“Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” is both the title and the central ethical question that frames Frans de Waal’s 2016 book on animal studies. In his writing, de Waal details how primatology and ethology have evolved from approaching their living subjects as crude objects of scientific inquiry to communal beings with complex, immeasurable interior lives. While ambitious and well-intentioned, there is one disconcerting element found in his project: Respect, it is held, must be earned through the exhibition of monitored intelligence. We can certainly live in a more empathetic world in which we care for animals, but it first requires our ability to locate the distinct intelligence of each animal. Why do we need proof of intelligence at all in order to respect another species?

 

For a more constructive approach to animal studies we might turn to a few recent science fiction films that have called into question the ethical divide between human and nonhuman animals. Through projecting a future or forging alternative fantastical histories sci-fi films can make visible the hidden violence committed in our present world. These films reveal what Giorgio Agamben dubs the anthropological machine, a mechanical and therefore unconscious thought process that considers Iraqi detainees and political refugees as animals in the human form. The anthropological machine must be stopped not only for the sake of certain humans but also for the sake of nonhumans.[1]

 

The films I will highlight are those of Denis Villeneuve and Bong Joon-Ho. Their films reconfigure or challenge our relations with nonhumans through critiquing the violence committed when we perceive them as physical threats in the sphere of international politics or as commodities in the sphere of neoliberal economics. The first pair of films I will discuss, Joon-Ho’s 2009 The Host and Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival, position the nonhuman as both a threat to national security and as collateral damage to globalization. The second and last pair of films, Villenueve’s Blade Runner 2049 and Joon-Ho’s Okja turns our attention from politics to the economy through locating the maltreatment of animals in the merging powers of technoscience and capitalism. Together these films reframe Frans de Waal’s question: Rather than asking if we are smart enough to know how smart animals are, we should instead be asking if we are smart enough to recognize that respect is the greatest expression of our intelligence.

 

The Host opens in a laboratory where a U.S. military pathologist notices dust accruing on bottles of formaldehyde. He then proceeds to order his Korean assistant to dump all of the formaldehyde into a drain leading to the Han River. In fantastical fashion the toxic chemicals mixed with the various life-forms of the river produce a carnivorous monster. The film follows Park Gang-do and his family who run a small snack-shack along the Han River. The creature in its first feeding frenzy captures Park’s daughter, Hyun-Seo. After receiving a phone call from her cell phone, Park and the rest of the family flee from government-issued quarantine in hopes of saving her from the creature’s lair.

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The opening laboratory scene that puts in motion the creation of the fictional monster refers to the McFarland Incident of 2000, an historical event wherein a US army officer was charged with ordering his men to leak formaldehyde directly into the sewage system. Many have assigned symbolic connotations to the monster, especially given its association with the United States. Christina Klein in her analysis of the film argues that this scene can be read “as an assertion of the Korean national against the global American other.”[2] However, it is the Korean assistant, she notes, and not the American morgue boss, who creates the monster.[3] The monster is thus produced by “a political posture of subservience.” The film’s title is an allusion to the idea that Korea has let itself become a “host” to a parasitic United States.[4]

 

As a contemporary “creature feature” The Host’s message is quite explicit: The faceless web of networked institutions breeds a monstrous nonhuman who lacks any empathy-inducing faciality. No positive philosophy, however, is presented toward the nonhumans we encounter in our everyday life: Humans kill animals for food, as is the case with the family’s snack-shack, or for macho retribution, as when Park asserts that “an animal which kills a human should be torn limb from limb.” The Host allots a great amount of nuance as a monster movie, however, through its attempt to encourage a sense of pride in Korean identity,[5] and its attempt to relocate the emergence of monsters or even of terror from a single enemy to a multitude of institutions and malpractices,[6] including environmental degradation and military occupation.[7] The latter point is one that is shared with Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival. Arrival’s nonhumans, however, aren’t the monstrous byproduct of government policies.

 

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The film follows linguist Dr. Louise Banks who is asked to help the U.S. military communicate with extraterrestrials, referred to as heptapods for their 7 limbs, and who have appeared on twelve distinct locations across Earth in large, hovering shell-like vessels. Many have interpreted the film as a reaction to the recent trend toward isolationist politics best exemplified by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.[8] In order to avoid the destructive, world ending consequences of miscommunication all nations are obliged to collaborate and decipher the heptapods message. But a more nuanced ethical position, one directed at nonhumans, emerges when we investigate the intermittent scenes of Louise interacting with her daughter, Hannah.

 

The film’s thematic primacy on mourning, ethics, and language, along with its title, beg an affinity with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the arrivant. The arrivant is conceived of as a ghost, a life form whose visitation will always be radically unpredictable.[9] Unlike the military officials and scientists who reduce relations with the heptapods to a “calculable process,”[10] Louis’ linguistic, dialogical approach engenders what Leo Bersani terms an “impersonal intimacy.”[11] Through the shared participation in a language game a truly shared world emerges.

 

As Louise spends more time with the heptapods and studies their written language the memories of her daughter, Hannah, become more vivid. These brief scenes, what the audience perceives as memories due to typical visual flashback cues, and what Louise perceives as bizarre dreams, are later revealed to be visions of a child she will give birth to in the future. Louise thus begins to experience time similar to the heptapods, which is structured in a looped fashion as reflected by the circular structure of their writing.[12] The audience, too, are obliged to synchronize with alien or inhuman time signatures considering the circular structure of the film which begins and ends with Louise playing with Hannah. Louise’s ability to foresee the future indicates the dissolution of perceptual bubbles, or what Jakob von Uexkull called Umwelts, that divides the two species.[13]

 

The impossible waiting for and responding to the heptapods as arrivant can be extended to Louis’ relationship with the only other two women in the film – Hannah does not yet exist, and Shang’s wife is deceased. Moreover, we only see Hannah and Louise. Despite the fact that Louise is aware of the inevitable death of her child, she does not “move on” to avoid the trauma and pain associated with her death: instead, she mourns the death of her daughter by allowing her to live.[14] The resolute peace between humans at the end of the film is the result of Louise repeating the dying words of General Shang’s wife. Through the words of the dead Louise is able to construct a considerably more peaceful future because the specter is incorporated into the political sphere.

 

The moral position of the film is thus to be found in the connection it produces between the impossible waiting for the arrivant and the work of mourning: Asking why the aliens have arrived will yield the same result as asking why the dead never truly leave. Their radical Otherness and spectrality shake our metaphysical grounding and make us think at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar; they haunt us. Denis Villeneuve’s next film, Blade Runner 2049, positions us in a ghastly future in which nearly all organic species of nonhuman animals have been eradicated, and those that remain are reduced to purchasable status symbols for the rich.

 

The plot of the film follows K, a replicant who is a Blade Runner tasked by the L.A.P.D. to retire, that is, kill older replicant models. After killing Sapper Morton, a rogue replicant, K discovers a box containing the skeletal remains of a female replicant who died during an emergency caesarean section. K is asked by his superior to find and kill the missing replicant-born child out of fear that public knowledge of their sexual reproducibility could lead to a replicant rebellion. K begins to consider he may be the replicant-born child when he recognizes the date 6-10-21 etched by the burial site is also etched in a carved wooden toy horse from a childhood memory.

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Whereas the signature object in the original Blade Runner was an origami unicorn, here it’s the carved horse. The toy horse functions as a virtual totem like the elusive bunny rabbit in films such as Donnie Darko and The Matrix. According to Dominic Pettman, the bunny ushers a new way of seeing and instills a sense of ontological uncertainty.[15] Throughout history the horse idol has been a talisman of humanity for its association of being free, wild, and for Theodor Adorno, heroic.[16] The horse is placed in a receding past, both as a material bond with K’s childhood and as a forgotten trace of an extinct animal.[17] The primacy on the idol and on synthetics confirms Émile Durkheim’s observation that the images of totemic beings have become more sacred than the beings themselves.[18] By 2049 animals are positioned merely to help self-define us as humans, or to help replicants consider they might have a soul. The key to the future is paradoxically an emblem of past relics that no longer exist.

 

There is a strong sense of irony in idolizing animals and trying to copy their admirable traits considering that since the writings of Rene Descartes actual animals have been conceived of as machines, soulless clockwork mechanisms that during the industrial revolution were increasingly exploited for food and labor. One of the more clever elements of the film is through showing how replicants, too, are guilty of animalizing others. An anthropomorphic reframing of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze can be found in the holographic servant named Joi.[19] Mariette and Luv are both replicants who engender a “human gaze” and animalize Joi, that is, judge her as sub-replicant, both a creature deprived of agency and a product to be consumed visually.

 

One of the more pervasive critiques of the film has been its misogynistic portrayal of female characters. The only female character with agency is an agent of the state, and even she is gratuitously murdered. The primacy placed on giving birth is additionally troublesome. Female replicants are presented as less “real” than their human counterparts because they cannot reproduce. In an inversion of Donna Haraway’s aphorism “make kin, not babies,” a woman’s telos is to be an exploitable source of nurturance, a carrier of life.[20] Blade Runner 2049 may constructively demonstrate how animals are experiencing capitalism alongside us but Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja better expresses how the exploitation of women and the exploitation of animals occur along similar pathways.[21] Moreover, it implicates the audience through critiquing current cultural trends. The capacity of social media to manipulate “citizen” consumers is foregrounded as much as the contradictions of greenwashing, which reduces ethics to a commercial lubricant.

 

The film tracks the perverse marketing tactics of the Mirando Corporation, a Monsanto-like company run by Steve Jobs-inspired Lucy Mirando, a self-aggrandizing and image-conscious CEO who has inherited the company from her controversial Father. In the opening scene the company announces their “discovery” of a breed of super pigs that will be sold as the penultimate guilt-free meat product: they are non-GMO, have a low carbon-footprint, and will be humanely raised. To further prove their “local” and “organic” mantra the Mirando Corporation send their 26 super pig specimens to farmers around the world to eventually crown a winner to whoever breeds the best pig. The public campaign is a ruse, of course, one that is meant to garner the appeal of more stubborn, ethically driven consumers. The protagonist, Mija, is a Korean farm girl who treks all the way to Mirando’s factory in Arizona with the help of the Animal Liberation Front to save her super pig Okja from being slaughtered.

 

Mirando’s scheme is a twist of Carol Adams theory of the absent referent. In her Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams maintains that behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent reference” is that which separates the meat eater from the animal; it is a symptom of patriarchal culture because it is used to control other bodies.[22] The Mirando Corporation, however, in an attempt to regenerate the brand’s image fetishizes the super pigs due to the pressure of selling products in a morally sensitive climate. By showing the connection between meat on the table and a living animal the company makes the absent referent present. But despite this the Mirando Corporation still reproduces the patriarchal violence of reducing animals to things.[23]

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It is suggested early on that what drives the immoral business practices of Lucy and her sister Nancy is the competitive spirit instilled in them by their Father. The two characters are extensions of their Father and are always trying to earn his approval.[24] Their gesture of subservience is contrasted to Mija’s relationship with her Grandfather. Earlier in the film when Mija’s grandfather tells her that Okja will be leaving, he complains that she has spent too much time with the pig and as a nearly grown woman should instead be in town meeting a boy. He gifts her a golden pig in hopes it would deter her feelings for Okja. In the final scene at Mirando’s slaughterhouse Mija offers the golden pig to Nancy to purchase Okja.[25] Through offering the golden pig she is further rejecting her Grandfather’s old, patriarchal values. Nancy’s acceptance of the golden pig, meanwhile, commits a form of idolatry by worshipping the image of a false God not unlike the Israelites in the Book of Exodus. Her devotion to market fundamentalism allows her to privilege commercial value, the gold bust, over the value of life, the unnamed others who are reduced to commodities. The proper role for animals for her is to produce protein and make money like a cash cow.

 

The films of Joon-Ho and Villeneuve recognize an ethics oriented toward the future begins with cross species respect. To share the same world with nonhuman animals without imposing our own telos will permit the flourishing of significant otherness. Moreover, this attunement to animals will help us understand the urgency of escaping the ontology of capitalism and ending imperialist policies that threaten the very possibility of a future.

 

[1] Kelly Oliver, “Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, PhaenEx, no. 2 (2007): 2.

 

[2]. Christina Klein, “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-Ho,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2008):  887.

 

[3]. Ibid., 890.

 

[4]. In this reading the creature functions not too dissimilarly as the original Xenomorph in the Alien series. The amoral, aggressive alien is a double for the Company that objectifies the crew and transforms all of nature into commodities for exploitation. The newer prologue films Prometheus and Covenant further confirm this connection suggesting that the corporate policies in place through the creation of android David literally lead to the production of the Aliens. Government negligence in The Host is not an impersonal machine, a case of proceduralism that silently reduces the complex lives of individuals or families to manipulable data. It is far more violent and monstrous, an autonomous being that feeds off human flesh.

 

[5]. Christina Klein notes how the bow Park’s sister, Nam-Joo, would use to shoot a flaming arrow into the creature’s mouth refers to Korea’s Olympic success in archery, while the Molotov cocktail that Park’s brother, Nam-Il, assembles and attempts to throw at the monster refers to the history of Korea’s violent street protests in the 1980s and 2000s.  

 

[6]. Nikki J.Y. Lee in her essay “Localized Globalization and a Monster National: ‘The Host’ and the South Korean Film Industry” argues “Because the movie’s monster is unnamed and lacks overt symbolic connotations—it does not serve as an allegorical, nationalist function—the meaning audiences take away from The Host are multifaceted, not one-dimensionally nationalistic.”

 

[7]. Homay King in his essay “Cloverfield versus The Host” includes neoliberal economics as another toxic mixture involved in the creation in the monster. The specific scene that evinces this theory comes early in the film when a businessman commits suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Han River. Through this scene, King is able to conclude: “If military occupation spawns the monster, then economic neoliberalism aids its growth and development.” in Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror ed. Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 134.

 

[8]. Washington Post film critic Zachary Pincus-Roth and Matt Miller of Esquire are two notable writers who focused on Arrival’s political relevance.

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[9]. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34.

 

[10]. Dominic Pettman in his Human Error critiques Peter Singer’s attempt to integrate nonhumans such as great apes into human personhood. “Ultimately,” he writes, “these well-meaning exercises of inclusion fail to acknowledge the profound alterity of nonhuman life. As with the United Nations and global statehood, ethnicity is recognized only if it speaks the same political language as the status quo. The agency ascribed to the nonhuman here stems from the human initiative itself.” Crary Wolfe in her Zoontologies argues similarly: “justice and communication does not reside in the mechanical unfolding of a positivist calculation.” Such an approach would ironically reproduce the sort mechanical behavior that Descartes associated with the animal and the “bestial.”

 

[11]. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 117.

 

[12]. In the film the Heptapod’s language is referred to as “nonlinear orthography.”

 

[13]. Jakob von Uexkull, Theoretical Biology (New York: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company Limited, 1926), 127.

 

[14]. According to Freud, it is only by separating ties to the dead other and transferring our energies on to a new love object that we can overcome the trauma of mourning. We let the other go while internalizing them in ideal form. An unsuccessful mourning is what he calls melancholia. Derrida argues that a successful mourning in Freud’s sense would fail because it disrespects the singularity of the other and allow them a future. This keeps the actual other close, respecting the fact that they resist all our attempts to assign them their proper and final resting place.

[15]. Dominic Pettman, Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (London: Zero Books, 2013), 34.

 

[16]. Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1992), 29.

 

[17]. John Berger in his popular essay “Why Look At Animals” locates 19th century paintings, the introduction of zoos, and the popularity of stuffed toy animals as key moments at which we acknowledged the impending disappearance of animals. John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin Group, 2009), 17.

 

[18]. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2008), 133.

 

[19]. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 3, vol. 16 (1975): 6–18.

 

[20]. This thesis opposes Donna Haraway’s philosophical message to “Make Kin, Not Babies” for the sake of the planet and to vision a future of coexistence.

 

[21]. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (London: Continuum International Publishing Co., 2015), 22. 

 

[22]. Ibid, 189. This is also evinced in the scene in which TV personality and zoologist Dr. Johnny justifies extracting meat from Okja because he felt humiliated by his boss, a woman, in a meeting: “when a man is humiliated by a woman in front of his own colleagues, a man is inclined to make his own decisions.”

The violence committed against Okja is explicitly connected to his manhood.

 

[23]. Mirando’s present referent is merely capitalism with a human face, or feminized face. Cultural capitalism adheres positive affective associations to the product. Mirando Corp advertises a culture of ethical awareness and care for animals.

 

[24]. Wendy Brown in her Undoing the Demos defines our current status as “homo oeconimicus” because we now formulate the self as a firm. We compete rather than exchange with each other.

 

[25]. In the previous scene Lucy has been fired after a disastrous marketing event that the Animal Liberation Front succeed in spoiling. Lucy thus loses the company to her icy Thatcher-like sister.