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.

Ratcatcher

Ratcatcher. Lynne Ramsay, 1999.
😿😿
Edition screened: Criterion DVD #162, released 2002. Scots English with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 94 minutes.

Summary: Cruel handling of a mouse, depictions of dead rats.

Details:
1) A 5-second shot of a dead rat with associated blood, 19:36-19:41.
2) Kenny’s white mouse is removed from its cage and tossed within a circle of boys, 49:00-50:50.
The situation escalates until the ominous utterings of “Kill it” and “Throw it at the wall,” neither of which happens before Kenny reclaims his mouse and retreats into the apartment building.
3) At 51:15 we see Kenny at his open apartment window with a helium birthday balloon tied to his mouse’s tail. He releases the ballon and it begins to float away, segueing into a depiction of Kenny’s fantasy that the balloon will carry his mouse to the moon where it will live happily with other mice. This concludes at 52:35.
4) At 1:04:30 Kenny goes into a 30-second frenzy of beating trash bags trying to find and kill rats. The implication, rather than the imagery, is violent.
5) From 1:19:00-1:20:49 a garbage crew comes to the trash-ridden neighborhood and the children join the crew in carnally beating and stabbing about in piles of trash bags, exposing rats. Again, the gleefully violent narrative implication is worse than the images.
6) At 1:24:00 Kenny comes to James with a rat he has killed. James expresses concern about Kenny’s actions through 1:24:45, culminating in his explanation to Kenny that the pet mouse is dead, and not living on the moon.


Ratcatcher is a densely written depiction of complicated relationships, centering on James and Kenny who could grow to be strong compassionate men if it weren’t for the thug-like presence of so-called ‘mates’ who inflict their intertwined cruelty to women and cruelty to animals. In the real world, all young men are confronted with the pressure to conform to misogynistic culture, and Ratcatcher dares to show the easy interchangeability of violence toward women (only acceptable up to a certain age or within certain limits) with violence toward animals (socially encouraged throughout a man’s entire life). By setting the film in a Scottish slum where the only ‘game’ are rats and hopeless girls, the film calls a club a club and dismisses raised fingers about legalized hunting/rape available only at higher levels of the lower class.

Ratcatcher is a film that might make you remember why you said goodbye to one set of mates long ago, or might give you the push you need if you’re on a fence. See also notes on Lynne Ramsay’s insightful Small Deaths, included on the Criterion release along with Gasman and Kill the Day.

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