earthlings

My stomach churns, my eyes fill with tears, and my nerves go wild with sensation. I can only stare through watery eyes as the image, sound, and thought of slaughter fills my mind.  From the beginning, a depressing stream of consciousness takes root: Blood; Guts; Gore; Cruelty; Impunity; Reality. I try not to look away.  But at times, my eyes just close and it takes a concerted effort to open them.  To stay awake and present and emotional. As Ximena says, “the truth is [just] too much to bear sometimes.”  I felt an incredible pulsing pressure brewing in the space between my eyes, in the center of my head.  (No doubt a low-grade headache from trying so hard to concentrate on something so bloody.)  At once, I wanted to throw-up, cry, yell, leave the room.  I remember thinking, “I hate humans.” Save the last comment, isn’t this the response—the sheer emotion—the makers of Earthlings expected or at least hoped for? The film is intended to shock and awe a people who have been desensitized, medicated, and numbed. What an ambitious endeavor it is to awaken people to the horrors of violence when violence has become so normative.  Just think, the images we saw had to compete with the graphic violence in our cinematic entertainment!  We are not shocked to see five-year-olds with toy machine guns, playing violent video games, or shooting at grackles with BB guns. So why are we shocked by this film?  Or are we even?

I must admit that while I was emotionally affected, I am neither surprised nor shocked by the blatant animal cruelty that we bore witness to in Earthlings.  After leaving class, I was disturbed that I was not shocked by the footage.  Perhaps it was because I had read a lot about the meat-packaging industry, the Call it cynicism, but there’s just not much that surprises me anymore about the violent depths to which humans will sink.  I remember thinking, “why am I fighting for social justice when the human race I am fighting for is destroying another race of beings”?  This was beyond upsetting for me. 

Throughout the film, I equated the cruelty of animals with the cruelty of humans (in the Holocaust, in the genocide of indigenous peoples, in the objectification of women, and the list goes on). And just as Earthlings draws a parallel between racism and speciesism, so too must I.  The movie opens with the idea that “By analogy with racism and sexism, the term “speciesism” is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”  If we treated human beings with dignity and respect (that is, if racism did not exist) then I might understand the shock one might experience upon watching Earthlings.  But this is just nothing new.