Quote of the day - The City without Jews

“A human wall encircled the beautiful, calm, and noble parliament building. The wall extended from the city’s university and went all the way up to the Bellaria. This one morning in June at 10 o’clock, it seemed that the whole of Vienna had gathered to witness a historical event of unprecedented magnitude…. And again and again, an excited one would step forward and address the audience around him; and again and again, the same call could be heard:

‘Out with the Jews!’

…Suddenly, the masses cried out with one voice:

‘Let’s cheer for Dr. Karl Schwertfeger: hip, hip, hooray! Long live the liberator of Austria!’

…‘You’ll immediately hear what will happen. Our chancellor Dr. Karl Schwertfeger will explain meticulously the “Deportation of all Non-Aryan People from Austria Act’…

…‘Ladies and Gentlemen! I am here to introduce an act and an amendment to the constitution which together will do nothing less than to enforce the deportation of the non-Aryan, Jewish population of Austria.

…Throughout my five years as party leader, the so called liberal press and the social democratic press alike, or, in other words, all the newspapers published by Jews have tried to make me look like some sort of boogeyman. They portrayed me as an angry anti-Semite and as a fanatic hater of Judaism and the Jews. Today, now that the power of the press has come to an irrevocable end, I feel the urge to declare that all of this talk is nonsense. Oh, yes, I’m brave enough today to stand here on this very platform and to declare that I’m a friend of the Jews rather than their enemy!

…Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I cherish the Jews. …I am prepared to admire the down-to-earth Jewish virtues, their extraordinary intelligence, their efforts to climb the social ladder, their exemplary sense of family, their internationality, and their ability to adapt to any milieu!

…Nonetheless, that’s exactly the reason why, with time, I came to believe that we, the non-Jews, can no longer live amongst and with the Jews. It’s either hook or crook. We have to either lose our Christian ways, our very essence, or renounce the Jews.

…They’ve taken control over our economy, our spiritual and our cultural life.

…And now that we hold the power in our hands, we’d be fools, no, our own enemies and the enemies of our children if we did not make use of this power and drive away the small minority that is destroying us. This has nothing to do with catchphrases and slogans such as “humanity,” “justice,” and “tolerance,” but with our mere existence, our very lives, and the lives of future generations!’

…And 10.000 throats answered from the street: ‘Out with the Jews!’

Dr. Schwertfeger let the excitement fade out, received handshakes from his fellow ministers, and then started talking about how the law would be implemented. One would proceed with utmost care and fairness and in accordance with the demands of humanity and the terms of the League of Nations….” - Hugo Bettauer, The City without Jews (1922)

The City without Jews is a satirical work describing the unforeseen consequences of the deportation of Jewish people from Austria. It’s not a great work of literature but it is a short, lively story with some darkly funny moments.* That it was written as political satire with no knowledge of what was to happen in Austria or to the author himself and the comedic treatment of the situation and the leading anti-Semites (allegedly based on real political figures) make it a difficult book to read. Its prescient details – the greeting “Heil!” gains popularity after the deportations, for example – leave a knot in your throat.

In an interesting coincidence, two of the characters who are government representatives are Secretary of the Treasury Trumm and Privy Councilor Tumpel, who argues shortly after the expulsion that “the Indogermanic naivety of our people ventures out again!”

In 1925, following open calls for his death in Austrian Nazi publications and the release of the Expressionist film based on the popular book, Bettauer was murdered by a young Nazi named Otto Rothstock. Pleading insanity, Rothstock was sent to a psychiatric institution, from which he was released within months.

* I’ve read some reviews suggesting that Bettauer at times falls into anti-Semitic stereotypes, but I believe they’re missing the point. As a satirist Bettauer – a Jewish man who converted to Evangelicalism in his late teens, possibly to try for a career in the Austrian military – was likely using and exaggerating these stereotypes for comedic and critical effect. This would seem to be confirmed by the stereotypes of Austrian Christians, who often state themselves that they have to expel the smart and adaptable Jews for whom, in their honest simplicity, they’re no match. Some of the funniest moments are in the descriptions of Vienna in the months and years after the Jews have been deported – style, glamour, and sophistication gone; the city giving way to “ruralization”; women wearing dirndl skirts (“which, indeed, look very nice when worn in the open country. Here, they looked like a bad joke or caricature”); cultural establishments turned into beer halls; businesses going to pot; and so on. I think what Bettauer is trying to do is to show how the anti-Semitic stereotypes implied a contrasting, and amusingly stereotypical, picture of non-Jewish Austrians.

Interlude – Orchestre Debout

Quotes of the day – Nuit debout

Various committees have sprung up to debate a new constitution, society, work, and how to occupy the square with more permanent wooden structures on a nightly basis. Whiteboards list the evening’s discussions and activities – from debates on economics to media training for the demonstrators. “No hatred, no arms, no violence,” was the credo described by the “action committee”.

“This must be a perfect mini-society,” a member of the gardening committee told the crowd. A poetry committee has been set up to document and create the movement’s slogans. “Every movement needs its artistic and literary element,” said the poet who proposed it.

Demonstrators regularly help other protest movements, such as a bank picket over revelations in the Panama Papers or a demonstration against migrant evictions in the north of Paris.

[Source]

Eloïse est professeure de physique-chimie dans un collège. Elle arpente la place de la République avec un panneau annonçant « Sciences debout : posez-moi vos questions ». Pourquoi cette démarche ? « Parce que la science est à tout le monde », sourit-elle. Avec ce vaste espoir de réappropriation (de l’espace, de la parole et du pouvoir) qu’incarne la Nuit debout, Eloïse ne voit pas pourquoi sa discipline resterait « cantonnée dans un laboratoire », victime d’une image élitiste.

[Source]

The Charlie Hebdo response

Here’s the newest cover:

Also, from cartoonist Joann Sfar on Instagram:

Sevil Rojbin Çetin

“State prosecutors have charged her with ‘breaking the unity of the state’ and are pushing for life in prison.”

garden rock

“[T]he goal of a karesansui garden is to suggest magnificent scenes from nature by forming the shapes of various landscape elements such as waterfalls, mountains, islands and ocean … thus the garden expresses the vastness of nature in miniature, within a strictly limited space.”

- Kinsaku Nakane, designer, Tenshin-en, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Women’s street names in Paris and Ankara

An action this week by a French feminist organization

A feminist group in France has been transforming the streets of Paris after noting that just 2.6 per cent are named after notable women.

Tourists on the Ile de la Cité got a surprise when they found that almost all of the street signs in central Paris had been changed overnight.

…Rather than walking down the Quai de la Tournelle near the Notre Dame, signs told passers-by that they were in fact on the Quai de Nina Simone. Other famous French figures such as record-holding sailor Florence Arthaud and pioneering lawyer Jeanne Chauvin were paid tribute to.

has spread to, and been radicalized in, Ankara:

After women in Paris intervened to name street names after women this week, the action has spread to the Turkish capital of Ankara.

…In Turkey's capital of Ankara, the Nar Women's Solidarity Network has taken up the direct action in their own city. They have so far renamed streets after women like Nevin Yıldırım, serving a life sentence for killing her rapist; Ekin Wan, the woman guerrilla tortured and displayed by Turkish police; sociologist Pınar Selek, framed for a bombing for her political activism; and artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and killed in Turkey while taking part in a women's performance art action to promote peace.

Quote of the day

“It’s a moment where the entire system of Guatemala is shaking. And in some senses, Guatemala is leading the world. They’ve achieved a level of civilization far higher than that of the U.S. It’s inconceivable that the U.S. could bring an American president to trial in an American court for mass murder of civilians. But Guatemala has done that. And now the people who are in the streets demonstrating are trying to take it farther by bringing down a sitting president.”

- Allan Nairn on Democracy Now!



Of course, we in the US hear little of these protests, or those in Honduras, or Beirut,…

Pictures of the week

Tel Aviv sur Seine promotional image:

[Source]

Tel Aviv sur Seine reality:

[Source]

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!

I just learned of the film from listening to this interesting interview with its director Dean Spade. Here’s the trailer, but you can watch the whole thing – it’s a little under an hour – on Vimeo for free, or at the film site, or right here:

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! from Pinkwashing Exposed on Vimeo.

I think Spade did a great job with it. As he describes:

This film is useful, I hope, because it tells a story of what some local activists did to speak truth back to propaganda, and how we made our city confront uncomfortable truths. It doesn’t spare the details of the backlash - and it was ugly - because being prepared for backlash is part of doing work against well-organized opposition. But I think it demonstrates that despite the backlash, our work built a great deal of awareness and relationships and strengthened our resistance network.

For more about pinkwashing (origins), see here.

And because I still love it:



And a live version I just learned of:



“Because there is nothing hot about cruising in an apartheid state.”

Chicago will cover transitional care for city workers beginning this fall

Once the policy takes effect on October 1,” RH Reality Check reports, “Chicago will become the largest city to provide transition-related care to its employees. San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. have also started including transgender-specific health care in their insurance plans.”

The recognition that transitioning is of fundamental importance to some people – the difference between a life of suffering and a life well and freely lived – and thus that it should be socially and materially supported is growing. As I’ve been arguing over the past week especially, it’s analogous to the need for social and material support for reproductive technologies and services – birth control, abortion, sterilization, maternity care, fertility treatments,…

The art of the gouge/model of the market

“Excessive on its face, such largesse at the top is all the more appalling for the widespread poverty and debt enabling it.”

- “The art of the gouge: How NYU squeezes billions from our students—and where that money goes”

“The actual scandal of ‘The Art of the Gouge’ is that even if NYU is a particularly egregious offender of basic decency and honesty, most of the report’s indictments could apply equally to nearly any American university.”

- “‘The Art of the Gouge’: NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education”

“[N]eoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities...and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”

- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

“We hurt”

“We really live in this city. And we hurt. We go through stuff every day. Every day. This is life. We deal with this every day….”

“...We’re messed up inside. That’s all I want to say. We’re messed up inside.”

“...We’re hurting. We’re hurting.”

These are comments made by a man in Baltimore interviewed a few minutes ago by Chris Hayes. There seems to be a limited range of emotions allowed to poor, black people in the US: they have a choice of rage or hope. I reject that. Racism, systemic discrimination and violence, and economic injustice hurt people. They hurt.

Black Ties Matter

Jessica Williams gets it just right:*

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes, More Daily Show Videos, Comedy Central Full Episodes

*(except the capital, in the global context, encompasses much more of the country)

Refugee citizens in a camp city

Prompted by a post at the anthropology blog Savage Minds announcing the relaunch of Allegra Lab, I looked into it and quickly decided to add it to my feeds. Here’s how they describe the site’s purpose:

‘Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World’ (allegralaboratory.net) is a collective of academics, an association and an online experiment founded in 2013. It explores creative ways to fill the ‘dead space’ that exists between traditional modes of academic publication and ongoing scholarly and societal debates. Allegra Lab discusses issues related to anthropology, law, art and beyond, and it is run by a diligent editorial team of professional scholars.

Today they feature a great article by law and human rights scholar Geraldine Renaudiere, “When Camps become Home: Legal Implications of the Long-Term Encampment in Zaatari.” The number of Syrian refugees in the Jordanian camp in what the UNHCR calls a “protracted refugee situation” is large: Zaatari is, according to Renaudiere, “the world’s second-largest refugee camp and the fourth largest city in Jordan.”

It’s a quick and worthwhile read.* From the conclusion:

Indubitably, the worrying situation taking place in Zaatari reflects the shortcomings and the weaknesses of an International protection system which, however well-intentioned, is no longer adapted to the nature of conflicts in the current international environment. It particularly challenges two fundamental assumptions which somehow shaped the refugee protection regime: first, contrary to preconceived ideas, refugees should not be reduced to vulnerable people, unable to assume responsibility or to take their fate into their own hands. On the contrary, despite instability and lack of autonomy, the present example have shown that people progressively re-create social bonds and re-establish a semblance of society thanks to solidarity, structure mechanisms and collective organization.

Secondly, refugees’ protection cannot be limited to temporary response or short-term initiatives. As clearly demonstrated by the case of Zaatari, beyond the emergency stage, a stronger protection framework is needed, especially through human rights standards and effective enforcement mechanisms. This cannot be reached however without external support and assistance from both international organizations and host countries. While the former should better adapt structures of the camp over time, optimize the social organization and progressively grant refugees greater autonomy, host countries’ stronger involvement and support is not only welcomed but will soon become a matter of necessity. In fact, considering its geographical expansion and its population growth, the camp of Zaatari could progressively reach the borders of surrounding Jordan towns.

* Could have used a bit more proofreading/editing – the word “the” is frequently missing, for example.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 2

In my previous post, I described Erich Fromm’s notion of the necrophilous character, as both an individual and a cultural pathology. I noted that, reading Adam Lee’s series about Atlas Shrugged, I started to see Ayn Rand as a clear embodiment – a word she would likely cringe to hear applied to herself - of this character. This surprised me because Lee’s posts, for the most part, didn’t primarily concern this aspect of Rand’s psychology. Nor did I have the book available to search for more examples, which undoubtedly exist. I didn’t need it, since even the small sample of quotations presented by Lee in these assorted contexts just scream “Necrophile!”*

Rand’s necrophilous tendencies are apparent from her physical descriptions of her characters, particularly in comparison to her paeans to nonliving substances and technical processes. They can also be seen in her disregard for the natural world and celebration of ecological destruction. At times, Rand’s descriptions of nonliving objects even reveal a fascination with violence toward living beings.

In showing that “in Randworld, moral worth is linked to physical attractiveness, and heroes and villains can be recognized and distinguished from each other by sight,” Lee offers Rand’s physical descriptions of her protagonists, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart:

The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice – then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair – then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. [p.34]

A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body. [p.20]

Most significant for my purposes is that what makes these characters attractive in Rand’s view is the extent to which they resemble nonliving things: icy eyes, sharp and angular features that know no age, precise and inflexible movements.** Taggart’s posture is explicitly contrasted with “womanly” or “feminine” embodiedness.

Even more telling, Lee provides, “[i]n the name of being fair to Rand” as a writer since he judges it “pretty good,” her vivid, breathless description of the pouring of molten steel at one of Rearden’s mills:

The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violet red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame… But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it, it fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. [p.34]

While the human characters are praised for their resemblance to nonliving things, steel is imbued with the qualities of a living being, even the “friendly radiance of a smile”!

Rand’s disdain for the living world encompasses natural landscapes as well. Lee provides a quotation in which she describes a road trip taken by her heroes:

The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.

…”What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.” [p.262]

The presence of the natural world in human affairs is portrayed as illegitimate: “It was preposterous, he thought, this growing intrusion of the accidents of nature into the affairs of men…” In fact, the most tenderly described element of a vista turns out to be…a mass of coal smoke:

Mr. Mowen looked at the skyline, at the belts, the wheels, the smoke – the smoke that settled heavily, peacefully across the evening air, stretching in a long haze all the way to the city of New York somewhere beyond the sunset – and he felt reassured by the thought of New York in its ring of sacred fires, the ring of smokestacks, gas tanks, cranes and high tension lines. [p.255]

The passion “to destroy for the sake of destruction” and utter disregard for the natural consequences of destructive acts are evident in Rand’s apparent approval of a character’s setting fire to the oil wells he’s abandoning: “Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would be the words: ‘I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours’.” Lee points out that it’s doubtful Wyatt had found the wells on fire when he arrived, but the point is that “Rand sees this as a grand gesture of defiance, a metaphorical middle finger extended to the looters.”

One of Lee’s recent posts is maybe the most interesting. The quotations he provides describe scenes in which Rearden has given Taggart various gifts. Lee uses these scenes to illustrate Rand’s attitude toward selfishness and giving, even in romantic relationships. She can’t allow Rearden to give a gift without driving home that no acts should ever be performed for the purpose of making another person happy. But the descriptions of the gifts are themselves interesting:

On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in her living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes. They were stems of Hawaiian Torch Ginger, three feet tall; their large heads were cones of petals that had the sensual texture of soft leather and the color of blood.

She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler’s box….

She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

Here, as in the description of molten steel above, a gem – a hard, nonliving substance - is granted life-like qualities. Even more suggestive of the linkage Fromm suggests between the two forms of necrophilism, living flowers call pleasingly to Rand’s mind injury (“the color of blood”) and eroticized death (“the sensual texture of leather”).

Described in Gary Weiss’s 2012 Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, Rand’s personality was atrocious in many ways. In her life as in her art, she would probably provide an excellent case study for a Frommian (or Horneyan, for that matter) analysis, not just of Rand as an individual but of the culture that creates and sustains these pathological tendencies. As Fromm suggests, understanding the necrophilous character, especially in relation to capitalism, has important implications for psychological and ecological health.

* I believe Fromm was correct in his contention that such tendencies could be revealed in “marginal, unintended ‘insignificant’ actions, the ‘psychopathology of everyday life’” (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 374). While he at times took this observation to silly hyper-Freudian extremes – a person’s necrophilousness could be detected in “a particular kind of lifelessness in his conversation” (377), “a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colors” (377), an “incapacity to laugh” (378), and “a special affinity for bad odors” which can give necrophiles “the appearance of being ‘sniffers’” (378) – I do think it’s fair to look for evidence in a person’s literary or artistic works.

** I’m not suggesting that people with similar physical features to Rand’s heroes look less “human” or natural in my view. My argument concerns Rand’s attribution of nonliving/nonhuman qualities to these features and her disgust at what she considered fleshy, human bodies, which reveals an open contempt for the living human form. More generally, as I discussed in the previous post, an interest in the nonliving and mechanical is not in itself indicative of necrophilous tendencies; it has to be analyzed in terms of a person’s (or a culture’s) attitude toward living beings and the connotations living beings and nonliving artifacts have for them.

Adjunct organizing – the “metro strategy”

The casualization of academic labor in the US has reached extreme proportions. Adjuncts now constitute around 3/4 of teachers. The situation for the adjuncts themselves is of course bad: bad obviously for their ability to make a living and plan a life, bad for their health, bad for their psychological well-being and dignity (and that’s leaving aside the stress from the burden of student loans), bad for their work as teachers and mentors to their students, bad for their capacity to engage in scholarship, bad for their relationships in academe,… It’s also bad for students, of course. And bad for academic freedom and the future of scholars in politics.

Fortunately, a new organizing strategy by the SEIU might prove effective. These two articles describe adjuncts’ working conditions and the “metro strategy” of organizing adjuncts – otherwise isolated in temporary positions across various campuses – in entire urban areas:

• “Adjunct Faculty, Now in the Majority, Organize Citywide”

• “Mad Professors”

Promising news at long last.

Vegan food! Women artists! Fish x-rays! More!

Had a delightful visit to Philadelphia recently. I was surprised at how much we were able to pack into a short stay. A few highlights:

Vedge. This is a place I’d read about in magazines and seen included in lists of top vegan restaurants. It had also been highly recommended by a local, and I was trying to keep my expectations in check so as to avoid disappointment. But there was no need, as the food was every bit as delicious as the rave reviews had led me to believe. The spring pea crêpe was one of the best single plates of food I’ve ever eaten (and I don’t even like peas!). An enjoyable experience in every way – I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Coincidentally, I saw The Art of the Steal recently



and so wasn’t keen on visiting the Barnes Collection or the big art museum (which would have been crowded and rushed for the amount of time we had anyway). PAFA is less heavily promoted, but it’s a real gem. The building itself is striking, and the collection of American art (including many works by former students and faculty) is a manageable size and well organized. My favorite galleries were the two at the far end, one featuring landscapes – the seascapes were of course the best – and the other dedicated to women artists. Apparently the Academy has been progressive in women’s art education, and I was happy to see such talent on display. I particularly liked the paintings by Susan Macdowell Eakins and Violet Oakley, and especially Eakins’ Girl in a Plaid Shawl (ca. 1880-85), which looks almost like a film still.



I often find the temporary contemporary exhibits at more traditional museums tedious, but I was impressed by Bill Viola’s Ocean Without a Shore.

“X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out.” We also stopped into this exhibit at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. They’re beautiful x-ray photos of ocean animals from the Smithsonian’s Collection of Fishes (a wonderfully and tragically poetic name*). Unfortunately, the exhibit ends today.



I’ll probably post about a few other sites in Philadelphia, including my new favorite fountain – the cat fountain outside Betsy Ross’s house.

* I did worry about the practices of "collection" and x-raying....

I loved this movie

This post was going to be the second of a two-part combination, the first being about a movie I hated. I’ve found myself procrastinating on that one, though, probably because I haven’t been much inclined this week to write about art that makes me angry, so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the film I enjoyed first!



I was surprised at how much I liked this movie, since I’d gone into it with such high expectations. I’d wanted to see it since I first heard it was showing in New York, and seriously considered making the trip for the express purpose of catching it in the theater. I’m glad I didn’t, especially since as good as it is at 51 minutes it’s quite a short film. This is an entirely appropriate length, but I would have had a hard time justifying the time and expense to see something the length of a television show which I’d eventually be able to watch online.

While I had only the trailer and a couple of reviews to go on, I knew that it was 1) a political documentary 2) about the Cold War 3) featuring rabbits. Given this, I couldn’t conceive of any way I’d dislike it. So my high hopes looked to make some disappointment inevitable, but fortunately that wasn’t the case - I was delighted.

Rabbit is, on one level, a traditional animal fable – the director Bartek Konopka describes it as a work in the new “fairy tale-allegory-docu” genre. The music, narration, and occasional anthropomorphic elements* contribute to this reading. And it seems from what I’ve read – which isn’t that much, to be sure, since I can’t read the languages involved – that the filmmakers approach it primarily at this level: they mean to tell the human story through the device of the rabbits. And it works on this plane, using the story of the rabbits to examine the human politics of security, fear, and freedom.

Happily, though, it doesn’t seem to be possible today to make a traditional animal fable or allegory, and that’s probably especially the case in the medium of film. This is apparent in the fact that the reviewer in the Guardian felt compelled to ask the director if he’s a [ahem] “rabbit-lover.” Because the rabbits aren’t animated or particularly anthropomorphized,* and because the movie tells the story (even if all of the footage isn’t entirely authentic) of actual rabbits, you can’t easily look through them to humans – see them as a pure representation or symbol of human experience. Watching the close-ups of their faces, viewing their responses to frightening events, seeing them hiding together underground, it’s difficult to accept them as mere vehicles for the human story. On one hand, it’s difficult not to sympathize with the rabbits as rabbits and not just as anthropomorphized human stand-ins. On the other, it’s hard to avoid drawing connections between their rabbit experiences (of terror, curiosity, joy…) and those of human animals, thus helping us to understand our own experiences more fully.

Further, in documenting the treatment of rabbits by humans to illustrate the treatment of humans by other humans, the film can perhaps advance our thinking about the connection between the practices of and rationales for oppressing animals and the practices of and rationales for oppressing humans. This could lead to a better understanding of both, including of the forms of deception - and self-deception - that facilitate our perpetuation of and acquiescence in these systems.**

At yet another register, the film might have some genre-subverting qualities, calling into question both the nature documentary and the animal fable. The conventions of the nature documentary are upended in Rabbit. These documentaries are often constructed so as to erase both the documentarians’ presence and the wider human interactions with and effects on the wild animals filmed. (When humans are featured, it’s in the role of the sympathetic scientist and expert.) Putting disruptive and destructive human actions front and center, the movie reveals the nature documentary itself as in some sense a means of obfuscation and the erasure of domination.***

By upsetting some of its conventions, Rabbit could possibly challenge the ancient genre of the animal fable itself. The movie doesn’t hollow out the rabbits’ experience to deny them their independent existence. It questions humans (literally, I mean - they interview people) about their own actions toward the rabbits. It plays on double meanings that reveal shared identities, as when someone describes border guards shooting people “like rabbits.” This might possibly encourage people to think critically about the symbolic function of traditional animal fables. In some sense, they could be seen as the artistic “exploitation” of animals, used fictionally as mere human allegories and denied respect as beings independent of their usefulness to human narratives.

I have no idea how much of this was consciously intended by the filmmakers. It’s possible that it’s a subversive result that you could only get from an artist who’s sensitive to the effects of their artistic choices but isn’t intending to produce a work “about” animals or how we treat them. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. At worst, it’s a clever, original, and insightful political film.

*The movie’s weakest moments in my view are those in which the rabbits are most anthropomorphized, as when the narrator says that each rabbit family was provided an equal burrow. In contrast, they’re sometimes discussed in species-centric terms, like when they’re described as especially “timorous” (that’s a word you don’t hear often enough); this actually makes their shared qualities with humans far more visible than the anthropomorphic bits do.

**I’m reminded of the parallels between East German propaganda about happy, contented workers and the propaganda of the contemporary animal exploitation industry. (The film’s final scene, which I won’t spoil, leads to similar linkages and questions.)

***Hey, at least I’m not talking about “the human gaze.”

Interlude - Glass, Concrete & Stone