You know the sort of science fiction story where the aliens descend out of the blue and abduct people? Where they tear children away from their screaming mothers and take them off for a good probing? Perhaps the aliens give the abductees a poor imitation of their home to live in. Perhaps they get “companions”, albeit ones that they don’t understand and share no kinship with. Perhaps they are taught to demonstrate their abilities for the amusement of the aliens. Pretty nasty, these aliens. To the orca, that’s us.
In such a story, what would be expected of the Will Smith/Tom Cruise character? Naturally, he’d go a little crazy. Possibly quite a lot crazy. Most of the time he’d play along. And every now and again he’d snap. And he’d note that if you can get them away from their damn machines the aliens are actually quite feeble. You could bite the head off one, if you tried.
BLACKFISH doesn’t have Will Cruise, it has an orca known to his abductors as Tilikum. Tilikum may be the only serial killer currently working as a popular children’s entertainer. He was taken from his family near Iceland in 1983. A grown man with tattoos up past his elbows and a beard like a yard-brush weeps freely at the memory of that day. “The worst thing I ever did”, he says. Weeps at the memory of Tilikum’s family watching him be lifted out of the water and out of their lives. It’s on tape. We see some of the tape. Some people in the cinema wept, too.
Tilikum may be the only serial killer currently working as a popular children’s entertainer.
Since then Tilikum has killed one person for sure (it’s on tape, we see some of the tape), had another found mauled to death in his tank, and at least collaborated in killing a third. The former SeaWorld trainers interviewed in BLACKFISH take a broadly psychoanalytic view of this. They are adamant that Tilikum isn’t a bad whale, as such, but he’s been turned into an unstable, isolated, depressed figure by decades of abuse. When he kills, and they don’t doubt that he does, and may again, it is out of pain and frustration and anger. Frustration that they share. The anger, sometimes, too. A fellow creature that they thought of as a friend has been made into a monster. And, you know, Tilikum is an apex predator. Killing people is the strongest way he’s got to make a point. It’s what we do, after all.
We should hope that Tilikum isn’t a bad whale, as such, because SeaWorld use him as a stud. His farmed semen (it’s on tape, we see some of that tape) has sired many, many show orca. With exquisite cruelty even those families are disrupted, with captive-bred orca being separated from their mothers and shipped around to different parks. Any social worker could tell you what that sort of thing leads to.
There’s a shocking contrast between the bland, chipper, optimists […] and the angry, staring, teary people they are now.
Towards the close of the film the former trainers head out on a whale-watching boat to see healthy, well-adjusted orca at sea (as with wolves in their natural habitat, no known risk to humans). They seemed pleased and moved by the graceful giants. So much so that one wonders if it had never occurred to them to do this before. There’s a shocking contrast between the bland, chipper, optimists (of the kind that America does so well) that they appear to be in the tapes of them working with whales at SeaWorld before Tilikum’s highest profile killing and the angry, staring, teary people they are now. They are embarrassed at themselves and angry at SeaWorld. BLACKFISH is an unashamedly polemical documentary and it will make you angry too.
One of them says, over tape of Tilikum’s current show, that in 50 years we’ll look back and think “what a barbaric age”. India has just declared that dolphins are non-human persons – it might not take that long.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2vG_Ifu4zg
You can keep an eye out for local theatrical screenings of BLACKFISH at http://blackfishmovie.com/
Very moving review. I almost fear to see this movie, I’m not at all sure I could take it.
The film is hard to watch. Other reviewers have noted that BLACKFISH doesn’t really tell us anything that we didn’t already know and that may be true of many in the audience (although perhaps fewer than we might expect, or maybe hope?). I refer often to what’s “on tape”, what we would call found footage, I suppose, and there’s plenty of it—as one of the fellows in the trailer explains, Tilikum is not unique in his response to captivity—all is distressing, and to see the evidence for something is much, much more powerful than merely to know it.
As I have said in the 2,200 words on Blackfish on my blog that I finished to-day, I actually think that we are shown too much – there came a point when I just did not want another example of someone getting hurt (or killed), and yet they kept coming…