Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Silent Running

Silent Running. Douglas Trumball, 1972.
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Edition screened: Eureka! Masters of Cinema Blu-ray #23, released 2011. English language. Runtime approximately 90 minutes.

Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.

Silent Running is a reminder that high-budget space films of quality were made between 2001 and Star Wars. A trio of androids in the film resemble color-coded recycling bins, but emote and interact with humans as service animals. The good man at the space station (Bruce Dern) tends a vegetable garden and treats the androids kindly, while his three galoot coworkers run go-karts around and act like the Steelers just made it to the play-offs wah-hoo.

Trumball’s Silent Running and von Trier’s Melancholia both have happy but bittersweet ‘endings’: the destruction of an Earth whose time has come. The end comes swiftly in Melancholia and is caused by impact with another planet. Silent Running concludes with confirmation that the spiritual and physical deaths of our world at the hands of capitalism will be torturous and not swift enough. ‘The Dreary Dane’ von Trier, then, has optimistically chosen intervention by a merciful God. In both films a token sampling of humanity dies with at least an affectionate understanding of what has been lost. The rest of us get exactly what we have earned and deserve.

The included 50-minute documentary The Making of Silent Running (Charles L. Barbee, 1972) is enjoyable and explains the workings of the androids.

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