then it enters their space and looks up from a very low angle position, revealing Hagen looking up and the TV placed high on the wall. It is not just Hagen's perspective, but one in which we watch Hagen watching. The camera angle indicates that this is the position of a dog, but none of the dogs in the room are that short. It is almost as if this would be the position of what looks like a terrier type dog being given a lethal injection next door. It calls attention to this dog's absence. At this moment the dog is presumably still alive; but having been marked as a "goner" as well, he is already marked absent. It is only after this invisible dog point of view, that Hagen gets up distracted by the soothing voice next door and goes to investigate through the crack in the door. In this way, just as in the slaughterhouse scene and the butcher shop scene, the narrator pays attention to a dead body, although in this scene the body lying prostrate on the table is just a simulated dead dog, unlike the dead in real life cows.

The whole scene is strange. We had been led to believe that Hagen was to be put down because of the shelter director's analysis of his leg wound: "That wound is pretty nasty. No one will take it. It's a goner. Put it separate" (*White God*). Then we see the opening of the *Cat Concerto*. In her white coat, wielding the emptied syringe, the pound director pets and pities the dog before her. This is a shelter, where unadoptable dogs are killed, by a euthanizer who pities the euthanized. Is her pity valuable? Is her white coat of death different than the white coat of the butcher who sleeps in his office in a building full of hanging carcasses? Is white the habit of regarding animals as objects? Is her promise that no one will hurt the dog anymore where he is going anything but empty?

The shelter director recognizes that Hagen has seen her. Both the dog's look and her look are open to interpretation, but I interpret her look as that of shame for the mistreatment of dogs by other humans, and shame, because of her own part in ranking dogs on the basis of human acceptability. Is her sympathy for the dog during its last moments different than the two old men an invisible dog showed leading their cows over the crosswalk to their slaughterhouse ends? These two cows were personally accompanied to their deaths, instead of simply dropped off en masse. Yet, their haunches will be interchangeable with those already anonymously hanging on meat hooks. While the pound director tries to save dogs, she still generalizes, is willing to sacrifice some to save others, is stuck in

the impasse of sympathy. Pity, although a move beyond indifference, is still not going to change the situation of the massive number of strays in Budapest's streets due to the white god's indifference.

The anthropomorphized cat looks back at dead dogs seeing, sitting and at a human audience seeing. Hagen looks back at Tom and looks back at the shelter director, who is not as flat a character as the dog seller, for instance. She does give Hagen a second chance. Normally, she maintains her distance, a strict, business-like arbiter of canine value. She seems to see herself as a savior, berating Lili, who comes to see if Hagen is at the shelter, for abandoning her dog. She "kills" Hagen three times in words, after which he "rises again" as a beast. The first time, she tells Lili that a dog on the streets has no chance of still being alive after a number of weeks. Never shown with glasses, she pretends that she cannot clearly see the picture on Lili's "lost dog" flyer. In a sense, she does not see Hagen clearly. He is just another stray dog, one more problem for her to deal with. With only so much funding and space, she culls the pack into those she deems more likely to be adopted, that is those that fit nicely into the human idea of canine possession, the cute, the friendly, the docile, the nonthreatening. Hagen becomes a specific problem for her when he lunges at the hand of the girl looking to adopt a stray. His uncontrolled behavior destabilizes her authority and therefore also hurts the chances of all the other dogs she has deemed "adoptable." Like the animal trainer who can not grasp that Max would come back to kill him, since the animal trainer somehow felt a connection despite his abuse of Hagen/Max, the shelter director seems personally affronted by the actions of a dog whom she had shown pity/mercy in letting him live despite his leg wound. Hers is a practical approach, and, the narrator shows, a defensive approach of "false witnessing." Hers is a White God approach—all business, vengeful god, or, with the dogs she puts down "the merciful approach of 'benevolent dominion'" (Kao 2014, p. 750). She still treats the dogs as objects that only have value if "fit for consumption" (here: adoption). While she pities those that are not, her pity does nothing to change the status quo of white god over dog.

#### **13. Wild "Eastern" Stare-off**

After the cartoon/euthanasia scene, Hagen is returned to the kennel. Hagen's response to associating the piece of music Lili had played him in order to soothe him with his uncomfortable witnessing of another dog's euthanasia is to stop eating. When he stops eating, he also stops engaging with and connecting with others. In the next cage, Marlene, the terrier from "dogland" looks at Hagen and wags her tail; Hagen does not respond, is indifferent to the terrier's attempted engagement. In the next scene in which potential adopters walk along outside kennels, his warning to be left alone is misinterpreted by a young woman seeking to adopt a shelter dog. By barking and lunging defensively at the fingers put into his cage by this young woman, he is simply expressing his choice. Like Lili, who had told her father that "I don't want a dog" when they reconcile and he suggests they go to the pound to adopt a dog, Hagen does not want "a girl." (At this point in the film, not even the companionship of a girl dog.) He is done trusting humans to treat him with respect. He did not immediately lose trust; even after Lili's father threw him out of the car, he licks the animal control officer's hand, who says surprised, "he doesn't hate us!" (*White God* 0:36:09). He has learned, however, to respond to his repeated objectification by treating humans as humans treat him—as objects to control. He targets specifically those who have hurt him. To the others, both he and the "pack" are shown to be indifferent.10

After the pound director yells at Hagen, "Have you gone mad? It's over. This is the end!" (*White God*), Hagen is led away by a pound employee to join the other dogs who will be killed. At the door of the cage the man has opened, Hagen slips out of his "noose." Unlike Marlene, who acts similarly whether she wears her rope leash or not, the "free" Hagen acts like the "captive" Hagen, the Hagen

<sup>10</sup> If humans are in the way of the pack, the dogs will simply run them down as if they weren't even there. The few times the narrator shows the dogs "attacking" random pedestrians, the dogs grab things (garden hoses, bags), not people.

who learns to see humans who control him as the enemy, an enemy who teaches him to bite the necks of those he fights. The narrator shows us both the employee's perspective of a snarling, fang-revealing animal in the defensive position, as well as Hagen's view of the employee's scared, defensive face. Both share a look, but Hagen only attacks the pound employee when this man yells at Hagen to "back off" and whips at him. Hagen rejects cages and he rejects obeying. He had given the white god a chance, but the white god refused to respond in any other way but by attacking him physically. Hagen responds in kind, and attacks as he has been taught to attack by biting "Just the neck! The neck!" (*White God*). In contrast to his reaction after the dog fight, Hagen looks at the man's body without empathy, the bloody piece of the man's neck in his mouth, seemingly becoming the picture of terrifying animality, becoming exactly that which the pound employee had feared. Yet, fear for his own life, lead both the pound employee and Hagen to attack the other as they do. It is not personal, yet; this is not revenge for revenge's sake. Hagen then looks at those in the cage, who begin to come out, and turns to leave the pound. Before he escapes, however, Hagen and the pound director share another moment.

Of all his victims, only this woman does not get a look accompanied by snarling fang-displaying growls and raised hackles. Hagen shakes himself as if shaking off the blood from the last encounter and calmly stops to look at the woman across the water trench between them. The pound director looks back. Perhaps she is trying to stare him into submission, but she realizes that she is not in control. Her twitching hand belies her calm; she is scared. Yet, even in her fear she seems to pity him again, his fight to survive in the world of the white god. He then looks quizzically at her, cocking his head twice, in an attitude humans typically like to read as "cute"11, initiating a connection perhaps. Yet, this seems so incongruous here. He has just shaken off the blood. Without the cocked ears and head, Hagen looked like a mean dog viciously looking at the pound director. Yet, he then cocks his ears and tilts his head. Viewers have grown to read this as the cute look of an anthropomorphized dog. It is a look that is often shared and interpreted in a dog-human pet relationship, in which the human interprets the cocked ears and slight head tilt as proof of the adorableness and/or the manipulative charm of a dog who knows how to control his/her human. Hecht and Horowitz (2015) cite a 2013 study that revealed how "a picture of a floppy-eared dog led the dog to be rated higher on 'Agreeableness' and 'Emotional stability'" (p. 161). The look is clearly elicited by the trainer beyond the camera. Yet, the narrator uses it here not, to destabilize the image of "animality" which he has just become as well as the image of the "readable cute pet" often assumed when a dog cocks his head. Hagen has repeated this throughout the film, when he wishes to initiate a conversation. However, like the shelter employee, the pound director, is unable or unwilling to renegotiate with him.

He gives her, like he does all of his victims, the possibility of a connection before pouncing. Yet, this look is different than the look he gave the dead body in the street and the dead body in the dog fight. It is almost as if he is mimicking he look of sympathy, the look of pity. Is he mocking her? Is he pitying her as she has pitied the dog she euthanized? Or is the viewer falling precisely into the anthropomorphizing trap that the film both uses and criticizes? I argue that this look does that it manipulates the viewer into anthropomorphizing, into simplifying, into naming the dog's emotions to make sense of the preceding violence. Most viewers have probably been rooting for Hagen, want to protect him, want the happy end. Yet, after this line-crossing, can we continue to do so? Or has he irrevocably joined the dark side of "beast?" Can we reconcile cute and friendly with independent, self-protector? The narrator makes us look at how we read "dog," how we turn "dog" into readable "friend" and into evil, "beast," in short, it asks us to be cognizant of how we separate and simplify by naming. It asks us to see Hagen as a complex being, as much as it asks us to see the pound director as not just pure evil because of her "murders." It manipulates us into anthropomorphizing Hagen into

<sup>11</sup> Hecht and Horowitz 2015 point out that, "[w]hen classifying dogs by breed, dog breeding organizations such as the american Kennel Club employ specific language to describe the requirements of each breed's physical appearance and often link physical appearance to temperament characteristics" (p. 255).

one who mimics and mirrors his human abusers in order to take canine human revenge. Yet, even as the narrator does this, it also keeps the viewer distanced enough from Hagen and the pack to be aware that she (and it) is anthropomorphizing Hagen's and then the pack's motivations. In so doing, however, the narrator clarifies the difference between pity and empathy. By having it look like Hagen is showing the pound director what it feels like to be the recipient of pity, the narrator also makes the viewer recognize how the film itself models this human tendency to "pity" in the White God rhetoric at the beginning and at the end in order to expose it. The viewer is torn into wanting Hagen to be "redeemable" and have his happy end, and recognizing that this is not going to happen. To deal with this recognition and this loss, do we turn him into the "beast" so that it is easier? In this sense, Péter (Károly Ascher), the boy Lili likes in the orchestra, was right when he tries to convince Lili to stay in the concert hall after the dogs have disrupted the concert that "You can't go out. They're rabid" (*White God*). This would be a way out of taking responsibility, of distancing ourselves, and making the individual dog invisible under the generic beast. If they are rabid, it is not their fault. No one is to blame. It happened to them, this "illness" where the familiar turns wild. Lili will not accept this. She still wants to save Hagen or at least connect with him before he is put to death. In her narrative, she can still save him. "I think they came because of me" (*White God*). For her, Hagen is still a pet who has a relationship with her despite weeks of being on the street. She is unwilling to see him as a beast. When the porter at the orchestra tries to prevent her from leaving the building by calling the dogs "Wild beasts!" Lili responds with "You're the beast!" (*White God*).

Interestingly, however, the pound director does not call Hagen a beast. The woman's hand twitches, and he has been trained to associate hands with human enemies. Hagen begins to run at her, not baring his fangs, but simply running at her and knocking her down. It is Hagen's version of "this is the end!" of the pound director's previous declaration after he had lunged at the girl who was considering adopting him. In other words, he has reached his tolerance limit with her behavior as much as she had reached hers with his behavior. The narrator has Hagen mirror the pound director's behavior to make the viewer recognize how differently similar behavior is interpreted if the actor is human or canine. Much like pound director had seemed indifferent to the fact that the body which she had just petted/killed is being put into a bag. Hagen, too, after their shared look, now seems indifferent towards her as the rest of the pedestrians who get in his way as he runs through the streets. However, she only yells at him as he starts to run toward her, not before. It is not even a command, but a powerless "You can't do that, you hear?" (*White God*) 12, before he knocks her down from the white god position. His act of "mercy" is to spare her from a neck bite, but not from a stampede. He is in the white god position; he deems who lives and dies. He doesn't have a syringe masking as "benevolence;" nor does he wear a white coat of authority. He does, however, now seem to wear the "coat" of animality.

#### **14. Bridge to Animal**

Ingold encourages us "to think of animate beings in the grammatical form of the *verb.* [. . . ] Wherever and whenever we encounter them, humans are humaning, baboons are babooning, reindeer reindeering." He continues that "[h]umans, baboons and reindeer do not *exist,* but humaning, babooning and reindeering *occur—*they are ways of carrying on." (Ingold 2013, p. 21) And so Lili's "Stop! Stop! Come back! Stop! No, don't go! Come back!" (*White God*) to the terrier and "No!" (*White God*) to the animal control officer who shot the terrier was wrong. In a sense she was telling the dog to stop dogging so that she would protect herself from the animal control officer humaning. She stopped and witnessed both "carrying on" until the little dog could no longer carry on. The film, however, carries on and ends in the hybrid space of dogging, humaning, and godding. In this last space, Lili's

<sup>12</sup> In one sense she is right, a dog "cant' do that"—that is attack humans if s/he wants to be accepted in this human dominated society.

"No! Dad, stop it! Enough! All of you!" (*White God*) works, but not because she commands it, but rather because she doesn't respond in (defensive—barking, snarling, shouting, flame throwing) kind, but by playing her trumpet. This unexpected reaction causes 251 dogs and one man to stop, to listen, to look, and to feel. It is a pausing to look at the other dogging and humaning and to hear the birding going on. Everyone including the moving camera "carries on" in this shot. And this is the point of the film: to "narrate" both humaning and dogging to the best of its godding ability. As Ingold explains, "to move forward, in real time, along with the multiple and heterogenous becomings with which we share our world, in an active and ongoing exploration of the possibilities that our common life can open up. And just as in life, becoming continually overtakes being" (Ingold 2013, p. 21).

Kao argues that "[t]hose seeking to change (and not simply interpret) the status quo must think carefully about how to inspire others to action" (Kao 2014, p. 746). *White God* attempts to inspire its viewers to action, to rethink their own relationships with animals in general, but specifically with dogs, and more specifically with stray dogs. It "examin[es] our assumptions about who the knowing subject can be" (Wolfe 2009, p. 571), shows "communication, response, and exchange" (ibid) between species. Lili plays the trumpet, communicates not through language but through music with Hagen, who howls/barks in "response." They then exchange a silent look; this shared, nonverbal gaze is a shared space, a close distance as it were, a shared separateness. This is repeated as we, the audience of the film, watch via an invisible dog perspective individual dogs from the "pack" sit down. We, too, are invited into this space. Like the father, we have a choice. The "pack" of dogs stares at the "pack" of humans.

Through its pluralized yet individualized gaze, the narrator reminds viewers that "modern publics are necessarily animal publics" (Blue and Rock 2014, p. 504). "In the twenty-first century world, interaction, not hierarchical separation, is what enables living together" (Huff and Haefner 2012, p. 165). Although the film ends in a place not of living together, but a place in which animals are brought to die together, it shows the place as a Harawayian "living room" (p. 66).

In the space of "the intersecting gaze" (Huff and Haefner 2012, p. 166), Lili finds a bridge to the dog she used to know, but whom she realizes that does not know. In hearing it, he finds a bridge to the girl he used to know, but who is also different that the girl who had a pet. Lili does not see Hagen as a part of her anymore. After a moment of seeing Hagen as "beast," she sees the individual dog before her, but one from whom she is now distanced. He is both familiar and unfamiliar. In this way, Lili sees a Hagen who is neither beast nor pet, but a complex, independent living being whom she not just loves as a former dependent but now also respects. In a sense, she proves to Hagen at the end what she had promised him when both sat on the hill and observed an old man training his dog to sit and to stay, namely that she would not treat him as a possession.

Lili moves from the benevolent ownership paradigm in which she feels she must speak for Hagen, to an acceptance of Hagen as an independent actor who does not "need" her and whose motives she may not understand. Her act of playing music to provide an alternative soundscape to the defensive barking and shouting is a leap of faith into empathy and the way she initiates a conversation with this unfamiliar dog who will not play the "good dog", will not "fetch". She hopes not for a reprisal of the bathroom scene in which she and Hagen are on the same side and she plays benevolent owner to a beloved pet, but rather for the possibility of communicating on equal terms with this independent Hagen who is part stranger.

When she first sees Hagen in the courtyard, the frightened Lili tries to be in control. She scolds Hagen, "What have you done?" (*White God*). Neither scolding, nor pretending that everything is the same, by throwing a stick and expecting Hagen to be a "[g]ood dog. Fetch! Why are you staring like that? Fetch the stick!" (*White God*) works. Finally, she negotiates with Hagen, asking him to see her: "Hagen, it's me. It's me, Hagen!" (*White God*). She asks him to see and recognize her as the individual Lili with whom he once lived. In so doing she is "letting go the lead, drawing closer, apprenticing herself to animal ways of being and knowing" (Fraiman 2012, p. 98). She draws closer not in terms of bridging the physical gap that remains between them. In a sense, this scene reviews Hagen's different

"incarnations"—the controllable pet, the uncontrollable beast, and finally political partner in the animal public. In responding to the music as Hagen and not as a beast, Hagen takes his subjecthood back from the plurality the label of animality forced upon him. He is not the product of human abuse. He is not the product of human benevolence. He is an agent, not an object. Lili tries to "shame" Hagen with her look and her voice, but is shamed by his look and his growl. But both keep looking, extend their gazes to move beyond shaming, beyond fearing, beyond pitying. The dog trainer had picked Hagen from a room full of street dogs for sale because "You've still got a heart" (*White God*) and then tried to turn him into a monster. Whereas the beast is heartless machine, the dog who sits at the end still has heart, despite everything, where heart is the ability to empathize.

The statements about dogs and animals made in the opening credits bridge into the fictional world by being the first example in a series of animal representations provided by the film. It links the dogs in the real world to the dogs in the film. These dogs whom we see seeing at the end of the film, are again linked to the outside world by the ending credits in which these dogs are named and represented. If we watch the film to the end, how we read these statements that refer back to the dogs both in and out of the film is informed by what we have witnessed in the film. How can one credit the dogs in the film respectfully? Does calling the "pack" dogs "our dog friends" and the "professional dog actors" "our dog colleagues" patronize them or level the playing ground? Does pointing out that these colleagues are owned problematic? The fact that the title of the film is in white font on a black screen like the credits seems to indicate an awareness that the whole film is in the end a product of the white god, even if the white god narrator attempts to imagine how dogs might experience the world narrated in the film. It is a product for consumption by humans and nonhumans (should they be interested in looking or be in the vicinity of a human watching it and hearing its sounds) in which humans manipulated dogs into performing in front of the camera and manipulated the images of dogs through editing to create a performance readable in human terms. It has, however, shown how humans simply assume authority over animals, but by destabilizing the assumption that this is the only way to relate to animals it at least makes visible that "we fail to see the animal's behavior on its own terms, because we have defined the term" (McLean 2014, p. 13) and that "in commercial cinema, they are characters in our stories not theirs" (McLean 2014, p. 13). *White* God's narrator insists, however, that their stories and our stories while not the same are interrelated and that our relationship with dogs could evolve as it has "over millennia" (ibid, p. 11). The dogs in the film did not decide to make a film in which dogs play a significant role. However, the dogs co-created it not just in performing on command, but also in being dogs and therefore unpredictable. Mundruczó admits to using dogs as a metaphor for current human hierarchical social relations. At the same time, however, he found that in working with dogs he had to change his own methods of directing. Working with dogs was "a shooting process where we had to adjust to them and no the other way around". By being themselves, especially the nonprofessional dog performers "bring a kind of indeterminate *otherness* into the frame, the otherness of the non-manipulable. Animals in feature films are thus always to some degree 'troubling', as they break through the falsely protective aura of the image, the aura that rules out the accidental and the unintentional" (Sheehan 2008, p. 122). The narrator does not "erase" the unintentional. There are plenty of shots in which the dogs are clearly looking either at their trainers or not at the object or person they are supposedly interested in in the film world. Examples are the five dogs "watching" the Tom and Jerry cartoon as well as, wonderfully, a black dog at the top right of the screen behind Hagen in the scene at the end who calls attention to him/herself by not lying quietly and attentively looking at Lili. In *White God* specifically, and in film in general, animals have a "rupturing effect, both in terms of the way it unavoidably points beyond itself to wider issues in its capacity to resist or problematize its own meanings on screen" (Burt 2002, p. 13). The film's narrator uses "animal imagery [that] does not merely reflect human-animal relations and the position of animals in human culture, but is also used to change them."(p. 15) Burt continues that the "transformative aspect" implicit in an animal on screen "reveals broader cultural tensions and anxieties about our current treatment of animals" and in *White God* the current treatment of other humans as well.

#### **15. Conclusions**

Recalling the tale in which members of Plato's Academy ended up defining man as "a wingless biped" and then being mocked by Diogenes who having plucked the feathers off a chicken" threw it in their midst as a representative of "man," Danta and Vardoulakis argue that the violence toward the chicken "becomes a primal scene of the human-animal relation—and thus a scene that is repressed" (Danta and Vardoulakis 2008, p. 3). They continue that "philosophers [and other writers and thinkers and artists] have not [. . . ] shied away from defining the human in opposition to other animals. In a fable that is no longer fabulous, human being constitutes itself through a definite violence against the animal" (ibid). This scene is often carried out behind closed doors—whether in the slaughterhouse, the pound, and illegal spaces like dogfights—and it is this scene in its variations that the film *White Dog* focuses upon, albeit with dogs and cows, not chickens. Although the narrator presents a pessimistic view of current animal-human (and human-human) relations, it does offer the possibility of an alternative scene, one in which non-human animals and human animals redefine this relationship together. Indeed, it posits that dogs, like humans, should be considered "political animal[s],"(ibid) in terms of having a voice in shaping the organization and institutions of the modern metropolis, which in *White God* becomes the site of reconsidering the constructions of Budapest's urban order. Instead of the "human political animals" "avert[ing] their gaze from (and so derogate[ing]) the alternative sociality of nonhuman animals" (ibid), the narrator suggests that human sociality could be improved by seeing and listening to the "animals" who share the urban social space. Instead of trying to deny the animal presence in the modern city like Budapest, the narrator insists on making the animal, specifically, the street dog, visible and audible. It reminds the viewer that "the animal", that is the living, forceful, uncontained, and unknowable other, is not absent, but very much a part of the city's public space. Instone and Sweeney feel that "[i]n many regards, dogs offer new ways of being in public" (Instone and Sweeney 2014, p. 774). They "suggest that dogs themselves are agents in the making of publics and public space and that dog bodies constitute a non-speech, non-text form of public address that calls attention to them as a sort of animal public" (p. 776).

The narrator gives the invisible dogs it makes visible and audible space to relate with each other and with us. In a sense, it "trusts" them to just be and to see, and for us to see them being and seeing, or as Haraway explains, it "cares" about them, where "[c]aring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the ending of the day than at the beginning" (Haraway 2008, p. 36). The final scene, in this space normally indicating finality the *abbatoir*—becomes a space of curiosity and caring. And while "[c]uriosity gets one into thick mud" according to Haraway, it also "is the kind of 'looking back' and 'becoming with companions' that might matter in making autre-mondialisations more possible" (Haraway 2008, p. 38). It might even begin with a quizzical look from the cocked head of an unfamiliar dog.

The spectators do not witness this mass killing at the end; instead we are left listening to birds and seeing in a bird's eye view the dogs looking at the human girl looking at Hagen and the father also lying down in front of the dogs and next to his daughter looking at his daughter. No *deus ex machina* will appear from the sky to save the dogs in the *abbatoir*. But the father, the original "White God" of the film tells the white coated slaughterhouse foreman who sleeps near his meat to pause, to wait, to postpone the destruction of these dogs, "to give them [Hagen and Lili, the 250 other dogs] a little more time" (*White God*).

It's not much, but it's a start; a start in a public space that for non-humans at least is associated with a dead-end.

**Acknowledgments:** I would like to thank Joela Jacobs and the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Taubin, Amy. 2015. God Bites Dog: Amy Taubin on Kornel Mundruczo's White God. *Artforum International* 53: 87. Ventre, Sara. 2015. Arizona Dogs Star in Hungarian Film 'White God'. *Kjzz.org*, April 23.

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© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Whiteout: Animal Traces in Werner Herzog's** *Grizzly Man* **and** *Encounters at the End of the World*

#### **Oliver Völker**

Department of Comparative Literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, 60598 Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Voelker@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Received: 31 July 2017; Accepted: 8 November 2017; Published: 11 November 2017

**Abstract:** Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog's later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog's films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film's human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both *Grizzly Man* and *Encounters at the End of the World* develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.

**Keywords:** animal agency; filmic representation of animals; material ecocriticism; *Moby-Dick*; Werner Herzog

#### **1. The White Whale**

In *Moby-Dick*, whose legibility both as a novel and as a whale is constantly put into question, Ishmael reminds the reader that the sperm whale has never "written a book, or spoken a speech" (Melville 1983, p. 1164). Nonhuman animals do a lot of things, a lot of things human animals don't quite understand. Even though the whale's fin might cover bones whose structure is similar to that of a human hand, it never held a pen. Melville's Leviathan does not step on the stage as the narrator of a novel that, after all, bears his name. This "pyramidical silence" (Melville 1983, p. 1164), as Ishmael puts it, marks a curious mismatch: As has been sufficiently stressed, *Moby-Dick* is steeped in cultural, economic and scientific discourses. Taken from "any book whatsoever, sacred or profane" (Melville 1983, p. 782), the vast abundance of ceteological knowledge and narratives that both constitutes the novel's dusty paratextual library and structures its encyclopedic series of 135 chapters stands in stark contrast to what is said, told and known by the whale itself—which is nothing. Instead of being an autonomous subject, the whale becomes an eagerly sought-after object of understanding. The metabolic rhythm between surfacing in the air and submerging into an unfathomable depth seems to constitute an allegorical game of hide and seek with a narrator who is bound for a breathless chase. "Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?" (Melville 1983, p. 1001). Unlike Ahab and similar to the reader, however, Ishmael is not hunting for revenge and blood but for a more pressing issue and a more subtle substance: meaning. Comparing the features of the whale's bulky physiognomy to "wrinkled granite hieroglyphics" (Melville 1983, p. 1165), Ishmael transforms the whale into a coded text, which can or could be deciphered, if only one had the right translation manual: "[H]ow may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldae of the Sperm Whale's brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if

you can." (Melville 1983, p. 1165). With this encouragement, the reader is sent on a mission which the narrator himself has already failed. Right from the novel's beginning, Ishmael is a survivor of the events he is about to relate, the only one who "did survive the wreck" (Melville 1983, p. 1408) of the fatal ending. The human being gets away with his life and a story to tell: "Call me Ishmael". (Melville 1983, p. 795). The animal, however, remains both elusive and untranslated. Undeterred, the white whale dives and stays hidden under the untroubled surface of an ocean that bears no mark or writing.

In this light, *Moby-Dick* could be seen as the exemplification of a structural problem in the relationship between animals and narration. Recent debates in animal studies and ecocriticism have challenged the view of human exceptionalism and stressed the similarities, mutual dependencies, and histories of co-evolution that shape the relationship between humans and animals. As a consequence, agency and other forms of meaningful self-expression are no longer considered as exclusively human capabilities. Kate Rigby, for instance, points out:

[t]he necessity of an ecological enlightenment, in which the nonhuman is resituated as agentic, communicative, and ethically considerable, while human consciousness is recognized as embodied and interconnected with a more-than human world that is neither fully knowable nor entirely controllable (Rigby 2014, p. 219).

In this context, practices of storytelling have been attributed a particular importance and critics are asking for new, more holistic ways of representation and stylization that would change the view of the animal as the mere witless other of humanity. This approach, however, poses problems of its own that can be put in narratological terms, for, lacking the faculty of speech, animals don't tell stories in a strict sense. As Ahab remarks in regard to the (dead) sperm whale's head, "not one syllable is thine"! (Melville 1983, p. 1127). But the symbolic system of human language not only constitutes the material that literature is made out of. In the history of philosophy, throughout its various attempts to establish an essence or unique capability of the human, language use was virtually always identified as marking a distinctive frontier or even "abyss", as Martin Heidegger puts it, between humans and the realm of nature. From this perspective, the prosaic means of literature could be seen as particularly unfit for any approach to nonhuman animals. To understand them, we have to rely on acts of interpretation and meaning-making, operations that easily transform their subject into an otherwise empty screen for anything we want to project onto it. This highly anthropocentric view of the animal as a kind of allegorical device becomes particularly notable in the case of *Moby-Dick*. As Melville's readers are informed, the whale not only provides a wide range of materials, due to its absence of color, the white whale is so polymorphic in its symbolic meaning that it can signify virtually anything, including the very outmost container of this "anything": "the heartless voids and immensities of the universe" (Melville 1983, p. 1001). However, in order to realize this versatility, its absence of color is first and foremost that of a blank page upon which the human hand inscribes its designs. The whale itself, we are reminded, "has never written a book", even though its oil might have provided the light for the book's completion.

If, however, an animal in literature starts to speak or even appropriates the writing materials of its oblivious masters, it is only insofar as it behaves similarly to human beings or, more precisely, mockingly mimics a certain idea of the human. Jonathan Swift's only too well reasoning Houyhnhms, E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing Tomcat Murr, and Franz Kafka's Red Peter all question and trouble the very notion of the human whose language they speak so eloquently. Still, these different mappings and transitions of the border between the human and the animal are articulated through the code of human language. As Philip Armstrong puts it:

Of course novelists, scientists and scholars can never actually access, let alone reproduce, what other animals mean on their own terms. Humans can only represent animals' experience through the mediation of cultural encoding, which inevitably

involves a reshaping according to our own intentions, attitudes and preconceptions (Armstrong 2008, p. 2).

The structure of the problem seems to entail a dilemma, for either the animal is seen as a mute automaton, devoid of speech and all capacities it entails or it becomes animated by a voice that barely disguises its human origin. Instead of arguing in favor of one of the horns, one option in dealing with dilemmas is to refute their validity altogether. One could ask, for instance, if whales, grizzly bears, or seals could ever access, let alone reproduce, what human-animals mean on their own terms. But for all his interest in animals as autonomous narrative instances, it seems that Armstrong reserves the creative activity of "cultural encoding", and thereby the realm of culture generally, to humans and their language games. Nonetheless, he suggests a kind of reading that tracks down the material traces that animals might have left in artistic forms of representation. Traces that could hint at a nonhuman world as an origin of meaning and subjectivity in its own right:

Hence, in seeking to go beyond the use of animals as mere mirrors for human meaning, our best hope is to 'locate' the tracks left by animals in texts, the ways cultural formations are affected by the materiality of animals and their relationship with humans (Armstrong 2008, p. 3).

To elaborate on this notion of materiality, the following paper will leave the realm of the literary text in a strict sense and focus on two of Werner Herzog's later documentaries in which the medium of film is brought into close quarters with the physical presence of nonhuman nature: Grizzly Man (2005) and *Encounters at the End of the World* (2007). In this attempt, the notion of the material will inform the paper's general perspective. While Ishmael, himself a narrative *specksnyder*, cuts through layers of whale blubber in order to reach an imaginary kennel, I would like to focus my attention upon all the greasy stuff that is cut away and usually discarded. This implies a more pronounced attention to the material fluxes and exchanges, the melees amongst nonhuman animals, cameras, and humans that are made prominent in Herzog's later works. My hope is that the specific qualities of film will allow for a different representation of human and nonhuman animals and develop a gaze that is able to reach beyond the anthropocentric confinements of language.

#### **2. "The Ripple of Leaves": Filming in the Wilderness**

Herzog's relation to nature seems contradictory. While the depiction of sublime, wild and oftentimes hostile landscapes plays a huge part in virtually all of his works from *Aguirre* to the most recent *Into the Inferno*, he has distanced himself from sentimental and anthropomorphic appropriations of nature on several occasions. Scattered throughout various interviews, statements and other paratextual forms, his approach to questions of nature and its aesthetic representation is most explicitly and extensively addressed in *Grizzly Man* from 2005. *Grizzly Man* retraces the life of Timothy Treadwell who spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in southern Alaska among wild brown bears, claiming and believing that only he could protect them against poachers and other intruders into an otherwise pristine natural habitat. As it becomes clear during the film, no such threat ultimately existed for the bears. Timothy spent his summers amid a healthy population of brown bears and if there was any imminent danger, it was for the human being. When Treadwell and his partner Amy Huguenard prolonged their stay into the fall of 2003, a season when the bears prepare for hibernation, both were fatally attacked.

What makes such a fascinating figure for Herzog's film is Treadwell's role as a passionate amateur filmmaker who shot over 100 h of videotape under challenging conditions. The original videotapes, which constitute the raw material of Herzog's approach, are not only edited and presented by a narrative voice-over but placed within a complex network of interviews with Timothy's friends and colleagues, a former girlfriend, his parents, biologists, ecologists, and even the coroner. Some of the difficulties in coming to terms with *Grizzly Man* stem from this multiperspectival form: It forces the viewer to differentiate between Treadwell as a historical figure, as the director and main character of

his own recordings, and, on yet another level, Herzog's representation of him as a filmic subject and the film's particular storytelling, which introduces substantial deviations from Treadwell's viewpoints. While all these different perspectives and layers can be understood as interpretative attempts to explore the possible meaning of Treadwell's work, their interplay functions as a kaleidoscope or echo-chamber, in which new and unforeseen possibilities of understanding start to proliferate.

Despite his often playful mannerisms, Treadwell does not come across as naïve and shows a keen awareness of the potential threats that he faced every day: Referring to one of the older bears that would attack him only a few days later, he stresses that "[ ... ] these are the bears that on occasion do for survival kill and eat humans. Could only the big old bear possibly kill and eat Timothy Treadwell"? (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:14:53). It might seem puzzling that this awareness never translated into a resolution to leave. Treadwell had a deep trust in his intimate understanding of the animals he lived with for thirteen years, seeing some of them grow up from cubs to full grown carnivores. "I know the language of the bear." (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:14:27), Treadwell claims, a belief that separates him from the more skeptical voices in the film that question both the existence of such a language and Treadwell's competence in performing this feat. Against the backdrop of this view of nature as essentially mute, *Grizzly Man's* representation of Treadwell is structured by the spatial figure of a fateful transgression. Right at the film's beginning, Herzog's narrative voice claims that Treadwell "crossed an invisible borderline" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:04:15), and other characters appearing in the film vary this pattern of thought only slightly, stating that he crossed an "unspoken boundary" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:29:13) between humans and bears. One of the most moving, yet disturbing scenes of the footage shows Treadwell hesitantly trying to touch a bear when both of them encounter each other in the liminal region at the shore of a lake (see Figure 1) (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:28:57–00:29:32).

**Figure 1.** Treadwell filming himself with a bear.

What are the rhetorical and ideological currents that are at play in Herzog's narration of Treadwell as a figure of transgression? It is noticeable that, in spite of its designation as an "unspoken boundary", the film reproduces a strict distinction between animals and humans repeatedly and in quite an audible manner. It is spoken all the time. The apparent need to establish this distance seems to be related to the bear's status as a carnivore. This could be conceived as too obvious to merit any discussion. Of course I do not want to deny that there can be good and very practical reasons why humans should evade

grizzly bears, not least for the latter's benefit. With reference to the local Alutiiq community that he is both a scholar and a descendant of, Sven Haakanson points out to Herzog that "if you habituate bears to humans, they think that all humans are safe. Where I grew up, they avoid us and we avoid them." (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:28:54). Yet, I wonder if Herzog's view of the grizzly bears as "metonyms of wild nature" (Ladino 2009, p. 54), as Jennifer Ladino accurately puts it, does not reiterate a more complex and problematic opposition between human and nonhuman animals on a general level. To illustrate this point, I would like to refer to a seemingly more timid animal that is mentioned only briefly in the film. Every now and then hikers in the Alps are attacked and eventually killed by cows that probably feel the need to protect their calf.1 However, it is rather unlikely that the victims of these bovine encounters could create a "story of human ecstasy" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:03:55) and be depicted as the sublime yet lamentable trespassers into a "world" of cows. In regard to *Grizzly Man* it therefore seems important that the bear is not only a wild, undomesticated omnivore that is able to kill, but that it eats and eventually digests the human body as it would do with any other form of meat.

In fact, the bear's metabolism and its various stages constitute a minor yet recurring background process of *Grizzly Man*. Treadwell himself is obsessed with the feces of Wendy, one of the bears, and cannot resist touching it with his hands. This fascination with an object that was "just inside of her" (Grizzly Man 2005, 1:06:38) develops a rather uncanny meaning, since Treadwell seems passionately drawn to the final product of a digestive system that he himself is eventually going to be a part of, an aspect that was already made explicit by the pilot Sam Egli earlier in the film. Egli was present after the park service shot and opened the bear that killed Amy Huguenard and Timothy Treadwell. In a restrained tone of disgust he reports that the body of the bear was "cut open, it was full of people, it was full of clothing, it was—we hauled away four garbage bags of people, out of that bear." (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:17:37). One of the interesting things about disgust is that its cause, effect, and content are all related to the borders of the human body. At first, the sight of a disintegrating human body can be discerned as the essential cause of disgust. At the same time, the disgusted person's own body and its relation to the spatial environment constitute the site of the feeling itself. As Winfried Menninghaus writes: "The fundamental schema of disgust is the experience of a nearness that is not wanted. An intrusive presence, a smell or taste is spontaneously assessed as contamination and forcibly distanced." (Menninghaus 2003, p. 1). Therefore, one of the most logical effects of disgust is a sudden expulsion of the interior to the exterior: vomiting. Finally, the act of vomiting makes it clear that disgust is a corporal reaction that overwhelms the human body. In this context, Egli's slight tone of disgust is given a different ring that concerns the quasi-ontological relationship between animals and the human: The spatial figure of "nearness" and "contamination" that Menninghaus writes about refers to the sight of a human body that is absorbed by the digestive system of a carnivore. Designated as "people", the human being not only loses its identity as an individual person but as a supposedly exceptional species. It finds itself right in the middle of a food chain that humanity is supposed to be in control of and normally is set apart from. As James Hatley argues, the sheer fact of edibility blurs a strict line between human and animal:

In merely the *threat* of being eaten, one finds oneself in the situation that the very body that sustains one's own life suddenly is also the body that is to be ingested, in order that another's life might be sustained. What was most intimate becomes most strange, and what was most strange becomes most intimate (Hatley 2004, p. 23).

It seems that exactly this kind of uncanny replacement between inside and outside and its ontological connotation is the object of Egli's disgust. However, what is so gratifying about Treadwell's found footage is exactly that it circumvents stereotypical images of the bear as a bleak carnivore and emphasizes forms of behavior that are indicative of a complex social being. Human being and bear are

<sup>1</sup> See for instance Nadine Ayoub (Ayoub 2014). "Autriche—des "vaches tueuses" dans les alpages". *Arte.tv*, 10.09.2014. Available online: https://info.arte.tv/fr/autriche-des-vaches-tueuses-dans-les-alpages.

not reduced to the same (edible) corporeality.2 Both life forms resemble each other by virtue of their respective engagement in practices of meaning-making, an aspect that leads me back to the question of animal expressiveness that this essay started with. Treadwell neither had a background in biology nor was he interested in adhering to norms of intellectual or academic rigor. Nevertheless, empirical research on grizzly bears does make use, if carefully, of "culture" as an explanatory term for their behavior. Regarding the question of social relationships and forms of communication among grizzlies G. A. Bradshaw writes:

Bear country is riddled with intricate bear trails and marker trees that serve to convey information in the absence of bear-to-bear physical proximity. These communiqués create an invisible web of messages that brings coherence to a physically dispersed community. Bears' psychology is thus uniquely suited to their habitat. We might then envision bear collective life as a dynamic network of relationships that is shaped by resources and terrain, much of which [ . . . ] is hidden from human eyes (Bradshaw 2017, p. 78).

Bradshaw invites us to imagine the bear's landscape as replete and entrenched with meaning, maybe similar to a network of hiking trails whose system of signposts is constantly modified and rewritten by each individual hiker. Her description sheds light on a rich material semiotics that certainly differs from human sign systems, yet is no less real. Unsurprisingly, this interpretation of the bear as an expressive being would be fundamentally at odds with Herzog's view on nature as dominated by "chaos, hostility and murder" (Grizzly Man 2005, 01:08:09). Showing the face of the bear that probably killed Treadwell in close up, Herzog's voice-over scorns at the rhetorical means of prosopopoeia:

And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there is no such thing as the secret world of the bears and this blank stare speaks only of a half bored interest in food, but for Timothy Treadwell this bear was a friend, a savior (Grizzly Man 2005, 01:32:51).

Prosopopoeia is typically considered as a sub-form of metaphor and is defined as the attribution of human features to animals, plants or inanimate objects. For Herzog, no such metaphorical transaction of expressive features to the natural world, be it animal or plant, seems legitimate. The animal is the absence of all meaning. For if the "blank stare" is able to speak, then only to indicate its own muteness and "indifference". As I pointed out with reference to research by Bradshaw, this assessment of the animal as devoid of any meaning or expression would seem doubtful from an ethological perspective. But even within Herzog's own work, the marginalization of the animal by reference to its lack of expression is less evident than it might seem. To elaborate on this point, the remaining part of this section will consider the role of the camera in both Treadwell's and Herzog's work.

As Herzog suggests, Treadwell held a fatal misconception. He did not realize that, instead of waiting for a big, furry, moving automaton to accept his tedious attempts at courtship, he could have pursued a probably less thrilling yet more dependable relationship: "Beyond his posings", Herzog states, "the camera was his omnipresent companion." (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:39:05). This notion of companionship with the camera also has consequences for the question of genre. According to Herzog, Treadwell's footage constitutes "something way beyond a wildlife film" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:37:36). In Herzog's terms, however, this "beyond" implies nothing but the irrelevance of "wildlife" altogether:3

<sup>2</sup> In his reading of *Grizzly Man*, James Goebel reaches a similar conclusion: "The "human" is no longer effectively or definitively marked off from the rest of the material world, but is constituted and de-constituted by it: animal, vegetable, and human occupy a shared plane of creatureliness, zones of exchange that attest to their porosity, openness, and vulnerability". See James Goebel. "Uncanny Meat". Caliban (Goebel 2016, p. 181). I try to reach beyond this interpretation in stressing the dynamic and lively aspects in this relationship.

<sup>3</sup> On several occasions, Herzog described his use of landscapes as externalized signs for inner visions, a transaction that critics frequently trace to German Romanticism: "For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest.

Treadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance, into a fog. What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear: that it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, into our nature (Grizzly Man 2005, 01:35:42).

While refusing an anthropomorphized view of the environment as overtly naive, Herzog refers to the notion of "wild nature" as the metaphorical vehicle for Treadwell's excessive inner states. Referring to the ragged surface of a glacier that is located some miles from Timothy's camp in the Alaskan backcountry, Herzog concludes "that this landscape in turmoil is a metaphor of his soul" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:57:42). Apart from its function as the material of signification, nature remains insignificant, without features. Both the slowly moving glacier and the forceful mammal might have a complex history of its own, its own story to tell, but for the moment this aspect remains in the background. It strikes me that this metaphorical conception of nature as designating human phenomena is not so different to the anthropomorphic view that Herzog rejects. Similar to Ishmael's projection of writing onto the white surface of Moby Dick's rugged skin, Herzog attributes any desired meaning to nature just as he does to Treadwell. At this point, a historical qualification seems to be warranted: When Herzog links the human environment that Treadwell is trying to escape from with "the same civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden and John Muir into the wild" (Grizzly Man 2005, 01:22:20), this historical analogy to American Transcendentalism seems equally true for Herzog's own conception of nature. When Ralph Waldo Emerson analyses the relationship between language and the tangible environment in his essay *Nature* from 1853, he refers to the structure of metaphor:

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thought? Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind (Emerson 1983, p. 24).

How, Emerson asks, can nature have significance apart from our language games and practices of interpretation? This question that "we cannot avoid", cannot be answered either, or so it seems. In a strange form of distraction, Emerson circles back to the assumption whose validity he wanted to contest: "the whole of nature is a metaphor".

But what the Transcendentalists could not have yet considered and Herzog cannot get around is the technical make-up of the camera and its relationship to the natural environment. Similar to Herzog's own tendency of prolonging scenes to a point when his interviewees visibly start feeling awkward and uneasy, Treadwell's material is most interesting to Herzog at exactly those transitory moments when a scene is already terminated, but the camera is still running and thereby creates a kind of surplus: "In his action movie mode, Treadwell probably did not realize that seemingly empty moments had a strange beauty. Sometimes images develop their own life, their own mysterious stardom" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:38:55). Here, Herzog's voice-over refers to a view of bushes and grass that are stirred by wind and rain. In an almost iconological way, this image recalls Siegfried Kracauer's *Theory of Film*. In a chapter entitled "A whole with a purpose" , he writes:

[F]or a film built from elements whose only raison d'être consists in implementing the (pre-established) "idea conception" at the core of the whole runs counter to

It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films". Quoted in: Laurie Johnson: "Werner Herzog's Romantic Spaces" *A Companion to Werner Herzog*, edited by Brad Prager (Johnson 2012, p. 511). See also Brad Prager. *The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth* (Prager 2007), especially chapter 3 "Mountains and Fog" .

the spirit of a medium privileged to capture "the ripple of leaves in the wind" (Kracauer 1960, pp. 221–22).

Emerson regards "the whole of nature" indeed as "a whole with a purpose," since it provides humans with the material to clothe their words and thoughts. By contrast, the technique of film introduces a different perspective. For Kracauer, the medium's unique potential lies in its ability to record the miniscule and seemingly insignificant, the purposeless manifoldness of the physical world that lies beyond the limits of narrative schemes and grand ideological frameworks. In this aspect, it differs fundamentally both from the genre of the novel and the drama, in which, according to Kracauer, every single element plays an integral part in the process of storytelling. In a similar way, Herzog seems to imply that it is exactly when the filmic stylization and well-wrought narration give way to unplanned moments of emptiness and quietude that not only Treadwell's recordings, but also the medium of film fulfill their own potential: An ephemeral grassy landscape in the middle of nowhere set in motion by wind and rain; foxes that surprisingly enter a scene in which Treadwell just completed his practiced monologue with the camera. The film offers the possibility of an excess that exceeds human narration. As Herzog puts it: "now the scene seems to be over but as a filmmaker sometimes things fall into your lap, which you couldn't expect, never even dream of." (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:24:22).

This is one of the decisive aspects of Treadwell's raw footage: Installed on a tripod, the camera constitutes an ambiguous, dynamic space that is habituated both by human and nonhuman agents. Treadwell's footage shows him, brown bears, and other animals within the same frame, sharing the same living space and at times, these fleeting moments constitute an almost geometrical choreography, a cycle of different life forms, as it can be seen in Figure 2. Here, Treadwell appears less as a transgressive intruder into a hostile realm of wild nature than as a part of an assemblage. This closeness does not necessarily imply a relationship of unconditional harmony. In the beginning of *Grizzly Man* there is an encounter with a bear that slowly trots towards the camera and eventually gets so close to it that the picture becomes blurred. Something is going wrong, but this becomes manifest only by the fact that Timothy suddenly loses his balance, gasps and almost drops the hand-held camera (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:04:34–00:04:42). In the sudden interruption, the seemingly transparent medium of filmic representation is stressed and thus becomes located as a part of the natural world that it tries to depict. As I would like to suggest, this kind of physical exposure slightly alters the image of nonhuman nature. In the immediate contact with the camera the animal leaves traces on the film and thus gains an autonomous, unruly presence, a possibly disturbing agency that counteracts any attempt to read it as a mere metaphor for cultural or psychological phenomena. Furthermore, this precarious interconnectedness also concerns the question of the film's genre. Principally, though for different reasons, Herzog is right when he claims that Treadwell's footage is "beyond a wildlife film". In the realistic aesthetics of the wildlife film, the camera seems to imitate a disembodied gaze with almost magical abilities: itself invisible, it sees everything and, while remaining distant, it discloses the natural world in every detail. This way, the view emerges of a self-contained, transcendent environment that is undisturbed by the presence of humans. However, as William Cronon has pointed out, when nature is defined by the absence of humans, and humans, accordingly, by the absence of nature, the idea of a fundamental difference between both realms is reinforced.<sup>4</sup> This view of the wilderness as sublime and untouched has problematic effects. Cronon writes that:

if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God's natural cathedral—then also by

<sup>4</sup> With regard to the aesthetics of nature documentaries Karla Armbruster makes a similar point: "They [nature documentaries] can also erase difference within nature by constructing it as a place without room for human beings, ultimately distancing humans from the non-human nature with which they are biologically and perceptually interconnected, and reinforcing the dominant cultural ideologies responsible for environmental degradation". See Karla Armbruster. "Creating the World We Must Save: The Paradox of Nature Television Documentaries". In: *Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature*, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels (Armbruster 1998, p. 221).

definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles (Cronon 1995, p. 81).

Granted, Treadwell's self image was constituted by the idea of (masculine) solitude and the absence of other human beings in a landscape that he refers to as the "sanctuary" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:09:49). By carrying a very situated and corporeal camera around with him, however, he creates an aesthetic form that disturbs the ideological view of an external realm of nature uncontaminated by human beings.

**Figure 2.** Bear, foxes, Timothy Treadwell.

How does this analysis relate to my initial question about the relationship between animal expressiveness and human narration? When Herzog emphasizes how Treadwell's images are able to "develop their own life, their own mysterious stardom" (Grizzly Man 2005, 00:38:55), he refers to a potentiality and vivacity of reality that lies beyond the control of the person that operates the camera. Drawing on Kracauer's considerations regarding ideology and film I would argue that the filmic gaze suspends a solely human perspective and narration and is able to open up new and quite lively possibilities of perception. When Treadwell's monologue with the camera is interrupted and he is shown amid the presence of bear, fox, and cub, the possibilities of different, non-human worlds can become accessible. Just as the images of the Alaskan grass landscapes can "develop their own life", they might give presence to differing forms of meaning-making. I think, for instance, of the semiotic network of trails and marked trees that configure the bear's material environment and thereby constitute a storied place as Thom van Dooren uses the term. The adjective "storied" refers to "the way in which places are interwoven with and embedded in broader histories and systems of meaning through ongoing, embodied, and inter-subjective practices of 'place making'" (Van Dooren 2014, p. 67). These practices of appropriation are not unique to human beings. Corresponding to its "invisibility" for untrained human perception, the system of trails and signs is part of a grass landscape that is only "seemingly empty", as Herzog puts it. Treadwell's footage therefore could be seen as the engagement with a particular place and how it is shaped and inhabited both by human and nonhuman beings. However, and as the following section will argue, this image of an entanglement across the borders of

seemingly different ontological realms is not necessarily limited to a notion of place, understood as a scene of dwelling. It can also be taken a step further and expanded to a global perspective.

#### **3. Whiteout**

Since Treadwell spent much of his time in Alaska alone, he oftentimes filmed himself talking to the camera or even filmed himself filming the environment. *Grizzly Man*, one could argue, is not least a meta-fictional film about the act of filming and bringing a camera to a place that is called the wilderness. Indeed, the triadic arrangement between human perception, technical recording device, and nonhuman nature has become a constant feature in Herzog's later work as a filmmaker, most notably in *Encounters at the End of the World* (2007), shot in Antarctica. The film title's plural form seems to be well chosen. In a rather loose sequence of appearances, *Encounters* shows the people that work and live in the surrounding of McMurdo Station, a United States research center on Ross Island, situated close to the mainland of Antarctica, that was established in 1955. Described by Herzog both as an "ugly mining town" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:09:16) and as coming "closest to what a future space settlement would look like" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 01:09:46), McMurdo is introduced as a place that oscillates between the banal and the unreal. Its inhabitants are ascribed an "intention to jump the margin of the map" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:11:23), as philosopher and forklift driver Stefan Pashov puts it at the film's beginning. Indeed, the quirky microcosm of mechanics, biologists, plumbers, glaciologists, volcanologists, physicists, and a seemingly somewhat out-of-place linguist seems to merge into the dreamlike. When Herzog interviews them in their respective working environments and fields of study, they all seem to struggle with phenomena of nature that exceed the means of a purely empirical approach and demand indirect means of representation such as the dream—or the film they are about to take a part in.

Therefore *Encounters* does more than show the sometimes peculiar proceedings of a remote research center within a seemingly barren and lifeless icescape. The film displays a particular curiosity for different ways of interaction and confrontation between humans and nature, including various animals that range from penguins, seals, starfish, and underwater crustaceans all the way to single-cell organisms. Furthermore, the film engages with complex natural systems and their inherent, stretched temporal scale such as drifting icebergs, volcanism, climate, and the impact that human civilization has on them. This way, a holistic view evolves of humans as entangled within a complex multitude of various life forms and material forces whose dynamic seems intractable. This depiction of nature as animate and elusive is emphasized by a distinctly self-reflexive form of representation that puts the camera, as it is used both in scientific and artistic contexts, into physical proximity with a more-than-human world.<sup>5</sup> The effect of this aesthetic is not only a defamiliarized image of the environment, but also of human observers and their spatial position in regard to nature. All inhabitants of McMurdo are required to participate in a two-day survival school, part of which is the "bucket-head whiteout scenario" that tries to imitate the meteorological conditions of a whiteout. In situations of severe snowfall or fog, conditions of visibility can be blurred to such an extent that any spatial orientation in regard to the corporeal outline of objects and the horizon becomes impossible; an experience that is understandably described as disconcerting and frightening. With some amusement, *Encounters* shows a hopelessly disoriented training group that gradually loses any orientation and is neither able to reach its supposed destination nor its point of departure (see Figure 3).

In other words, "whiteout" means the loss of one's self; a collapse between perceiving center and outer environment. At the same time "whiteout" is the name of a white correction fluid used to erase

<sup>5</sup> In this regard, I strongly disagree with readings that deny the relevance of nature for Herzog's *Encounters*, such as Reinhild Steingröver, who claims "that ultimately the subject of Herzog's nature films is not nature". See Reinhild Steingröver, "Encountering Werner Herzog at the End of the World." *A Companion to Werner Herzog*, edited by Brad Prager (Steingröver 2012, p. 467).

writing. A thick liquid, it blurs the borders between the written letter and its formless "environment", the blank page. In the previous Section 1 argued that *Grizzly Man* creates a lively space that is inhabited both by human and nonhuman life forms. As the following part of this paper suggests, *Encounters at the End of the World* both enlarges and intensifies this image of entanglement, as it situates human beings among the fluxes of various interacting ecosystems, the sum of which seems to constitute the earth system. In this whirl of various forces, Herzog's filmic approach to Antarctica creates the disorienting conditions of the whiteout-scenario in which the line between humans and their so called nonhuman environment starts to dissolve.

**Figure 3.** The "bucket-head whiteout scenario".

On its surface level, Antarctica is a quiet place. It is so quiet that, as the physiologist Regina Eiser remarks in *Encounters*, you can hear the sound of your own heart beating. This silence also enables an increased awareness for the sounds and voices that stem from underneath the ostensibly solid ground of the frozen Ross Sea, where seals swim and hunt for prey. The underwater soundscape is given extensive attention in the film, and in the next scene one of Eiser's colleagues euphorically describes the "chucks and the whistles and the booms [ ... ] which make you realize that there is a whole world underneath you" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:31:05). While underwater recordings of seals are playing, the biologists are seen lying down and putting their ears close to the ice—a scene that lasts over a minute within the film (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:31:17–00:32:27).

This rather uncomfortable *tableau vivant* manifests a literal freeze-frame of the human body (see Figure 4). The temporal continuity of the film is interrupted, the three figures are arrested in their movement and thus seem to embody the very act of attentive listening to the calls of the seals. The ice above the Ross Sea turns into the vast membrane of a loudspeaker, from which the sounds of a foreign and utterly strange world right underneath one's feet resound. Just like bears, seals are predators. However, they are depicted sinking elegantly into the deep like gentle and peaceful torpedoes. Eiser compares their calls to the music of Pink Floyd or even to a sound that originates rather from outer space than from organic nature.

**Figure 4.** Nutrition physiologists listening to seals.

More than anything else, the ensuing moment of strangeness seems to be the common denominator that keeps the film's different representations of animals together. This is particularly vivid when *Encounters* turns to another being that lives at the intersection between water and the mainland: the penguin. The engagement with this particular animal, however, is loaded with symbolic meaning since it also works as a commentary on the contemporary filmic representation of Antarctica. When, right at the beginning of *Encounters*, Herzog states that "I would not come up with another film about penguins" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:02:36), this is to be understood as a quite forward pun on Luc Jaqcuet's *March of the Penguins* from 2005. Jaqcuet depicts the life and reproductive cycle of the emperor penguin within a sublime and untouched ice landscape. Although this vision of Antarctica does not show any trace of human presence, including the film team, for some this absence seemed conspicuous. As critics have argued, *March* is about the very beings that are absent: humans. Framed by the sympathetic narrative voice of Morgan Freeman, the heartwarming story about the hardship and toil that penguins go through in bringing up their offspring was read as a stand-in for the nuclear family that makes up its main audience. Presented as a timeless and eternal cycle of life, it naturalizes a certain ideology of sexuality and society. Apart from Herzog's tendency towards self stylisation, his representation of the penguins differs indeed from Jaqcuet's "story [ ... ] about love." (March of the Penguins 2005, 00:03:18).<sup>6</sup> At first, when Herzog interviews the marine ecologist David Ainley in front of the object of his studies, a colony of penguins that he has been observing for years, the scene is reminiscent of the conventions of a wildlife film and its epistemological hierarchy. Ainley finds himself on a slightly elevated position from which the colony below can be observed. Herzog gently but perseveringly tries to undercut this frame and baffle the taciturn Ainley with an array of rather unusual questions. Asked about the possibility of insanity within the animal world, Ainley eventually points out that sometimes they "do become disoriented"

<sup>6</sup> As Jennifer Ladino describes the role of nature in *March of the Penguins*: "A stunningly beautiful Antarctic landscape provides the backdrop for the film's anthropomorphic tale of tradition, stability, and continuity. Morgan Freeman narrates the penguins' journey in terms that are alternately serious and humorous, but always pacifying and grandfatherly". See Jennifer K. Ladino. "For the Love of Nature: Documenting Life, Death, and Animality in *Grizzly Man* and *March of the Penguins*."(Ladino 2009, p. 54).

(Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 01:13:40) and after a cut the next scene shows a penguin stopping on the route between its colony and the feeding ground at the open sea and suddenly heading toward a mountain landscape in the distance, a place where it will have no chance to sustain itself. No explanation for this behavior is given; it remains incomprehensible. However, when the penguin is described as "disoriented", he becomes in fact quite similar to the humans that lose any orientation in the so called bucket-head whiteout scenario and whom Herzog describes as "drift[ing] completely off course" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:25:06). In other words, within the logic of *Encounters* there is no presupposed stable human perspective from which the actions of animals could be easily discarded as lacking expression or reason. While there is an apparent need to paint human physiognomies on the white bucket-heads, as seen in Figure 3, they are less expressive than the bear's alleged "blank stare". The structure of "whiteout" I am trying to describe is a blurring of distinct lines between inside and outside or even a form of reversal. While the communicative exchange among seals constitutes a "whole world" of signification, human beings seem to have lost a clear perspective.

This gradual dismantling between humans and their "environment" is intensified as Herzog quite explicitly considers the impact of human civilization on the seemingly timeless landscapes that he is filming and thus extends his approach to the realm of non-organic nature. In this context the introduction of the glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal is of particular importance since it begins right away with the account of a dream in which the sleeping scholar finds himself on top of his subject matter, the gigantic iceberg B15:

At night, lying in my bed here at McMurdo, I am again walking across the top of B15. Might as well be on a piece of the South Pole, but yet, I am actually adrift in the ocean, a vagabond drifting in the ocean and below my feet [ ... ] I can feel the rumble of the iceberg, I can feel the change, the cry of the iceberg, as it's screeching and as it's bouncing off the seabed, as it's steering the ocean currents, as it's beginning to move north, I can feel that sound coming up through the bottoms of my feet and telling me that this iceberg is coming north (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:13:15).

MacAyeal's recurring dream is about a primordial awakening. While he is sleeping, the iceberg transforms itself into a living being that moves its weary limbs and expresses its slowly increasing vigor in a series of sounds and calls that find their way from the ice into the human ear. As it becomes clear in the following scenes, this dream presents a means of understanding in its own right, with its own epistemological status. As MacAyeal points out, the heroic period of Antarctic exploration, shaped by figures like Amundsen, Scott and Shakleton, commonly conceived of Antarctica as "a static, monolithic environment" (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:17:05). Understood as the mere scenery for the drama of reaching the South Pole, an endeavor fueled by nationalistic pride and colonial striving, the unmarked ice landscape functioned as a blank field on which the human was able to inscribe its designs and ideology. In this view, Antarctica appears as a featureless object that can be crossed and thereby symbolically conquered. Its structure thereby bears similarities to the whiteness of the whale, that can be used to "symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing" (Melville 1983, p. 997), and the bear's "blank stare" that functions in a similar way.

As I argued at the beginning of this section, whiteout erases human writing. In the sped-up sequence of satellite images that MacAyeal points at, the environment of Antarctica is not seen as a mere object of signification but as an agent. Of course the nature of climatic changes manifests such a large temporal and spatial scale that it cannot be perceived from a singular point in time and space. Almost invisible in real time, the slow changes of climate and the movement of the icebergs need forms and media of visualization, such as the accelerated rate of the satellite images. Seen from this unusual perspective, Antarctica becomes increasingly defamiliarized and uncanny. The frozen and barren landscape does not present itself as a stable and unchanging entity but as a complex and living system in which human beings are not the exclusive origin of agency and meaning. The iceberg's movements become animated and reality itself has become dreamlike:

Now our comfortable thought about Antarctica is over," Douglas continues. "Now we're seeing it as a living being, it's dynamic, it's producing change. Change that it's broadcasting to the rest of the world. Possibly in response to what the world is broadcasting down to Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World 2008, 00:17:15).

Here, Antarctica is depicted in a reciprocal, productive interplay of various subsystems such as climate, cryosphere, ocean currents, and the landmasses. The earth seems to display a functional interaction and thus exhibits similarities to Donna Haraway's terms of sympoiesis or holobiont. In continuity of the model of symbiosis as a mutual dependency of different life forms, sympoiesis understands relationships as the basic and irreducible structure of natural phenomena. Unlike symbiosis as a form of mutual dependency or advantage, the notion of *poeisis* emphasizes the productive and constantly evolving aspect of such a relationship.7 Haraway writes:

I use holobiont to mean symbiotic assemblages, at whatever scale of space and time, which are more like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems, than like the entities of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc.) (Haraway 2016, p. 60).

However, Haraway does not limit her model to a distant realm called nature or the environment but understands human agents as an integral part of sympoietic processes, a fact that is made prominent by her use of the term "natureculture". In fact, a surprisingly similar view is expressed by MacAyeal's remarks on Antarctica that he describes as "a living being" that sends and receives data to and from "the rest of the world". What is so remarkable about his statement is not only the changed understanding of nature as an active agent, but also its articulation in terms of a radio or television transmission. While Herzog's Fitzcarraldo steadfastly blared his opera recording of Enrico Caruso into the jungle, this unidirectional relation has changed into the rhetorical structure of a chiasmus. The iceberg and its stirrings not only affect the complex interplay of ocean currents, water temperatures, and the meteorological patterns of the atmosphere, but its voice also affects the receiving set of Herzog's film. This emphasis on the technical media of recording is telling because ultimately *Encounters* is, again, also a film about filming and how the medium of film is related to other media used in the depiction and understanding of the environment. When Herzog accompanies a group of volcanologists to Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island that reaches an altitude of almost 4000 m, the crater is completely covered in clouds and fog. But apart from the scientists that heave their material through the unreal scenery of fog, snow and rocks, particular attention is paid to the cameras, microphones and other technical devices that are installed at the rim of the crater and point into the abyss. Similar to Timothy Treadwell who filmed himself filming the Alaskan wilderness, Herzog directs his camera at cameras that are designed to monitor the environment in Antarctica (see Figure 5).

<sup>7</sup> Bruno Latour, among other theorists, has broadened the notion of agency so that it includes nonhuman animals, entities and processes. See for instance Bruno Latour (Latour 2005). *Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.* Oxford: Oxford University Press. This conceptualization of agency does not necessarily entail the attributes of self-consciousness, free will, or reasoning, but constitutes rather a deflated account of agency that does not presuppose intentionality. As a consequence, his position has become the object of criticism. For instance, Bob Carter and Nickie Charles point out that his model of nonhuman agency deludes the notion of agency to a point where it starts becoming useless: "since every thing has agency, and agency is the ability to have an effect, we arrive at the banal conclusion that everything affects everything else in some way or another". See Bob Carter and Nickie Charles. "Animals, Agency and Resistance." (Carter and Charles 2013, p. 328) This is a fair point to make. In the context of this paper I cautiously use the term of agency with regard to natural processes in order to emphasize their relevance and dynamics with regard to human beings.

**Figure 5.** A camera pointed into the crater of Mount Erebus.

This depiction of the camera enshrouded in mist and fog alludes to the whiteout scenario that *Encounters* introduces at its beginning but it can also be read as a commentary on the general position of the human observer towards nature as a subject of study. Throughout the film, the viewer watches ecologists listening to seals, studying penguins and other sea animals, glaciologists measuring the movements of the allegedly eternal ice, and geologists reconstructing the history of volcanic activity. In Herzog's take on these configurations, the attempt at translating natural phenomena into a human sign system is never entirely successful or complete; humans are not placed in a privileged and distanced epistemic or aesthetic position from which they can comprehend and contemplate the sublime wonders of nature.<sup>8</sup> Just as the camera is enshrouded in mist, humans and their natural environment become so entangled with each other that the presupposition of a center loses its meaning.

This study began with the question of how animals and, on a larger scale, nonhuman nature, could become present as independent sources of agency and narrative energy, maybe even as narrative instances in their own right, with their own perspectives and their own story to tell. Since Herzog is not relying on animation, the films in question do not reverse the hierarchy between narrating human and narrated animal in a literal sense—a structure I outlined in the beginning through the relationship between Ishmael and the white whale. Herzog does not try to stage an imaginary entrance into the consciousness or subjective perspective of animals, not to speak of inorganic forces. Nevertheless, both *Grizzly Man* and *Encounters at the End of the World* focus on a range of various animals like bears, foxes, seals, penguins and sea animals, and they consider larger natural phenomena such as climatic and geological processes that develop their own irreducible physical presence and cannot be considered as mere background phenomena for the story of human individuals. As has become clear at several points of the analysis, this conception of nature as an active and autonomous force is not necessarily a comforting notion. Herzog's gaze shows a human body that is entangled with dynamic

<sup>8</sup> In a similar way, Laura McGavin reads *Encounters* as a "nonanthropocentric vision of Antarctica as a complexly alive environment where single-celled organisms, Wedel seals, forklift operators, subatomic particles, PhD dropouts, and volcanic magma actively intermingle." Laura McGavin. "Terra Incognita." *Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment* (McGavin 2013, p. 53). However, McGavin seems less interested in the various media of recording and representation that Herzog portrays in *Encounters*.

nonhuman agencies, and both films linger on resulting moments of incomprehension, disorientation, and physical danger.

The lack of distance between human and nonhuman agents emerges also on a medial level. Both films explore forms of representation that indeed reach "beyond a wildlife film", as Herzog puts it in regard to Timothy Treadwell's work. As I pointed out in my analysis of *Grizzly Man*, the conventions of the wildlife film tend to obscure the physical presence of the camera and the mere fact of filmic representation remains mostly hidden; a strategy often associated with the rhetoric of unmediated realism.<sup>9</sup> By contrast, Herzog's gaze is not a disembodied view from nowhere. *Grizzly Man* and *Encounters* employ a purposefully self-reflexive way of representation and go to great lengths to emphasize and display the different technological media that are used to record and visualize their respective environments: Treadwell's video recordings of the brown bears, the soundtrack of the hunting and swimming seals, furthermore the sped-up depiction of floating icebergs in fast-motion, and the video recordings of the volcanic crater of Mount Erebus. Finally, it is also Herzog's own camera and his way of figuration that are alluded to by the various cameras that appear on the screen. In a meta-hermeneutical meditation on human's epistemic and medial stance, both *Grizzly Man* and *Encounters at the End of the World* take a step back and ask about the different ways of narration and representation by means of which the human is trying to make sense of nature. The effect is a defamiliarized image of the human observer and his spatial position in regard to nature but also of nonhuman animals. As a common feature of the various animals that have been introduced in this essay, they all seem to disturb or interrupt human forms of narrative signification and use the resulting gaps in order take on an autonomous and expressive status. While Melville's white whale eludes the attempts of representation or translation, Treadwell's camera shows human and nonhuman animals in a dynamic relationship that is not controlled by the human operator. In a similar way, yet with a more global perspective, *Encounters* situates the human in a vast system of natural processes, a situation I brought into connection with the semantic ambiguity of the whiteout. Representing both the erasure of human writing and the dissolution of corporeal lines in meteorological conditions of severe snow and fog, it can also be understood as an aesthetic form that attempts to leave behind the limits of an anthropocentric perspective on nonhuman nature. In my view, Werner Herzog's work can be understood as walking in this whiteout.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Armbruster, Karla. 1998. Creating the World We Must Save: The Paradox of Nature Television Documentaries. In *Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature*. Edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels. London and New York: Zed Books, pp. 218–38.

Armstrong, Philip. 2008. *What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity*. London: Routledge.

Ayoub, Nadine. 2014. Autriche—Des "Vaches-Tueuses" Dans Les Alpages. *Arte.tv*. September 10. Available online: https://info.arte.tv/fr/autriche-des-vaches-tueuses-dans-les-alpages (accessed on 9 November 2017).

Bradshaw, Gay A. 2017. *Carnivore Minds. Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are*. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Carter, Bob, and Nickie Charles. 2013. Animals, Agency and Resistance. *Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour* 43: 322–40. [CrossRef]

Chris, Cynthia. 2006. *Watching Wildlife*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

<sup>9</sup> See Cynthia Chris. *Watching Wildlife* (Chris 2006, p. 71): "The preference for unpeopled landscapes also bolsters an implicitly positivist belief in the veracity of direct observation, that is, in the camera's capacity to represent reality. [ ... ] In other words, rather than relationships, conflictual or otherwise, between natural environment and human society, the strategy of minimizing human presence in wildlife films seems to invite viewers to forget that their view on nature is mediated, even as the very act of nature spectatorship underscores its distance and unfamiliarity".

Cronon, William. 1995. The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In *Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature*. Edited by William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 69–90.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. *Essays and Lectures*. Edited by Joel Porte. New York: The Library of America.

*Encounters at the End of the World*. 2008. Directed by Werner Herzog. New York: Discovery/THINKfilm.

Goebel, James. 2016. "Uncanny Meat". Caliban. *French Journal for English Studies* 55: 170–90.

*Grizzly Man*. 2005. Directed by Werner Herzog. Santa Monica: Lions Gate Entertainment.


Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. *Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality*. New York: Oxford University Press.


*March of the Penguins*. 2005. Directed by Luc Jaquet. Burbank: Warner Independent Pictures.


Van Dooren, Thom. 2014. *Flight Ways: Life at the Edge of Extinction*. New York: Colombia University Press.

© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Barking at Heaven's Door: Pluto Mehra in the Hindi Film** *Dil Dhadakne Do*

#### **Alessandra Consolaro**

Department of Humanities, University of Turin, via Giulia di Barolo 3/a, Turin 10124, Italy; alessandra.consolaro@unito.it

Academic Editor: Joela Jacobs Received: 15 December 2016; Accepted: 3 April 2017; Published: 7 April 2017

**Abstract:** In this article, I discuss the representation of pets in the 2015 commercial Hindi comedy-drama (commonly known as Bollywood) *Dil Dhadakne Do* (DDD), which translates to Let the Heart Beat; this is the first ever case of a Hindi movie having a dog as a narrator. For centuries, Indian animal tales have had a habit of anthropomorphizing, but generally narratives about dogs uphold the basic prejudice that they are polluting and degraded animals. DDD introduces a dog named Pluto Mehra, not only as a pet, but as the fifth member of the Mehra family, with the role of the *sutradhaar* (storyteller, narrator) who recounts the story of a rich, dysfunctional family. Pluto knows the Mehras' foibles and follies, and he is the only voice of reason among them. A generational shift in one's outlook towards pets has taken place in the Indian middle classes: pets are no longer perceived as animals that must serve some purpose, but are actually considered to be equal members of the family, even becoming a statement of style for pet owners. I analyze this attitude reversal toward animals within the context of a globalized economy and consumerist ideology.

**Keywords:** Hindi cinema; Bollywood; speaking animals; animal narrator; human-animal studies; world literature

#### **1. Pluto Mehra and His Humans**

Brutality and benevolence and cruelty and compassion are contrasts that have marked the relationship between humans and dogs [1], and also the history of India. For centuries, Indian animal tales have had a habit of anthropomorphizing, but generally narratives about canines uphold the basic prejudice that dogs are polluting and degraded animals, for they are stigmatized as scavengers and eaters of carrion. Most caste-minded Hindus consider them execrable, in the same way that Jews and Muslims abhor pigs. Dogs are often used as a symbol for the people who are disparagingly termed 'dog-cookers' in Sanskrit texts—Dalits, formerly called Untouchables, and Adivasis, the so-called tribal peoples ([2], pp. 71–113).

A number of figurines of dogs wearing collars, which likely signifies domestication, have been found at Harappa and at other Indus sites [3]. In Indian mythology, Indra's divine bitch Sarama is the ancestor of all other dogs ([4], pp. 67–83), and the Vedic gods Indra, Yama and Rudra were associated with dogs. Nevertheless, in this corpus, the dog seems to be of little importance and in later literature too, the animal is rarely presented as a pet ([5], p. 296–97; [6], pp. 36, 196). The only major exception is a passage in the great epic *Mahabharata*, showing Yudhishthira as being more prepared to renounce celestial bliss than to abandon a dog that has devoutly followed him all the way to heaven's door. As it turns out, however, the animal is not a real dog but Dharma in the form of a dog. So, in the end "no dog gets into heaven" ([7], pp. 494–95).

Even in colonial India the status of dogs was very low. When the British left, dogs and Indians were not allowed in most clubs ([8], pp. 42, 135), a discriminatory practice that upper caste Indians applied to temples with regard to these animals and to Dalits. With the exception of a few royals and scattered hunting tribes, Indians have not traditionally been a dog-loving people. However, the colonizers used to keep dogs as pets, and this practice spread among the colonized people, from a desire to emulate those in power. In any case, even today, in India 'dog' is a swearword, and people who tend animals, who touch human waste, or who are leather workers are often referred to as dogs.

Animals with linguistic abilities are often seen as a useful tool for the education of children and the illiterate [9]. Yet Walt Disney's global success shows that even intelligent and educated adults succumb to the charm of tales whose main characters are animals, conveying—overt or covert—religious, philosophical, or scientific messages. In South Asia there has been a longstanding tradition of 'human-animal ventriloquism', and the setting of a collection of stories where it occurs, such as the *Panchatantra*, the *Jataka-*s, or the *Hitopadesha*, indicates that they were directed at children or simple folk. How humans write the thoughts and speech of animals in literature tells us a lot about how we represent and construct ourselves [10]. Literary representations of animal minds reveal a great deal about how humans think about animals, and what the consequences of that thinking is. Animal stories in Indian narrative tradition cannot be taken merely as fairy tales for the entertainment of children, for they often promote a particular ideology: wisdom and knowledge coming from unexpected and extraordinary sources can be a more effective tool of social control and instruction than learned discourses and sermons [11].

The bond between animals and humans, especially dogs, has been well explored by many filmmakers and a rich literature has investigated dog narrators that appear in several Hollywood or European films [12–18]. Yet, even if animals have been part of the cast of a few popular Hindi films, the academic investigation of this phenomenon is not well-developed. In the 'golden age' of Raj Kapoor, the underdog protagonist's meeting with a dog in *Awaara* (1951) is a Chaplinesque sentimental representation of the 'degradation' shared by dogs and some humans. Raj Kapoor's autobiographical drama *Mera Naam Joker* (1970) had a mongrel in the concluding chapter, acting as the medium through which the protagonist befriends a woman; they form a street circus team until the dog is rudely grabbed into a municipality van meant to capture the stray population.

Dogs in Hindi cinema have been associated with various forms of justice and often animals are shown uniting a family or identifying villains. For example, this happens in *Sachaa Jhutha* (1970), *Noorie* (1979) and *Teri Meherbaniyan* (1985); in both latter films, the pet dogs even take revenge for their masters' death. In *Mard* (1985), there is an instance of a dog taking a political stance: the protagonist Raju (superstar Amitabh Bachchan) crashes into a "Windsor Club"—that exhibits the signboard "Dogs and Indians Are Not Allowed" at the entrance—together with his dog, who will make a definite literal statement by urinating on the face of a British colonial oppressor. If pets can see through the masked appearances of the villains in *Khoon Bhari Maang* (1988), the paranormal film *Maa* (1992) has a pet dog that can see ghosts. Pets in *Parivaar* (1987) can even drive a car, and Tuffy, the dog in *Hum Apke Hain Kaun* (1994), not only guards the groom's sandals during the wedding, but also umpires cricket matches and can even receive divine messages from Lord Krishna. A poignant story about children's love for their pets can be found in *Halo* (1996) or *Chillar Party* (2011). Dogs in Hindi films can be millionaire heirs, like the protagonist of *It's Entertainment!* (2014), or the reincarnation of an ancestor, such as in *Bol Radha Bol* (1992).

None of the dogs mentioned in this—non-exhaustive—list is a talking animal. Hollywood films such as *Marmaduke* (2010) and *Love the Coopers* (2015) are family dramas which privilege a star voice-over to provide a dog's perspective on family life. However, in the Hindi cinematic field we find only one animated film, *Roadside Romeo* (2008), showing a talking dog voiced by Saif Ali Khan; this is a human story transposed onto animated dog characters about an abandoned dog who is trying to rebuild his life on the streets. In 2015, the commercial Hindi comedy-drama *Dil Dhadakne Do* (DDD) [19]; directed by Zoya Akhtar and produced by Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar, story and screenplay by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, for the first time in Hindi cinema, introduced a dog not

only as a pet, but as a full-fledged family member, with the role of the *sutradhaar*<sup>1</sup> of a dysfunctional family's drama. Pluto Mehra is the fifth member of the Mehra family, knows the Mehras' foibles and follies, and is the only voice of reason among them.

In this article, I endorse the concept that popular culture, and commercial cinema with it, are serious objects of critical inquiry and they provide a space where the construction and reconstruction of meaning can take place. I am going to consider Bollywood's relationship with human's best friend and discuss the role that Pluto Mehra plays in the family drama, analyzing it within the context of a subtle development in the global economy, as a result of which India has the fastest growing dog population in the world and a thriving pet care industry. Dog ownership can be seen as an economic indicator: India is the world's second-most populous country, but since it is still largely rural and poor, it has one of the world's lowest rates of dog ownership. As incomes rise, some people can afford to have pets for the first time. The generational shift in the attitude towards pets is evident: from being perceived as animals that must serve some purpose to now being seen as equal members of the family. This trend manifests in the increased number of pets acquired, a higher awareness of the dietary needs of pets, the adoption of more professional grooming services, and more services offered for animal care in general. On a macro level, as countries develop, new industries (such as dog shows, puppy hotels, etc.) develop around dog care and pampering.

Introducing DDD, I will focus on the character of Pluto Mehra, the voice of the narrator that watches the events happening around him and presents to the audience the differences between a mute animal and a social (human) animal. The film begins by introducing us to the dysfunctional Mehra family. Kamal Mehra (Anil Kapoor) is a Punjabi, Delhi-based millionaire in plastic manufacturing, who never misses an opportunity to boast about his self-made business. His wife Neelam (Shefali Shah) is totally neglected by him, and spends her life socializing with her friends, hiding her dissatisfaction through overeating, and dropping wicked, sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek one-liners. Their lives are actually separate, as there are endless differences between them, but in the public sphere they pretend that they are the 'best couple', because their whole world revolves around their anxiety about other people's opinions. The Mehras have a daughter, Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra), who is a successful entrepreneur and the owner of an extremely lucrative online travel portal, listed by Forbes magazine. She has inherited her father's acute business acumen, but because of patriarchal norms, this remains neglected, and leadership of the family business has been forced on her younger brother, 25-year-old, carefree Kabir Mehra (Ranveer Singh). Kabir loves flying and dreams of becoming a pilot, but his parents insist he must take over the management of AYKA industries.

It is at this point, 14 minutes into the film, that the audience discovers that the voice-over of the narrator is actually that of Pluto Mehra, who we had glimpsed briefly earlier ([19], 8:30), when he was introduced as, "Pluto is our doggie...brother" and "Pluto is our brother" by his human siblings Ayesha and Kabir ([19], 11:53). This Bullmastiff is the fifth member of the Mehra family. The loyal pet's autobiographical account clarifies the moral, emotional and social gap between the human protagonists and the animal, who states that "if anybody is normal in this family, it's me!" ([19], 14:15).

The plot takes place over a period of one week, when a group of friends, colleagues and family members get together to celebrate the Mehra's thirtieth wedding anniversary, in a journey that will forever change the balance of the family. The luxury cruise in Europe is, in fact, a screen to hide the imminent bankruptcy of the Mehra's company. When hardened opportunists Kamal and Neelam Mehra discover that their company AYKA is not just running at a loss, but is also losing its credibility and reputation for integrity in the market, they convert their anniversary celebration into an attempt at matchmaking between their son Kabir and young Noori Sood (Ridhima Sud), who has recently broken off her engagement to another man. Noori is the only daughter of wealthy Lalit Sood (Parmeet

<sup>1</sup> In classical Sanskrit theatre, the *sutradhaar* is the one who creates a coherent narrative by acting as producer, narrator, storyteller, director, and even manipulator of the performance.

Sethi), and the Mehras hope that her father will invest in their company despite a longstanding rivalry, to secure her a groom and restore the family honor. They do not reveal their plan to Kabir, but simply invite the Soods on their cruise, where they confront their bitter enemies, the Khannas. Once on board the ship, the Mehras' lives begin to change. Kamal's career is heading towards failure, and he and his wife can barely tolerate each other. Ayesha is fed up with her marriage and wants a divorce, as she realizes that she can no longer pretend to love her dominating, egotistical husband Manav (Rahul Bose) when she has found true love with her childhood friend, journalist Sunny Gill (Farhan Akhtar), the son of Kamal's loyal manager Amrish Gill (Ikhlaque Khan). Ayesha and Sunny meet on the cruise after a long separation that was caused by Ayesha's parents who did not appreciate the growing intimacy between both youngsters, as Sunny does not belong to their social milieu. Kabir falls madly in love with the London-based Muslim artiste Farah Ali (Anushka Sharma), and begins to rebel. Meanwhile, many more private matters and family secrets are being exposed. Will the Mehra family be able to deal with the situation? I am not going to spoil the ending. My main interest here is to discuss the role that Pluto Mehra plays in the family drama, which I will do in the next section.

#### **2. A Cynical View of Life**

Apparently, director Zoya Akhtar initially wanted to call the dog Plato, after the Greek philosopher. However, she felt that no one would understand the connection and settled for Pluto instead [20]. The reference to one of the six biggest stars of the Walt Disney cartoon is clear. Interestingly enough, unlike most Disney characters, Pluto the Pup is not anthropomorphic: he does not speak or walk upright, but acts like an ordinary dog. By contrast, despite being of the same species as Pluto, another dog, Goofy, is completely anthropomorphized and behaves like a human. This marks Pluto the Pup as a household pet among other non-human animals, who are dressed as humans ([21], pp. 10–11, 20). Pluto Mehra does not disrupt the recognizable narrative either, which remains as if it were reality. In the film, Pluto Mehra does not actually speak to other characters, but only vocalizes in barks. His comments are addressed to the audience, and within the plot he is firmly positioned as a pet, showing no magical or hyperreal element. This means that DDD is not an animal fable, even though his unexpected role as *sutradhaar* places Pluto Mehra within a more general narrative pattern, where wisdom and knowledge come from unpredictable and extraordinary sources, which can be traced back to the Upanishad corpus ([11], p. 19).

DDD is a commercial movie, and it is not advisable to seek the depth and complexity that can be found in tales of famous talking animals in literature [22–28]. Pluto's philosophizing should not be expected to be too profound, as the film is meant primarily to entertain. Nevertheless, Pluto Mehra is characterized as a philosopher who separates his identity from the other characters and has original opinions, different from those accepted in the society in which he lives. Zoya's father Javed Akhtar, one of the most renowned writers in Bollywood, penned the lines for Pluto-the-wise-dog, and superstar Aamir Khan provided the voice. Pluto is very interested in observing human nature and has his own take on everything. His comments are social satire dealing with problems like patriarchy, gender discrimination, individual freedom and social normativity. This is not new in Hindi movies. The novelty lies in the use of the talking-dog motif to illuminate philosophical thought regarding human differences, with an intensely real, intrinsically 'adult' animal character articulating many sharp observations about relationships and life.

As Erica Fudge has shown in her work, "dogs offer writers a way to think about human stability" ([29], p. 11). If one tries to define what kind of philosopher-dog Pluto is, Pluto's philosophical musings are cynical, insofar as they both express a dog-positioned philosophy and are in the spirit of ancient or classical cynicism. Of course, this requires a refusal of the binary 'West and the rest' as well as the Orientalist and nationalist discourse about the purity of ancient Indian civilization. Present-day culture in India can only be understood as a complex result of centuries of cultural exchange; the elite middle classes are often more acquainted with Euro-American educational models than with local ones [30]. In this view, Pluto contraposes what can be defined as classical cynicism to

the cynical (in the present acceptation of this word) lifestyle of contemporary, increasingly neocapitalist Indian society. If we consider the etymological meaning of the Greek term *κυνικóς* ('doglike', the adjectival form of the ancient Greek word for dog, *κ*ύ*ων*), the fact that a talking canine, as an outside observer, makes "cynical observations on the foibles of human nature" is not surprising ([31], p. 114). Theodore Ziolkowski's masterful historical summary of the motif of the "philosophical dog" provides examples from classical antiquity, from the European literary tradition, and from modern fiction of Europe and the Americas. He concludes that the "philosophical dog is still being used for the purposes of cynical social comment," in forms that have transformed the original conventions through "inversions" and "deformations." ([31], p. 122).

In the present acceptation, 'cynic' often has a negative association with Machiavellianism, nihilism and pessimism. According to this kind of cynicism, self-interest is the only driving force in human relations: people crave only attention and power and, when they get these, use them to their own and their allies' advantage. In this view, humans are unscrupulous, greedy, materialistic, manipulative and hypocritical individuals; there is no public good or universal standard of morality, only personal good. For this kind of cynic, even if he claims to be otherwise and pretends to be acting out of any idealistic motive, a sense of right or of duty, or passions such as love, honor, piety, is simply a liar. This kind of person is merely hiding their egoism behind attractive phrases and is cheating others with the appearance of respectability and a cunning manipulation of ideals. Yet, as William Desmond shows, this conviction does not hold regarding ancient cynics. Pessimism about human motivation is a trait they share with contemporary cynics. However, ancient cynics believed that human beings are basically good and were optimistic regarding human nature: the superfluous artificialities of 'civilization' may have led humans to adopt bad habits and social behaviors, but this is similar to a temporary illness. The cure to regain natural goodness and happiness is a little satire, a good dose of frugality (εὐτέλεια), a shameless flouting of social conventions, simplification of one's lifestyle, and a renewed sense of living in the present moment ([32], pp. 2–3; [33], p. 16).

Pluto's observations on the human race sound like edifying clues that he presents to the audience, with the goal of showing the path to real happiness. By comparison, Farhan Akhtar's (Zoya's brother) dialogue for the rest of the characters is more witty and entertaining. DDD causes debate among the audience, insofar as it discusses gender and family issues that are very important in present day India, advocating that young people should be given more freedom in their choices regarding their career and partner. It addresses key factors that influence marriages and sexual relations, such as respect for family, reverence for the wisdom of elders, transmission of 'Indian values,' family honor, social and community standing, expectations of family, and gender roles. In this context, Pluto's commentary has a crucial role in upsetting commonly accepted norms.

Pluto's first musing comes at the very beginning of the film. He stresses the difference between humans and other animals regarding the notion of time, pointing out human inconsistency and strangeness. In fact, while "time just flows for the rest of the animals," "human beings divide it into years, months, days and make calendars" and celebrate birthdays and other special occasions so that they "take a U-turn and come back each year" ([19], 03:10–04:55) (all translations from Hindi are the author's). In subsequent 'dialogues,' Pluto confirms Alice Kuzniar's observation that "it is most often about language and communication that the canine philosopher broods" ([34], p. 57). A sequence shows Kabir having lunch with his parents, who start quarreling about Neelam's right to dispose of her share in the family company, with Kamal throwing in her face the fact that she has this money only because he earned it, totally overlooking her support to him when he was a young, penniless entrepreneur ([19], 16:08–19:20). While the visual shows them shouting and arguing, Pluto comments: "Human beings are blessed with language. It is a gift that enables them to clearly express their thoughts, ideas and emotions. But the irony is that, in spite of this power, the acute lack of understanding between them will not be found in mute animals. If there can be so much misunderstanding in one nuclear family, how can one even hope for world peace?" ([19], 18:40–19:19). Later, he comments on the human incapacity to communicate and to express feelings in a genuine way ([19], 2:28:02–2:28:30), leaving

the most important things unsaid: "the things they say to someone are often meant for someone else. And the conversation they shy away from most is that of the heart, of love. Yet that is the only thing that matters! Now, how can one explain to them that if you love someone, just show it!" ([19], 2:00:00–2:00:41).

The need to eschew social conventions in order to regain a more 'natural' way of living is reinforced in the comments where Pluto emphasizes the animality of human beings. Mating, for example, starts with rituals. Commenting on the first meeting of Kabir and Farah, in a deserted swimming pool at night, Pluto describes the invisible conversation they have: they don't exchange a word, but "at the start of a new love story, one doesn't really need speech." "The eyes talk...the body communicates;" "you see someone, a chemical reaction is triggered in the brain, blood rushes faster through the veins, a tingling sensation passes through the body...So, your heartbeat increases." Both humans are swimming as if performing a love dance: "When he comes here, she goes there." And Pluto's final comment is: "Even we play such games in the beginning" ([19], 36:30–39:13).

Yet in human society, and particularly in the Indian setting where the Mehras happen to live, "mating" has become a very complicated issue. Although the movie is set in the exclusive ambience of a millionaires' cruise, when it comes to selection of a partner and family life, the problems of the élite seem to be quite middle class. The boys are not proving worthy enough, the girls are raring to break through the glass ceiling, and the previous generation is holding on to some obsolete and hypocritical notion of values and morality. In Pluto's view, the root of this evil is in a wrong training system for human infants: "We animals also train our young. A lioness teaches her cubs to hunt. A pigeon teaches her squabs to fly. But once they've grown up, they are on their own. Indian parents somehow can't accept that their offspring are capable enough to live life on their own terms. [ ... ] They remain involved in their children's lives way longer than required [ ... ] But can a leopard change its spots? Do what you like, the kids [ ... ] will follow their own instinct" ([19], 43:45–45:11). Throughout the film, Pluto's comments as well as the plot development seem to imply that generational shift and cultural change are crucial to solving these problems.

In order to understand the impact that such statements could have on the Indian audience, one should keep in mind that marriage in India is generally not aimed at satisfying passion, but is rather considered a life-long economic security system which parents alone can arrange [35]. Marriage is treated as the joining of two families, a strategic alliance rather than a mere union of two individuals, and the couple's preference has a lower priority than the family as a whole [36]. The custom of arranging marriages is commonly associated with South Asia, but it is difficult to find a definition for a constantly changing set of practices, although some customs are generally associated with the following: elder relatives and/or a matchmaker look for a spouse from a 'good family' and check caste and financial situation; horoscopes are matched; the man's family comes to tea to 'see the girl;' the dowry is set, etc. [37]. Yet there is a whole range of arrangements, from those where the young people never meet before marriage and are merely informed about the family's decision to have them marry, to the self-arranged marriage where the young people make sure that the potential partner fulfils all the criteria set by the family [38]. Free choice is recognized in modern law and legislation on marriages, but the burden of custom associated with the perpetuation of the caste system works firmly against it. Nevertheless, the condition of modernity, represented by the presence of law, rights, and state, changes in the political economy, and the emergence of urban cultures significantly different from rural cultures, are factors that have opened up a space for possible aspirations for change in private lives.

Social and family pressure to get married is extremely strong, and any newly wedded couple must face pressure for normative compulsory hetero-reproduction in the demand for an immediate pregnancy, as a child is "the emblem of futurity's unquestioned value" ([39], p. 4). This intensifies gender discrimination, as women are expected to concentrate on domestic life and renounce any other ambition. Pluto reflects on this issue, and denounces the patriarchal norm according to which "the tradition of our nation is that after marriage the daughter belongs to another family. The son could have

umpteen marriages; he will always remain our own" ([19], 07:10–08:58). In DDD, Ayesha Mehra "was married and shipped off" to Mumbai at the age of 21, but she is resilient: contrary to all expectations, she did not immediately produce an heir for her husband's family and, while her husband pressures her to try in vitro fertilization, she is secretly on the pill. Refusing to accept her prescribed role as acquiescent wife and nurturing mother, she sells off her jewels and sets up her own business, an online travel portal that soon becomes the second biggest in the market. Pluto comments that "just like her father, she too is self-made. The difference is, she doesn't say it." Pluto contrasts Ayesha's understated and unrecognized achievements to her father's much-boasted-about, bullying and aggressive success: "Mr. Mehra is referred to as a self-made man. One wonders that if people can make themselves...then why don't they make themselves a little better? But what can one do? These days, 'better' is not defined by intelligence, honesty or courage but by something else. It has to do with something called money" ([19], 03:10–04:55).

Money is the key to obtaining respect and recognition in society. One of the attractive perks of becoming rich is the access to polite and refined society, but here is how Pluto describes social etiquette: "They say dogs have a strong sense of smell. But when it comes to sniffing out trouble, humans aren't far behind. Not only do they anticipate danger in advance, they even plan their response to it. Ironically, the biggest threat to a human being is another human being. To shield themselves, they change their color to suit their environment. And they become a bit like chameleons." When we see two rival businessmen shaking hands, we know that "in reality, it is a show of strength. Their wives are exchanging smiles but it is a baring of fangs. Their children have been instructed to keep a distance, but are actually sizing each other up. [ ... ] Pretension is a purely human trait. When others do it, people call it hypocrisy. And when they do it themselves, they call it worldliness" ([19], 26:47–28:22).

DDD's plot shows the Mehras progressively understanding and accepting Pluto's values and ideas, and concludes with a reunited Mehra family sailing away on a life raft with Pluto commenting: "My whole family has been rescued. I had never seen them this happy and headed in the same direction before. They say a leopard can't change its spots but man has the power to change. Now look at my own family. Today they've learnt that love, alone, is not enough. If you love someone, you have to set them free. Free to be, free to live differently. Every heart beats to its own rhythm. Let every heart beat! And it doesn't matter that for miles around us there is just water. Or that our boat is really small. We are together. We are for each other. What else does one want?" ([19], 2:44:00–2:45:00).

Apparently, this is an ode to individual freedom, but I would like to consider this interpretation a little more closely. DDD is definitely trying to say that, unlike love, marriage (which is more often than not a compromise or an imposition) is a dysfunctional institution. Most families only reflect that inherent flaw, and the demands of the family continue to eclipse the primary importance of the couple, as "the couple's intimacy can easily degenerate into a mutual ego boosting, a joint self-centredness" [26]. Excessive "familism" governing intimate relationships is wrong, and it can be countered only by finding the right balance between the demands of the extended family and those of the couple. Yet, if we consider the closing scene of the movie, we notice that the focus is not on an emancipation of the siblings from the family of origin in order to build up their own couples or new nuclear families, or even to live on their own as singles. Rather, the film reinforces the notion that the family of origin is a safe and reassuring harbor.

In actual fact, as director Zoya Akhtar herself stated, the movie is intended to emphasize the very special bond existing between siblings, a strong relationship that prevails over the multiple love affairs shown in the movie [40]. This is a strong criticism of a culture that makes marriage, childbearing, and economic responsibilities the domain of the extended family, leaving little or no room for self-exploration and self-determination. Ideal marriage is presented as a means of attaining personal happiness, or a means of sharing one's life with a person one loves. Nevertheless, family unity, family togetherness, and common family goals remain of primary importance, and personal considerations are only secondary. In DDD, for example, the daughter Ayesha postpones the fulfillment of her newly found love in favor of unity and cohesiveness in her family of origin, which are necessary for family stability and survival. However, this reinforces a consolidated family model [41]. Even in the fairytale-like world of Bollywood, the dream of constituting a two-person universe remains something to be negotiated within the family framework, and the individual is not considered to be autonomous, but interconnected with, and also lower in hierarchy in comparison with the family network [42]. In the end, the only real innovation in the new family model is that pets too are considered to be siblings. In the next section I will present the changes that this new attitude to animals has brought to real life in contemporary India.

#### **3. Barking at Heaven's Door** ... **or Living in Hell?**

As I have shown, in the context of the movie, Pluto Mehra's musings function as props to upset established family models, in order to make the notion acceptable that pets are family members. This reflects a generational shift in the outlook towards pets that has taken place in the Indian middle classes. In this section I will focus on this phenomenon within the context of a subtle development in the global economy, as a result of which India has the fastest growing dog population in the world with a thriving pet care industry.

In DDD, Pluto Mehra is humanized by the presence of his philosophizing voice. The dog barks only twice, in a hectic sequence involving many humans trying to rescue Kabir, who has jumped overboard ([19], 2:28:34), and in a subsequent scene when the whole family is reunited on a lifeboat ([19], 2:42:40). He is on a leash when boarding the cruise ship, with somebody commenting about ship rules, "Poor Pluto, sorry!" ([19], 24:10–24:18). He is also shown with other pets aboard ([19], 58:58–59:17) and having the run of the ship, suggesting an exceptionally pet-friendly cruise. In reality, most major cruise lines maintain a general 'no pets' rule and only welcome service animals on board. Some transatlantic ships allow dogs or cats, but they are confined to their onboard kennel, where dedicated crew members feed, walk and clean up after them, in addition to lavishing them with treats and toys, while their human guardians can visit them only at designated hours each day. On the contrary, Pluto, a thoughtful and observant individual and a member of the Mehra family, spends his time with his human relatives. One sequence shows Ayesha, Kabir and Pluto at leisure in Ayesha's cabin, both human siblings eating chocolate and confessing to each other their secret fears and expectations, while Pluto silently studies the scene. When Ayesha's husband Manav arrives, he is disgusted at the sight of dog hair on the blanket, and complains about Pluto's sitting on the bed, stating that they "are living in a kennel" ([19], 34:27–36:25). As I pointed out in the previous sections, in DDD, dog humanization introduces a new family paradigm, and Manav's inability to recognize Pluto as a family member marks him as adhering to an obsolete ideal, to be rejected. In fact, while going out with Pluto, Kabir gestures to his sister, "Talaq! Talaq! Talaq! (Divorce!)"

Changes in the social perceptions of dogs are marked by the progression of their habitat. Dogs' transition to family members has allowed them to move "from the wild to the barnyard to the front yard to the front porch, then from the front porch to the living room, from the living room to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the bed" [43]. As Erica Fudge has shown, pets are pets before they are animals, and the progression from being perceived as animals that serve a purpose to being considered equal members of the family and an object of love, is also a journey to civilization [29]. Pluto Mehra's commentary on the negative effects of civilization reminds the audience that in the ancient cynic view 'economics' (oἰκoνoμία) is an un-natural sphere, characterized by unequal power relations, supremacy, and violence. This begins within the domesticity of the family, and it extends all the way to public relations. Pluto lives in an affluent world, amidst humans who have adopted a consumerist lifestyle. Yet, he praises as 'wealth' what cannot be bought and sold, and is inspired by the notion of frugality, the virtue that is the basis of the ancient cynic's lifestyle. In open contrast to this, in their promotion from pets to family members, animals have even become a style statement for pet guardians, which leads to their entrance into a consumers' paradise.

The media's positive portrayal of pets has had a huge impact on the public perception of them. As a rich literature has shown, the Hindi commercial film industry in the past three decades has had

a strong relationship with post-liberalisation capitalism and consumerism [44]. The opening-up of the Indian economy to transnational capital and consumer goods fostered elemental changes in the Indian media context that can be described as the globalization of culture and urban life in a third world situation. This can be seen in the new Indian media world of the 1990s and the concomitant universe of commercial Hindi film [45]. Bollywood has an immense influence on Indian lifestyle and aping what is shown in a film is the order of the day [46]. That even includes rashly purchasing a breed of dog that has been seen in a film: after DDD was released, Delhi recorded a 60 percent increase in the sale of bullmastiffs [47]. This is nothing new: in 1994, thanks to the performance of a fluffy Indian Spitz named Tuffy in *Hum Aapke Hai Koun*—the musical romantic comedy which broke many records and still remains one the biggest blockbusters of Hindi cinema—the popularity of Indian Spitz and their close relatives Pomeranians shot up amongst pet owners in India. In 2014, Golden Retrievers became very popular because of *It's Entertainment*, a comedy drama starring Akshay Kumar. The actor was so impressed by his co-star Junior that he decided that the credit for the dog should appear before his. It is not only films which persuade people to rush to a pet shop for the pedigree breed featured. In 2003, an advertisement launched a pug craze after the Hutch campaign showed a cute pug following a little boy: puppy farms sold out, and the long waiting-time was frustrating for the aspiring pug-parents, with prices shooting up from Rs 10,000–12,000 to Rs 20,000–60,000 in a few weeks [48]. When Hutch telecom was re-branded into Vodafone, the pug made a comeback in 2007, 2012, and 2016 campaigns [49], and remains a very popular pet. What used to be an 'ugly' breed with a curly tail and a wrinkly, squashed-in muzzle, highly vulnerable to reverse sneezing, eye prolapse, hip socket problems and bacterial infections in its skin folds, has become a very popular mobile-phone wallpaper in India.

India is the world's second-most populous country, but since it is still largely rural and poor, it has one of the world's lowest rates of dog guardianship. The growth of pet guardianship is a largely urban phenomenon, and is a result of changes in lifestyle, such as the breakdown of the traditional joint family structure and the rise in smaller nuclear families. Per capita disposable income is another crucial factor: as incomes rise, some people can afford to have pets for the first time. The pet population in India has grown from 7 million in 2006 to 10 million in 2011. On average, 600,000 pets are adopted every year [50]. According to Goldman Sachs, India's GDP per capita in US\$ terms will quadruple from 2007 to 2020, and the Indian economy will overtake the US by 2043 [51]. Dog ownership can be seen as an economic indicator. Every year there is a rise in pet care registration of about 24 percent, and the Indian pet market is now an \$800-million-plus industry ([52], p. 16).

As pets are looked upon as companions, pet guardians have a higher awareness of their dietary needs and are increasingly willing to spend on what they perceive as being necessary or beneficial for their pets, be it pet food, treats, toys, medicines, resort stays or even cruises. India has been projected to be the fastest growing global pet market, and the rising pet ownership rates are driving demand for pet food, health products, and pet accessories. Thanks to globalized communications and information, new generation dog guardians in contemporary India see how dogs are being treated abroad, therefore they want that kind of affluence as well. Pets can enter the consumers' paradise that the neoliberal change in society has created for a very limited but affluent section of the Indian population, and, increasingly, pets are becoming serious consumers themselves. While a few years ago the concept of branded pet food was unheard of in India, and dogs were fed table scraps, the market is now flooded with dietary and health products for pets. As dogs have moved from 'pets' to 'family members,' the message from the pet food industry that feeding them table scraps is inappropriate has become commonly accepted. Also, the hectic, tiring lifestyles developed due to rapid modernization have made most urban dwellers time-poor, leading to an increased preference for commercial packaged pet foods [53]. Exploiting the strong canine-human bond of the early 21st century, a plethora of other products are being manufactured and distributed, promoting consumption connected to the non-human members of the new families. While a decade ago it was common for dogs to sleep outside the house or in the garage, now some owners keep their air-conditioner on 24 h a day just for their pets.

Elite humanized dogs like Pluto Mehra fulfill many different roles with regards to their humans. Young urban Indians are earning more and marrying later, with pets often becoming their replacement children; delayed parenthood is witnessed in most urban and newly married couples, and pet ownership often serves as an emotional stimulant. The issue of maternity versus women pursuing careers is addressed in DDD without directly posing Pluto as a surrogate child. Nevertheless, he is a transactional object of love: the audience comes to know from his own account that Pluto had been given to Ayesha by her childhood friend Sunny, to whom she was linked by mutual love. In order to break this bond, Ayesha's parents sponsored Sunny's studies in the USA, and subsequently Pluto was passed to Kabir after Ayesha's marriage because Manav's family did not want him ([19], 1:25:40–1:26:34). In the movie, the focus is on Pluto as a sibling more than as a surrogate child. In fact, parents Neelam and Kamal have no interest in him and the film stresses the sibling relationship between Kabir and Ayesha which extends to their brother Pluto. Pluto's character is pivotal in emphasizing the attitude change towards pets as a sign of awareness about equality. For example, Pluto's voice over during the scene in which Kabir and Farah meet in the pool is an example of a non-critical and non-ironic commentary, suggesting that the dog reserves most of his judgement the older, more hypocritical, and conservative generations ([19], 36:30–39:13); also generation shift is crucial, as even within the Mehta family some members of the family (Kabir, the son) are "more equal than others"(Ayesha, the daughter), and it is up to the siblings to change this power relation imposed upon them by the parents' choices. Moreover, a cultural shift is necessary: Ayesha's husband Manav is of the same generation as Ayesha and Kabir, but he still advocates the previous generational frame of mind, which reflects in Manav's attitude to both dogs and women. When Ayesha's parents become aware of the injustice and violence that obsolete conventions legitimize, they change their attitude and support their daughter's decision to divorce, asking Manav and his mother to leave for good ([19], 2:28:35–2:32:40).

This development of the plot suggests that generational and cultural change is promoting a relational model, based more on equality, equity and understanding. Yet, Pluto Mehra's philosophy seems to be reversed when it comes to humanized animals in the real world. Even the social life of humanized animals is being adapted to Indian culture. As I said in the previous section, marriage plays an important role in India, so dog parents are more and more concerned about finding suitable mates for their surrogate children or siblings. In doing so, however, they tend to reproduce established practices from human society, to the point that there is gender discrimination and a preference for male offspring even for non-human 'children'; sterilization is never considered, and matchmaking services are already available [54]. Even religious rules can be bent for the sake of the dogs' well-being; while some dogs living in vegetarian households, where non-vegetarian food is strictly prohibited, live on curd, rice, roti and lentils [55], other vegetarian households where meat cannot be cooked make exceptions for their dogs' food [56].

One of the dark sides of the new attitude to animals is that enthusiastic, elite dog lovers, eager to show off a pure-bred dog at the end of the leash as a symbol of new wealth and status, have generated a booming breeding industry, which is not inspired by love of animals, but only aims to maximize profits. The breeding, marketing and sale of dogs has become a high-level commercial venture in India, involving thousands of breeders and pet shops in a million-dollar business. A huge number of pups of specific (imported) breeds are requested by prospective pet guardians, most of who are ignorant about the basics of healthcare and management of dogs. Unethical and unscrupulous puppy mills carry out backyard breeding in the most unhygienic conditions. They keep dogs in crowded, filthy conditions without socialization or proper medical care. Females are forced into repeated pregnancies, with no recovery period in between. When they are no longer of any use, they are either killed (not euthanized) or abandoned. Puppies bred within a closed gene pool are often born with deformities or disease, resulting in high mortality, or are weak and unhealthy animals that are then ill-treated, and in many cases simply abandoned on the street. Puppies are drugged to prevent them from whining and are often sold before they are weaned. The mortality rate is very high, as estimates suggest that

40 percent of these animals die in captivity or during transportation [57]. In 2010, the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) drafted a document regarding 'Dog Breeding, Marketing and Sale Rules' and sent it on to the Animal Welfare Division of the Ministry for the Environment, Forests and Climate Change for scrutiny, as per the power conferred by Section 38 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (PCA) (1960), but it has been shelved for the past six years [58–60].

Pressured by animal rights associations, the Indian government has recently banned the importing of foreign dog breeds into India for commercial purposes [61], but the risk is that this thriving industry will simply go deeper underground. As elsewhere in the world, rich Indian city dwellers are willing to pay whatever is required to own an expensive breed. Another major problem is that fashionable imported breeds such as Alaskan Malamuts, Siberian Huskies, St Bernards or Tibetan Mastiffs cannot acclimatize to Indian weather and therefore develop severe health issues due to the Indian climate. Yet they are visible in alarming numbers in Indian megacities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta. Moreover, these dogs are hard to maintain. Once their fascination wears off, hobbyist guardians realize that keeping dogs is hard work, and as the dog gets older they see that caring for the dog requires much of their time and money. So, they often try to get rid of them by selling them off, giving them to friends or just abandoning them on the streets, where they join the packs of emaciated dogs roaming about in panic, as they lack survival skills.

Neither the breeders nor the buyers care about the millions of starving strays and abandoned dogs in India who suffer in shelters or on the streets. In fact, in the geography of human-animal relationships, if dogs are in human homes, they are cherished and protected as pets, but if they are identified as strays they are 'out of place' and they must be controlled as pests ([62], pp. 6–12). According to official records, there are 17 million stray dogs in the country [63], but other sources state that there are about 30 million free-roaming dogs in India, with an estimated urban density of 178 per square kilometer [64]. Certainly, the main reason why India has a street dog problem is neglect of municipal sanitation practices, as these animals survive by scavenging rubbish. However, unethical trade also has high zoonotic potential, which is a public health concern. Dogs play a crucial role in the transmission of rabies, and India accounts for 35 percent of human rabies deaths worldwide [65,66]. In the 12th five-year plan, the Government of India launched the National Rabies Control Programme, allocating 500 million rupees to fund surveys of dog populations, training for veterinary surgeons and para-veterinary surgeons, mass vaccination of dogs, and animal birth control [67], but it has not yet been fully implemented.

In 2001, the central government legislation known as Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules (ABC) abolished the colonial practice of state implemented stray dog extermination, where stray dogs were killed by electric shock or poison in largely unsystematic efforts by local authorities. PCA and ABC replaced killing with neutering and vaccination as the approved strategy for street dog control. But there are civil society groups such as "Stray Dogs Free Bangalore" and "People for the Elimination of Stray Troubles" that lobby for the complete violent elimination of street dogs from India, and culls continue in various regions of the country [68,69]. Animal activists are trying to educate people about the horrors of puppy mills and the need to adopt existing dogs—Indian and foreign,—instead of increasing the demand for expensive breeds.

Behind the blissful lifestyle of a few privileged individuals such as Pluto Mehra, who have access to a consumers' paradise, there exists the distressing reality of hellish life and dreadful death for the vast majority. This sounds alarmingly similar to the present state of humans in India, where the growing divisions in living conditions are such that for the majority of Indians standards of living are dramatically worsening, while the elite and some sections of the professional middle classes are enjoying the best of times [70–72]. As Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter Van der Veer suggest, what seems to establish this notoriously elusive social category in its singular designation is its largely homogeneous pattern of consumption [73], together with a civic cynicism (in present day acceptation). The post-1991 discourse has largely been urban-centric and pro-market. In a country whose social indicators are, in some cases, barely above those of sub-Saharan Africa, there is a total lack of urgency

regarding the need to make progress in the education and health sectors, immunization, hygiene and the judicial system. Yet, growth without improvement in the lives of all has split the country into two very unequal halves [74]. India has become a more unequal place in the last couple of decades and, more worrisome still, as Thomas Piketty suggests, it is likely to become more so, with disastrous consequences for social cohesion and economic growth [75]. Apparently, it is not only in Indian animal tales that animal society mirrors human society [11]; in real life, too, canine and human societies follow similar patterns.

In the cinematic reality constructed around the character of Pluto Mehra, the notions of justice and equality are discussed within the frame of the family, emphasizing the gap between ethics and emotions on one side, and consumption and self-interest on the other. The more general level of citizenship is not addressed. One could argue that in Bollywood movies there is often a process of disneyfication—the transformation, typically of something real or unsettling, into carefully controlled and safe entertainment or into an environment with similar qualities—insofar as reality tends to be decontextualized and repackaged in a family-friendly and simplified format, ideal for mass-consumerism. Pluto Mehra's positioning as a frugal, privileged individual belonging to the middle class elite projects hope that a sense of resilience could emerge to overcome modern cynicism in favor of the ancient form of this philosophy. But this does not imply change in real life.

#### **4. Conclusions**

In DDD, metaphors write themselves. Family is a cruise. You are stuck with the same people, sometimes there are clear skies, and sometimes the voyage is rough. You may find yourself adrift, but, at the end of the day/movie, your family is your lifeboat, saving you from drowning, and getting you safely to shore.

Pluto Mehra's astute observations about humans and silent exhortation to reject hypocrisy and adopt a free and frugal lifestyle, while valuing emotions and relationships more than wealth and success, seem to be accepted within the film framework. The film's main characters cannot hear his thoughts, but his role as a *sutradhaar* makes him a pivotal figure in the drama. Pluto's 'cynical' commentaries teach the viewer that the key to happiness is a 'natural' lifestyle inspired by simplicity and by stripping away unnecessary desires and customs. This philosophy aims for frugality and a convivial space made of nonviolent relations among equals. This guarantees the natural and legitimate desire to enjoy what is pleasurable and beautiful, combined with the love for comfort, luxury, even dissipation. Frugality is not synonymous with a monastic or ascetic lifestyle: it is just necessary to remind ourselves about the usefulness of uselessness, the pleasure of wasting time, the beauty of anything that cannot be bought or sold.

Pluto's unspoken thoughts and his Weltanschauung eventually make an impact on the choices of the Mehra family and his humanization leads to a better human-nonhuman relationship, prompting an amelioration of family life. Nevertheless, as I have shown, the ideology supported in the movie is not as different from the mainstream concept as a superficial analysis might suggest. In the end, all the lead characters remain as privileged as before, and the only innovative change is access to consumerism for the nonhuman member of the family.

The humanization of pets within a middle class consumerist ideology has two sides. On one hand, this leads to an animal rights position that promotes dog welfare. According to Indian legal terminology, dogs do not necessarily have to be owned: while the 1890 Act and the PCA 1960 used the term 'stray' dog (connoted as illegitimate), the ABC Rules classified dogs into 'pet dogs' and 'street dogs,' thus recognizing the independent status of ownerless dogs. They might be welcomed by some humans and hated by others, but their existence is acknowledged and accepted in the very language of Indian law. Street dogs are owned in a rather loose way, as they are often cared for by local communities, with someone providing them with food, and, in some cases, even veterinary care. On the other hand, dogs are often bred to satisfy human aesthetic ideals and economic interests, and dogs are euthanized or neutered in order to guarantee human health and safety. Even if the film

representation of canine humanization in DDD suggests that it fosters animal welfare, one should be aware of the biopolitical implications of human intervention in animal welfare [76]. Human interests such as public health or aesthetics generate practices and norms that come to be perceived as necessary for the animals themselves, both at individual and collective levels.

DDD's social commentary is out of the ordinary for a mainstream Bollywood film, particularly the insight that the movie provides into the gender roles of the Indian upper class family, through the character of the talking dog Pluto, who narrates the film and comments on the hypocrisy of Indian families. The figure of a dog narrator fits into a long tradition of talking animals in Indian folk tales which have an educational purpose: the interaction between animals, functions as a mirror of human society. However, Pluto's teaching is likely to remain unheeded in real life. The philosophical dog's commentary in DDD revolves around the theme of human irrationality. He admonishes the audience that in order to live a happy life it is necessary to avoid wasteful habits in favor of a—materially and emotionally—sustainable lifestyle. But Pluto Mehra's fans probably pay attention only to the more immediate and superficial message: "Live your life, do what you like, don't give so much attention to other people's advice, just be with your family, support them, and . . . let the heart beat!"

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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