DOCUMENTARY FILM: Blackfish & Seeing Sea World

I have taken zoos as valuable learning institutions, eagerly seeing entertainment destinations to prevent my children and grandchildren from being exposed to boredom.

And I delighted in my visits to the magnificent San Diego Zoo, butterfly farms, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Wild Animal Park, petting zoos.  Aren't zoos, aquariums, water parks, circuses, even backyard turtles and school fair goldfish prizes, rightfully part of the discovery process? Isn't valuing earth's stupendous reality as we attain our years the most desirable outcome?

Yes but. As I painfully reset my relation to all sentient beings, replacing dominion with stewardship, I wish it were possible to leave only footprints. 

The compromises are hair-shirt uncomfortable these days, with films like "The Cove" and "Blackfish" revealing animal abuse we never even thought about as we walked through the magic kingdoms commerce created for us.

Here's the modest proposal: We look at movies instead. Film crews are licensed to shoot and audited for best practices. Audiences go to Imax-type movie theaters, called Filmzoos. They look at taxidermied specimens and plaster models in diorama settings.

I know, you can't hear me anymore. Being able to pay means you get your way. Don't say I didn't try to warn you.  Karma exists.

PS: PETA did attempt a demonstration at the Rose Parade but it was quickly dispersed and they came off mostly as nutty activists. Probably its the first stage of awareness, Marcuse might say, or the only possible last stage of one-dimensional men.



    

    

MOVIES: The Dallas Buyer's Club

Stories from the AIDS epidemic: this film tells a story based on a real individual, a tough, homophobic rodeo cowboy, Ron, who was diagnosed with AIDS.  He's horrified when he finds out, not because he's just received a death sentence, but because people will think he's a queer.  

In a flashback sequence, during a wild drug and liquor debauched orgy, he seems to recall or not a brief encounter with another man, and I imagine his deep shame as his payback is visited upon him. I could be wrong about this: my husband points out that he could have contracted AIDS from a woman or a needle. 

The background song here should be the old country ballad "…love,o careless love…look what careless love has done to me."

Ironically he cannot get AZT legally in the U.S. because the FDA has lagged in developing remedies for the disease.  Ron goes to Mexico and finds medicines there that alleviate his condition.  

Despite his poor judgment, he's not a stupid man, and he figures out how to import drugs for AIDS victims and sell them illegally, building a thriving business.  Various government law enforcement agencies pursue and thwart his efforts.  It's a damning perspective on bureaucracy and its failures, all the more sad because Ron's drug "cocktails" extend many lives, while early AZT drug trials actually kill some patients because dosages were too strong and suppressed the immune system too much. 

Rejected cruelly by his own friends, he teams up with a gay transvestite to sell, and his own homophobia is eroded away until he comes to a life-embracing spiritual wholeness.  In the most memorable scene in the film, he enters a butterfly incubation chamber and hundreds of them land all over him, and a look of wonder and gentle surprise covers his face as grace covers him over.

Matthew McConaughy, Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner all give strong, memorable performances - how good the actors are, I'm always amazed.  But they don't need to lift the material, the whole film is wholly fine.  

   

BOOKS: Donna Tartt - , A Secret HIistory,The Little Friend, The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch (2013),  A Secret History, The Little Friend

These three books are all compelling, engrossing, polished, singularly wrought novels. They are nearly genre-free, following no escapist recipe.  All feature children as protagonists. Yet the narrative is never compromised with a simple point of view. The inevitability of the story proceeds from fully drawn characters, and so the plots, complex as they are, feel Dickensian in their resolutions. 

The three novels could be classed as mysteries or thrillers, because they are truly hard to put down, the quality of suspense so imbues the writing.  In The Goldfinch, a little boy who worships his mother “saves” a famous painting after the Met is blown up by a terrorist bomb. In A Secret History, a young man goes east to college and his choice to study the classics leads to conspiracy and murder.   The Little Friend, the most upsetting of the three, is about a little by who is kidnapped from his yard during a family holiday dinner.  His young sister determines to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

Each features meticulously wrought settings, breath-taking moments of danger, sympathetic treatment of characters as their amoral, evil, cruel, insensitive personalities and choices wreak grief, derail careers, and precipitate breakdowns from which there is no return. 

Tartt’s characters’ downhill slides turn the stomach of any parent:  long  (repetitive) descriptions of alcohol and drug use, theft, lost ambitions, cruel parents and guardians, the pitiful loneliness of lovely children callously neglected. 

The novels end where they began: the look-back the grown-up child has shared with you closes the account of the childhood tragedy.  There is distance and coolness now; the past is the past, about the only comfort Tartt permits her readers. 

BOOK: The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman

This book has some of the most beautiful writing about mothering a little girl that I have ever read. I loved the magnificent distant setting, the descriptions of the island, and the symbol of the lighthouse. The seemingly factual lighthouse keeper's unusual and rigorous job was fascinating, too. 

I accept that Isabel did what she did, and Tom, too. But then I found the characters' various refusals, required promises, misplaced letters, unfair blaming, quite authorially manipulative and began to resent it. The conclusion, after long grief, stoic oaths, angry revenge behavior, is rather sudden, and Isabel's recovery from her breakdown and its consequences is left to us to imagine.  I suspect it was much worse and incomplete than the novel led us to conclude.  But then, that's the book club's discussion topic.