"In
the highly saturated media environment that we live, the present poses a myriad
of modern and exceedingly public venues for enacting affective social activism.
Never before have we lived in a more global moment in time, when information
about events taking place on the other side of the world are available at the
click a mouse on a computer or touchscreen button on a smartphone or tablet.
Information travels rapidly, especially something like the extremely provoking
and sensational story of the slaughter of innocent sea creatures supposedly
every bit as cognizant and self-aware as any human being. Through the 2009
documentary film The Cove, as well as
a social media campaign explosion, specifically on Twitter, the questionable
dolphin fishing practices which take place for several months out of the year in
the small fishing community of Taiji, Wakayama prefecture, Japan have been
attacked. This problem however, is not so very cut and dry as it may seem; it
seems that both sides are liable to bend the truth to better suit their aims, social
media posts have the potential to (and often do) go viral without the proper
citation of information to back up assertions, and what is truly “real” about
the situation often gets lost in the crossfire. Nevertheless the public nature
of these kinds of activism are vital to keeping an issue present in people’s
minds and also push it towards some kind of resolution, regardless of who exactly
might suffer from this paradigm shift.
The
2009 documentary film The Cove,
directed by former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, stars Ric
O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer and converted animal rights activist working
to expose the controversial dolphin hunting practices in Taiji, Japan.
Throughout the course of the film Ric explains how the entertainment industry
has and continues to make millions fetishizing human and dolphin relations as
being completely positive, even in captivity, and how the dolphin fishing
industry in Japan is systematically wiping out thousands of these animals
annually. Ric’s main assertion however is that dolphins are extremely smart,
sentient beings like humans and have a much greater capacity to understand the
dire situations they find themselves in than we may currently accept as
possible. Though this may be true, O’Barry’s position is undeniably biased
although understandable. As the film progresses, the viewer finds out that Ric
actually worked to create this romanticized human-dolphin relationship in the
1960’s as the trainer who not only captured but worked with the 5 dolphins that
interchangeably played the female bottle-nosed dolphin on the massively popular
television show Flipper. However, the
more he worked with these dolphins he began to understand they posses a much
higher level of critical thinking, problem solving, and sentient thought than
he previously believed was possible.
The
real turning point for Ric O’Barry however came when one of his most beloved Flipper dolphins, Kathy, “committed
suicide” in his arms. One day, Kathy simply swam into his arms, took a last
breath, consciously forced suffocation by not taking another; she then sank to
the bottom of the tank and died. Prior to the incident Ric said he could feel
and see her depression living in captivity. Watching Ric relate this tale, it
is hard not to become emotional. This kind of story in a documentary is meant
to illicit a reaction, causing a deeply affective response by demonizing the practice
of keeping these majestic living beings in captivity. Similarly, the way in
which the Japanese fisherman are portrayed in the film is as almost animalistic
and diabolical themselves, attempting to hide the horrendous atrocities they
are committing. In The Cove, we do
see the filmmakers and activists working alongside Barry getting harassed by
local police and fisherman in Taiji, however these interactions often amount to
little more than jeering and a removal of these intruders from the space they
are trying to infiltrate. As a result, the team is forced to work under the
cover of darkness, planting hidden aquatic and land recording devices
systematically throughout the secluded killing grounds that is the cove."
This
is where I am at this point in time in terms of writing my final paper. I have
watched The Cove and am currently
sifting through a slew of online articles and Twitter posts concerning the
issue as it is unfolding presently. From here on, in my paper I would like to
talk a bit more about what the team does in The
Cove and expose some elements of the filmmaking that seem to make it less
of a documentary and more of a modern, reality thriller. I also intend to
address some of the wild allegations that Ric makes in the film about the
people of Taiji and their practices, specifically if the hunt is truly a part of their
tradition as they say or if the whole situation has gotten a bit out of hand. Finally, I will
discuss how social media has also played an important role in this issue, with
every kind of individual weighing in on the situation with their own, heavily
biased opinions on the issue, often times influenced directly by the possibly
wrong assumptions and viewpoints that The
Cove engenders.
The following are some of the online resources I plan on utilizing in the rest of my paper:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/world/asia/japan-dolphin-hunt/index.htmlhttps://twitter.com/CarolineKennedy/statuses/424405245217611776
https://twitter.com/UKAmbTim/statuses/425056733237878784
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264742893/ambassador-kennedy-criticizes-japans-dolphin-hunt
https://twitter.com/search?q=tweet4taiji&src=typd
https://twitter.com/SeaShepherd/status/113476843461550080
https://twitter.com/rickygervais/statuses/424257527363424256
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/04/04/social-media-storm-descends-taiji-japanese-town-center-dolphin-slaughter-248055.html
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