Harpooning "The Cove"

Backstage at the Oscars the other day, Louie Psihoyos, director of best-documentary winner The Cove, said something of his film that I find both deeply troubling and also heartening. "Our hope," he told interviewers, "is [that] the Japanese people will see this film and decide themselves whether animals should be used for meat and for entertainment."

Let's get the heartening part out of the way first. As some of the figures in the movie point out, there isn't that much difference between eating a cow and eating

a dolphin. Psihoyos's honesty is comforting. He is willing to say outright that his aim has less to do with dolphins than with humanity's ethical bearing toward animals in general. The plight of dolphins is a conduit into this larger moral morass.

But there is a sinister aspect to his statement as well, having to do not only with the disingenuous

presentation of his broadside against meat-eating and animal-exploitation—he tries to show that dolphins specifically deserve our concern while saying nothing about other animals—but also with his focus on a single country, Japan.

In The Cove, Psihoyos and a team of eco-warriors join guilt-ridden dolphin-trainer-turned-activist Ric O'Barry in his attempt to expose the yearly slaughter of 23,000 dolphins (a number for which there is no independent confirmation; the Japanese government places the number under 2,000) in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji, home to a cove that O'Barry calls "a dolphin's worst nightmare."

I won't go on about the team's muscular methods, which are amply documented in fawning reviews praising their commando-style bravery in the face of a dozen or so unarmed fishermen. But the scenes are indeed gruesome, with abundant footage of masked Japanese men spearing and hooking dolphins until the waters run scarlet with their blood. Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry supposedly substitutes mercury-rich dolphin meat for whale meat at supermarkets, and the government holds the International Whaling Commission (IWC) under its thumb.

In this respect, The Cove is staggeringly good propaganda. It is impossible to give the paranoid, antagonistic fishermen or their inarticulate enablers the benefit of the doubt. From the first scene, we are told that they are engaged in a holocaust, and all that remains to be done is the documentation. The fishermen stare stone-faced into the activists' cameras, smiling only when left alone to tear into the flesh of their catch. Japanese bureaucrats give polite, fumbling non-answers while their representative at the IWC and his totally uncool American collaborator/legal advisor (honestly, take off that bow-tie) spin like ferris wheels in a gale, pumping aid dollars to poor countries in exchange for votes. (Something that Japan's opponents at the IWC also do, though the film makes no mention of this.)

And why? Why do the Japanese so love killing dolphins?

Here's a spoiler you might have seen coming: absent entirely from The Cove is a convincing explanation for Japanese recalcitrance in the face of international opinion.

The standard answer is that the Japanese enjoy dolphin meat, and, hence, fish dolphins. So the filmmakers go to Tokyo and find some people who say they don't think dolphins are food and, furthermore, are outraged that anyone could think otherwise. Thus Psihoyos and crew prove that there is actually no market for dolphin meat in the country, that a cultural taste for the stuff is, as O'Barry puts it, a "big lie."

Their anecdotal evidence fails to account for the diversity of food cultures within countries—they eat cow brains in Indiana, you know—but it does achieve what I think is its principal aim: persuading viewers that the fishermen of Taiji are ignorant country bumpkins desperately in need of a little enlightenment. And if the Japanese themselves are too complacent and conformist to do anything—"the nail that sticks out must be hammered down," goes the Japanese proverb—well, it must be time for some old-fashioned American heroism.

But let's follow these Jason Bournes of the Japanese coast a little farther into their rabbit hole of perplexity. If Japanese don't like dolphin meat, why do they kill dolphins? Faced with the impossible illogic of it all, the filmmakers surmise an explanation that is, frankly, repugnant in its essentialism: the Japanese psyche lusts unabatedly for empire and therefore lashes out at the rest of world and its norms. "You won't get away with it this time!" say Japan's backward-leaning fishermen and government, still smarting from the wounds of World War II.

So basically, we're left with a stark choice: either enough Japanese view dolphins in much the same way Westerners view cows that there is a market for dolphin meat, or nationalist hicks kill thousands of dolphins as some kind of effigy of the West in order to maintain an imperial grandeur that exists only in their heads. Which of these is the more reasonable answer? Hm, tough call.

Of course, the filmmakers don't allow us to consider the possibility that perceptions of dolphins and other animals are culturally determined and variable. Note that O'Barry describes the cove in Taiji as a dolphin's "worst nightmare"—as though dolphins have nightmares. As though they are people and deserve to be treated according to the same ethical standards that humans apply to other humans. O'Barry is adamant about dolphins' intelligence, claiming—based on what bizarre, reality-averse metrics I cannot conceive—that dolphins may be more intelligent than humans.

It is essential to the film's premise that dolphins are unique. Otherwise, viewers might wonder why they should care any more about the killing and consumption of dolphins than they do that of cows, chickens, pigs, halibut, alpaca, and kangaroos.

And even in the face of this uniqueness, why indeed? What is it about dolphins' intelligence, sentience even, that makes them especially worthy of consideration? Is there really a compelling moral argument on this basis? Is this even the basis of the filmmaker's argument, or are they concerned with cruel treatment, which they also highlight? Which is it: sentience, or the ability to feel pain?

O'Barry's romanticization of dolphins provides an untenable foundation for moral argument. But Psihoyos is on somewhat firmer ground. He doesn't want any animals to be used for food. A chicken is a pig is a dolphin is a person. If you won't eat people, you can't eat the rest of them.

Yet he doesn't want to make that point in the film lest he turn off viewers who thought they were going to a movie that was going to make them feel righteous. Here in the West, we like our pork fatty, our steaks rare, and our salmon smoked. Killing dolphins is tragic, but killing cows is dinner, and heaven forfend a filmmaker and his crunchy buddies tell us otherwise. That would be something the audience doesn't want to hear.

In other words, Psihoyos is not blind to the divergent cultural sensitivities surrounding the killing and eating of animals after all. But because he is unwilling to say something truly radical, the same idiosyncratic perspectives on animals-as-food that make the film possible—that allow Americans to eat hamburgers while decrying dolphin-fishing; that leave some Japanese scratching their heads about all the fuss—must be papered over with essentialist fantasies. Otherwise the whole project is skewered like the unfortunate dolphins of Taiji.