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.

Dry Wood

Dry Wood. Les Blank and Maureen Gosling, 1973.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion Blu-ray set #737 Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, released 2014. English language with some clarifying English subtitles. Runtime approximately 37 minutes.

Summary: Idiotic drunken brutality to animals

Details:
1) The first minute of the film is a rooster being mis-handled and chased as part of Mardi Gras hijinks.
2) We get to see a chicken killed in real time by the one-handed neck-twirl method, 2:30-2:40. Thanks for that.
3) Brutal killing of a snapping turtle, followed, of course, by gay clowning around with its broken body, 23:40-24:15.
4) An adult pig is shot (stunned) point blank between the eyes, in front of its family, then brutally killed by teenagers with the world’s dullest knife as it twitches in agony, 24:40-25:45.
5) This pig and quite a few others are hacked up with an axe and butchered at a festive pig-hackin’ soirée, through 29:50.
6) AGAIN with the cans of Schlitz beer … while a man has a child assist in cutting off the pig’s snout with a hack saw, 30:46.   I kid you not.
7) Makin’ sausage. Laughter and guts galore, along with the undeniable hilarity of inflating intestines, 32:50-34:10. 

A nice follow-up to 1971’s Spend It All, Blank here offers more rumination on the serene beauty of rural Cajun life. I’m not interested in asking what the hell is wrong with these people. That’s a very complicated and unfair question that should inquire about a larger social structure of enforced poverty, racial murder and violence, poor education, and corporate exploitation of rural challenges. But I do question what is wrong with hyper-educated white brats who imitate mud-and-cracklins culture as a weekend diversion, who clumsily emulate this gory entrails-swinging method of indulging repressed sexual tendencies, and I question Criterion and our film-buying public for celebrating these films as wonderful documents of a time gone by. Go buy. bye bye.

Criterion includes a making-of documentary ironically titled A Cultural Celebration.

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