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.

Medium Cool

Medium Cool. Haskell Wexler, 1969.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #658, released 2013. English language. Runtime approximately 110 minutes.

Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.

The Criterion Blu-ray of Medium Cool includes numerous bonus features (all animal violence free) that greatly enhance one’s understanding of this important film, including:

Look Out Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’ (Paul Cronin, 2001) - Cronin’s excellent film explains the content, methodology, and social context of Medium Cool, and is a crash course in documentary film making, in film theory, and in late 1960s American history. It manages to both magnify and expand Wexler’s original film, and in the process becomes a more enjoyable viewing experience than Medium Cool itself. Unfortunately, Criterion gives us only 53 minutes of the original 60 minutes, probably reflecting a contractual impasse over using a particular image or piece of music.

‘Medium Cool’ Revisited (Haskell Wexler, 2013) - Wexler’s 33-minute film about the Occupy Movement’s protest of the 2013 NATO conference in Chicago provides a saddening edification about the topics that Occupy tried to address, the occasional eloquence with which those concerns were expressed, and the media blackout of that reality. It is such a short time after the event, and already, all we know is Glenn Beck’s revisionist account of “those filthy America-hating scum”. As usual, there is, there was, no “liberal media” that might have, or could have, shown us the truth. We missed a lot through our Walmart-serving media’s enforced misunderstanding of this event. We missed the opportunity to align with people who actually wished to help us and instead cashed in that chip to hear advertisements for Food Insurance and gold bullion hucksters.

Sooner or Later (Paul Cronin, 2007) - There is much to be learned in the combined viewing of Wexler’s original film and Cronin’s 2001 Look Out Haskell … making-of documentary. One wake-up is Chicago’s late 60s’ ghetto of recently emigrated Appalachian mountain folk … Tenement blocks identical to those housing impoverished blacks, instead filled with illiterate white families from coal mining country. Sooner or Later locates Harold Blankenship, “hillbilly slum” resident and child participant in the original 1969 film, as he lives in 2007 having returned to impoverished rural life in West Virginia. 

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