Movies: Zoo

Robinson Devor's documentary combines interviews with dramatic reenactments to suss out the story behind (oh, no pun intended) a Seattle man's death in July 2005, after equine anal penetration punctured his colon and instigated unstaunched internal bleeding. My movie-going partner complained that the doc "didn't answer the questions it asked, and didn't ask the questions [he] wanted the answers to," but I wasn't looking for the nuts-and-bolts that he was (the very little bit of that provided, by way of glimpses of shadowy (fake?) live footage, were more than enough for me). I wasn't looking for much of anything actually, although I'd heard that the film was quite aesthetically fine. I was simply curious.

The dead man, who called himself "Mr. Hands," was one of a group of men that regularly got together at a host's ranch in rural Washington. All from different walks of life and different parts of the world, they met on the internet and had one thing in common: an interest in and desire for sexual activity with horses. The host, a long-time ranch hand for a wealthy couple, had his own small spread with a house, an apple tree, and a few horses of his own, and he would invite fellow zoos he met on the internet for weekend parties, Christmas, and Thanksgiving dinners.

In my opinion, the doc is far from aesthetically fine. In fact, I found the visual components to be extremely distracting from the real meat of the movie: the interviews (ditto for the soundtrack). So, it could have been a great radio program. The flaw is in both intent and style; first, most likely in attempt to de-fang the topic, the doc is painted in broad, artistic strokes; this could be dooming enough, but the reenactments take their cues from the shadowy Unsolved Mysteries series, and the acting ranges from barely passable (Mr. Hands himself) to unbearably bad (the wealthy couple that employs the ranch hand). Certain inexplicable choices are made, like that of placing the actor hired to play Cop #1 on a too-small stool in the middle of a bright white screen (particularly jarring given that most of the movie is shot in night and shadow) for a completely non-charismatic and only tangentially-related 5-10 minute interview—when we see him in the next scene, stomping through the grass, we can't help but snicker at his negligible performance. The best shots are those of crisp leaves and dewy apples, but they come off looking a bit like commercial shots for the Home and Garden Network

If one can ignore these things, as well as the pulsating, melodramatic soundtrack (somewhere between Philip Glass' lesser work and Cliff Martinez's Solaris soundtrack, but of course a far shittier version of both), one can hear the voice of reason in the seemingly unreasonable. One zoo explains that they would occasionally get into conversations about the government curtailing their civil liberties, planting the small seed in our consciousness that zoophilia might be categorized under the inalienable right to privacy. At the time of Mr. Hands' death, bestiality was not illegal in the state of Washington. Because of his death, it now is, and is punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Toward the film's end, Jenny Edwards, the "horse rescuer" who agreed to play herself in the film, comes to the ranch to collect the "abused" horses. In the doc's most chilling moment, she says, "We didn't want any of these guys or their friends to come and try to buy [this horse] so we decided to geld it that night." We then see the preparations and the surgical procedure: the horse, drugged and suspended upside-down from a crane, its four legs bound together, brought into the operation room and settled on its back. And I, raised on concrete and without much of any interest in horses (since I don't eat them), was angry and sad. The hypocrisy of this horse rescuer is that she believes that by passively engaging in sexual activity with a horse, a man abuses it, but by castrating the animal, she isn't. (If, like my movie-going partner, you require a bit of nuts-and-bolts, it is, of course, the horse who penetrates the man, and the horse needs no encouragement to do it; as easily as a dog will, pardon, hump your leg, or even a chair leg, a horse will, when the opportunity presents itself, penetrate whatever is there to be penetrated).

With regard to gelding, Wikipedia says the following: "A male horse is often gelded to make him more well-behaved and easier to control. Gelding also removes lower quality animals from the gene pool; breeders choose to leave only their best animals as stallions; lesser specimens are gelded, to improve the overall quality of the breed. To allow only the finest animals to breed on, while preserving adequate genetic diversity, it is recommended that about 10% of all male horses should remain stallions." Hitler for Horses, anyone? Now, I admit, I am from the concrete jungle, and I have no reason to want to control a horse (and yes, if I had a cat, I would have it spayed or neutered, to prevent overpopulation and other such animal cruelty—however, I don't have a cat, in part because I am very wary of the domestication of animals). I am not arguing that gelding horses is animal cruelty (although, I think it may actually be, since don't see how it's so far from female genital mutilation in humans). But I'm no vegan, so I'll cease on the topic immediately.

My point, though, is that the film does ask the important questions and I think it answers in favor of the zoos, though it's arguable. Bestiality is often likened to the sexual abuse of children (the horse rescuer, in fact, invokes this, and even goes so far as to say that when she met the ranch hand, he had a "pervy vibe. . . like a child molester-type," because animals, like children, are a) innocent and b) unable to consent. That kind of infantalization, idealization, and anthropomorphization of animals frustrates me to no end. An animal behaves based on instinct, and sometimes training, and lacks the developed psyche of a child. I don't argue that an animal cannot be abused, even sexually, but I do argue that this is not a case of animal abuse. The horse's consensuality, sorry to say, is embedded in his action. While I wouldn't hesitate to recommend psychiatric counseling to the zoos, the only person I'd prosecute for animal cruelty is the horse rescuer.