This is a little outside the realm of what I normally cover here at POP!, but seeing as I haven’t had time to write anything substantial lately, what the hey. Tonight’s episode of Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell (CNN’s HLN network, 7PM EDT) will be a special one, with the entire hour dedicated to animal advocacy issues. Though I have a bit of a heart/yuck relationship with Issues – while I’m happy to see animals granted equal consideration on a mainstream news network, and generally am in agreement with Jane on many topics, the show is also sensational at times, and grants entirely too much attention to celebrity gossip and such – even I have to admit that the idea of an entire hour dedicated to nonhuman concerns, voiced by a vegan at that, is very cool. And waaaay overdue, you might say.

Anyhow. DawnWatch has a rundown of planned topics, as well as contact info for JVM and CNN so that you can submit your feedback. Please tune in if you can, and thank Ms. Velez Mitchell for her coverage of animal rights issues (and CNN HLN for allowing her to speak out on behalf of such marginalized populations) even if you can’t/won’t/don’t watch tonight’s episode. You can also hit up CNN – as well as Issues and its host – on Facebook.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: This Monday on “Issues” — “Jane’s Fight for Animal Rights” CNN’s HLN 7/5/10

The wonderful Jane Velez Mitchell of CNN’s Headline News Network is at it again — but bigger and better than ever before. This coming Monday, July 5, she will do an unprecedented full hour on animal rights issues, which she is calling “Jane’s Fight for Animal Rights.”

She’ll be talking with representatives from many of the major animal protection groups about
– The oil spill and it’s impact on animals
– The Ohio initiative — now tabled, and the resulting farm animal welfare gains and what’s ahead
– Dairy farm cruelty such as cow tail docking
– The fight against a monkey breeding facility planned for Puerto Rico
– The Nevada Wild Horse Round-Up

She’ll also talk with Bob Barker and Pierce Brosnan about whales and Whale Wars and with CSI’s Jorja Fox about the recent release of a group of Bolivian circus lions to a California sanctuary.

Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell airs on the HLN network at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. Jane, a passionate animal advocate, particularly wants great ratings on this one, so please tune in, tell all your friends to watch, and spread the word far and wide. If you TiVo or DVR and watch it within three days the ratings still count. And Jane says those comments matter! So please go to www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?106 either right now to tell her how excited you are about the upcoming animal coverage (which is plugged on the CNN website) or immediately after you watch the show. Your enthusiastic reaction in the past has helped make it possible for Jane to keep doing this kind of coverage, which no other major media person is doing on a regular basis. Keep up the great work!

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts only if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to learn about Karen Dawn’s book, “Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals,” which was chosen last year by the Washington Post as one of the “Best Books of The Year!”

To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php

George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007) is your standard, post-apocalyptic zombie fare. As the dead begin to reanimate, a group of film students and their professor flees down the East Coast in a rickety RV. The story is told from the vantage point of the students, in particular Jason, the aspiring documentarian of the group.

Nonhuman animals don’t make an appearance in Diary of the Dead – really, there’s not one guard dog or zombie cat to be found – and yet, the movie’s ending speaks to what I’ve been feeling with increasing urgency as of late. (Cue images of the “oil” spill in the Gulf Coast, complete with hand-wringing about oil-soaked pelicans, torched turtles belonging to endangered species – and the “livelihoods” of the “fishermen” who themselves eke out a living by slaughtering nonhuman animals by the millions. “RIP Gumbo,” indeed.)

The final scene, narrated by Jason’s girlfriend, Debra (who took up his cause after he was mauled to death by a zombie; no spoiler alert needed, as she refers to him in the past tense throughout the film’s voiceover), turns the camera’s lens inward, into the heart of humanity.

Click here to watch the movie’s ending (skip ahead to 6:50; sorry, embedding disabled!), or keep reading for a transcript.

Jason once said he thought he could help. Maybe even save some lives.

This is the last thing he downloaded before he died.

[Cue: homemade video footage, downloaded from the internet.]

A couple of hometown Joes who were now shooting targets.

[Two white, middle-aged men, dressed in flannel and hunting jackets, swigging on beers while brandishing handguns...]

That day they used people.

Dead people.

You know, just for fun.

[...laughingly shoot at reanimated humans, i.e., zombies.]

There was one target that different from the rest.

A woman, tied by her hair to the branch of a tree.

The boys had this one set up just for kicks.

They got out their favorite 12 gauge and…

[BOOM! A shotgun blast rips through the zombie woman's mouth, splitting her face in two. Her torso falls to the ground as her partially decapitated head continues to swing from the tree. Eyes, staring - accusatory in their blankness.]

Are we worth saving?

You tell me.

In a world in which it’s “Us” versus “Them” – “Us” and “The Other” – all manner of cruelties can be justified: Pigeon shoots. Canned hunts. Leghold traps. Farmed animals. Forced pregnancy and birth. Stolen milk, anemic babies, grieving mothers. Enslavement. Torture. An early and merciless death.

And that’s before the shit hits the fan.

Tell me: who will you become after the death of death?

Kay eyes Patrick’s burger from over the top of her book, Meat Is Not Green.
Image from “Meat is Murder.” Original air date April 19, 2010. Copyright ABC Family.
——————————

Sorry for my absence, folks. I’ve been otherwise preoccupied in the “real world,” and – while I wish I could say that I’ll soon return to regular blogging – this may or may not be the case. In the meantime, check out the following alert from DawnWatch, wherein Karen provides an overview of a recent veg-friendly episode of ABC Family’s 10 Things I Hate About You (“Meat Is Murder,” Season 1, Episode 14). Sadly, last week it was announced that the show will not be picked up for a second season; however, I still urge you to send some feedback ABC’s way, whether positive or negative (or a little bit of both!), in order to encourage similar (or new and improved!) plot lines in the future.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 8:46 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Meatless Mondays on ABC’s 10 Things I Hate About You 4/19/10

Last Monday’s episode, April 19, of the hit primetime ABC series “10 Things I Hate About You” was titled “Meat is Murder.” It centered on Kat’s efforts to get Meatless Monday’s introduced at her school.

You can watch the episode on line [here].

I urge you to check it out, at least for a minute — stations take note of what shows and episodes get the most online hits.

I will give you some highlights:

It opens with Kat sitting at lunch, reading a book titled, “Meat is Not Green.” When her boyfriend sits down with a burger and asks about the book in a teasing manner, Kat says: “Did you know that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture?”

He admits that it’s fascinating and she says, “If everybody at this school ate vegetables instead of processed animal flesh just one day a week it would make a huge environmental impact.”

He asks if he could do a walkathon instead, and she says, “If you don’t want to do it for the earth, do it for you colon.”

Then she gets up and says, “Enjoy your carbon footprint. I am going to go do something about this.”

While it’s hard to tell just from reading the words, what’s great about the scene is the fun and warm way in which Kat delivers the information, with she and her boyfriend agreeing to hang out after school that day. There was a time when animal and environmental activists were portrayed on TV as unbearable. This episode shows how far we have come. The animal advocate on this show is super smart and also warm and pretty and charming — characteristics the animals could use on their side.

Kat goes to the student council meeting and says: “Every day the earth is getting closer and closer to cataclysmic climate change, yet every year we are burning more and more fossil fuels. It is time for our generation to say ‘Enough.’ We didn’t cause this mess, but we can clean it up, and that starts right here, right now, with your approval of Meatless Mondays.”

When the item goes up for a vote, it passes! Then we see an appropriate bit of realism when Kat’s previous ally decides to sabotage the win and run a student president election campaign based on the promise of pepperoni pizza on Mondays. But the ending of the episode is positive, with Kat’s boyfriend trying his first soy dog and deciding it isn’t bad. He asks why, if “you guys” hate meat so much, the soy dog tastes like meat. She says: “Well it’s not that I hate the taste, it’s just that whenever I see meat all I see is this little face saying ‘Don’t eat me.”

Nice.

“10 Things About You” takes feedback at: community.abcfamily.go.com/feedback
Choose that show’s title from the pull down menu.

Please take just a moment to thank the producers for the Meatless Monday episode. Positive feedback will encourage similar themes in the future. The Meatless Monday website, www.MeatlessMonday.com tells us that 751,000 people watched last Monday’s episode of “10 Things I Hate About You.” Those numbers mean power to get a message out. Please express your appreciation and give the producers some encouragement so that they’ll keep up the good work.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to learn about Karen Dawn’s book, “Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals,” which was chosen last year by the Washington Post as one of the “Best Books of The Year!”

To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php

9. Law and Order SVU used ideas from The Sexual Politics of Meat (and its slide show) in a recent episode on “Beef.” Of course! Because as the fictional me says on their show, “Meat eating and patriarchy go hand in hand.”

I think I’m now legally required to watch that particular episode (and report back to y’all, natch!), which is currently languishing away on my DVR, where it patiently waited out the end of May sweeps. Possibly I’ll need a few more weeks to recover from the loss of Lost, though. Fair warning.

—————-

Just a reminder: tonight’s episode of Law & Order: SVU will include a subplot of animal rights activism inside a slaughterhouse. The show airs at 10 Eastern / 9 Central; you can find additional details on the show’s website.

Karen Dawn recently sent out an action alert about the episode, featuring opportunities for you to provide NBC with feedback. Please thank them for addressing “meat” production, and also let them know how you think they handled the subject matter after you’ve seen the episode in question!

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 2:55 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Meat expose on Law and Order SVU this Wednesday, 4/21/10

Many of you have been asking what has happened to DawnWatch. After ten years of regular coverage DawnWatch alerts were indeed sparse during the second half of last year, when I was losing Buster Dawn and focused on little else. Then the excitement around The Cove, culminating in the Oscar going to that extraordinary film about the horrors behind dolphin abusement parks (to coin Ric O’Barry’s perfect phrase) took all of my attention for a while early this year. Now I am writing a new book, and am also working on rearranging Dawnwatch to make the site more interactive, so that other people can post. But I have missed working on it, and have appreciated hearing from those of you who have missed getting it, so I am going to get back to it on a more regular basis.

And boy to have a great excuse to come back: This week a hit prime time dram, Law & Order SVU, will be airing an episode that focuses on the meat industry. There is no newspaper that has as many readers, or news show that has as many viewers, as this drama, so its power to educate the public is terrific. I happened to catch a preview last week, and went to the show’s site to learn more. You can see the preview of the episode [here].

According to the promo blurb, Detective Olivia Benson goes undercover at a meat plant to solve the murder of a woman who “was filming an unflinching expose of meat.” We hear, on the promo clip:

“She was going to call her film, inside the slaughterhouse… Except she’s the one who got slaughtered.”

The show will air on NBC this Wednesday, April 21, at 10pm (9 central) so set your DVRs and TIVOs and tell your friends!

You can post a comment about the show, before or after it, on the page that I linked to above. Just click on “comments” and help get a lively discussion going. Please! You have to register to join in there, but that takes just a few seconds — seconds well spent to help give the animals a voice.

Then most importantly, please take just a moment to contact the producers and let them know how much you appreciate their attention to this subject. Shows take their feedback seriously. Go to www.nbc.com/contact/general/
Then scroll down to the feedback form and choose Law & Order SVU from the pull-down menu.

While you are setting those DVRs, make sure to add the one hour special of highlights from The Genesis Awards, our movements Oscars, which will air on Animal Planet this coming Saturday, April 24th at 12:00 noon ET/PT and repeat on Sunday, April 25th at 1:00pm ET/PT. The ceremony this year was just terrific. You can learn more about The Genesis Awards and see a brief video of a few highlights on line at: www.humanesociety.org/genesis

Thanks for caring, and for acting on behalf of the animals.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to learn about Karen Dawn’s book, “Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals,” which was chosen last year by the Washington Post as one of the “Best Books of The Year!”

To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php

In honor of Earth Day, Biz Markie and the Climate Protection Action Fund want you to rap (or lip sync) along to a “clean energy” version of his ’80s classic “Just a Friend.” Repower America will provide the lyrics and instructions; you just need a web cam and an internet connection. Here are the details:

What do Earth Day, YouTube’s home page and a rap classic have in common?

You.

On April 22, we’ll be releasing a remix of the top-ten-hit song “Just a Friend” performed by Biz Markie and Repower America supporters from across the country. It’s going to be featured all day on YouTube’s home page — and you can be part of the fun!

You don’t need a perfect singing voice to get involved — and for that matter, you don’t even need to know the song. In fact, the chorus to Biz Markie’s song is famous for being beautifully off-key. If you’re still not convinced that you’re ready to bust out rapping on tape, just lip-sync or dance in your video. (Or get your kids to.) The only thing that matters is that you participate — in whatever way works for you.

We’ve got everything else you need to sing along — lyrics, music and a video showing you how to record your own version.

Check it out and add your voice to the Biz Markie Earth Day remix right now: cpaf.RepowerAmerica.org/Remix

Naturally, the “eco-friendly” lyrics ignore the role of meat, egg and dairy production in climate change – which is well in keeping with environmental organizations’ unwillingness to address human privilege and its many attendant ills. That said, perhaps some of you more creative types can work a reference or two to veganism into your own video? If you’re interested, you have to move fast – the deadline for submissions is midnight tomorrow night, April 18th. Eastern time, I presume?

Fowl Play Screening and UPC Presentation in New York City May 15
Join United Poultry Concerns & Mercy For Animals at the Columbus Library!

United Poultry Concerns and Mercy For Animals invite you to attend a screening of MFA’s award winning film Fowl Play and a presentation by UPC president Karen Davis in honor of International Respect for Chickens Month/May.

Hosted by the Columbus Library on Saturday, May 15 from 11:30am to 2:00pm – the day preceding the Third Annual Veggie Pride Parade in NYC – this event will be followed by leafleting for chickens!

Fowl Play Screening and Chicken Presentation will be held at:

Columbus Library
742 10th Ave (between 50th & 51st Streets)
New York, NY 10019-7019
(212) 586-5098

Saturday, May 15, 2010

11:30am-12:00pm – free vegan food samples

12:00pm – Introduction by Matt Rice, NYC Campaign Coordinator for MFA

12:05pm – Fowl Play screening (25 minutes)

12:30pm – Presentation/Lecture by UPC President Karen Davis, author of the groundbreaking book Prisoned Chickens Poisoned Eggs

1:00pm-2:00pm – Leafleting session for chickens

This event is free and open to the public. Please join United Poultry Concerns and Mercy For Animals on the eve of the Veggie Pride Parade in honor of International Respect for Chickens Month/May.

Give a cluck – stick up for chickens – go vegan!

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.

Don’t just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.

www.UPC-online.org

Order Today: Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (2009 Revised Edition)

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

Sexism and speciesism go together like, well, movies and popcorn. Carol J. Adams wrote the book on this nasty little tag-team, and I for one am a smarter consumer of pop culture for it. I also love movies and popcorn, so imagine my surprise when, one snowy afternoon, I watched Penelope and found my vegan-feminist Spidey Sense a-tingle.

Penelope stars Christina Ricci as an otherwise gorgeous girl born with a pig’s nose as the result of an old family curse. (Women! pigs! obvious! parallel!) The curse, of course, can only be broken by the love of “one of her own kind”—unanimously interpreted to mean that of another aristocrat. Already, we have all the elements of a fairy tale—the perfect lens for examining cultural notions of beauty and self-love.

Penelope’s parents are a study in contrasts: her father, Franklin (Richard E. Grant), guiltily accepts responsibility for Penelope’s “disfigurement,” as his side of the family bears the curse; her mother, Jessica (Catherine O’Hara), is so terrified of what people will say that she fakes baby Penelope’s death to deter snooping reporters. She is so obsessed by her daughter’s nose that she bans anything pig-related, scolding Jake the butler when he plays “This Little Piggy” with the baby’s toes and forbidding her husband to eat bacon. Any notion of her daughter as animal is anathema to her—we’re meant to understand that she means well, but her fixation reveals far more about her than it does about Penelope.

Penelope grows up in secret, nurturing a love of horticulture and staging puppet shows by herself, never encountering the outside world. Jessica, meanwhile, has but one goal: groom Penelope for marriage. She hires a matchmaker on Penelope’s 18th birthday and is hell-bent on finding a man—any man, as long as he’s a blue-blood—to break the curse. (The focus on breeding calls to mind the ways in which, for women and animals alike, destiny is still often pre-determined.) After several failed attempts at allowing potential suitors to meet Penelope face-to-face (to a one, they scream at her ugliness and leap out the window), an elaborate courtship ritual is contrived. The young men wait in the library, where Penelope watches and talks to them through a one-way mirror. Her family, disturbingly, watches on closed-circuit TV, munching on popcorn, eager for her to find The One.

When the film begins, Penelope is 25, which means she’s spent seven years being rejected by every blue-blood in town. After a particularly disastrous meeting with histrionic snob Edward Humphrey Vandermann III (Simon Woods), Jessica senses that their options are running out, and suggests they double Penelope’s dowry. In a rare show of hurt and frustration, Penelope snaps, “If they can’t stand the sight of me now, what makes you think they’ll be able to for double?” When she later tries to soothe herself with junk food, Jessica slaps a Ho-Ho out of her hands and scolds, “Now you’re just going to make a pig of yourself?” “No, that’s already been done for me,” Penelope replies bitterly.

Vandermann, his ego wounded by a newspaper article branding him unstable after his rantings about a monstrous pig-faced girl, joins forces with tabloid reporter Lemon (the super Peter Dinklage), who’s been chasing Penelope’s photo since her birth. They hire anti-Prince Charming Max Campion (James McAvoy), who’s gambled away the family fortune, to pose as one of Penelope’s suitors. You know what happens next: over chess games and discussions of books, Max and Penelope develop a connection. He finds his errand distasteful—he’s uncomfortable with the idea of exploiting Penelope to get her photo, but he could really use Lemon’s money, too. In this pairing, it’s not the woman who feels pressured to marry for money. Max gets thisclose, too: unfortunately, when they’re finally face to face, it all gets FUBARed and he runs out of the library, leaving a distraught Penelope believing that yet another man is repulsed by her. “I’m a monster,” she cries, and her internalization of all the hatred directed at her is complete.

By this point, it’s clear that Penelope needs to take matters into her own hands if she’s ever going to break free of her gilded cage. So, that’s what she does. She steals her mother’s credit card, wraps a scarf around the lower half of her face, and braves the city alone. Frightened though she is by such foreign sights as joggers (she thinks they’re chasing her), she’s pleasantly surprised that no one treats her as an oddity. Her scarf? It’s a harmless eccentricity, easily overlooked by a friendly bartender and a sassy courier named Annie (Reese Witherspoon).

Jessica and Franklin, meanwhile, are losing their minds, but can’t figure out how to find their daughter without drawing attention to her. “Think ‘pig,’” Franklin says in exasperation to a private investigator confused by the fact that Penelope’s parents have no photos of her. “So, she’s a fat girl,” he clarifies, making a note. Here again we see the overt, unfavorable association of women and animals. To their further chagrin, the drawing that runs of Penelope, next to the headline, “Have You Seen This Pig?” is the one that Edward earlier described to a sketch artist: hideous, be-fanged, stringy-haired, snarling. Penelope has been reduced to a porcine vampire-zombie. Fed up with the speculation and the drama, she makes a deal with Lemon to sell him her photo herself. A brief session in a photo booth gives her back her power.

The headlines that accompany her photo most clearly highlight the intersection of speciesism and misogyny. “Behold the Pig-Faced Girl,” trumpets one. “‘It’ Exists,” declares another. Indeed, she does, but Penelope’s pig nose renders her less than human. She’s a discovery, a new species of creature to be gawked at. In her naïveté, she marvels at the hordes of paparazzi clamoring to photograph her: “They’re not running,” she says in wonderment. She knows that she is a freak to them, but she’s a freak on her own terms.

Of course, Penelope becomes everyone’s darling. Amusingly, her newfound public adopts the same welfarist attitudes her mother did, and Pig Latin is banned from schools. Even Edward Vandermann, who insisted that she belonged in a cage, is cajoled by his embarrassed father into asking for Penelope’s hand in marriage. “Things are different now,” she protests when her mother urges her to accept with a reminder that Edward could break the curse. “You’re just a talking pig to those people,” Jessica says harshly, and we see that Penelope’s public coming-out has done little to change her opinion of her own daughter.

Penelope and Edward’s wedding day arrives, and amongst the sparkling champagne and artful bouquets, there is much anxious breath-holding. What will Penelope wear? Can Edward go through with it? Will he break the curse?

Duh, of course not. Before she can repeat her vows to Edward (who mumbles his without looking at her), Penelope realizes what a farce the whole “curse” deal is and runs off to her room, her only sanctuary. Jessica pleads with her to reconsider, to think of the family, but Penelope, who has finally taken steps to create the life she’s always wanted, cries, “I don’t want a whole new me. I like myself the way I am!” Those words, Penelope’s words of self-acceptance, break the curse. Her pig nose disappears, replaced by one that looks an awful lot like it, only human. “I had had the power all along,” she muses in a voiceover.

Jessica is appropriately contrite, even though Penelope still comforts her, as she’s done for years. She’s not changed, though: In the same breath, she goes from admiring Penelope’s new nose to suggesting a nose job so she can look her best. She’s chronically unhappy, and Penelope feels sad for her, but she’s through with absorbing her mother’s unhappiness. In a further magical twist, Jake the butler is revealed to be the witch who cast the curse so long ago. Before he disappears, he kindly renders Jessica mute, so her manic shrieks are reduced to soundless flailing.

“Wait a minute,” you’re thinking. “This is a fairy tale. Penelope’s broken the curse, but she has to get her man, too.” And right you are. Max, the broke-ass high-born gambler, is actually Johnny, who is equally broke-ass but nowhere near as aristocratic. However will Penelope find him again? A nifty subterfuge is introduced on Halloween, when little girls everywhere don scarves and pig masks to “be” Penelope. As she knocks on Johnny’s door, Penelope puts on a pig mask of her own. He doesn’t recognize her at first, and the mask allows them to slowly reveal their true feelings, much as the one-way mirror did during their first meetings. When they finally kiss, it’s with her mask on. Johnny realizes that she never needed him to break the curse in the first place. And they lived happily ever after.

On the surface, Penelope is a sweetly modern fairy tale about loving yourself and defying shallow beauty conventions. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find thoughtful, if accidental, commentary on the joint subjugation of women and animals. While I was glad to see that everything didn’t automatically fall into place for Penelope once she broke the curse, I found myself wishing that she had kept her original nose, a la Cyrano or Roxanne. Or Shrek, even, another movie with a subversive-yet-kid-friendly message about beauty. Speaking of kids, the wisest voice in Penelope comes in the form of one of her students. “It’s not the power of the curse. It’s the power you give the curse,” he supplies helpfully. Wise words for us feminists as we keep fighting our own curses, which are too often also those of our non-human sisters.

Did I miss something? Promote your local event, tell us all about your favorite new release, and share other animal-friendly pop culture goodies in the comments!

Caution: Spoilers Galore!

As far as horror movies go, The Crazies is fairly standard stuff. A plane crash-lands in a remote marsh just a tick upstream of the rural farming town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa. On board is a biological weapon, engineered by the U.S. government in order to “destabilize populations”; allegedly, it was en route to “an incinerator in Dallas,” having proven too dangerous for wide scale use. The plane’s payload slowly leaks into its watery tomb, where the contaminant is carried downstream, straight into Ogden Marsh’s water supply – and onto its citizens’ crops and into their bellies. In short order, the virus infects the town’s residents, transforming them from loving husbands and mild-mannered educators into violent, homicidal “crazies.” *

The federal government quickly moves in, quarantining the town and separating the townspeople into two groups – “infected” and “not” – ripping families apart in the process. Those who are thought to be sick are taken to the local high school (now set up as a makeshift hospital), strapped to hospital gurneys, and “treated.” (“Observed” is more like it. The viewer doesn’t get the feeling that there’s anything the doctors can do to help their patients.) The healthy residents are transported to a large gas station/truck stop/convenience store situated on the edge of town, ostensibly for eventual evacuation to nearby Sioux City. Of course, because this is a horror film and all, things do not go as planned; a riot breaks out at the high school, leading to the government’s evacuation (and eventual nuclear incineration, complete with cover-up) of Ogden Marsh. The events unfold within a 96-hour period (two days pre- and two days post-outbreak), during which the audience follows four heroes – the local sheriff and deputy; the sheriff’s wife, who’s also the town’s only doctor; and her teenage assistant – as they try to understand what’s happening to their fellow citizens and, later, escape to safety.

What’s particularly interesting about The Crazies from a vegan perspective is the way in which the town’s residents are portrayed, pre- and post-infection. Precipitating the sheriff’s hunt for and discovery of the downed plane is the discovery of its pilot – or rather, its pilot’s body – in the marsh by a group of (duck?) hunters, whom the sheriff scolds for illegal, off-season hunting.

Later on, during the first night of the viral outbreak, the sheriff and his companions stumble upon the same group of hunters while looking for a working vehicle along the town’s main street (which might very well be called Main Street). The hunters are infected, and have “graduated” from the recreational killing of nonhuman animals to hunting humans for fun. Hiding across the way, our heroes watch as the hunters gun down several fleeing people – and then load the dead bodies into the back of their pickup truck, the same way hunters do with deer corpses. As one of the men opens the truck’s tailgate, the viewer is treated to the image of a half dozen human bodies, freshly dead and still dripping blood, stacked one atop another, pyramid style. The grotesque, veiny zombie faces and city setting aside, the group – laughing, whooping, hollering – looks as though they could be chasing down deers or turkeys on a dusky Sunday morning.

The next night, the sheriff and his wife – now the only two survivors – run into the hunters again, this time at the now-abandoned convenience store. The hunters have taken up residence at the establishment; finding that the store’s roomy cooler makes for the perfect place to stash dead bodies, they have converted it into a meat locker – for human meat, that is. At one point, the protagonists are forced to hide among the corpses, “playing dead” in order to survive. A human body, swinging upside-down from a meat hook, provides lifesaving camouflage.

While it’s true that the bio-engineered virus turns all those infected into homicidal killers, the group of hunters are presented as an especially dangerous and menacing group. They are one of the first and last challenges the heroes must overcome in order to escape. Unlike many other sick townspeople, the hunters do not succumb during the first day of infection, either to the military or to other “crazies”; they not only survive, but thrive, banding together and hunting down “the others” in a somewhat organized and efficient fashion (even having the sense, in their diseased state, to keep their “meat” in cold storage). As far as “the crazies” go, the hunters are the “craziest” of the “crazy” – already thrilled by violence and death prior to the outbreak, their blood lust only escalates with sickness.

Additionally, the film also utilizes a few familiar symbols of animal exploitation – above and beyond the aforementioned hunting imagery – in order to emphasize just how horribly the townspeople have been treated by their government. For example, on the first night of the infection, the healthy individuals are ferried to the mega-convenience store in cattle trucks (slatted wood siding and all – just wide enough to poke an arm through in panic and plea), similar to those used to transport women (read: cattle) in The Handmaid’s Tale and humans (read: guinea pigs) in Terminator Salvation. Twenty-four hours later, the doctor comes across these same trucks, left abandoned in the store’s parking lot. Peering inside, she finds the bodies of her fellow citizens, gunned down where they stood. Herded, trapped, dispatched. “Like animals,” no doubt.

Of course, this isn’t to imply that the filmmakers intend this is as a commentary on our treatment of nonhuman animals. Instead, it’s much more likely that they’re simply appropriating the imagery of animal suffering and exploitation in order to further drive home the desperate plight of Ogden Marsh’s human residents. Even so, I find the linkage of oppressions both significant and heartening; as long as we condone and encourage the exploitation of some of us (no matter how “less”), we are all potential victims. Violence is a virus, and no one is immune.

* The title – a carry over from the 1973 flick The Crazies, of which this 2010 version is a remake – is both unimaginative and ableist. And I say the latter as a someone who 1) doesn’t usually take issue with “crazy” when used as slang, i.e., “my husband’s snoring drives me crazy” and 2) is herself, shall we say, “certifiable.”

One of the reasons I started POP! is because I felt a little odd discussing every little mention of vegetarianism, veganism and animal advocacy issues over at my main place. There are just so many examples that to address each one would quickly overwhelm a space with pop culture minutiae.

Seriously, once you get into the habit of actively engaging in media – viewing it with a critical eye, rather than passively taking it in – you start to notice animal-friendly (and, on the downside, animal-unfriendly) themes everywhere: vegetarianism is discussed in passing; characters talk about their “pets”; animal “evidence” is discovered at a crime scene; monsters and aliens act as stand-ins for free-living predators and conventionally intelligent nonhuman species; cyborgs and AI challenge our notions of what it means to be “human”; etc., etc., etc.

Anyhow, while watching a rerun of CSI on Spike this morning, I caught an unexpected – and insightful – example of the former: a short-lived character who just so happened to be a vegetarian. His vegetarianism – which seemed to extend beyond his diet, to his ethical beliefs – was incidental to the plot line; he could have just as easily been an omnivore. But his rejection of “meat” (as well as cheese – perhaps he might have better been described as a vegan?) provided the writers an excellent opportunity to slip in a sly piece of commentary on the intersectionality of oppressions.

Season 6, Episode 19, “Spellbound” – here’s the setup. A psychic was found murdered in her storefront. The fingerprints of one Reese Bringham – the self-described vegetarian – were discovered on her cash register, suggesting a murder committed during the course of a robbery. Warrick Brown and Captain Brass have brought Reese in for questioning:

[INT. POLICE DEPARTMENT - INTERVIEW ROOM - DAY]

(Warrick and Brass interview Reese Bingham.)

BRASS: The state has a law that murder committed during the commission of a felony buys you the death penalty. Do you understand that?

REESE BRINGHAM: This has to be a mistake. I don’t even eat meat. Or cheese. I won’t even hire an exterminator.

WARRICK: Your prints were found at the crime scene.

REESE BRINGHAM: I haven’t been to any crime scenes.

BRASS: You been to any occult shops lately?

REESE BRINGHAM: Yeah, I work next door to one.

WARRICK: You want to explain to me why your prints were found on the cash register?

REESE BRINGHAM: The owner’s my friend. Did something happen to her?

BRASS: You don’t know that she’s dead?

(He sighs, saddened.)

REESE BRINGHAM: No.

WARRICK: She was killed and then robbed, and your prints are on her cash register.

REESE BRINGHAM: Okay, yeah, wait … I can explain that.

BRASS: Start explaining.

REESE BRINGHAM: I work at a vegetarian restaurant. We make these soy burgers. Sedona was hooked on them. So, you know, she’d order, I’d deliver.

BRASS: So you’re a soy-burger-making, vegetarian delivery boy, hmm?

REESE BRINGHAM: Look, she’s always busy doing a reading or whipping up some kind of potion. She told me to take the money out of the drawer.

BRASS: Give yourself a tip?

REESE BRINGHAM: Soy burger and fries was $6.95 plus tax. I’d take a ten.

WARRICK: You delivered to her last night?

REESE BRINGHAM: (shakes his head) No.

BRASS: Was it your day off?

REESE BRINGHAM: Like most nights, I work until six and then I like … to go to the Stripperama.

BRASS: I thought you didn’t like meat?

(He chuckles unsure.)

WARRICK: Is there anyone who can confirm that?

REESE BRINGHAM: Well, yeah.

WARRICK: She got a name?

REESE BRINGHAM: Girls aren’t allowed to tell you their real names, but I call her Star ’cause she has these … blue stars tattooed on her hips. And it kind of looks like a meteor shower when she dances.

WARRICK: Would you stand up, please.

(Reese stands up slowly, unsure.)

REESE BRINGHAM: I can go?

WARRICK: No. You can strip down to your skivvies.

REESE BRINGHAM: Excuse me?

BRASS: You want some music?

The Sexual Politics of Meat, anyone?

Later on, when Sanders and Warrick visit with ‘Star’ at the Stripperama in order to confirm Reese’s alibi (spoiler: he’s innocent), the dancer dismisses him as “harmless” – even though he appears to be ever-so-politely stalking her. Also: she describes Reese as smelling like “nasty pickles.” I’m not sure whether this is supposed to be a jab at vegetarians (bean curd stinks!) or deli workers (bread and butter pickles stink!), but it seems to play into the stereotype of vegetarians as smelly hippies. Indeed, Reese himself – a young, white male, in his early-to-mid twenties, of average height and build, somewhat quiet and nondescript (“harmless”) – is perhaps the image many people hold of vegetarians.

So it’s an interesting juxtaposition of the expected (Reese’s appearance) with the unexpected (Reese’s behavior, as well as Brass’s reaction to it).

Thoughts?

(Transcript via TWIZ TV.)