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.

Wild at Heart

Wild at Heart. David Lynch, 1990.

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Edition screened: Shout! Factory Blu-ray, released 2018. English language. Runtime approximately 124 minutes.


Summary: As Harry Dean Stanton watches fuzzy 1980s hotel TV, we see several documentary nature-show clips of African animals tearing into each other. Hyenas twice tear at a carcass 46:39 - 46:48, then vultures get their turn 48:45 - 48:50.


You want to hear the dialogue between Stanton and Diane Ladd between those clips, and I recommend just watching through the short grainy bits of vintage nature documentary.


I hadn’t seen Wild at Heart in twenty years and was disappointed by the re-visit. Some set pieces and cameos by the Lynch stable of actors are wonderful, but I found the film as a whole almost ruined by the incessant and uninteresting Wizard of Oz quotations. These clumsy tie-ins seem resentfully forced into the story and are not in keeping with Lynch’s methodologies of Transcendental Meditation and Dream Language composition. Perhaps they are part of the source literature and Lynch was or felt obliged to cram them into the script.




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