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.

Caution: Spoilers ahead.

The second-to-last episode of CSI in 2009 featured a particularly animal-friendly plot line. I say “particularly” rather than “surprisingly” because CSI has a longstanding track record of treating animals and animal advocacy issues with a modicum of respect – a practice which stands in sharp contrast to similar crime shows like Law & Order. (See, for example, Veg*nism & Pop Culture: But does Costa Rica have an extradition treaty? and Veg*nism & Pop Culture: Sara Sidle: From CSI to Terra-ist.)

Season 10, Episode 9 (Appendicitement) saw the CSI team investigating not one, but two separate murders, both of which occurred on the premises of a BBQ joint. Since IMDB has a decent writeup of the episode, I’ll let them take it away:

There are two twisty tales in Vegas tonight. Strike that, one in Vegas and one outside.

The first tale concerns lab tech Henry. Greg, Nick, and Hodges literally kidnap Henry on his birthday to take him to this great barbecue place up the road apiece called Harry’s Hog Hideout.* On the way there a crazy lady runs them off the road and the car rolls. Fortunately, none of them is seriously injured but Nick’s car is out of commission. With no cell service, they decide to walk the last little bit to Harry’s but, unfortunately, when they arrive they discover it’s been closed for seven months due to a Hepatitis outbreak. They decide to poke around and see if there’s a working phone inside.

Instead they find a dead body, a man with a raccoon attached to his face.

While Henry, disgruntled about his crummy birthday, hangs with the dead guy Hodges and Greg poke around outside. They figure out that the guy lured the raccoon to a nearby barrel and tried to kill him by filling the barrel with ethylene gas and blowing him up. The explosion threw the raccoon and the guy through the window of Harry’s. So it was an accident.

Meanwhile, Nick looks for a phone and it’s not working. He returns to the scene just as another guy shows up and pulls a gun on Henry. They make it clear that they’re cops and the guy, Slick explains that the dead guy was Gomez the cook at Harry’s, who was generally a good guy.

(Emphasis and asterisks mine, of course.)

Initially – and in breaking with the show’s usual treatment of such cases – the CSI investigators exhibit disappointingly little concern for the dead raccoon. Personally, I am lacking in sympathy for people who inadvertently blow themselves up while trying to lure a sentient being into a trap, only to torch him alive. Killing “nuisance” animals – especially when there are humane, catch-and-release options available – is bad enough; plotting to light them on fire while still alive and fully conscious is downright sadistic. Unfortunately, the CSI team doesn’t voice any of these thoughts – that is, until much later in the show.

Once the plot unfolds and the bodies are transported back to the lab, coroner David Phillips expresses grief at the raccoon’s demise. I can’t recall what exactly was said (nor did I think to save the episode on my DVR so that I might type up a transcript – doh!), but I believe that David muttered something about the human getting what he deserved and referred to the raccoon as an innocent bystander.

In other words, all is well in the Las Vegas crime lab!

Alas, we still have one body to account for…

Just then the crazy broad woman that who ran them off the road comes barreling up and crashes into the debris outside, rendering her car unusable as well.

She comes in, soused, and she and Slick make eyes at each other while eating martini olives. She was Harry’s wife and they explain that Harry ran off, cleaned out their accounts, and they haven’t heard from him since. Nick asks after a phone and Slick says there’s a ham radio out back. They try it but it blows a tube. Super nerd Greg thinks he can make one though.

Meanwhile, Shirley shows Henry a postcard from Harry saying he found a younger woman, took all their money, and ran off to an island to be happy without her. He agrees it’s mean. She then tries to, ew, put the moves on him.

Hodges discovers that Slick and Shirley were making moonshine in the basement. Greg figures out how to make a phone work by wiring up the receiver directly to the phone pole outside and calls for help. As they wait, Henry accidentally spills sulfuric acid on his hand and Nick quickly runs to the BBQ pit in the middle of the restaurant and grabs some charcoal to neutralize it. While rooting around in there he discovers a human skull. He pulls his gun and goes over to Slick and Shirley and asks them if they know who it is, they claim they don’t.

Later at the station they determine the skull and other bones found in the pit are in fact Harry. Nick realizes the ribs are gone. Harry also had hepatitis. They deduce that whoever killed him then served up his ribs at the restaurant. Slick and Shirley each blame the other in their interviews with Brass. But Henry is stuck on the postcard. When they discover that Gomez had a rap sheet for forgery, they figure out that he forged Harry’s handwriting, sent the postcard to his mom in Florida to send back to Shirley. They figure that Harry found out about Gomez’ past and used it against him to keep him at the restaurant and Gomez got sick of it. Henry, who sprained his ankle and burned his hand, decides it wasn’t the worst birthday ever after all.

Sweet serendipity! A man who made his name by trading in the charred remains of enslaved, tortured, murdered and dismembered animals has himself been murdered and dismembered – not to mention, marinated, barbecued, and served up on a platter to his own hungry customers.

Deliciously ironic is one patron’s exclamation of glee: “I have always loved Harry’s ribs!” Clearly, she means to say that she’s always loved the ribs of pigs, which Harry has (with a little help from the omnipresent animal agriculture industry) stolen, repurposed and resold as “his own.” Here, nothing is Harry’s but the marinade recipe. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, this time, the ribs actually are Harry’s. She is literally eating Harry’s ribs. And – being “meat” and all – Harry’s ribs are just as yummy as a pig’s.

BBQ CHEF by chillmost on Flickr

By the by, it’s worth noting that a number of online reviewers recoiled at the thought of – ick! – eating Harry as opposed to the intended pigs. Humans, pigs, cows, dogs: we are all made of the same basic stuff – meat, tissue, bones, etc. If you find the though of cooking and eating Harry (or Spot!) appalling, perhaps it’s time to examine your moral inconsistencies vis-à-vis “meat” consumption. Ditto: dairy and eggs. (I have a t-shirt that reads, “If milk is so natural, go suck on a cow’s teat!” Better still: “If milk is so natural, go suck on your mother’s teat!”)

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* Suicide Food, anyone? Why on earth would pigs choose to seek refuge in the place of their demise? Answer: they wouldn’t. They’re porcine, not stupid.