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.

My Childhood

My Childhood. Bill Douglas, 1972. 
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Edition screened: Included on Facets 2-DVD set The Bill Douglas Trilogy, released 2008. Scots English with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 46 minutes.

Summary: Depictions of dead bird and cat.

Details:
1) At 18:33 Granny knocks down Tommy’s bird cage while clearing cobwebs with a broom, and at 18:39 beats the cage with her broom. Tommy rescues bird and battered cage.
2) We see the bird cage on the floor again at 28:20, this time with the cage door open and Bill’s cat eating the bird (not graphic in itself). Tommy grabs the cat, and beginning at 28:26 there is a 30-second sequence including the two boys struggling over the cat, brief off-screen sound of the cat being beaten, an image of a cat's body thrown over a banister, and a static shot of a dead cat lying on the ground.
3) 36:12 begins a 10-second sequence of a dead bird unwrapped from dirty newspaper and thrown to the ground.

Additional comments:
My Childhood is the first film of The Bill Douglas Trilogy. The important implications behind the cat/bird sequence and the subsequent killing of the cat are depicted with subtlety and are easily misunderstood. Our lifetime viewing of cartoons and comedies where the cat “gets” the caged bird makes us over-simplify the narrative in My Childhood. In fact, this domestic conflict and sadness was designed by Granny, and is a realistic depiction of the real trauma parents can contrive in the lives of their children. Granny’s first violence to the caged bird was unresolved and unsatisfying, so she then provided the open cage to the cat, resulting in the death of both animals and fortifying the misery that she demands must dominate the home. Too cowardly to suffocate her grandchildren in their sleep, she has murdered the animals that represent them.

Rarely does art dare to expose how adults use pets as surrogates for the resentment felt toward their own children. In the real world, a child's wish for a pet is denied or disdainfully granted to reflect undesirability of the child. The expense and work of keeping a pet is stressed, exaggerated, and used as a threat to express resentment over the time and money required by the child. Pets are treated impatiently and banished outside because of the child’s unwelcome presence. The pet mysteriously disappears or is treated cruelly by the parents because it is illegal to beat or kill a child.

@ BL
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