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.

Peyton Place

Peyton Place. Mark Robson, 1957.

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Edition screened: 20th Century Fox DVD, released 2004. English language. Runtime approximately 156 minutes.


Summary: A live lobster is pulled from a glass holding tank and dropped into a kettle of boiling water, 1:35:00-1:35:10. Although the reality of this torturous practice is horrendous, the depiction is not graphic and is presented as part of a romantic dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Malibu Beach.


Lobster aside, Peyton Place is an unexpectedly decent film from just about any perspective. The script, acting, set design, moralizing themes, and costuming are excellent. Peyton Place also is really ‘seedy’- a word I’ve used less than half a dozen times in my life - in the way the film draws our interest to rape, abortion, and adultery (although none of those words is used in the 1957 production), and the type of small-town gossip that ruins innocent people’s lives.

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