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.

Heaven’s Gate

Heaven’s Gate. Michael Cimino, 1980.

😿😿

Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #636, released 2012. English language. Runtime approximately 216 minutes.


Summary: cockfighting; horses in gun fights


Details:

1) A backyard butchering scene starts at 21:57 and highlights the chore of getting the mountain of discarded guts into the mountainous discarded gut cauldron. Other action with the hanging carcass in the background through 24:00.

2) A man is ready to shoot a calf in the head but is interrupted and nothing comes of this; just before the cockfighting scene below.

3) Cockfighting scene starts at 58:15 and is intercut with other action until the fight is interrupted at 1:04:07 by people squabbling. We see the white rooster injured and his owner reviving him to make him continue.

4) While unloading horses from a box car, a white horse slips and falls due to missing battens on the ramp, 2:07:09. This disregard for the animals’ safety is easily corrected both in the film and in the real world, and I am left wandering about the reality of this “accident”. The ramp is not a 19th-century artifact but part of the set built for the movie, suggesting that some battens were intentionally left off and the camera ready for the impending fall.

5) A rather spectacular battle scene unfortunately includes a horse rearing up as he is shot at 3:02:00. The battle scene concludes at 3:07:00 with a few milder implications of injured horses, the sort of depictions common in Western movies that are unclear whether the horse or the rider has been shot.

 

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