movie review #1: Earthings, (Viewing the world through the lens of Shaun Monson)

Click here to watch Earthlings

           Earthlings was full of disturbing scenes such as puppy mills, slaughter houses, factory farms, primates in lavatories, circus training facilities, and more on. Places that are not allowed to film, and actually two thirds of films are taken undercover. Earthlings shows how cruel human can be toward life creatures. Watching animals suffer, breathing after all the skins took off, I was horrified, and even decided not to eat any meats nor wear leather jackets. Rethinking about Earthlings, however, I was more horrified about the fact that a single documentary can have such power to change one’s idea.

cow slaughter

lion hunting

           Let’s compare those two pictures. What do you feel? Does anyone think lion is doing something wrong? How about the other picture? Does human who is slaughtering a cow looks right? Many people would think about the first picture. “It’s natural isn’t it?” On the contrast, not many people would look at the second picture with smile on their face. In the first picture there is a cow and a predator which is killing it and in the second picture there is again a cow and a predator which is killing it. It is quite similar to each other, but why do we react so differently between these two pictures?

           Everyone has their unique values[1]. If there are many people sharing similar values or ideas, it becomes widely accepted common sense, or public opinions. However, there are no absolute standards that decide what is wrong and what is right. Indeed, values sometimes clash to each other. These conflicts don’t mean one value is wrong and the other one is right. There are no answers, just differences exist between them.

           Baring this in mind, is Earthlings a fair documentary[2]? After watching it, I couldn’t stop thinking about mankind’s mistreatments toward animals. Thinking about its purpose, Earthlings has served very well. However, I don’t think it was a good documentary. According to the director(Shaun Monson), Earthlings were taken to people to know the truth about what is actually happening to animals. However, Earthlings didn’t stop at its purpose. It went beyond, making biases into people who watch it. Documentary didn’t taken form of neutrally reporting the actual truth. Earthlings uses way of pathos[3], showing animals suffer, die in pains, brutally treated. All these scenes draw out sympathy. Sympathy towards those animals change to horrify towards people’s behavior and this again change to hatred towards those facilities, and behaviors of human. But the truth is, as I said earlier, other people’s values aren’t wrong. To some people it can be shown bad, maybe to some people it is something natural. There is no such thing as wrong. However in this film, it keeps saying it is wrong. It keeps force you to think it is wrong. It disables your abilities of critical thinking.

           Documentaries, every one of them has message in it.[4] They are edited with background music, and if needed with narrations. However, the purpose of documentaries should finish at the stage of showing other perspectives, other possibilities, and new thoughts. In order to do so, documentaries have narrations. Usually narrations provide logos to the film. Also, it explains about the opposition side, too. Using various devices, directors try not to go over the line. However, Earthlings went way too far. Narrations which should provide logos didn’t play its role. It kept its pace with the pathos. There are many old sayings in the narrations, and they just emphasize the situations without logical reasoning.

           Not only that, Earthlings shows only the worst out of the worst cases. It showed stray dogs. But there are a lot of happy, pleased dogs living with human beings. It showed milking cow in a harsh condition. No space and daily routine life of milking. However, there are also place where they stray the cows and let them play freely. Not only that, it doesn’t show the benefits we can get from animals. For animal experiments in the science lavatories, Earthlings describes them like an unneeded torture that is done without any guilt under the name of science. But you can not hardly imagine how much we gained from those experiments. How much we developed. How we made medicines and new treatments for diseases. Earthlings just shows the worst parts, it just shows the contents they want to show in order to make people have one thought in their mind. It is like a brainwash. It completely changes one’s values, and standards. I am not saying showing other perspectives of commonly accepted things are bad. What makes problems is that Earthlings, using way of excessive   pathos, went too far.

           Earthlings, they showed unknown sides of animal treatments. But, did it show truth[5]? Like the director says, is Earthlings truth? Actually, it was more like the world seen through the lens of director’s values. No such value exists, which rules over any other values. They are just different. The differences may have been caused by their cultures, environments, and educations. But we have to respect and understand other values. Earthlings is indeed well made film uncovering the animal mistreatment. However it can’t avoid criticism that it’s too one sided, and too emotional.

EMBEDDED LINKS
[1]http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-lessons-do-psychologists-take-from-their-work-to-improve-their-own-lives
[2]http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_22/section_1/artc1A.html
[3]http://toomuchpathos.wordpress.com/tag/documentary/
[4]http://popculture.knoji.com/essence-of-documentary/
[5]http://www.myswizard.com/2005/12/31/absolute-truth-definition

VIDEOS
http://earthlings.com/?page_id=32
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhNImyKnlc8