In 1972 The Doberman Gang leapt into existence as if from the pages of a Thomas Pynchon novel. It is a film in which six dogs—all named after infamous bank robbers—complete a $600,000 heist. They then escape into the wilds of California’s Simi Valley, laden with both physical and metaphorical swag. The film was a runaway financial success. It spawned three sequels: The Daring Dobermans, The Amazing Dobermans and Alex and the Doberman Gang. The Amazing Dobermans was one of the final starring roles of Fred Astaire.
The Doberman Gang is notable from an historical standpoint. It was the first film to receive American Humane’s trademarked certification, “No Animals Were Harmed”, which now appears on over a thousand films per year. Audiences could enjoy the heist of The Doberman Gang without worrying if the film’s stars would be shot dead by law enforcement or face dog years behind bars.
American Humane’s certification is intended as a promise to ethically-minded audience members. It appears, though, in the closing credits of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey—a production which saw 27 horses die after “being kept at a farm filled with bluffs, sinkholes and other death traps”. The horses did not die while shooting on an active set. They were kept on a site unequipped to host them, and died of injuries and diseases. Peter Jackson and the production team of The Hobbit could thus hold their hands up and deny legal culpability.
Controversy sprouted around the film’s premiere, as PETA alleged that the filmmakers’ responsibility was being bureaucratised away. Playing pass-the-parcel with blame wasn’t going to resurrect any dead animals. A line had been crossed—that much was clear. Less clear: where the line actually lies.
PETA posited that if any animal died, even as the indirect result of a film’s production, blood was on the filmmakers’ hands. To be ethically consistent, PETA would have to protest every production whose catering department served sausage baps; or whose costumes were stitched from leather, wool, silk. But protesting these actions at a film’s premiere would see you dragged away howling and given a state-sanctioned time-out. And besides, PETA don’t have the personnel to attend every red carpet event on the planet. As a result, most film premieres are zones of doublethink where we excuse animal death as justifiable; unworthy of protest.
In 1980, the late Ruggero Deodato directed the most controversial film in history: Cannibal Holocaust. The film fell victim to its own radical presentation and trailblazing style, as audiences were unable to distinguish its fact from its fictions. Deodato was arrested on suspicion of murder, and forced to prove that his lead actors were still alive in an Italian court. Today, this brand of moralistic hand-wringing isn’t quite as pervasive, and the central controversy of Deodato’s film is its use of the unsimulated torture of animals. Infamously a tortoise is stripped of its shell, still alive, before being dismembered with a machete. A cute mouse thingy is also stabbed through the neck and dies screaming.
Deodato’s position on the animal cruelty in Cannibal Holocaust was inconsistent. In a 2011 interview with Electric Sheep Magazine, the director said: “[critics] don’t make the connection between the food on the table that mummy has cooked from the supermarket, and the fact the animal has actually been killed. When you go to a Third World country people kill animals. I saw pigs and rabbits being killed growing up on a country farm when I was young.” But conversely he has expressed regret, saying he was “…stupid for introducing animals”. Whether Deodato regretted the use of animals in and of itself, or simply wished he could have pre-emptively avoided the backlash, remains unclear. He claimed that all animals killed on set were eaten by native members of the crew.
Deodato grew up in a situation where animal death was shameless and commonplace. Slaughter was a fact of life and not considered a spectacle. Perhaps this left Deodato ill-equipped to recognise his actions as exploitative. Or was he just making excuses for himself? Why was it so important to emphasise that “natives” ate the tortoise, rather than Deodato himself, or his Western European cast? Even when feigning unapologetic indifference, Deodato seemed to want to place himself higher on a moral hierarchy than others.
One of cinema’s most universally acclaimed directors, Werner Herzog, has used animals to complement spectacle throughout his career. Few of Herzog’s early films lack a scene of animal cruelty. In Even Dwarfs Started Small a chicken is surrounded, manhandled and harassed. Aguirre, the Wrath of God sees a horse tumble from a wooden raft into a river, and monkeys thrown around with disinterest like they were rotten pieces of fruit. Infamously, Nosferatu employed a legion of hundreds of rats who were kept in absolutely dire conditions and suffered beyond words. And perhaps the most famous scene of Herzog’s career, the surreal ending of Stroszek, concerns an imprisoned chicken who dances on cue for spare change. This is an old sideshow trick, which works by activating a hot plate under the chicken’s feet when money is inserted into a coin slot.
Herzog famously described the jungles of his Fitzcarraldo shoot as “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” He claimed men must humble themselves before the chaos, misery and lack of order of the natural world.
This attitude puts me in mind of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am—a dense read that I’m not intellectually equipped to actually finish. In the book’s opening, Derrida explores a feeling of shame that he experienced when his cat saw him naked. This shame is hypocritical; we are surrounded by unclothed animals all day long and don’t think anything of it. The shame, then, is a symptom of our anthropocentrism, our belief that we have superiority over other animals. It’s not a huge reach to transpose this attitude to animal slaughter. No one would contest that murder is an essential component of the animal world. But many among our species do their best to establish distance from this murder and cruelty.
Try to find out where your nearest slaughterhouse is. You will likely be surprised at how difficult a task that is. When we admonish, protest or ban animal cruelty on screen, what are we trying to do? Do we really want animals to stop dying, or do we just not want to see it?
Andrew O’Keefe