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.

Journalist Bob Woodruff made an appearance on The Daily Show last night in order to promote his latest project, Earth 2100:
 

I find it interesting that Stewart and Woodruff open the discussion with a clip of Earth 2100 that invokes the anecdote of the frog submerged in a pot of boiling water: namely, if you put a frog in a pot of water that’s already boiling, she’ll jump right out, having sensed the heat and danger. But if you place her in a pot of cold or lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, she’s none the wiser, and will remain in the deathtrap until she becomes frog soup. In this metaphor, humans are the frogs, and the pot is earth.

Which is all fine and good, except according to Snopes, this is a folk tale:

Like a fable, the “boiled frog” anecdote serves its purpose whether or not it’s based upon something that is literally true. But it is literally true? Not according to Dr. Victor Hutchison, a Research Professor Emeritus from the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Zoology, whose research interests include “the physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior”:

“The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”

The “boiled frog” legend is a ubiquitous one – one that, given its falsehood, is both speciesist and completely inappropriate for what I assume is supposed to be a scientific documentary. The latter point is a given, but allow me to explain the former: central to the anecdote’s premise is the idea that a frog is so utterly stupid that, given subtle but entirely discernible cues, “it” would remain oblivious to the increasing danger and allow “itself” to be boiled alive. “Let’s not be like those lesser animals!” the tale cautions. Except. In denying climate change and poo-pooing slight increases in average global temperatures as “insignificant,” the human species is actually exhibiting less sense than Dog gave a frog. The frog isn’t earth’s complacent village idiot – we are.

Also of note: Jon alludes to the presumed vivisection which led to the “discovery” that frogs might allow themselves to be boiled alive, given the right circumstances. Both Stewart and Woodruff appear to think that such gruesome experiments probably took place years ago, in the distant past. Except.

“The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”

While I can’t locate citations for these experiments, Wiki suggests that they’re more recent debunkings of “research” performed in the late 1800s (“research” on which the legend is apparently based).

So, yeah, we boil frogs alive – or attempt to, anyway. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Anyhow, back to Earth 2100.

The show strikes me as a prequel to Life After People – which I blogged about last week – albeit with a contingency plan. Of course, all the lifelines in the world won’t help unless we’re willing to avail ourselves of them.

From ‘Earth 2100′: the Final Century of Civilization?:

It’s an idea that most of us would rather not face — that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind.

To change the future, first you have to imagine it.

It seems outlandish, extreme — even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen. [...]

In the history of Earth, there have been five mass extinctions in which at least half the species on the planet disappeared. Scientists believe the extinctions were brought on by natural disasters — massive volcanic eruptions, rapid climate changes and meteors hitting Earth.

Today, scientists say we are in the middle of a “sixth extinction” — and for the first time, it’s being caused by one species — us. It seems inconceivable that we could do so much damage to our planet that we actually cause society as we know it to collapse. But historical precedent shows that it is, in fact, a very real possibility.

“Every society that collapsed thought it couldn’t happen to them,” says Joseph Tainter, an expert in anthropology and societal collapse. “The Roman Empire thought it couldn’t happen. The Maya civilization thought it couldn’t happen. Everyone thought it couldn’t happen to them. But it did.”

These populations grew too much and exhausted their resources — and their climate suddenly changed. People were forced to fight each other for what little was left or face starvation. Entire societies broke down.

“Civilizations in the past have lost the fight,” says climatologist Heidi Cullen. “They have collapsed as a result of the inability to deal with several different events going on at once. I think the takeaway is that honestly, we are not that special.”

Earth 2100 covers the obvious suspect (climate change) as well as water scarcity, oil and fuel depletion, national security, migration patterns, drought, flooding, mass (non-human) animal (species) extinctions, and other global crises. If you’re as cynical as I, probably you’ll read this as Exhibit #23,386,982 in favor of VHEMT.

Anyhow, if this all sounds interesting, Earth 2100 airs tonight on ABC at 9 PM ET – so set those timers!

There are also a number of clips available on the show’s website, so check it out.

In an entirely unrelated matter, I’m supremely disappointed that The Daily Show didn’t so much as mention the murder of Dr. Tiller on Monday’s episode. Granted, I didn’t expect them to devote a segment to it – nor would such a segment have been appropriate, unless conducted with righteous anger and a complete absence of humor, which Jon rarely deals in – but I had hoped for a mention of the crime, or at least an “in memoriam” graphic to close the show. But nada on what amounts to an atrocity committed against women everywhere. Fauxgressive much?

Videos in this post

The Daily Show – June 1, 2009 – Bob Woodruff
Bob Woodruff lays out the worst-case scenario for the future of our civilization in “Earth 2100.”

Mylène @ My Face Is On Fire recently wrote about scifi author Terry Bisson’s 1991 short story “They’re Made Out of Meat,” which she noted, “provides an interesting twist on how most humans view animals.”

Wiki’s entry is on the story is rather short (but then, so’s the story!) – and contains spoilers – so if you’d rather be surprised, skip right on down to the video and press play before reading further. The running time is 7 1/2 minutes, but it’s worth every second.

They’re Made Out of Meat is a Nebula Award-nominated short story by Terry Bisson. It was originally published in OMNI. It consists entirely of dialogue between two characters, and Bisson’s website hosts a theatrical adaptation. A film adaptation won the Grand Prize at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum’s 2006 film festival.

(The aforementioned award-winning short is what I’ve embedded below.)

The two characters are sentient beings capable of traveling faster than light, on a mission to “contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe.” Bisson’s stage directions represent them as “two lights moving like fireflies among the stars” on a projection screen. They converse briefly on their bizarre discovery of carbon-based life, which they refer to incredulously as “thinking meat.” They agree to “erase the records and forget the whole thing,” marking the Solar System “unoccupied.”

Interestingly, the only link listed under “See also” is “Carbon chauvinism“:

Carbon chauvinism is a relatively new term meant to disparage the assumption that extraterrestrial life will resemble life on Earth. In particular, it would be applied to those who assume that the molecules responsible for the chemical processes of life must be constructed primarily from carbon. It suggests that, as carbon-based life forms who have never encountered any life that has evolved outside the earth’s environment, human beings may find it difficult to envision radically different biochemistries. The term was used as early as 1973, when Carl Sagan described it and other human chauvinisms that limit imagination of possible extraterrestrial life in his Cosmic Connection.

From there, you can go to “Anthropocentrism,” “Chauvinism,” “Chemical evolution,” “Carbon-based life,” and “They’re Made Out of Meat.”

I always found our humanoid conceptions of aliens life forms to be unreal and egotistical, but never considered it a form of prejudice. But yeah, “carbon chauvinism” (carbonism?) sounds about right. How fitting, then, that “anthropocentrism” (which links to “speciesism”) is referenced in the entry.

Anyhow, this short adaptation of “They’re Made Out of Meat” is really well done, and – if you’re so predisposed (read: intellectually honest) – the themes can equally be applied to our treatment of non-human animals.

See also: Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man.”
 

Many thanks to Mylène for the video!

This series of retro ’50s monster movie poster adverts for the SciFi Channel has little to do with animal advocacy – but why let a lil’ thing like that stop me from putting an animal-friendly spin on ‘em?

Each “poster” depicts an iconic movie monster recoiling in horror as a human invades his space:

From top to bottom, we have The Thing (or The Creature from the Black Lagoon or similar), hastily exiting the water and looking back in fear as the head of a human woman begins to emerge from the tide; a dead zombie, previously safely ensconced in the confines of his coffin, trying to escape a menacing human hand, coming at him from above; and a family of gray aliens, frantically running to and fro, as they witness an “alien” aircraft (read: human airplane) circle the skies above. Printed in a retro horror movie font on each poster are the words, “HUMANS ARE AMONG US.”

Though clearly tongue-in-cheek, these posters depict humans as the real monsters, contrary to the plot of nearly every scifi and/or horror movie ever made. The Thing, undead zombies, and anal-probing gray aliens: none hold a candle to humanity when it comes to violence, domination, bloodthirst and evil. Commonly, horror films portray monsters and aliens as creatures to be feared, but in reality, it’s the other way around: they should fear us. Monsters walk among us, and we are them.

I’m particularly tickled by this theme because, more often than not, I find myself rooting for the monsters and aliens in these movies. Humanity tortures, enslaves, slaughters and exploits sentient creatures – mostly non-human, some human – by the billions. Why, then, shouldn’t I root for the reptilian monster men, who have possibly come seeking righteous vengeance for their victimized cousins, made into crocodile-skin purses or brutalized in shitty roadside alligator wrestling operations?

This is especially true of my reading of alien-invasion stories. Here, aliens from faraway planets invade earth, with the intention of exploiting her natural resources – including us! – for their own convenience or survival. As the plot unfolds, almost without fail, humanity rallies together in order to valiantly defend against these malicious, technologically and/or evolutionarily advanced would-be conquerors. The deck is always stacked against us, yet we rarely fail to triumph. It goes without saying, of course, that the audience is to rally behind humanity.

But I rarely do. After all, aren’t the aliens just doing to us, what we have done to non-human animals for centuries? And aren’t (our collective) logic, reason, ethics, science and philosophy on the aliens’ side? As I said, these aliens are usually depicted as more “advanced” than us: they have superior technology; can travel through space (and perhaps time as well); sometimes exhibit “psychic” powers, or abilities that are well beyond our understanding; and are generally portrayed as intellectually more evolved than us (as evidence by their massive heads). Humans point to similar advantages we wield over non-human animals to justify our exploitation and enslavement of them. If superior might/intelligence/emotions/technology/consciousness/self-awareness makes right, isn’t it the aliens’ right to subjugate us?

Of course not! – as any animal liberationist will tell you. But seeing as the human heroes of these alien invasion films (presumably) see nothing wrong in exploiting “lesser” animals, methinks I’ll stick with the monsters and aliens. I’m probably safer among them, anyhow.

…and the early battle scenes in Qatar? In poor taste, to say the least. Watching American soldiers and Middle Easterners being blown to smithereens isn’t so much entertaining as it is depressing.

Also depressing was this statement, part of Optimus Prime’s endless moralizing: “All sentient beings deserve freedom”. (Or perhaps it was more along the lines of “All sentient being deserve the right to live”…I forget now.) Really? All sentient beings? Because, like, “sentient” isn’t codeword for “human+”.

Sentience refers to utilization of sensory organs, the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. The possession of sapience is not a necessity. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness, or apperception.

Sadly, and despite the obvious implications of such an animal-friendly statement, Transformers was hardly a pro-AR movie. On the contrary; one of Optimus Prime’s cronies (you know, the “good” “guys”) wanted to kill a dog (which he* saw as evidence of a “rodent infestation”) for pissing on his foot. Uh, yeah, maybe y’all should modify that statement to “All sapient beings…” I hate to break it to the screenwriters, but dogs are sentient, you dumbasses.

The effects were pretty cool, though.

* Though Shane doth protest, the Transformers are all clearly uber-masculine entities. Androgynous they aint.