European Journal of American Studies, 13-1

European journal of American studies

13-1 | 2018 Special Issue: Animals on American Television

Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12441 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.12441 ISSN : 1991-9336

Éditeur European Association for American Studies

Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 13-1 | 2018, « Special Issue: Animals on American Television » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 16 mai 2018, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https:// journals.openedition.org/ejas/12441 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12441

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.

European Journal of American studies 1

SOMMAIRE

Animals on American Television: Introduction to the Special Issue Michael Fuchs et Stefan L. Brandt

All Teeth and Claws: Constructing Bears as Man-Eating Monsters in Television Documentaries Michael Fuchs

The Death and Resurrection of Brian Griffin Brett Mills

Wild Animation: From the Looney Tunes to Bojack Horseman in Cartoon Los Angeles Laurel Schmuck

“Absolute Alterity”? The Alien Animal, the Human Alien, and the Limits of Posthumanism in Star Trek Manuela Neuwirth

Horsing Around: Carnivalesque Humor and the Aesthetics of Dehierarchization in Mister Ed Stefan L. Brandt

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Animals on American Television: Introduction to the Special Issue

Michael Fuchs and Stefan L. Brandt

1 Since its early days, American television has offered viewers a wide variety of animal characters.1 From main characters such as Lassie (Lassie, CBS, 1954–1973), Mister Ed (Mister Ed, CBS, 1961–1966), and BoJack Horseman (BoJack Horseman, Netflix, 2014–) to secondary and tertiary characters such as the cat Lucky in ALF (NBC, 1986–1990), Data’s cat Spot in Star Trek: The Next Generation (syndicated, 1987–1994), and the chicken and the duck in Friends (NBC, 1994–2004), animals have been regulars on American television. Of course, these animals play various roles in these and other fictional programs—agents driving the action forward, sidekicks to the human main characters, and little more than accessories or narrative backdrop. Most of the time, however— irrespective of whether they are companion animals or “wild” animals, live-action or animated—they seem to characterize and/or help viewers understand human characters.

2 For example, in the pilot episode of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), mobster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) suffers a panic attack while barbecuing at his son’s birthday party. In his first meeting with psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), he suggests that the attack might have been the result of stress caused by feelings of loss— both losing control and losing his family. In addition, he tells her about a duck family who made their home in his swimming pool. Tellingly, when the ducklings fly away, he breaks down. A few days—and another collapse—later, Dr. Melfi and Tony return to the ducks: “What is it about those ducks that meant so much to you?” the psychiatrist wonders. With tears in his eyes, Tony explains, “I don’t know. It was just a trip having those wild creatures come into my pool and have little babies. I was sad to see them go.” “When those ducks gave birth to those babies, they became a family,” Dr. Melfi points out. Tony understands: “You’re right. That’s the link, the connection: [I was a]fraid I was gonna lose my family, like I lost the ducks.” The show here makes explicit that the ducks function as vehicles for human concerns; the duck family is a symbol for both of Tony’s families—his wife, mother, and children, on the one hand, and the mafia, on the other—and the tensions between these two. The animals are used to

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anthropocentric ends. In other words, The Sopranos does not invite viewers to ponder these creatures as animals. Instead, the program makes explicit that these critters are primarily symbols rather than representatives of actual animals.

3 Although they might, at first glimpse, focus on actual companion animals and real- world experiences, documentary-style reality TV shows such as Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan (National Geographic Channel, 2004–2011; Nat Geo Wild 2011–2012) and My Cat from Hell (Animal Planet, 2011–), likewise, primarily center on humans. Indeed, Millan’s voiceover, which opens most episodes of Dog Whisperer, declares, “I rehabilitate dogs; I train people.” This sentence spotlights Millan and implies that he has an understanding of dogs which exceeds the average human’s and that he can impart this knowledge on the uninitiated. In Dog Whisperer, rarely is the dog the problem in the household, but rather guardians who fail to follow Millan’s three principles of “pack leadership”: “exercise, discipline, affection”—in that order. To be sure, by repeatedly emphasizing these three dimensions as key ingredients to a dog’s happiness, the show does highlight companion animals’ needs and desires, but, in the end, Dog Whisperer centers on humans and their inability to understand their nonhuman family members—and their needs.

4 While Dog Whisperer usually deals with “problem” dogs (and the titular dog trainer), the telling title of My Cat from Hell makes its focus clear—“help[ing] cat owners find the source of conflict with their furry friends,” as the show’s description on the Animal Planet website reads. In certain respects, Dog Whisperer and My Cat from Hell are mirror images of one another. Where Millan usually finds himself confronted with dogs who get little to no exercise, who know few to no rules, and who receive too much affection (especially in moments when they do something their human companions consider “wrong”), the cats featured in My Cat from Hell are often bored or their guardians reward unwanted actions, leading the cats to commit all sorts of transgressions (from the human point of view, of course). As the show’s trainer, Jackson Galaxy, points out repeatedly throughout My Cat from Hell, all “problem cats” can be helped, if only provided with appropriate help from their guardians to alter their behavioral issues, medical concerns, or other types of mishandling in their homes. To ameliorate these domestic and other problems, the cat guardians are, as Diane Negra remarks in a piece for In Medias Res (2016), “called upon to cultivate and monitor the wellbeing of [their] pets” in an attempt to establish “interspecies harmony.” More so than Dog Whisperer, My Cat from Hell episodes often highlight the need to purchase commodities required to properly engage (with) the cats, thus epitomizing the industry that has developed around our companion animals—in which both shows (and dog and cat trainers, in general) play no small roles.

5 A relatively recent outgrowth of the constantly growing pet industry is the premium cable television network DOGTV, launched in the United States on February 13, 2012. The official website hails DOGTV as “an audio-visual therapy tool for dogs who suffer from loneliness, boredom, separation anxiety or depression. When your dog is home alone or experiencing stressful situations, DOGTV offers scientifically-developed content for dogs. DOGTV provides programming for your dog” (our emphases). As a network purportedly geared toward dogs and their needs, DOGTV broadcasts different types of programs for lonely or (or, rather, “and/or”) stressed dogs. Relaxation episodes present soothing sounds and calm images, typically featuring other dogs sleeping or relaxing, while stimulation episodes show other dogs running around, playing, walking on the

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beach, and so on. The broadcaster’s YouTube channel suggests that “[d]ogs love to watch DOGTV,” showcasing clips of dogs getting all excited while watching the simulation videos, jumping around, attempting to catch balls that appear to be thrown in their direction, and trying to interact with the dogs they see on the screens.

6 In a way, the very premise of the channel appears to challenge John Berger’s ideas about the human gaze controlling human-animal relationships, which has become all the more prevalent in the twenty-first century, as “our culture is moving increasingly toward a rhetoric of images, where most communicative acts occur through visual media” (Morey 41). Indeed, in the context of DOGTV, we human beings do not seem to look at dogs; and neither do dogs look at us; here, dogs look at other dogs on television. However, this conclusion would be too simplistic. After all, human technologies frame the dogs displayed on DOGTV, both during the process of recording the dogs and when they are shown on television. In addition, a quick search on YouTube suggests that dogs watching other dogs on television are the objects of the human gaze, too, as their human companions watch, photograph, and record dogs watching other dogs on DOGTV before offering the (audio)visual artifacts for consumption on various internet platforms. Randy Malamud has suggested that the resultant “visual cultural experience of animals is prone to be laz[y] and … voyeuristic” (85). This lazy and voyeuristic engagement typifies “the deficiency in looking at animals in visual culture as compared to really looking at real animals,” which “stems from the basic fact that viewers at the movies or surfing the net are … comfortably ensconced, isolated, in their own world” (85). In this human-centered world, animals have “found a proper habitat … in the recording devices of the technological media” (Lippit 25), as they come to inhabit dedicated documentary and nature channels such as the Discovery Channel, NatGeo Wild, and Animal Planet.

7 In our day and age, animals’ spectral presences multiply across platforms. Indeed, as Cynthia Chris notes in Watching Wildlife (2006), “Turning on the television any day, one might flit from views of sharks off the coast of southern Africa to polar bears in Manitoba, rattlesnakes in Florida, crocodiles in Queensland, and pandas, real and replicas, in Sichuan Province” (loc. 66). She continues to explain that “[t]he images of animals and their habitats, natural or artificial, found through television, are representations of real places and the creatures that live there,” but they are “selected, framed, edited, and interpreted … according to an array of social forces and cultural contests over meaning” (loc. 66; loc. 61).

8 This constant imposition of meaning has defined the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, in particular since the dawn of modernity (see Latour 10–12). Tellingly, in one of the first non-scientific books which addressed climate change, Bill McKibben emphasized that anthropogenic actions brought about the end of nature, as conceived by humankind: “We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it, there is nothing but us” (58). Indeed, “traditional approaches to nature and its conservation are no longer quite in sync with the environments we currently confront,” Ursula Heise diagnoses in Imagining Extinction (loc. 255). In particular, McKibben’s notion that “there is nothing but us” has taken on entirely new dimensions with the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene, which suggests the interrelation between human and nonhuman actors

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while simultaneously acknowledging the emergence of humankind as a planetary force. In addition, the notion that there might be nothing but us sooner rather than later has become an increasingly pressing anxiety of our age.

9 Confronted with the effects of the ongoing sixth mass extinction, scientists and artists increasingly try to imagine and understand nonhuman perspectives. Books such as Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (2012) and Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (2016) have attempted to show the world as animals perceive them. The world of television has likewise sought to bring humans closer to animals. For example, National Geographic introduced crittercams in 2001. These small devices include a video camera and are mounted onto animal bodies. Crittercam claims to allow humans “to experience the world from an animal’s point of view,” the description of an exhibition based on collected footage suggests (Guarinello). Donna Haraway has opined that the camera, violently attached to the animal body and used as an extension thereof, promises “[i]mmediate experience of otherness, inhabitation of the other as a new self, sensation and truth in one package without the pollution of interfering or interacting” (252). However, “rather than offering … an animal’s individual experience,” Anat Pick has pointed out, crittercam “rehearse[s] early cinema’s phantom ride—the mounting of a camera on a moving vehicle for the production of thrill.” The technology, Pick suggests, cannot keep its promise, as the animal body is reduced to a mere vehicle for visual spectacle.

10 The discourses surrounding crittercam thus encapsulate the tension-loaded interrelations between the natural and the techno-cultural worlds—on the one hand, crittercam represents an attempt at seeing the world through animals’ eyes; on the other hand, crittercam is imbricated within a techno-cultural framework shaped by humans. In his book Ecologies of the Moving Image (2013), Adrien J. Ivakhiv stresses that movies rarely take up a single coherent position on the continuum of the human–animal relations. Rather, filmic representations of human-animal relations construct certain forms of similarity and difference, which viewers then take up in their own responses by moving along or projecting themselves within the space between the human and the animal, affectively or cognitively taking up positions, shifting positions, and approaching the boundary by identifying with a character … or by retracting when faced with the prospect of its crossing. (loc. 5523)

11 Animal representations on television are, likewise, caught in contradictions, paradoxes, and inconsistencies. Critics have, for example, suggested that the “wild” animals featured in the reality television show Call of the Wildman (Animal Planet, 2011–2014) were captured before the scenes were shot and the scenarios in the show scripted. Even high-profile animal documentaries combine shots from animals recorded at different times and in different places (including zoos) to establish narrative cohesion. By the same token, cooking shows tend to displace the animal entirely, as Carol Adams concludes in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990): “Without animals, there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food” (20).

12 In the end, whether animals on display in a fictional program, for example, become stand-ins for humans or refer to actual animals in the “real” world depends on the way in which the individual viewer (influenced by the society surrounding her/him) actualizes their meaning potentials. This special issue of the European Journal of American Studies sets out to explore these paradoxes. What do these animal

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representations in television reveal about America, Western societies, and the human condition, in general? Is television solely interested in how we see animals or do some programs, at least in some way, provide audiences with insights into the actual lives of companion animals or free-living animals? How close can television—the medium that seeks to bring the world into our homes—get to a nonhuman point of view? In trying to answer these and other questions, this special issue takes seriously Brett Mills’ recent claim that “none of the things that existing studies of television do can be done unless animal representations are accounted for” (7).

13 The essays in this special issue thus broach different issues in connection with animal representations on American television; and they do so from various perspectives. Michael Fuchs’s piece is the only one which examines non-fictional programming. In his essay, he explores the ways in which representations of bears in Animal Planet documentaries remediate horror film aesthetics. He argues that the bears in these documentaries function as monsters and thus induce both fear and sympathy. Indeed, death plays a major role not only in the context of Fuchs’s contribution, but animal representations more generally. Accordingly, the interconnection between animals and death similarly undergirds the essays written by Brett Mills and Laurel Schmuck. Mills discusses a three-episode narrative arc in the animated sitcom Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) in which the show’s dog character, Brian, is first killed and then resurrected. Mills suggests that the sitcom exploits animal death to teach the audience a lesson, which, effectively, turns animal death meaningless. Schmuck’s essay takes a rather different approach to animal death, as her contribution focuses on animal representations inhabiting Los Angeles. Combining Akira Mizuta Lippit’s seminal ideas about animal spectrality with Viktor Shklovky’s theory of estrangement, Schmuck demonstrates how BoJack Horseman remembers the past of Los Angeles and the past of cartoon history, as the animated animals not only become a means to understanding the human, but also to remember the human and to remember the forever-vanishing animal. The final two essays turn to somewhat more uplifting topics. Primarily focusing on the relationship between the android Data and his cat in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Manuela Neuwirth highlights the various types of becomings that relationships between posthuman beings (encompassing both aliens and pets) can open up. Although Neuwirth sees potential in the franchise’s utopian and inclusive premise, in the end, she remains critical of Star Trek’s rampant humanism and attendant anthropocentrism. Whereas Neuwirth emphasizes the underlying human exceptionalism in a franchise aspiring to depict an inclusive utopia, Stefan Brandt’s essay on the pioneering sitcom Mister Ed highlights ways in which the show’s titular character challenges both anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Discussing the show’s aesthetics of dehierachization, Brandt draws on Paul Wells’s concept of “bestial ambivalence” and Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s notion of “liminal animal denizenship” to illustrate how Mister Ed figures as a shapeshifting character subverting the human/animal dichotomy.

14 In the end, this special issue seeks to raise the question of the animal in the context of European American Studies. After all, if American Studies shares a concern about “issues of knowledge and power” (Hall 42), the field must take seriously the animal question. Acknowledging “the intersections of race, nation, class, [gender, sexuality,] and species” (Adams and Donovan 7) will be a first step toward achieving that goal.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 25th Anniv. ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.

Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan. “Introduction.” Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 1–8. Print.

Chris, Cynthia. Watching Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Kindle.

Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Guarinello, Elena. “National Geographic Crittercam: The World Through Animal Eyes.” ExhibitFiles. 26 Sep. 2007. Web. 15 Jan. 2018.

Hall, Stuart. “The Work of Representation.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997. 13–74. Print.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. Kindle.

Ivakhiv, Adrien J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Kindle.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print.

Malamud, Randy. An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor, 1989. Print.

Mills, Brett. Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Print.

Morey, Sean. “A Rhetorical Look at Ecosee.” Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Ed. Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. 23–52. Print.

“My Cat from Hell.” Animal Planet. 2018. Web. 15 Jan. 2018.

Pick, Anat. “Why Not Look at Animals?” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 4.1 (2015). Web. 15 Jan. 2018.

“The Sopranos.” Writ. David Chase. Dir. David Chase. The Sopranos. Sky Go. 15 Jan. 2018.

Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP. Print.

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NOTES

1. In critical discourse, the differentiation between “human animals” and “nonhuman animals” has gained traction. While we support the idea behind the discursive gesture of re-integrating Homo sapiens into the animal kingdom, including all animal species other than Homo sapiens under the umbrella term “nonhuman animals” discursively supports human exceptionalism just as much as the simpler differentiation between “animal” and “human,” which we will use in this introduction. We have left the use of these terms to the individual contributors.

AUTHORS

MICHAEL FUCHS

Michael Fuchs is a fixed-term assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz. He has co-edited five books and (co-)authored more than forty published and forthcoming articles and book chapters on horror films, American television, video games, adult films, fan cultures, comics, and American sports. For additional information on his past and ongoing research, check out his website at www.fuchsmichael.net.

STEFAN L. BRANDT

Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has published three monographs, most recently The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945–1960 (2007), and five (co-)edited volumes, including Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City (2018) and In-Between: Liminal Spaces in Anglo Canadian Literature(2017). In addition, he has authored numerous essays on American literature, film, and popular culture.

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All Teeth and Claws: Constructing Bears as Man-Eating Monsters in Television Documentaries

Michael Fuchs

1 In 1997, an article published in Variety pointed out that while they were “[o]nce relegated to a few PBS specials about Siberian tigers and ‘National Geographic’ docus tracking endangered antelope, wildlife programs documenting every area of beasts and beastly behavior have exploded to the point where they are arguably the tube’s hottest single genre” (Richmond 27). Before the launch of the Discovery Channel in 1985, nature programming “constituted a marginalized segment of TV production and distribution that could be found by viewers only on the fringes of an industry dominated by three commercial networks” (Chris loc. 1205). Discovery, however, turned nature documentaries into its brand identity, relying primarily on this genre to fill its schedule, especially in its first few years of operation. With the mainstreaming of wildlife documentaries, they increasingly embraced the spectacle of death, which has caused Peter Steinhart to diagnose a similarity between the moment in which a predator takes down their prey in a documentary film and the money shot characteristic of adult films. However, I would argue that contemporary wildlife documentaries centering on large predators tend to remediate horror film aesthetics, as viewers do not only constantly wait for the next kill, but also see the carnage in all its gory detail. In 1988, Discovery responded to the seemingly insatiable human appetite for audiovisual proof of large predators killing their prey by launching what has since become the television equivalent of the summer blockbuster: Shark Week.

2 Shark Week proved that “viewers flock in largest numbers to nature programs featuring top predators,” as viewers are “fascinated by the ‘violent natures’ of the most spectacularly ‘fanged and clawed’ species” (Chris loc. 1534). The representation of sharks in the annual week-long special follows a particular pattern, as Matthew Lerberg has demonstrated. Jaws (1975), the original summer blockbuster, has had a lasting impact on the ways in which American popular culture depicts and understands sharks. The movie’s title makes explicit what the shark stands for: the animal’s voracious

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appetite. As Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the film’s resident marine biologist, emphasizes, the great white shark “is a perfect engine, an eating machine.” Shark Week draws on the visual grammar established by Spielberg’s movie by “reducing” sharks “to fin and jaws” (Lerberg loc. 971), thereby suggesting that the sharks depicted in Discovery’s documentaries are as monstrous as the great white in the fiction film.

3 Tellingly, in 2012, Animal Planet launched its own week-long special modeled after Shark Week: Monster Week. Monster Week did, however, not simply materialize from a cultural vacuum; Animal Planet had repeatedly shown documentaries about “monstrous” animals, such as the two-hour special Giant Monsters with Jeff Corwin in 2009. In addition, the channel started to broadcast River Monsters in 2009. Discovery (Animal Planet’s parent company) even acknowledged the influence of River Monsters on the creation of Monster Week, noting, “River Monsters has made a splash with Animal Planet viewers (the best-performing series in network history), so it’s only natural that it would inspire something a bit bigger, a bit creepier,” on its blog in May 2012 (Harris). The launch of Monster Week thus fed off a media environment which had accepted the equation of animals with monsters.

4 While this monster discourse remains implicit in Lerberg’s discussion of Shark Week, it will take center stage in this essay. My article will examine two bear documentaries, the episode “Killers Bears” of the Animal Planet series Human Prey (2009) and the Maneaters episode “Bears” (2010). I will suggest that these two examples epitomize not only a specific type of bear documentaries, but a type of documentaries centering on large predators, more generally—documentaries which depict predator species as monsters which may endanger human lives. To be sure, Bill Nichols has explained that ideologies operate most forcefully “where there appears to be only natural and obvious meaning” (Ideology 5). “Film and television,” Derek Bousé points out in his book Wildlife Films, “do not and cannot convey reality in its fullness, but have become quite adept at realism—that is, at giving convincing impressions of reality” (7; original italics). And there might be no representational context that communicates as “natural and obvious” a meaning as wildlife documentaries. After all, they suggest to viewers that they re-present (rather than represent) animals in their (more or less) “natural” habitat and strive to create the illusion that they provide viewers with “an unmediated, unedited experience of ‘Nature’” (Rothfels x). However, in my contribution to this special issue, I will demonstrate that bears serve as monstrous projection screens for humans. Similar to such iconic monsters as Frankenstein’s creature, the monstrous bears, however, do not only engender fears and anxieties, but also evoke sympathy in viewers. After all, these bears are not inherently monstrous; they only become monsters when they encounter human beings.

1. Monstrous Bears

5 Tellingly, in their journal entries of May 5, 1805, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis portray a grizzly bear as a “verry large and a turrible looking animal,” which was “extreemly hard to kill” (it took the party ten shots to get the bear down). After having examined the dead mammal in more detail, Lewis concluded that the animal was a “monster.” Lewis and Clark’s descriptions may be considered the beginning of depicting the grizzly bear “as a ravening, snarling, bloodthirsty beast” (Schullery 101); however, in the context of this essay, the performative gesture of labeling the grizzly a

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monster is more important, as it transforms the bear into a monstrous creature. Indeed, linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have suggested that symbols shape our everyday experiences: “The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. … Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people [and nonhuman animals]. Our conceptual system … plays a central role in defining our everyday realities” (3). Thus, referring to a grizzly as a “monster” influences our understanding of these animals, as we linguistically mold the raw material provided by the actual animal body into a symbol, thereby creating a monster. Indeed, “[a]ll monsters,” Asa Mittman has remarked, “are our constructions, even those that can clearly be traced to ‘real,’ scientifically known beings[.] … [W]e construct or reconstruct them, we categorize, name, and define them, and thereby grant them anthropocentric meaning that make them ‘ours’” (1).

6 The word “monster” can be traced to the Latin word monstrum, which denotes an abnormal shape, on the one hand, and a sign, on the other. Monstrum, on its end, derives from the root monere, which translates as “to warn.” The word “monster” thus suggests both a warning sign and something out of the ordinary. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, when “monster” entered the English language, the word meant “a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appetite” (“Monster”). Importantly, before human beings used animals and human-animal hybrids in these symbolic ways, large predators had threatened the lives of humans for millions of years (Trout loc. 272). The employment of animals as metaphors was thus anchored in the close contact between early humans and nonhuman species (Berger 14–19).

7 The increasing differentiation between the domains humans and animals inhabit most likely resulted from the emergence of agriculture and the attendant domestication of animals. In this period of human history, “a new concept of animals and humans emerged, with humans transcending and controlling animals and nature” (DeMello 34). The rigid demarcation between the artificial, ordered, and cultured sphere of the human and the natural, chaotic domain of nature “creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (Latour 10–11).

8 The seemingly unbridgeable chasm which separates human from nonhuman animals (along with the natural world at large) opens up a connection to monsters. After all, monsters are, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it in his seven theses on monstrosity, “difference made flesh” (7). They are “our others par excellence. Without them we know not what we are” (Kearney 117; original italics). Indeed, the self needs others in order to define itself. In The Open (2002), Giorgio Agamben likewise explains that the “anthropological machine” produces “the human” by constructing differences to nonhuman animals. Thus, the human depends on the animal; “man originates from animal” (loc. 347). On the other hand, as Tim Ingold has concluded, “Every attribute that is claimed we uniquely have, the animal is consequently supposed to lack; thus, the generic concept of ‘animal’ is negatively constituted by the sum of these deficiencies” (3). Accordingly, the conceptual categories of “the human” and “the animal” mutually constitute one another, for human is that which is not animal, while animal is that which is not human (even though, taxonomically speaking, humans are part of the animal kingdom; i.e., human is animal, while animal need not be human).

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9 Cultural practice imagines this conceptual separation in spatial terms, as cultures are founded upon topological binaries, which are always ripe with meaning (Lotman 131). Space, as Henri Lefebvre has shown, is simultaneously produced by social practice and constitutes social life; space—along with the cultural ballast it carries—shapes human actions. Likewise, Michel Foucault has highlighted the ways in which space is interrelated with regimes of power: Space serves practices of inclusion and exclusion, thereby managing social difference.

10 Both “Killer Bears” and “Bears” tell stories in which humans and/or animals are repeatedly “out of place” (Brownlow 147), as the clear borderlines separating the world of humans from the world of bears fade away, since the species increasingly inhabit overlapping spaces. In “Bears,” the opening voice-over narration tellingly stresses, “In the past, bears were rarely seen. But now, as human populations are expanding, our worlds are colliding—and conflicts are rising.” While large predator attacks on humans have been increasing dramatically since the 1990s (see Penteriani et al.), “bear attacks are rare events” (Herrero viii). Indeed, an average American is ten times more likely to die from a dog attack than from a bear attack. And more than 50% of animal-related human fatalities in the United States are caused by farm animals and the group of hornets, wasps, and bees (Forrester, Holstege, and Forrester). Of course, these numbers are slanted, since, on any given day, there are thousands of times more encounters between humans and dogs, humans and farm animals, and humans and these insects, respectively, than human-bear encounters. However, media representations of bear attacks (and attacks by any large predator, more generally) are just as unbalanced.

11 Notably, “Bears” acknowledges that 98% of grizzly bear attacks are, in fact, on hunters —as they move silently through the underbrush and bears (and other predators) have learned to associate the sound of a rifle with easy prey—and black bear attacks “are rare.” Still, the documentaries’ structure suggests that bear attacks occur at an alarming rate. Describing a standard strategy in wildlife documentaries, Christopher Parsons has remarked that filmmakers cram “in as many incidents and confrontations with other species as time will allow.” While “these confrontations can happen in nature, … they occur only very occasionally, even when they are direct predator/prey relationships” (16). The same approach is at work in the two Animal Planet documentaries. In “Killer Bears,” three violent human-bear encounters are packed into 48 minutes of runtime; “Bears” is even more intense, featuring five encounters in 39 minutes.

2. Creating Monsters

12 This conscious manipulation of time by controlling the rhythm of the attacks demonstrates that wildlife documentaries do not simply capture reality. “Of course, all cameras lie” (97), David Attenborough, the famous voice of numerous BBC nature documentaries, remarked in a lecture in 1961. Documentaries create the illusion of authenticity, but they are bound by institutional and cultural contexts. These frameworks require a specific “way of seeing and speaking, which functions as a set of … conventions … for the filmmaker and the audience alike” (Nichols, Introduction 17). As a result, documentaries—similar to fiction films—are “suspended somewhere between representation and simulation of nature—between truth and fiction, science and storytelling” (Bousé 16).

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13 In terms of narrative form, the two bear documentaries follow a rather simple pattern and are composed of five core elements: (a) snippets of interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses of bear attacks, (b) audiovisual reconstructions of the attacks, (c) photographs of the wounds the bears inflicted, (d) voice-over narration, and (e) additional interviews with animal behaviorists, park rangers, and other people knowledgeable about bears. The expert interviews are primarily explanatory, trying to explain the bears’ actions.

14 The main interview segments allow average people who experienced bear attacks first- hand (or witnessed attacks from close vicinity) to tell their stories to the audience. Since the interviewer is invisible, these interviews create the illusion as if the interviewees were speaking directly to the audience. These are testimonies by people who have made experiences the audience cannot quite understand; testimonies which produce authenticity, as the bear attacks become anchored in material reality. The interviewees’ framing—placed in a nondescript room, primarily filmed in medium close-ups—adds to the realism of their past encounters, as their temporal and spatial distance from the action allows them to provide relatively objective reflections and conclusions—which are, of course, anchored in their subjective experiences. In terms of content, the interviews have one aspect in common—all highlight the bears’ incredible power, speed, and ferocity. In “Killer Bears,” Kelly McConnell, for example, reports that he “just felt helpless, while in “Bears,” Johan Otter remarks, “I never knew that a bear was this strong. It’s one big clump of muscle.” 1

15 The voice-over narration underscores the brutality of the attacks. For example, when describing an incident at Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park in British Columbia, the “Killer Bears” narrator uses language with a clear goal. Patti McConnell walks “into a death trap” and is “frozen with fear” when she spots the bear. Moments later, “[t]he 400-pound beast viciously attacks Patti. … The bloodthirsty beast tears into Patti.”2 When a man tries to save her, “[t]he bear’s reaction is explosive,” as the animal kills the intruder in a heartbeat and begins to feed on the human body. Alerted by the noise, more people arrive at the scene and “desperately try to keep the furious bear away from Kelly [McConnell] and his mom [i.e., Patti].” However, they soon come to understand that the “only way to end the carnage is by killing the bear. … But this vicious predator is not done with his bloody rampage.” As the bear gets closer to another group of people, “running bodies trigger the bear’s killer instinct. The massacre won’t end until someone kills the crazed beast.” The numerous plosives and sibilants used to describe the bear and his actions support the traits ascribed to him and the words referring to him: The bear is a bloodthirsty, crazed beast that viciously massacres human beings (which, on top, are only “bodies”) on a bloody rampage and leaves behind carnage. Clearly, this bear is a monster hungry for human meat.

16 The reconstructions of the bloody encounters follow a similar goal. During the attacks, rapid cuts move back and forth between the victim’s point of view, the bear’s point of view, and a third, more objective, perspective. The camera is constantly shaking, trying to visually capture the chaos and the brutality of the attack in question. The bear repeatedly opens his mouth and recurrently growls, while human screams are practically omnipresent. In-between, viewers can hear bones cracking and—sometimes —the bear’s lips smacking, indicating that the predator has started to eat his prey.

17 Stylistically, the bear attacks call to mind the way horror films depict murder scenes. In particular, the bear’s point of view (Fig. 1) provides a clear reference to the iconic

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opening scene of Jaws (which arguably drew on the opening of the 1953 movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms). Vera Dika has explained that the subjective perspective characteristic of slasher movies allows viewers to experience the events from the point of view of an “unknown character, figuratively occupying his position within the film’s space” (36). Crucially, while the first-person perspective at first might suggest identification with the bear whose body viewers are invited to inhabit, the exact opposite is the case. The bear “lacks all personality and its motives are nonexistent [sic]. It becomes known only through its body and aggressive actions: it is constructed as an acting body” (Aaltola). The documentaries thus underline the difference between humans and animals: whereas humans “are intentional, rational and moral heroes” (indeed, seven of the eight stories about bear encounters feature heroic people trying to fight off the bears), the bear is little more than “an instinctually violent body that is unseen, unknown—and frightening” (Aaltola).

Fig. 1: The camera assumes the bear’s point of view as he closes in for the attack. Screenshot from “Bears” © Discovery Communications, 2010.

18 In addition, whereas John Berger has claimed that “animals are always the observed” (27), the documentaries imply that bears, in fact, observe humans, always waiting for the opportunity to pounce on them. In this way, “Bears” and “Killer Bears” suggest that in a real-life situation, the human does not have the active, controlling gaze. However, the large-scale implications of this acknowledgment of the realities of life on this planet are nullified by the media apparatus, which not simply frames all of these moving images, but rather becomes a symbol “of the technical prowess required to ‘produce’ nature” (Pick 24). The human viewers, presumably sitting in front of their TV sets in the safety of their homes, look at the (television representations of) bears looking at prey, thereby creating the illusion of mastering the situation.

19 Tellingly, whenever the stylization of the reconstructions is on the verge of becoming too intrusive, the recreations of these past moments are replaced by photographs of the eventual outcomes of the attacks (see Figs. 2 and 3). In this way, the television documentaries draw on photography’s aura of authenticity in an intermedial gesture. In his reflections on photography, Roland Barthes explains that (analog) photography

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requires a “real thing which has been placed before the lens,” since without the material object, “there would be no photograph” (76). However, Barthes does not promote an overly simplistic understanding of photographs as “‘copies’ of reality” (88); rather, photographs “emanat[e a] past reality,” as they are assumed to capture reality and are thus endowed with “an evidential force” (89), which creates the illusion of an indexical reference to a past reality. Tellingly, the photographs display horrifying wounds, which seek to engage viewers affectively by drawing their attention to their own organic existences.

Figs. 2 & 3: The wounds a female grizzly inflicted on Johan Otter in 2005. Screenshots from “Bears” © Discovery Communications, 2010.

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3. (Nearly) Eating Humans

20 On another level, this return to the material reality of the human body is intricately interwoven with a threat the bears embody: “It’s everyone’s worst nightmare: Being eaten alive by a wild animal,” the voice-over narrator in “Killer Bears” announces early on. No scholar seems as competent to discuss the encounter with a large predator as early feminist ecocritic Val Plumwood. After all, a large saltwater crocodile attacked her while she was kayaking in Australia’s Kakadu National Park in 1985.

21 In her reflections on the nearly fatal encounter, Plumwood notes that she “had given insufficient attention … to [her] own vulnerability as an edible, animal being” (10). When the crocodile struck her, one of the first thoughts crossing her mind was that “[t]he creature was breaking the rules, was totally mistaken, utterly wrong to think [she] could be reduced to food” (12). Even though Plumwood had commented on the implications of anthropocentrism for more than a decade when the crocodile attacked her, her thoughts were deeply entrenched in the very discourses she had critiqued. While, in her writings on the attack (penned more than a decade after the fact), she demonstrates an awareness of these issues and nearly ridicules herself for her past naïveté, she repeatedly appears to establish overly simplistic binaries separating “us” (humans) from “them” (animals) and taps into discourses that transform the actual crocodile into something other than a crocodile.

22 Indeed, she describes the saltwater crocodile as “a predator of humans from the distant past” (10). While Plumwood (most probably) employed these exact words to highlight Westerners’ tendency to suppress aspects of human existence which contradict the master narrative of human progress, her phrasing takes on Freudian overtones. After all, Freud argued that “the uncanny … is something … which has undergone repression and then returned from it,” which includes that which “recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of … the race” (245). Like any monster, the bears in the two Animal Planet documentaries arguably function as embodiments of the return of the repressed, as their wildness comes to symbolize everything humankind has repressed (and/or suppressed) because of the progress of civilization.

23 However, this interpretation removes the corporeal experience from the equation—but this bodily dimension of the encounter with a large predator is important, as it anchors accounts of animal predation on humans in lived reality. “The monstrous body” may be “pure culture” (Cohen 4), but the grizzly bears and black bears in the documentaries also exist (or, rather, existed) in material reality. Indeed, while scholars in the environmental humanities might be quick to point out Plumwood’s binary thinking, which arguably oversimplifies the entangled nature of our worldly existences, these binaries ground the discussion of the place of the human in the biosphere in a real- world experience. When you encounter a grizzly bear or a black bear in the wild, the animal may consider questions such as whether you are a potential threat (accompanied by the basic question “flight or fight?”) or maybe even a potential food source. If the bear were to decide to move toward you, your fragile human body would not stand much of a chance, and the corporeal encounter would also come down to a binary—live or die.

24 Notably, the aesthetics of the reconstructions of the attacks have a similar effect, as the visuals, in combination with the screams and sounds of bones cracking and bears

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feeding on humans, in fact, undermine the mastery of the image by assaulting viewers, utilizing what Steven Shaviro has called “the visceral immediacy of cinematic experience” (36). Drawing on horror aesthetics, these documentaries affect viewers; they make their bodies flinch and respond in other corporeal ways in an attempt to reproduce the monstrous force of these animals through the televisual encounter with them.

4. Sympathy for the Monster

25 While the documentaries thus depict black bears and grizzly bears as creatures human beings should not simply respect, but rather fear, “Bears” and “Killer Bears” do, in fact, acknowledge that humans primarily shape human-bear relations and that the bears are generally not to blame for these violent encounters. In “Bears,” Drake Stephens, introduced as a “Human/Bear Conflict Advisor,” explains that “our population is growing, the black bear’s population’s growing, and we’re competing for the same space.” Similarly, Kevin Frey of Montana Fish & Wildlife Parks remarks that grizzlies “need a lot of space; and they probably need a lot of space away from us” (“Bears”). However, instead of giving them the space they need, animals are “driven from their homes by logging, mining, agriculture, and urbanization” (Wolch and Emel xi) due to the increasing human overpopulation of the planet.

26 Scientists have added two more reasons for the increase in carnivore attacks on humans: On the one hand, “the contemporary conservation paradigm” may have created “an increasing number of bold individuals” who are no longer afraid of humans (Penteriani et al.). On the other hand, “risk-enhancing human behavior” increases exponentially, as people from developed countries no longer know how to interact with wild animals (Penteriani et al.). This dimension is intricately interrelated with the media. John Berger has argued that “the widespread … diffusion of animal imagery … began as animals started to be withdrawn from daily life” (35). “The reproduction of animals in images” only amplified this process and made “animals ever more exotic and remote” (Berger 36). As animals vanish “from the immediate world, they … reappear… in the mediated world of technological reproduction” (Lippit loc. 398). As the representations and simulations of animals thus replace actual animals, our relationship to, and with, them changes, as well, for, ensnared in “a shroud of cinematic [and televisual] conventions” (Bousé 8), the connection between the representation and its real-world referent is lost. Our understanding of (and for) an actual encounter with a wild animal is lost. Our link to the “natural” world is lost.

27 However, Johan Otter offers a modicum of hope in his recreation of his bear encounter. When looking at the female grizzly during the attack, he came to understand that “all the animal wanted to do was … eliminate the threat, the threat for its cubs.” He continues, “That made me kind of feel connected, because I was doing the exact same thing: I was protecting my cub” (“Bears”). The life-threatening situation thus allowed Otter “to arrive at some comprehension of what it means to be-with other individuals of different yet related species” (Acampora 27; original italics). The question is, of course, whether only a nearly fatal encounter with a predator can allow us to grasp the entangled nature of life on this planet.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human–Animal Studies. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print.

Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Rutherford, NJ: Associated UP, 1990. Print.

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Mittman, Asa Simon. “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. New York: Routledge, 2016. 1–14. Kindle.

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Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. Print.

---. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Print.

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Pick, Anat. “Three Worlds: Dwelling and Worldhood on Screen.” Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human. Ed. Guinevere Narraway and Anat Pick. London: Berghahn, 2013. 21–36. Print.

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Rothfels, Nigel. “Introduction.” Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. vii–xv. Print.

Schullery, Paul. Lewis and Clark among the Grizzlies: Legend and Legacy in the American West. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Print.

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Steinhart, Peter. “Ecoporn.” Audubon 85.3 (1983): 22–25. Print.

Trout, Paul A. Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2011. Kindle.

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Wolch, Jennifer, and Jody Emel. “Preface.” Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. London: Verso, 1998. xi–xx. Print.

NOTES

1. Johan Otter has since written a book about how his—and his daughter’s—life changed after the encounter with the bear, A Grizzly: A Father and Daughter Survival Story (2016). 2. All emphases in this paragraph added by the author.

ABSTRACTS

Since the mid-1980s televised wildlife documentaries have become increasingly spectacular. In particular, documentaries revolving around large predators have not just proliferated, but supported entire networks, as evidenced by Discovery’s Shark Week, which has enjoyed a phenomenal success since its introduction in 1988. Shark Week, as Matthew Lerberg (2016) has shown, epitomizes the representational reductionism which operates across media—sharks are nothing but fin and jaws. Drawing on audiovisual conventions established by Jaws, sharks tend to be depicted as monsters—even in programs with didactic and/or conservationist goals. In this article, I explore representations of another large predator family, bears, in two Animal Planet documentaries. As I show, the monstrous bears embody human anxieties, but they also invite human sympathy, as human beings have turned them into monsters.

INDEX

Keywords: Animal Planet, grizzly bears, black bears, wildlife documentaries, monstrosity

AUTHOR

MICHAEL FUCHS

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The Death and Resurrection of Brian Griffin

Brett Mills

1 What kinds of stories does American television tell about the death of animals? How are such deaths represented, and in what kinds of television do they appear? How are audiences positioned in relation to those deaths, and therefore what responses are viewers encouraged to have? And what does the representation of animal death tell us about American culture more broadly, and its relationships with animals more specifically? This essay uses a single case study to unpack how these questions might be answered, as a starting-point for reflection on American culture’s use of animal death within the framework of storytelling in popular media. My article maintains that the representation of animal death in television is significant because it tells us something about both humans’ understanding of death and the use (symbolic and otherwise) of animals in contemporary American culture. After all, as Jonathan Burt argues, “It is difficult to avoid the presence of death … at all levels of inquiry into animal representation” (157). Here, Burt suggests that human cultures employ representations of animal death as a way of engaging with their own mortality in order to avoid confronting this issue directly. In this way, the animal is reduced to a vehicle through which an inescapable aspect of human existence can be simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Taking this further, Lori Marino and Michael Mountain postulate that humans’ “mortal anxiety and denial lead … to an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the rest of the natural world” (6), as humans’ refusal to accept their own mortality discourages engagement with the fragility of the world. On the other hand, this denial allows humans to assert their superiority over other beings, founded on the assumption that only humans have a sense of their own impending deaths. For many human cultures animals thus become a useful resource for displacing anxieties about mortality, enabling humans to acknowledge that which awaits us all while simultaneously refusing to face this fact directly.

2 My essay explores this phenomenon through the analysis of an example from popular television. In doing so, my article is attuned to the specificities of television, and therefore the kinds of stories that the medium is able—and likely—to tell. In particular,

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“the episodic nature of television remains an organizing principle” (McNutt 3) for its storytelling. That is, television’s ability to offer narratives across multiple episodes, or for programs to be made up of multiple episodes each with their own self-contained narratives, encourages forms of storytelling different from those media which typically are not episodic, such as film or literature. This aspect matters because central to television representations are the ways in which these depictions are narrativized. To be sure, representation could be understood here simply as the visual and aural symbols that constitute a character. However, I aim to explore how these characters function within stories, and thus the narrative purposes to which they are put. After all, narratives imbue characters with socio-cultural meaning, transforming them into carriers of meaning and ideology. Moreover, thinking about narrative facilitates the exploration of the socio-cultural norms that enable stories to make sense, as any narrative’s comprehensibility is dependent upon audiences bringing to it their understanding of how stories work and the norms that exist within the cultures invited to read it. Accordingly, the examination of stories may unearth dominant ideologies which are so persistent and normalized that they do not need to be asserted. In the end, Brian’s role in Family Guy (Fox, since 1999) is significant not because of what it tells us about this particular animal death in this particular program; instead its very meaningfulness points at the much broader and ingrained understanding and use of animal death in contemporary American culture.

3 In doing so, this paper aligns itself with human-animal studies, which “explores the spaces that animals occupy in human social and cultural worlds and the interactions humans have with them” (DeMello 4). One of these interactions is representation, in two ways. First, the making of an animal representation is a process by which that depiction comes into being; secondly, readers cognitively interact with these representations in order to make sense of them. After all, “[i]t is by our use of things, and what we say, think and feel about them—how we represent them—that we give them a meaning” (Hall 3; original italics). This approach asserts that animals do not have inevitable, “natural” meanings that representations simply draw on. Instead, representation is a process by which something, such as an animal, comes to be meaningful. Furthermore, “the stakes in representing animals can be very high” (Rothfels xi), as these depictions can help encourage particular kinds of human-animal interactions and considerations. If animals are depicted as vermin, or as a threat to human safety, it is easier to legitimize their destruction; if animals are depicted as pets, it is easier to justify spending considerable amounts of money on their happiness; if animals are depicted as tasty, then the meat industry becomes legitimate. The contradictory nature of humans’ categorization, and subsequent use, of other living beings is encapsulated in the title of Hal Herzog’s 2011 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. This contradictoriness must somehow be legitimized, and thus it is necessary to “recognize the kind of stories we tell ourselves” (Fudge, Animal 16) that carry out that legitimization. Human-animal studies works to make visible these processes, and in doing so destabilizes both the kinds of stories that humans tell and humans’ right to tell those stories. In doing so, it problematizes the authority humans give themselves to tell stories about other beings at all.

4 Accordingly, “animal studies pushes the limits of exclusively human ways of being” (McHugh, Animal Stories 7). It does so by opening up alternative readings of texts, which insist on seeing animals as textual elements in themselves, rather than—as is often the

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case—metaphors for the human. In this way, the ways in which humans represent animals reveal humans’ categorization and use of animals—both as representations and, by extension, in the world beyond. Human-centered readings all too easily fail to take into account, and think through, the animal-ness of animal representations. In response, animal studies aims to write animals back into the narratives that contain them. Thus we may ask, “How might species life be configured in texts?” (McHugh, Animal Stories 9). Such a question makes explicit the work that goes into such configurations, rejecting the idea that representations of animals are inevitable, simple, or natural. Instead, they are cultural products, configured in ways that are comprehensible within the culture that produces them. Therefore, the representation of animal death in American television is a particular configuration of animal depiction, and it is the narrative purpose to which that representation is put that reveals human-animal relationships, along with the power structures that underpin these. Of course, acknowledging these power structures inherently raises the question of whether there are alternative ways for such stories to be told, or whether it is legitimate to tell them in the first place. Human-animal studies constitutes a foundational challenge to the right humans claim to tell stories about animals, and the purposes to which those stories are put. In telling such stories humans insist upon their ability to make sense of the non-human world, rendering it comprehensible to human cultures. This in itself asserts human mastery over the non-human world, as the right- to-speak-on-behalf-of presents an act of silencing those who are spoken about. By insisting on seeing representations of animals as indicative of humans’ instrumentalization of other beings, rather than merely as resources useful as metaphors for the human, the practice of animals as narrative resources becomes apparent. The story of animal death that is explored here, then, is telling in that it reveals how human cultures render animals as little more than resources whose representational deaths are useful for human-centered concerns.

1. Brian Griffin

5 Brian Griffin is the dog in the American animated sitcom Family Guy. He has been one of the core characters in the family-based program since the series launched in January 1999. Family Guy is a “staple” (Booker 82) of contemporary American animated television, sitting alongside series such as The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–) and King of the Hill (Fox, 1997–2009). It focuses on the Griffin family, constituted by father Peter, mother Lois, and the children Meg, Chris, and Stewie. While ostensibly employing a relatively realistic form of animation, the program is renowned for its “inserts” (Booker 89) in which statements made by characters lead to cutaways of brief comic scenes that typically function as self-contained comic moments unrelated to the main plot. Brian represents another aspect of Family Guy that signals the show’s contradictory relationship with its predominantly realist mode. While, visually, he is clearly a dog, he usually walks on his back two legs, speaks English, and interacts with the rest of the characters as if he was human. Much of the comedy that draws on Brian’s character mocks his supposedly simplistic liberal views, whereby his performance of concerned intellectualism is found to conflict with his animalistic desires or when being moral is simply too hard to maintain socially. This conforms to the program’s comic voice of “brash satire” and amoral nihilism, in which “virtually no topic is considered out of bounds,” resulting in “jokes about Hitler and the Holocaust, violent death, rape, child

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abuse, [and] drug use” (Booker 92–94). Since the series mixes these different modes, it has been understood variably as magical realism (Crawford), “postmodern American satire” (DeRochi 40), and a program whose politics are so “arbitrary” (Sienkiwicz and Marx 115) as to render it socially inert. Indeed, the series sits squarely in the tradition of the family-based American animated sitcom which “tend[s] to challenge authority, mainly by exposing official hypocrisy” but whose politics is blunted as “the aesthetic distance of the cartoon allows mainstream viewers to discount the grotesquerie if they so desire” (Tueth 145–146).

6 This complexity is evident in the representation of Brian as both a dog and a human. For the most part, Brian narratively functions as a human while visually appearing as a dog. Episodes show him driving a car, eating a meal at the table with the family, or reading a book, exemplifying that, in many cases, his narrative role could be fulfilled by a human character. However, Family Guy finds humor in moments where Brian’s dog- ness bursts through his humanity, suggesting that his place within the human world is merely a veneer masking his true animalistic nature. Accordingly, characters throw sticks to distract him mid-discussion, and he confesses embarrassedly to having dug through rubbish to find scraps to eat. More significantly, though, some episodes build their narratives entirely around his dog-ness, offering up a politics attuned to concerns over animal welfare. For example, in “Dog Gone” (season 8, episode 8), Brian joins an animal rights league after coming to realize that his family care less about the deaths of animals than they do about the demise of humans. Similarly, in “Brian: Portrait of a Dog” (season 1, episode 7), he is offended when Peter expects him to perform in an animal show, and ends up leaving the family for a time. To be sure, Brian can be involved in narratives which explore animal-related matters, while his dog-ness can be practically irrelevant in other episodes. This malleability demonstrates how human cultures “recruit animals to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of their own experience and fantasies,” while the representational tools struggle with “how we might capture the agency of another being” (Daston and Mitman 2; 5). That Brian can be a dog and not-a-dog at the same time, and that either of these aspects can take priority at any particular point in service of the narrative, indicates his position as a representational resource valuable only inasmuch as the narrative requires at any particular point.

7 To be sure, Brian is an animated dog in a cartoon sitcom. His animated status is significant, as animation allows for particular kinds of representations that would be understood quite differently in other genres or modes. In particular, animals are omnipresent in animation, largely as stand-ins for humans. This application of supposedly human-only characteristics to non-human animals is referred to as “anthropomorphism,” a process that evidences how human cultures “use the animal in the service of human communication and human action” (Miles and Ibrahim 1866). Anthropomorphism suggests animals must evidence their human-ness in order to have access to representation, revealing human cultures’ insistence on understanding the world in anthropocentric ways. But anthropomorphism is troubling, partly because it is seen as “bad” practice and thus “to be avoided” (Horowitz and Bekoff 23). However, some scholars have argued that this approach has prevented the acknowledgment of similarities in human and animal behaviors, resulting in “anthropodenial” (de Waal 69; original italics), which helps maintain the human-animal divide necessary for human cultures to naturalize their dominance.

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8 For example, depictions of human-animal hybrids have been seen as one of the ways in which science fiction engages with debates about biomedicine and other technological advancements, meaning the genre explores “problems of human/animal relation” (Ferreira 224). Science fiction examines this hybridity as a potential “problem” and thereby responds to broader societal concerns about what happens to the category of “the human” if it is crossed with beings categorized as other species. Given that the rights that humans assert for themselves—and deny to other beings—are dependent on the certainty of “the human” as a meaningful category, destabilizing its boundaries has significant consequences for hitherto anthropocentric certainties (Piotrowska). While, as noted above, there are nevertheless some narratives in Family Guy in which Brian’s dog-ness is foregrounded, he does typically not challenge the human-animal boundary. Instead, the “ambiguity or ambivalence in the language of animation” entails that representations of characters such as Brian can be “beasts and humans, or neither” because animation “dilute[s] the implications of meaning” (Wells, Animated Bestiary 3). As such, “[c]ross-species coupling is an endemic and unnoticed currency of the animated cartoon” (Wells, Animated Bestiary 4), since animation “prioritizes its capacity to resist ‘realism’ as a mode of representation” (Wells, Understanding Animation 25; original italics). That said, animation is not entirely divorced from conventions of representation that inform all modes of audiovisual culture, and a cartoon animal’s animal-ness is a relevant and inescapable component of what is offered up for meaning. Indeed, it may well be the case that animation so commonly features animals because the fluid “animality” human cultures impose upon non-humans is easily aligned with the “plasmatic agency of animation” (Wells, “Rhetorics of Representation” 101), meaning that animals are a productive resource for the ways in which cartoons tell their stories.

9 However, delineating whether Brian should be primarily read as an animal, an animal- as-metaphor-for-the-human, or an animated animal (in contrast to a live-action one) is not what is at stake here. Instead, it is precisely this fluidity which points to the usefulness of animal representations within contemporary American cartoon culture. While such representations may have import in terms of how they contribute to the real-world treatment of dogs, it is also significant that the image of a dog is a resource a cartoon can draw on in order for the narratives it tells to make sense. And, of course, it does matter that Brian is a dog, for this is what enables him to function within Family Guy in the role of a pet, as dogs are normalized as pets within American culture. He is not a crocodile, an elephant, or a fruitfly—and that is significant. That his dog-ness becomes practically invisible is testament to the “chaotic omnipresence” (McHugh, Dog 9) of dogs. Indeed, dogs are “the most storied of all pet animals” (Fudge, Pets 10). As I demonstrate below, the fact that Brian is a dog is key to his narrativized death; if he were not a dog, it would not have happened. As such, while his status as an animated animal questions the impulse simply to correlate this animal representation with understandings of dogs outside of narrative forms such as Family Guy, his dog-ness must be kept in mind, as it is vital to the meanings of his death.

2. Death

10 In the November 2013 episode of Family Guy called “Life of Brian” (season 12, episode 6), Brian is killed. He is about to play hockey in the streets with Stewie, the baby in the

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Griffin family, when a speeding car runs him over. He is rushed to the vet, where medical professionals describe his injuries as too severe and call in the rest of the family to say goodbye to him. Brian thanks them for the life they have given him, and then he dies. Later in the episode, his funeral takes place (Fig. 1). Even though Family Guy typically employs a comic tone in which “derogatory speech is not only ritualized but is funny and has no consequence” (Ricke 121–122), the vast majority of this episode is presented in a serious manner, and the audience is invited to find Brian’s death as traumatic as the characters in the program do. For example, Brian’s final words to the family are, “You’ve given me a wonderful life. I love you all,” and the camera slowly moves in as his eyes close. This moment is followed by close-ups of the family members crying, and the plaintive incidental music discourages reading this moment comically (Fig. 2). The episode then cuts to a shot from behind the family, as they huddle together around Brian’s body, a scene which concludes with a slow fade to black. As such, this narrative event represents not only a disruption within the regular characters that have functioned as the program’s comic dynamic, but also a rupture in the gag-laden form of storytelling which Family Guy offers as one of its key pleasures. Accordingly, Brian’s death and the family’s mourning is emphasized as an anomaly, representing one of the few times in the program where a genuinely meaningful emotional reaction is invited in audiences.

Fig. 1: Friends and family gather for Brian’s funeral. Screenshot from the Family Guy episode “Life of Brian” (Netflix Austria).

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Fig. 2: Confronted with Brian’s unexpected death, the family begins to cry. Screenshot from the Family Guy episode “Life of Brian” (Netflix Austria).

11 Indeed, the audience did have an emotional reaction. As one of the most popular characters in the program, the death of Brian attracted a lot of publicity, and many fans soon mobilized their unhappiness at the program’s decision to kill off Brian. A petition on the website change.org garnered over 128,000 signatures calling for his return (Lombardi). The production team justified their decision to kill off Brian in many interviews. Steve Callaghan, Family Guy’s executive producer, recounted that the idea came from a story conference, wherein a group of writers thought that dispensing with one of the series’ recurring characters “could be a fun way to shake things up” (qtd. in Aguilera). When asked why Brian was chosen rather than one of the other main characters, he said, “As much as we love Brian, and as much as everyone loves their pets, we felt it would be more traumatic to lose one of the kids, rather than the family pet” (qtd. in Aguilera). The decision was thus species-based. And even though the death of Brian was depicted in a serious and somber manner departing from the program’s usual tone, it was deemed to be manageable within the series in the way in which the death of a human character might not have been. Brian’s death, as a character, thus arises entirely out of his status as a non-human character, narratively disposable to an extent that a human character might not be—despite his popularity. Indeed, for many of the program’s fans, he is a more beloved character than other recurring ones, such as the Griffin children, Chris and Meg (see Compyjosh). This incongruity points toward industry assumptions about what is acceptable, or narratively manageable, within popular, mainstream animated programming such as Family Guy, where the human always trumps the non-human.

12 This narrative’s legibility—and, in particular, its justification—arises from Western cultural understandings and expectations of the non-human beings we define as pets. The pet is, of course, an odd kind of animal, separate from what is typically characterized as “the natural world” and functioning entirely within the realm of the human. Indeed, the existence of many kinds of pets is precisely a result of the deliberate breeding of some animals in order to foreground desired behavioral characteristics and to reduce or remove others. That is, pets are not just animals enmeshed within everyday human activities; for many breeds, their very existence

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results from the human desire to create non-human beings that behave in ways we find acceptable. As such, Yi-Fu Tuan argues that pets are the result of human activities of dominance and affection, whereby humans express significant amounts of affection toward those non-human beings with which they share their living space (2). Indeed, this affection can assume dimensions that may open it to criticism, as humans pamper their pets with the help of a constantly growing pet industry producing goods that may not always be in the animals’ best interests. But Tuan argues that such affection always functions within regimes of dominance, since pets must always fit within human daily activities and routines. Furthermore, they are expected to behave in ways acceptable to the family they share a living-space with, lest they be rehomed or, ultimately, euthanized. Indeed, humans are forever the ultimate arbiters of pets’ ongoing existence, which shows that—despite the affection that clearly informs many pet- owner relationships—this is an unequal relationship within which the pet’s behavior is always being assessed from a human vantage point.

13 Tuan notes how this uneven relationship plays out for the dog, where power can be exercised in a “willful,” “arbitrary,” and “perverse manner” (102). He sees this contradictory human behavior evidenced in the various uses to which domestic dogs are put, including working as guard dogs and hunting dogs. However, this paradox becomes even more evident in societal terms. After all, a nation such as America can pronounce itself to be dog-loving despite the fact that about two million dogs a year are euthanized in American dog shelters. The dog is thus loved, a part of the family, man’s best friend, called upon to labor, and easily put to death. While Tuan focuses on actual dogs in the real world, I suggest that media representations of dogs draw on similar cultural contradictions which, in the end, always prioritize the human. Indeed, the Family Guy production team can pronounce Brian both loved and easier to kill off than the human characters, which shows that animal representations function within regimes of dominance and affection, as well. Furthermore, such representations help normalize societal understandings of pets such as dogs, which then render humans’ dominance of other species not only legitimate but necessary. Accordingly, representations of fictional animals rely on the same discourses that shape behavior toward pets in the real world.

14 Indeed, this idea may be taken a step further. Erica Fudge argues that “humans represent animals only in order to represent human power over animals” (Animal 152). In this context, animal death is a recurring trope in audiovisual media. This near- omnipresence results from the fact that “the animal is especially suited to embody death’s inevitability,” since their non-human animality connotes “the movement of life that they intrinsically incarnate” (Bellour 288; 290). Pets are particularly useful in representational terms because “the modern urban pet is not a real animal” (Baker 13; original italics) and is instead a living thing defined by its purpose for humans.

15 One of the purposes to which human cultures put the representation of pets is that of enabling the discussion of death in a manner that does not require humans to acknowledge their own mortality. As a result, children’s literature often explores death through the proxy of stories about pets. These animal narratives thus offer a space for children to attend to matters such as loss and grief in a manner that is both close and removed (see Corr). As for real-life pets, “[r]esearch indicates that many [owners] … think about their animal companions’ deaths while the animals are still well” (Hewson 431), because the shorter life spans of most pets compared to humans means that the

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inevitable loss of the pet is part and parcel of the pet-keeping activity. Accordingly, death is forever present in human-pet relationships. It is thus unsurprising that human cultures draw on audiovisual forms such as television in a manner which results in the “supplementation of animal-for-human death” (O’Brien 48). Dogs play a particular role in this context, as “[t]ime, aging, and necessary death … are recurring subjects of dog discourse” (Mangum 41) in human narratives.

16 The notion of “shaking things up,” which Family Guy’s executive producer refers to, could have been implemented in a variety of ways: the introduction of a new character or a change in the program’s visual style, for example. But instead of probing these ideas and despite his role as a main character in the show, Brian’s status was deemed intangible enough that his removal would offer a useful narrative moment without upsetting the series as a whole. To be sure, “Life of Brian” engages with loss and grief in a manner comparable to children’s literature, as the episode employs a pet as a vehicle for thinking about death. Significantly, it does so by killing off the key non-human character. Considering that Brian’s human-like behavior tends to obscure his animality, it is significant that it is he who is chosen for death. Indeed, although Brian may drive a car and speak English and read books, his dog-ness is never entirely absent. As such, his acceptance into a human world of representation is forever limited given his animal status. In the end, his dog-ness renders him viable for execution, evidencing the ways in which animals are forever reduced to resources for anthropocentric narratives, especially when, like Brian, those animals spend most of their time functioning as proxy humans.

3. Resurrection

17 To be sure, there is a happy ending (of sorts) to this story. While the production team first insisted that Brian’s death was permanent and not a publicity stunt, he came back to life only two episodes later, in the episode “Christmas Guy” (season 12, episode 8), via a time travel machine. The time travel narrative suggests that Brian, in fact, never died in the first place. Justifying the decision to run the three-episode storyline, the creator of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, said: “And thus endeth our warm, fuzzy holiday lesson: Never take those you love for granted, for they can be gone in a flash” (qtd. in Goldberg). However, he added that he could not imagine audiences would ever think that Brian’s death would be permanent, saying the production team would need to be “fucking high” in order to do so. In hindsight, it would have been odd for a long- running, successful series to rid itself of one of its key characters. However, the fact that many viewers did, indeed, believe that such a move was possible points to the disposability of animal characters, especially when their death is justified on the basis of preserving the human. While this happy ending could be seen as evidence for the affection with which animals—and animal representations—circulate, the whole storyline still demonstrates the narrative insecurity of animals compared to humans.

18 This primacy of the human becomes even more evident in view of the episodes between Brian’s death and his eventual resurrection. Toward the end of “Life of Brian,” the Griffins decide to get a new dog in order to fill the void Brian’s death has left behind in the family. At a pet shop Peter chooses Vinny, a smooth-talking dog with an Italian accent, and takes him home. At first, Stewie, Brian’s closest friend, is highly resistant to the idea of replacing Brian and plans to have Vinny removed. But once Vinny comforts

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Stewie as he mourns Brian, they become friends. By the end of the episode, Vinny has replaced Brian, and the role of the dog in the program has not been abandoned (Fig. 3). While Vinny’s comic function, which focuses on the stereotypical aspects of his Italian character, renders him quite different from Brian in personality, in terms of narrative role, his primary function is to replace Brian. Indeed, the episode ends with Vinny sleeping at the foot of Stewie’s bed, suggesting his closeness to Stewie in a manner comparable to his pairing with Brian. In this way, Vinny’s dog-ness becomes more significant than his role as an Italian stereotype, and one dog is offered up to function narratively in an identical manner to the one that died only ten minutes earlier. I highlighted the importance of the serial, episodic nature of television to understanding how the medium functions above. In this context, this particular ending of “Life of Brian” signals that future episodes of Family Guy can employ the same basic narrative premise as the show used prior to Brian’s death, thereby indicating the extent to which both Brian and Vinny’s dog-ness are, effectively, one and the same. Their function as pets within the program’s diegesis is thus in accord with their function as pets within the program’s organizing structure.

Fig. 3: Vinny replaces Brian between the latter’s death and eventual resurrection. Screenshot from the Family Guy episode “Life of Brian” (Netflix Austria).

19 Interestingly, there is only room for one dog in such a format. This aspect becomes manifest when Brian returns from the dead. The narrative depicts Brian being saved, being pushed out of the way of the car that, in the original timeline, killed him. In this new alternative timeline, the Griffin family never encountered the other dog, Vinny, who consequently simply disappears from the program. The resurrection of Brian Griffin is dependent upon the death of Vinny—a death so certain that he never diegetically existed in the first place. While dogs may be permissible within Family Guy’s narrative, it seems the show can incorporate only one at a time. The program’s format allows for “a pet”; and while it may be Brian or Vinny, it cannot be both. Vinny is thus simply forgotten, irrelevant to the program’s narrative because the role of pet is already filled. Brian and Vinny are interchangeable; pets first, and individuals a very distant second. Put simply, if we have Brian we do not need Vinny, and his death is so insignificant as not to warrant any kind of screen time at all.

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20 The death and resurrection of Brian Griffin, then, encapsulates how animal representations suggest the societal purposes to which animals are put. Both loved and disposable, their disposability evidences specieist hierarchies that consistently prioritize the human. The interchangeability of Brian and Vinny exposes the limited space for animals, as they function as “the pet,” rather than individualized characters, in a manner not applicable to the human characters. Finally, the show’s creators stressed that Brian’s death was a storyline intended to remind viewers not to take those they love for granted; but this valuable moral lesson is enacted through the narrative sacrifice of an animal—not a human—character. As such, the annihilation of an animal representation—and the subsequent annihilation of the replacement animal’s representation once the original has returned—is justified because it enables humans to learn a valuable lesson. As such, the death of two animals is acceptable as long as humans learn something. There might be no clearer evidence than this causal chain to showcase how human cultures employ animals as little more than resources, there for us to do what we want them to.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilera, Leanne. “Family Guy’s Shocking Death: Boss Reveals Why They Decided to Kill Off [Spoiler]!” E! Online. 24 Nov. 2013. Web. 1 June 2017.

Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Print

Bellour, Raymond. “Hitchcock: The Animal, Life and Death.” Animal Life and the Moving Image. Ed. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon. London: British Film Institute, 2015. 288–297. Print.

Booker, M. Keith. Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Print.

“Brian: Portrait of a Dog.” Writ. Gary Janetti. Dir. Michael Dante DiMartino. Family Guy: Season 1. Twentieth Century Fox, 2004. DVD.

Burt, Jonathan. “Morbidity and Vitalism: Derrida, Bergson, Deleuze, and Animal Film Imagery.” Configurations 14.1–2 (2006): 157–179. Print.

“Christmas Guy.” Writ. Patrick Meighan. Dir. Greg Colton. Family Guy: Season 12. Twentieth Century Fox, 2014. DVD.

Compyjosh. “Best Family Guy Characters.” The Top Tens,. n.d. Web. 1 June 2017.

Corr, Charles A. “Pet Loss in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 48.4 (2003): 399–414. Print.

Crawford, Alison. “‘Oh Yeah!’: Family Guy as Magical Realism.” Journal of Film and Video 61.2 (2009): 52–69. Print.

Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 1–14. Print.

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DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print.

DeRochi, Jack. “‘What Have You Learned?’: Considering a New Hermeneutic of Satire in Family Guy.” Studies in American Humor 3.17 (2008): 35–48. Print. de Wall, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.

“Dog Gone.” Writ. Steve Callaghan. Dir. Julius Wu. Family Guy: Season 8. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. DVD.

Ferreira, Aline. “Primate Tales: Interspecies Pregnancy and Chimerical Beings.” Science Fiction Studies 35.2 (2008): 223–237. Print.

Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Print.

---. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Print.

Goldberg, Lesley. “Family Guy: Did Brian Return from the Dead?” The Hollywood Reporter. 15 Dec. 2013. Web. 1 June 2017.

Hall, Stuart. “Introduction.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997. 1–11. Print.

Hewson, Caroline. “Grief for Pets Part 2: Realistic Client Care So That You ‘Do No Harm.’” Veterinary Ireland Journal 4.8 (2014): 431–436. Web. 1 June 2017.

Herzog, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print.

Horowitz, Alexandra C., and Mark Bekoff. “Naturalizing Anthropomorphism: Behavioral Prompts to Our Humanizing of Animals.” Anthrozoös 20.1 (2007): 23–35. Print.

“Life of Brian.” Writ. Alex Carter. Dir. Joseph Lee. Family Guy: Season 12. Twentieth Century Fox, 2014. DVD.

Lombardi, Ken. “Family Guy: Brian Griffin Comes Back from the Dead.” CBS News. 16 Dec. 2013. Web. 1 June 2017.

McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print.

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Mangum, Teresa. “Dog Years, Human Fears.” Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 35–47. Print.

Marino, Lori, and Michael Mountain. “Denial of Death and the Relationship between Humans and Other Animals.” Anthrozoös 28.1 (2016): 5–21. Print.

Miles, Chris, and Yasmin Ibrahim. “Deconstructing the Meerkat: Fabular Anthropomorphism, Popular Culture, and the Market.” Journal of Marketing Management 29.15–16 (2013): 1862–1880. Print.

O’Brien, Sarah. “Why Look at Dead Animals?” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 57.1 (2016): 32–57. Print.

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Piotrowska, Monika. “Transferring Morality to Human-Nonhuman Characters.” The American Journal of Bioethics 14.2 (2014): 4–12. Print.

Ricke, LaChrystal D. “Funny or Harmful?: Derogatory Speech on Fox’s Family Guy.” Communication Studies 63.2 (2012): 119–135. Print.

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Tueth, Michael V. “Back to the Drawing Board: The Family in Animated Television Comedy.” Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture. Ed. Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison. New York: Routledge, 2003. 133–146. Print.

Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Print.

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ABSTRACTS

This essay explores the animated American sitcom Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) as a case study for thinking about the use of animals in narratives. It focuses on episodes in which the program’s dog, Brian, is killed and subsequently resurrected. Brian is a useful subject for this examination in view of his hybrid dog/human status. My discussion of Brian’s death and subsequent resurrection demonstrates how narratives exploit animals for anthropocentric purposes, enabling human cultures to engage with topics such as death. In doing so, my essay evidences how animals are little more than narrative resources, used by programs for decidedly human ends.

INDEX

Keywords: Family Guy, death, animal representation, television, anthropocentrism, animation, dogs

AUTHOR

BRETT MILLS Brett Mills is a senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human (2017), The Sitcom (2009), and Television Sitcom (2005), and co-author of ReadingMedia Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts, which is currently in its second edition (2012).

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Wild Animation: From the Looney Tunes to Bojack Horseman in Cartoon Los Angeles

Laurel Schmuck

The figure for nature in language, animal, was transformed in cinema to the name for movement in technology, animation. And if animals were denied capacity for language, animals as filmic organisms were themselves turned into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities. The medium provided an alternative to the natural environment that had been destroyed and a supplement to the discursive space that had never opened an ontology of the animal. (Lippit 196-197)

1 BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–), an animated adult television show about a washed-up actor who happens to be a horse, imagines Los Angeles as home to a society of humans and animals living together as equals. Creatures such as cats, turtles, giraffes, and giant insects sport human fashions and work human jobs, but they all retain some of their most stereotypical animal attributes. The show’s protagonist is an animal who has been deemed obsolete time and again. Bred for work, transportation, and finally racing, horses are becoming superfluous in contemporary society, since there are fewer demands for them in the much-changed industries of transportation, agriculture, and sport. Names like Secretariat, the iconic racehorse who won the Triple Crown in 1973 and who plays a significant role in the show, are phenomena of the past. In BoJack Horseman, the horse outlives the utility of his animal identity as BoJack, an alcoholic womanizer living in the Hollywood hills. His whole life, he has aspired to be like Secretariat, or, at the very least, to play his role in a movie. In the show, Secretariat’s life ended in despair and suicide, and his legacy portends a similar fate for BoJack. After continual bouts of depression and existential strife build up to an attempted suicide in the desert, BoJack regains hope upon seeing an inspirational sight: “wild” mustangs running free. Albeit depicted in characteristic absurdity, these “wild” horses wear stylish running shorts and sneakers. BoJack is the culmination of all things animal in society. He cannot be fulfilled; he is set up for failure. Even his success, epitomized by his 1980s TV show, in which he played an adopted father to human children, is based on the hilarious impossibility of traditional happiness for a horse. BoJack’s Los Angeles

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is a space full of half-assimilated human-animals who retain traits of the animal and live human lives.

2 In this essay, I will trace what Akira Lippit calls the “animetaphor” in cartoon Los Angeles. I understand Lippit’s term as a moving image of the re-membered animal which projects a collective anxiety of oblivion for all animals, including humans.1 I will begin by discussing this theme in the context of early cinema and the philosophical and psychological movements that accompanied it. I will then investigate more contemporary examples of these models in three case studies—Chuck Jones’ characters in the Looney Tunes (1930–1969), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and BoJack Horseman— to explore the imagined city of Los Angeles as a cartography of animal ghosts, invented and re-invented as semiotic machines, which force us to look at animals as ourselves and at ourselves as animals. Mechanisms of mass cultural memory are at work in the cinematic history of Los Angeles, and animals are the projections of those memories. The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism during the early part of the twentieth century serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real space in Los Angeles through the movement of animated animals.

1. Psychoanalysis and Memory

3 The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real spaces in Los Angeles and their relation to the movement of animated animals. BoJack Horseman, the central text studied in this article, is preoccupied with the concerns of psychoanalysis. Questions of responsibility and memory make up the central questions that haunt BoJack: Do the traumas he experienced during his childhood make him who he is, or is he personally responsible for his anxiety, despair, and wrongdoing? Is there something in his psychological makeup that his mother and father bequeathed him and which makes him the way he is? Can he justifiably erase the memories of his father and mother, and live in Los Angeles as an orphan, free of the aforementioned effects from his childhood?

4 In History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997), Norman Klein studies the “phantom limbs” left behind after destructive policies erase communities. A specialist in the history of cartoons, he compares the process of animation to the process of erasure in the city’s culture: “[W]hile researching on animation for ten years, I noticed that the drawings and pencil effects made before a cartoon was finished often betrayed more about the real intentions than what finally showed on the movie screen” (3). Klein is drawn to the idea of the creation of mass culture, which is directly linked with erasure: “The sheer numbers of erased versions, and the many animation crafts people I interviewed utterly changed my understanding of what takes place when mass culture is produced …. The same clearly was true of Los Angeles” (3). Although I will not investigate the production histories of specific cartoons, I will analyze the psychological and cultural origins of certain characters, most notably BoJack, as well as scenes and plots which reveal similar phantom limbs in Los Angeles’ cultural cartography.

5 Klein mentions the process of mass culture creation above, and that is exactly what I will engage with in psychoanalytic terms. Klein goes on to discuss the mechanism of

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individual forgetting or erasure in the psychological concept of the imago—“an idealized face left over from childhood—a photograph, the color of mother’s dress on the day she took ill (the photological trace)” (3–4). These personal fictions are what make up mass culture. When investigating such images, we must recognize their connection with memory and fiction. They are creations whose context is lost: “the details around get lost, as if they were haunted, somewhat contaminated, but empty” (Klein 4). Like a romantic fragment, the images of animation are both authored and authorless. In his famous essay “Death of the Author” (1967), Roland Barthes proposes that writing is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture” (142). A work of animation is almost a literalized demonstration of his theory. “[T]he hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription … traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself” (Barthes 142). In the animated pictures discussed here, literal hands are creating the text out of a moving image of animal. Although an animated character may be created by an individual, the figure is drawn and redrawn “ by numerous hands, all of which are ultimately absent in the final product.

6 I propose to read cartoons as mass-authored texts. They cast a fictive light from a source akin to the unconscious: “Imagos are the sculpture that stands in the foreground next to negative space. Imagos are the false light that defines chiaroscuro” (Klein 4). The interplay between negative space, false memory, and erasure is important for the animal in cinema and especially in animation. We are, after all, remembering the animal. The disappearance of the wild animal from our lives, or the extinction or endangerment of species, often spurs cartoon representations of animals. “At once territories and metamorphoses have been taken from [man]—the unconscious is the individual structure of mourning in which this loss is incessantly, hopelessly replayed—animals are the nostalgia for it,” Jean Baudrillard has explained (139). When creating animations, we project a false light through which to view ourselves and our histories.

7 The first moving pictures were often used to reproduce animal movement, such as Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and its depiction of all kinds of animals’ gaits. Likewise, the first animated works often featured animals, such as Windsor McKay’s famous “Gertie the Dinosaur,” whose premise was to use the new technology of cartoon animation to reanimate a dinosaur from the natural history museum in New York City. McKay’s dinosaur is widely recognized as “the first anthropomorphized animal cartoon character” (Eagan 33). Purportedly, McKay (and presumably his audiences) believed that animating extinct species of animals was a public service, a necessary role of technology. This role is just what Lippit describes in an expansion of John Berger’s ideas: “Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film and radio” (3).

8 Akira Lippit concludes his vast study of the disappearing animal with an exciting speculation about cinema, which combines its genesis with that of psychoanalysis and at the same time conflates cinema studies with critical theory on animals: “[C]inema, which arrives with psychoanalysis in 1895, provides, perhaps, the proper metaphor for

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the impossible metaphor, the animetaphor” (196). Lippit also ties together Freud’s notion of unheimlich and memory with both cinema and the disappearing animal: “The function of unheimlich reproduction, … the dynamics of animation and projection, … and the fundamental properties of memory can be seen as the basis of cinema, but also of the animal” (196).

9 Numerous scholars have linked photography to the uncanny because it “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (Barthes 4). Tom Gunning has developed this idea, remarking that photography was “experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles alongside the concrete world of the senses verified by positivism” (42–43). Where literature and language are vessels for so-called humanness, and photography is the means of mourning the dead, cinema becomes the expression of a non-linguistic self, of a life through movement: “Cinema is like an animal; the likeness a form of encryption. From animal to animation, figure to force, poor ontology to pure energy” (Lippit 196). This physical movement is what leads Lippit to his tentative comparison of cinema to the animal: “cinema may be the technological metaphor that configures mimetically, magnetically, the other world of the animal” (Lippit 196). Paul Wells has argued that cartoon animation, especially featuring animal characters, offers an additional degree of difference from the human world: “It is possible to view animation as an approach that inevitably facilitates a representational difference, and that intrinsically interrogates orthodox positions, embedded ideology, and epistemological certainty per se” (5). In this essay, these ideas culled from film studies will also be applied to television. Since the main object of this study is to explore animated animal figures as they reflect problems of memory in the imagined landscape of Los Angeles, I will not distinguish between different genres of animation.

2. Shklovskian Estrangement

10 I propose to expand Lippit’s suggestion concerning the interrelation between animals and cinema by adding the literary theory of “estrangement” proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in 1916 to the above web of animating forces. Alongside Freud’s notion of unheimlich, which means not only weird or unfamiliar, but also wild, in the sense of an undomesticated animal, Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement relies mostly on the evocation of animal voices and figures. Like Freud’s unheimlich, Shklovsky’s theory invokes a negative aesthetics, characteristic of modernism, which was marked by a “subtraction of meaning and value rather than by an act of creation” (Emerson 639). Shklovsky was “enamored of Futurism, modernity, fast machines, and the efficiency of the device” (Emerson 638), but he detested the automatization of human perception (i.e., the recognition of an object or an image without active or participatory creative perception). In a rebellion against Cartesian automata as animals, Shklovsky channels the animal gaze as a way to disrupt automatization: “A body whose perception has become automatized ceases to be aroused by stimuli in its environment—either strategically for self-defense or pleasurably for art, play, or Eros” (Emerson 645). Like Freud’s unheimlich, which reveals what is hidden from the self and marks the return of repressed material, Shklovsky’s device makes something unrecognizable (hidden or unknown) for it to be revealed as something unfamiliar and therefore creative—this

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process also reveals the true properties of an object.The individual encounter with an image both concerns the individual and repressed meaning.

11 Cinema implicates more than one individual in its making and viewing (Cavalcanti 84), and can be linked with the unconscious, as early cinema theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov suggest: “the structure of transference perhaps best confirms the rapport between film and the unconscious” (Lippit 24). Thus, Lippit argues that “cinema is no longer a machine like other machines. Transference allows films to communicate” (24–25). Since transference is a method of communication that makes language superfluous, cinema can be linked to the animal by the same logic (Lippit 25).

12 The linkage between technology and the unconscious was also proposed by other thinkers of the time, especially in Russia. In her study of technology and the Russian avant-garde, Julia Vaingurt explains how cinema and radio were perceived this way by thinkers of the 1920s. For example, the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote about “the influence of a past event on subsequent events that take place in the same geographic location … through absence” (Vaingurt 117). I would venture to argue that Freud’s unheimlich, Shklovsky’s estrangement, and the fascination with animal movement of early cinema and cartoon animation suggest a particular function of cinema, and even more so cartoon animation, to remind us of repressed sensations and images from our collective unconscious.

3. The Fabulist Tradition

13 Chuck Jones, the creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Pepé Le Pew (among others), begins his memoir Chuck Amuck (1989) with a scenario reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s famous chapter about being caught in his cat’s gaze. Derrida stresses the material presence of his cat, who is different from the vast lineage of literary and folkloric cats: “I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat …. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables” (6).

14 Chuck Jones, on the other hand, in his encounter with the ostensibly “real” cat Johnson, credits the fabulist tradition (Aesop) as the source for his desire to animate (13). However, he contradicts himself somewhat when he elaborates on the process of animation, which he notes means to “invoke life” (13). He starts by claiming, à la Aesop, that it is easier to make animals seem human than to make humans seem human (13). Just like Shklovsky’s example of the stone’s “stoniness” (xi) being revealed only when it is made unrecognizable as a stone, the humanness we imagine in our true nature is not expressed unless humans are made unrecognizable (i.e., disguised as animals).

15 An attention to the reversal of automated recognition characterizes Chuck Jones’ approach to animation throughout his description of the encounters he had with the cat named Johnson in his childhood. He notes that Johnson could only be drawn and understood through the observation of his idiosyncratic difference to all the expected attributes and behaviors of a “cat.” He remarks: “Although he wore a cat uniform, he contemptuously disdained all forms of feline behavior—an immortal, surely; an individual absolutely” (23). He then rebuts his earlier suggestion that animators are akin to Aesop, as he writes of his Uncle Lynn’s storytelling as the genesis for his own

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appreciation of narrative. He enjoyed Uncle Lynn’s stories because they never conveyed a moral or message. They were stories about animals, but they were more akin to anecdotes or jokes, and Chuck describes his enjoyment as the “love of listening” (27). I would argue that Jones followed the example of Uncle Lynn in his cartoons, whereas Disney animators often attempt to use cartoons to impress upon their audiences specific messages. This divorce from a didactic orientation is characterized by an attention to pure movement. According to Jones, “We are how we move” (14). This antididactic drive is, however, not bereft of literature. Jones seamlessly incorporates poetry and modernist prose as he describes his first encounter with Johnson. Alluding to Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” (1916), Jones credits his realization of “difference” between cats to the appearance of Johnson who “padded in on little fog feet” and goes on to draw on James Joyce’s “mckgnaow” when describing Johnson’s mewing (14).

16 Both Derrida and Jones encounter the wildness of their cat counterparts in their writings. It is this wildness, which Akira Lippit sees remembered in art, as wildness has disappeared from our everyday lives and is reproduced as pure energy or pure movement in cinema and animation. Similarly, the concept of wildness ascribes wholeness to the fragmented, as Gary Snyder explains in The Practice of the Wild (1990): “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order” (12). When imagining the ecology of contemporary urban culture, such as is played with in BoJack Horseman, this distinction between wholeness and homogeneity is important: “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness” (Snyder 12). If every part of a heterogeneous ecology flourishes, then wholeness is achieved.

17 This type of fragmented wholeness can be seen in the imaginative ecosystem of Bojack Horseman’s Los Angeles, where the diversity of species, who even retain some of their often now-useless evolved traits, seems to point to unity rather than disunity. The assumption that a cat and a turtle can play major roles in a talent agency and in the cinema industry, respectively, shows that society functions smoothly although each of these animals evolved for very different occupations. They were still able to “make it” in Los Angeles, because Los Angeles is a place where malformed or misdirected animals come to make their living.

18 In this notion of wild ecology, wholeness is achieved through fragmentation and difference. In narrative, this idea translates to uninhibited expression rather than didacticism. The fabulist use of animals is transmuted into directionless movement, cartoon animation.2 Many Disney cartoons rely more on the former use, although they sanctify the folkloric sources upon which they draw (e.g., the grasshopper learns and does not die [Cavalcanti 88]). Ultimately, they strive to construct a coherent worldview that does not account for unresolved differences. This approach implicitly “den[ies] wild nature as an integral part of the biosphere at the world level and as part of individual character at the personal level” (Murphy 125).

19 Disney’s interpretation of the fabulist tradition to reinforce homogeneity and sameness stands in stark contrast to the attention to difference that characterizes the cartoons analyzed in this study. Murphy’s concept of wildness (“active manifestations contingent, indeterminate, and contextually particularistic, and thus continuous

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demonstrations of the principle of difference” [125–126]) permeates Chuck Jones’ writings about the genesis of Johnson the cat, his first cartoon.

20 BoJack Horseman absorbs elements from Chuck Jones as well as from the fabulist tradition. However, the associations of the fables—turtles are slow and careful, etc.— are reduced to insignificant qualities, which are exploited for humorous asides and rarely contribute to the plot, and certainly don’t express a didactic message. Examples of this include: the chicken dressed as a teeny bopper who lays an egg in fear when BoJack yells at her; BoJack’s tendency to neigh loudly during sex; the cow-waitress at the diner who flaunts her disdain whenever she is obliged to serve steak or squirt milk into her patrons’ coffee; Mr. Peanut Butter’s (the dog’s) inexplicable rage whenever he sees the mail man; and his habit of keeping framed pictures of his friends’ rear ends rather than their faces in his house. None of these animal attributes contribute to the central plot of a given episode, but they account for much of the humor in a television show whose plots are largely psychological, and which often deal with serious subjects like despair, suicide, and substance abuse.

21 Indeed, BoJack’s story is the only one which may be read as an extended fable, as his eternal flight from the threat of oblivion. In a casting for a bio-pic centering on his childhood hero Secretariat, BoJack’s audition partner asks, “What are you running from?” “Nothing. I’m terrified of nothing,” responds BoJack, as viewers become very much aware of the fact that he is afraid of being forgotten (“Later”). From this point of view, BoJack is the animal of the fable. One trait defines him and determines his end. On the other hand, we are not shown what that end will be, even though all signs point to suicide. His idol, Secretariat, committed suicide when he was banned from racing. BoJack’s constant movement, inspired by fear of nothingness, of oblivion, is what Akira Lippit describes with his animetaphor: The animation of an animal which moves frantically in order for it not to be forgotten. This movement frustrates the frame of the fable. Bojack ultimately is propelled onward and does not submit to his predictable fate as a fabulist character. This use of defamiliarization in combination with the entanglement characteristic of wildness helps accomplish this transcendence of the fabulist formula, calling attention to the incompatibility of animals’ misplaced evolutionary proficiencies as they work human jobs. This amounts to an estrangement of roles that would otherwise slip automatically into the formulaic pattern of the fable. Wildness challenges the concept of unity through sameness, and invites alternative paths, negating the set fabulist roles.

4. The Chase

22 One of the best examples of this pure movement is the chase cartoon. Chuck Jones’ Pepé Le Pew cartoons, which feature the titular skunk’s “self-conscious pursuit of the pursuit itself” (Thompson 152), provide a textbook case study. Pepé Le Pew’s signature chase—in which he bounds lyrically through streets and meadows to lilting music, while his exhausted victim loses ground—expresses the theme of the “French” skunk’s cartoon series in a single fluid movement. This kind of animal movement, captured in the cartoon—perhaps more than in other cinematic representations—allows animal presence to be imagined and remembered in the media, after its disappearance in society.

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23 Pepé’s chase embodies a wild, tireless animality, which is asserted upon the omnipresent, frightened domesticated animal—the cat or dog: “Violation of the laws of space and time … frustrate[s] the cat’s every escape route with the implausible placement of Pepé everywhere” (Thompson 144). This wildness, though, is counteracted by the stilted scenario—there are no skunks in France; and the scenery— often a quaint French town with French pussycats who coo “le meow”—looks like a flimsy movie set hidden in some corner of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

24 Pepé’s chases prefigure Bojack, who is locked into a predetermined cycle of escapism and despair, perpetuated by constant movement. Indeed, Pepé’s pursuit of what appears to be a female skunk is characterized by the inferred impotence or blockage— we know the object of his desire is just a cat inadvertently disguised as a skunk: “Pepé’s casual bouncing hop is the traditional opening sally that marks the onset of the sexual chase …. The chase’s rhythm is then accelerated through the sudden ubiquity of Pepé” (Thompson 144). This ubiquity is another device which accentuates the all- encompassing and unquenchable desire represented by Pepé. Even if he does catch his beloved, he will continue to desire. He is nothing but desire, as the chase is set against a flimsy replica of a romantic locale.

25 Tellingly, Pepé Le Pew’s character draws on the 1938 film Algiers, the Hollywood remake of Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé Le Moko. In these films, Pépé Le Moko embodies romantic masculinity, as he is trapped in the Casbah because of his crimes, but dreams of returning to Paris. When a bewitching woman lures him out of the Casbah, he is killed by the police. In the films, place is linked with memory and imagination—Paris is paradise and the Casbah a prison. In the Pepé Le Pew cartoons, however, the setting is reimagined as just another Hollywood: “[I]n the Pepé le Pew series, France … is an externalization of American popular cultural clichés of love and romance,” as the settings provide “visual ‘postcards’ of an imaginary space” (Thompson 149). The individual downfall of Pépé Le Moko is transformed into a continual chase in Pepé Le Pew, who, like BoJack, is ultimately running from nothingness (in Pepé’s case, impotence) more than he is running after any given skunk look-alike.

26 The chase, which is a centerpiece in so many cartoons, is especially important for understanding the link between BoJack Horseman and cartoon history: “The cross- species chase structures dozens of cartoon series” and “is authorized and naturalized by the traditional predatory relationships of nature” (Thompson 142-143). But when it comes to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and BoJack Horseman, the natural predation typical of nature is already at a far remove. Norman Klein casts the relations of power instead in the discourse of capitalism (“Hybrid Cinema” 212). Therefore, within the predatory relationship in the chase, the “contract player (represented by Bugs) is prey to Elmer (dumb boss)” (Klein, “Hybrid Cinema” 215).

27 In BoJack Horseman, the motif of running and racing prevails in all three seasons. BoJack’s crazed pursuit of fame and meaning, and his attendant flight from oblivion, is counterbalanced by the steady and blissfully directionless recreational jogging enjoyed by background characters who inspire BoJack to change. His search for meaning, often manifested in his soliloquies about running—whether to escape something, or simply to “keep living forward” (“Live Fast, Diane Nguyen”)—is spurred by his position in the “industry.” Both literally as an actor and metaphorically as a horse, he has outlived his purpose. He has been chewed up and spat out, and his claim to fame, his recognizable face, is all that remains of his marketability. This aspect is laid bare when the creators

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of the film-within-the-show Secretariat electronically appropriate his facial features as a contractual back-up plan in case something goes wrong during the production. In the end, the company uses visual effects to make the movie, while BoJack’s talents as an actor are not even used. He is a worker dispossessed of his craft. He is empty and unfulfilled, and this is why he chases after meaning. With this in mind, Klein’s interpretation of the chase as a predatory relationship in the industrial schema of cartoons and capitalism is a perfect lens through which to approach the chase in BoJack.

28 The ultimate emptying happens when BoJack is transposed into the world of the Looney Tunes chase cartoon, and he must give up all the characteristics he, a horse, would presumably need to participate in a chase. In the context of the chase, the most important episode is “Fish Out of Water” (season 3, episode 4), in which BoJack spends a weekend under the ocean at a film festival. In this experimental episode, the plot hinges on a Looney Tunes-inspired chase sequence. Once BoJack relocates to this underwater world, there is no dialogue at all. He can neither communicate nor subsist (he can’t speak, he doesn’t have the correct currency, he cannot eat, smoke or drink; in other words, he enters a land of Shklovskian estrangement, which allows him to access deeper meaning more readily). He encounters a factory worker, a male seahorse, on a bus, and helps him give birth to several babies. When one is inadvertently left behind, BoJack begins his episode-long chase after the father of the baby seahorse. Along the way, he becomes attached to the child and feels fulfilled when taking care of him, in contrast to the perpetual despair he usually feels. The chase scene is comical and ornamentally animated, and relies on the traditional tools of both the Looney Tunes and slapstick humor. What makes this chase special is the way that BoJack’s character builds on the traditional cartoon chase (whether it is a primal predatory chase, or a love chase, like Pepé Le Pew’s). BoJack’s habitual flight from despair is counterbalanced with a chase after meaning. This encounter with the male seahorse and his children undoes all the impossibilities that cause BoJack pain in the rest of the show. The artificiality of his TV show’s premise (a horse as the single father of human children) and the assumption that he must be surrounded by people who adore him in order to be happy are both confounded by the underwater chase. In this alternate universe, BoJack finds an alternate self—a seahorse, who, by nature, even as a man, can bear his own children and happily love them. This is the impossible made possible in an alternative reality. Furthermore, BoJack believes that he cannot find meaning and that his character is inherently bad. This, too, is confounded in the underwater chase, in which BoJack sacrifices his own safety to save the seahorse baby, who begins to love BoJack as a father. After inheriting Pepé Le Pew’s emasculating and eternal chase for meaning, BoJack transcends it with this selfless chase, which ultimately fulfills. Tellingly, this episode takes place far away from Los Angeles, where BoJack only plays out the imaginary roles bequeathed by his predecessors in Hollywood. In this remote underwater world, he can escape the legacy that haunts his character and his species while at the same time subverting the tradition of the Looney Tunes chase sequence by attaining a small share of meaning through selflessness instead of all-encompassing desire that normally characterizes his way of life.

29 The running motif is constructed with the help of Shklovskian defamiliarization. Like Shklovsky’s example of making a stone “stoney” again through subtracting its recognizable features, BoJack Horseman makes BoJack, the horse, “horsey” again by subtracting from him his natural capability to run. His running is made difficult and unnatural. His role models are also unnatural: The elderly monkey decked out in

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running garb who jogs past BoJack’s house every day tells him that running gets a little bit easier every day. The mustangs who run shirtless through the desert in the final scene of the third season are also made strange by their running shorts, replacing the supposedly “wild” with the somewhat cultured. By imagining the supposedly “natural” ability of the horse to run, we uncover how unnatural everything about the horse really is. Humans artificially bred his ancestors for various uses, and now BoJack must exist in a post-horse culture. It is not surprising that the literary horse depicted by Leo Tolstoy was the foremost example chosen by Shklovsky to present his theory of literary estrangement. It’s furthermore not surprising that Tolstoy chose the horse as his vehicle for a critique of personal property based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical depiction of the Houyhnhnms (the horse people) in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

30 The chase, in his life as a washed-up actor and in his life as a horse, is a result of BoJack’s position in a capitalist society that propagates the myth of the “race.” Like Tolstoy’s estranged horse-narrator, it is no surprise that a critique of this “race” would come “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

5. Capitalism

31 As mentioned above, Norman Klein envisions the predatory chase as a microcosm of the capitalist world of animation, which he calls “fundamentally industrial,” since it revolves around “repetitive action[s]” and since ownership of the means of production is significantly removed from the artists, with “contracts that say the studio owns whatever ‘creative’ ideas are generated. Beneath the ergonomics and cheery carpeting, it is still a factory” (“Hybrid Cinema” 212). BoJack’s precursor Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) dramatizes this cartoon class struggle.3 Paul Wells has argued that the use of animals in cartoons allows for “social embedding”: “[E]xposing notions of consensus and the limits of democratic existence ... the vehicle for what I call the political carnivalesque” (175). Roger Rabbit, a period piece set in 1940s’ Los Angeles, the golden age of the Looney Tunes, provides an excellent example of this social embedding. In the film, the “toons” are real-live actors, who are second-class citizens exploited for their movie work every day before returning to their spectral imaginary home—“Toon Town,” which doubles as a dreamland and a lawless ghetto beyond the borders of “realistic” Hollywood.

32 Originally inspired by the live action/cartoon hybrid You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940), Roger Rabbit explores the coexistence between animated creations and historical Los Angeles. You Ought to Be in Pictures similarly revolves around Porky the Pig’s contract at Warner Brothers. Daffy Duck convinces Porky that he is exploited, that he could be a real star in the movies, and that he should tear up his contract with Warner Brothers. Daffy’s ulterior motive is that he could have more lead roles with Porky out of the way. Porky eventually reneges on his ill-advised departure from Warner Brothers and begs for his contract back (Leon Shlesinger mercifully agrees). The theme of the exploitation of animal cartoon characters was already developed in this earlier cartoon, and Roger Rabbit takes the premise a huge step forward, giving the toons their own society, Los Angeles neighborhood, and social status. The toons, who are Hollywood’s true workers, actually seize the means of production in Roger Rabbit.

33 The most disturbing element of the film is the notion that toons cannot die—that is, until the villain creates a special chemical mixture into which they can be “dipped” and

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dissolved. This denial of death is reminiscent of philosophy on animal death. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for example, claimed that animals, since they exist as a category and not as individuals, never die and simply exist continually (Lippit 34). In Roger Rabbit, this immortality is accentuated when the toons’ creator dies and leaves the whole cartoon business to the toons. The conflict arises when the villain tries to obstruct the inheritance. Ultimately, the death of the human gives way to communism in the story— the toons will own the means of production. Although not all the toons are animals, they do represent the other in the same manner—they have little use for money, but they need to solve the problem of exploitation. The imagined integration of human and toon or human and animal cultures (such as in BoJack) ultimately are suggestive of a reality outside of the capitalist mindset. If we remember Klein’s conflation of Los Angeles’ erased communities with the drafts thrown in the garbage during the making of a cartoon, we can imagine the marginalized toons as an embodiment of all the communities exploited or marginalized for the sake of capitalistic enterprise in Los Angeles.

6. Post-Human Memory

34 In the context of capitalism, with which I link the chase cartoon, and especially BoJack’s never-ending chase after meaning, the inevitable result is a space of memory and trauma. The BoJack Horseman episode “Live Fast, Diane Nguyen” explores such a space. In the only episode that takes place in Boston, BoJack accompanies Diane to her family home so she can arrange a funeral for her father, whom she blames for all of her coming-of-age strife. Once there, despite her efforts, her slow-witted brothers manage to steal the body, miss the funeral, and instead have their father turned into a barrel of chum, which they intend to throw at Derek Jeter’s “fat face” as vengeance for some deep wound in their collective Bostonian masculinity.4 After a frustrating encounter with her brothers and BoJack, Diane steals the truck in which the chum barrel is stored and speeds away in anger. BoJack is the only one who knows to where she has disappeared. When BoJack finds Diane, they sit atop a landfill and gaze at the starry sky while they try to reckon with the wrongs done to them by their forbears. Just like the ever-growing trash heap beneath them, the consequences of their fathers’ negligence have become their responsibility. In this scene, where we normally see a backdrop of the Hollywood hills behind a BoJack-and-Diane tête-à-tête, a trash heap along with the actual remains of Diane’s father (the presumed source of all her problems) are substituted for the beauty of Los Angeles.5 BoJack tells Diane that the reason people live in Los Angeles is because, just as we didn’t willingly choose our families, we don’t need to be responsible for or to them. He praises the superficiality of the city they call home, which is in effect another heap of waste—the byproducts of our parents’ generation and their failures, all those people who are damaged or in need of escape, thrown together as a motley assortment of half-developed people, much like the half-assimilated and varied animals and humans in BoJack’s Los Angeles.

35 This contemplation of existential despair, which is capped by BoJack’s assuagement: “at least your father can never hurt anyone again,” is undercut with old Hollywood-style humor. Immediately following this statement, the remains of Diane’s father roll down a hill and follow an unlikely path that will seemingly lead directly to Derek Jeter (who sweetly helps a goat in old women’s clothing cross the street). At the last moment, the

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barrel knocks out the goat in Jeter’s place, and in a comic fulfillment of the demonization of the Yankees espoused by the caricatured Bostonians who are Diane’s brothers, Jeter glances in either direction before abandoning his good-Samaritan persona and stealing the unconscious goat’s purse. But even this can be read as an investigation of responsibility.

36 Even after we are dead or our actions have been completed, the consequences, such as the trash, the waste, and the effects on our children’s emotional health, continue. This is the human effect on the environment made light of by the substitution of animals into human positions of responsibility. BoJack’s mother, Beatrice, also a horse, is an heiress to a sugar cube fortune, a clever superimposition of an industry historically troubled by ethical issues onto an animal, who is herself a product of the human oppression of breeding, work, and spectator sport. The fourth season, which perhaps stresses psychoanalytical themes as well as metabiosis most, explores Beatrice’s past while and after BoJack returns to Beatrice’s childhood home in Michigan.6 We see her childhood reenacted simultaneous to BoJack’s time there, as if time is artificial and when we occupy a space, we share it with all its former occupiers (“The Old Sugarman Place”). We find that contrary to her own ideas, her parents forced her to conform to ultra-conventional forms of behavior, exploiting her feminine beauty by attempting to marry her off to the son of a coffee creamer company’s owner in an attempt to make a lucrative business deal. All this is laid bare at her debutante’s ball, when she is made to perform her skills as a show jumper. This combined satire of gender inequality and animal exploitation shows the source of Beatrice’s own psychological injury to which she reacts by running away with BoJack’s father, who impregnates her, marries her, and is ultimately unable to make her happy. After this, she blames her loss of beauty and fulfillment on BoJack, passing her trauma onto him (“Time’s Arrow”). At the end of BoJack’s time in his mother’s Michigan home, he talks to Diane on the phone who paraphrases BoJack’s praise for Los Angeles during the landfill episode discussed earlier. Only Diane’s words are able to snap BoJack out of his dark exploration of memory and responsibility during his time in the Michigan house (“The Old Sugarman Place”). Once again, he escapes to Los Angeles, where he attempts to erase the influence of memory on his life.

7. Conclusion

37 BoJack Horseman is not about animals at all. The themes dealt with in the most serious episodes are those of moral responsibility, the inheritance of our parents’ moral faults, the nature of despair and loneliness, and whether our unconscious intentions are demonstrated in our inadvertently harmful actions. These are the concerns of psychoanalysis. As I have shown, these concerns motivate a convergence of topoi in BoJack Horseman, which ultimately yield a Los Angeles populated by the animal ghosts of Warner Brothers cartoons. The emergence of cartoon animation coincided with society’s mourning for the disappearance of animals. More so than in live-action film, cartoon animation is characterized by the idea of animetaphor, which Akira Lippit introduces in his study of technology and the philosophy of the animal. The onset of Modernism, and especially Freudian unheimlich and Russian formalist fascination with the wilder, unfamiliar perspectives, explain the displacement of the animal to visualized narrative, and especially to animation. The city of animation, Los Angeles, is

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home to the ghosts of this history of uncanny relationships between animals and cinema, or between humans and animals in cartoons.

38 Figure 1 illustrates the simultaneously spectral and material traces of animals in Los Angeles. This mural on the side of a live poultry butcher shop is inhabited by animals suspended in motion, all participating in the chase, the hunt. Only they are humorously aware that the object of the hunt is themselves. Foghorn Leghorn advises customers to buy freshly killed poultry, not frozen. This mural shares uncanny similarity with the BoJack Horseman episode “Chickens” (season 2, episode 5), where a chicken farm is run by chickens who claim to provide a dignified life for the poultry they raise for slaughter.7 Both the episode and mural in Figure 1 are examples of the cannibalism inherent in capitalist consumption. These animated figures herald their own disappearance long after the era of the original Looney Tunes has passed.

Fig. 1: Mural on the side of a poultry shop in Los Angeles. Photo taken by Albert Vazquez.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author. ” Image—Music—Text. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Animals.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print.

Benesch, Klaus, “Writing Grounds: Ecocriticism, Dumping Sites, the Place of Literature in a Posthuman Age.” Public Space and Ideology in American Culture. Ed. Miles Orvell and Jeffrey L. Meikle. New York: Rudopi, 2009. Print.

Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Vintage, 1980. 3–30. Print.

Cavalcanti, Alberto. “Comedies and Cartoons.” Footnotes to the Film. Ed. Charles Davy. London: Lovat and Dickson, 1937. 71–86. Print.

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“Chickens.” Writ. Joanna Calo. Dir. Mike Roberts. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2015. Stream.

Cohen, Karl F. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Print.

Eagan, Daniel. America’s Film Legacy. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.

Emerson, Caryl. “Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost' (How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain).” Poetics Today 26.4 (2005): 637–664. Print.

“Fish Out of Water.” Writ. Elijah Aron and Jordan Young. Dir. Mike Hollingsworth. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2016. Stream.

Gunning, Tom. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 42–71. Print.

Jones, Chuck. Chuck Amuck. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999. Print.

Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 1997. Print.

Klein, Norman. “Hybrid Cinema: The Mask, Masques, and Tex Avery.” Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation. Ed. Kevin S. Sandler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. 209–220. Print.

“Later.” Writ. Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Dir. Martin Cendrada. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2014. Stream.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

“Live Fast, Diane Nguyen.” Writ. Caroline Williams. Dir. Joel Moser. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2014. Stream.

Murphy, Patrick. “‘The Whole Wide World was Scribbed Clean’: The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney.” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 125–136. Print.

“The Old Sugarman Place.” Writ. Kate Purdy. Dir. Anne Walker Farrell. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2017. Stream.

Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Intro. Gerald. L. Bruns. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1990. Print.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild: Essays. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2004. Ebook.

Thompson, Kristen Moana. “‘Ah Love! Zee Grand Illusion’: Pepé le Pew, Narcissism, and Cats in the Casbah.” Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation. Kevin S. Sandler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998. 137–153. Print.

“Time’s Arrow.” Writ. Kate Purdy. Dir. Aaron Long. BoJack Horseman. Netflix, 2017. Stream.

Vaingurt, Julia. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. Chicago, IL: Northwestern UP, 2013. Print.

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Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Print.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Touchstone Pictures, 1988. Stream.

NOTES

1. My discussion concerns cinematic history and theory along with examples from film and television. For my project, which concerns the representation of animals in moving images, the difference between television and film is not relevant. Both film and television, at least in the case studies conducted here, include projections of the moving image of the animal. Although film and television series have different effects due to their singular or extended viewing processes, these differences will not be relevant here. 2. There is an implicit neoliberal didacticism in BoJack Horseman. Although these various species were formed for other walks of life, they were still able to make it in Los Angeles. 3. Alhough there is no room in this study for discussion of less well-known influences in the line of succession in cartoon history leading to BoJack, I would still like to highlight Fritz the Cat (1972). The racy, psychedelic meanderings of this full-length cartoon movie featured, similar to BoJack, the main character having “sex with all kinds of animals” (Cohen 81): “The film is full of bare-breasted females of various species, foul language, cops with pig heads and outrageous images of softcore sex” (Cohen 82). The film was envisioned as a way to “lampoon our phony values,” and to be the “antithesis of a Disney animated feature” (Cohen 81). Newsweek called it a “celebration of urban decay” (Cohen 84). BoJack doesn’t go as far as Fritz in terms of pornographic content or violations of narrative expectations via the device of hallucinogen-spurred trips (although one or two of these sequences do mark the darkest episodes of BoJack). BoJack seems to strive for mass palatability, while skirting the edge of madness and nihilism only in a few moments. The show may, however, be called an exploration (if not a “celebration”) of urban decay. 4. From 1995 to 2014, Derek Jeter played for the New York Yankees, the archnemesis of the Boston Red Sox. Since he won five World Series titles with the Yankees, he represents a Bostonian masculine inferiority anxiety. However, it should also be pointed out that during his time in New York, the Red Sox broke the “Curse of the Bambino,” a superstition that developed from Boston’s failure to win a World Series title after selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in December 1919—until finally succeeding in 2004. 5. This metonymic substitution of a landfill for the city of Los Angeles evokes dystopian visions of a post-human world. Klaus Benesch’s study “Writing Grounds” explores the evolution of dumping sites in literature. These sites can serve as a catalyst for nostalgia for or distancing from the past, and can be embraced as a source of artistic creation or as a representation of posthuman reality (446). 6. “Metabiosis” is Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s term for “the influence of a past event on subsequent events that take place in the same geographic location,” or “the influence through absence” (Vaingurst 116). 7. In a TV ad in the episode, the chicken-spokesman of “Gentle Farms” explains to his young chicken-son that “friend” chickens are distinguished from “food” chickens through the administration of hormones, which makes the latter into “meat,” “erasing any moral gray area.”

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ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I trace themes of the animetaphor. I interpret Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term as a moving image of the re-membered animal that projects a collective anxiety of oblivion for all animals, including humans. I begin with an exploration of this theme with respect to early cinema and the philosophical and psychological movements that accompany it. I then investigate more contemporary examples of these models in three case studies—Chuck Jones’ characters in the Looney Tunes, the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the Netflix series BoJack Horseman—to explore the imagined city of Los Angeles as a cartography of animal ghosts, invented and reinvented as semiotic machines, which force us to look at animals as ourselves and at ourselves as animals. Mechanisms of mass cultural memory are at work in the cinematic history of Los Angeles, and animation is often a projection of those memories. The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism during the early part of the twentieth century serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real space in Los Angeles through the movement of animated animals. I argue that the fascination with animal movement of early cinema and cartoon animation suggest a particular function of cinema, and even more so cartoon animation, to remind us of repressed sensations and images from our collective unconscious.

INDEX

Keywords: Los Angeles, animation, BoJack Horseman, Who Framed Rogger Rabbit, Looney Tunes

AUTHOR

LAUREL SCHMUCK Laurel Schmuck is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, “Plants and Animals in Leo Tolstoy’s Late Prose,” explores the connections between the symbolic uses of animals and plants as well as non-male and non-human voices and the narrative structures of Tolstoy’s late fiction. Her other research interests include animal philosophy, animals in nineteenth-century French literature, and animals in American and Russian cartoons.

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“Absolute Alterity”? The Alien Animal, the Human Alien, and the Limits of Posthumanism in Star Trek1

Manuela Neuwirth

1. When Species Meet in the Future: Convergent and Divergent Becomings and Human Exceptionalism in Star Trek

1 Two decades before the crew of the original Enterprise set out to “boldly go where no one has gone before,” nonhuman animals—fruit flies, to be more specific—embodied Star Trek’s final frontier motto in real life by being the first earthly beings in outer space (“Cosmic Menagerie”). In fact, in a comic reference to this motto, chief engineer Trip follows Captain Archer’s dog Porthos with the words “where no dog has gone before” in the Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN, 2001–2005) episode “Strange New World” (season 1, episode 4).2 Not only does this humorous meta-reference recall the first dog in earth orbit, Laika, but its mocking tone pinpoints the ambiguous representation of pets in Star Trek that forms the basis of my argument in this essay.

2 In the decades following the debut of Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969; now referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series), Star Trek would develop from a cult show to a successful multimedia franchise, presenting a multispecies utopian future to a global viewership. It is not only in terms of its setting in outer space that Star Trek went where no one has gone before: Part of the series’ success is ascribed to its inclusion and innovative treatment of alterity in various forms.3 The shift from “man” to “one” in the series’ motto between TOS and The Next Generation (syndicated, 1987–1994) is testament to a further development in this regard, especially considering gender politics. “One” is inclusive of any one subject, my point here being that animals were (unwilling) pioneers of that spirit of exploration and quest that was and is ascribed to and decidedly constructed as human.

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3 By and large, Star Trek’s various series and movies focus on an inclusive, multispecies society of the twenty-second, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth centuries that has established an interstellar, democratic state, the United Federation of Planets, and managed to do away with most contemporary causes and issues of inequality via technological progress and interspecies community (Barrett and Barrett 61). Resting on an enlightened humanism, the series offers a utopian, mythical vision of species coexisting in harmony which represents, according to Rhonda Wilcox, the “ability to embrace the Other” as its “essential credo” (88). In this essay, I will demonstrate that Star Trek’s portrayal of the interactions between humans and nonhumans cannot be interpreted with quite as much optimism when considering a particular “other,” namely the animal.

4 The very idea of humanity rests on an essential, yet unstable species boundary establishing the nonhuman animal as the “other.” The answer to the question “what is ‘human’?” therefore is “that which is not animal,” while “what is ‘alien’?” could be countered with “that which is not human.” This viewpoint establishes an intimate connection between alien and animal, both representing the “other,” that which, in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze (11). One might expect that, conflating extraterrestrial and animal, this alterity is absolute in the true sense of the word and harbors the potential for overcoming the species boundary through an alien-animal bond. However, Star Trek’s depiction of posthuman “aliens” and animal characters belies this assumption. My discussion of various affective animal-“alien” relations, primarily android Data’s interactions with his pet cat Spot in TNG, as well as the backstory of Vulcan Spock’s childhood with his pet sehlat I- Chaya in TOS and Star Trek: The Animated Series (NBC, 1973–1974), will show that Star Trek promotes an anthropocentric position in the representation of animals as much as in the representation of other alterns. I include Data, technically an android built by a human engineer, in a category of “aliens” together with organic (semi-)extraterrestrial beings such as Spock and Worf. In this, I am working from a broad definition of “alien” as essential “other,” recalling Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1984). While Data’s status as quasi-cyborg disconnects him from the naturally intuitive, organic condition traditionally epitomized by animals, his status as a machine connects him to nonhuman animals when contemplating historical considerations of animals as complex machines, a view famously held by René Descartes.4 Significantly, Haraway observes that “the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between the human and the animal is transgressed” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 152), pointing to the complex link between posthuman corporeality and affect. Rosi Braidotti, in turn, links cyborg and pet when she asserts: “we need to rethink dogs, cats, and other sofa-based companions today as cutting across species partitions not only affectively, but also organically …. As nature-cultural compounds, these animals qualify as cyborgs, that is to say as creatures of mixity or vectors of posthuman relationality” (73). Blurring the boundary between human, nonhuman, and machine is thus the kind of posthumanism envisioned by Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. More than just a destination of technological determinism, Braidotti sees the posthuman turn as a paradigm shift emblematic of post- discourses that have increasingly questioned the humanistic subject as the basic reference point in the age of the anthropocene brought about by advanced capitalism (5). The decline of humanism towards an anti-humanism has been furthered and welcomed by the humanistic subject’s “others” who mark the critical condition of the dominant subject-position at the center and move beyond anti-

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humanism towards an innovative, posthuman project (Braidotti 37). This posthuman project links together all posthumans, set apart from the rational, unified, central subject through their liminality, affect, and multiple as well as mutual becomings (Braidotti 49). Thus conceptualized, both “alien” and animal alterns in Star Trek present posthuman subjects. In order to distinguish between, and point to, the extraterrestrial influence in these humanoid alterns in Star Trek, I will refer to them as “aliens” or “posthuman aliens” (I will forgo the quotation marks from here on out), simultaneously evoking connotations of “extraterrestrial” as well as ultimate “other.”

5 Star Trek’s alien/android-pet interactions thus present a perfect venue for investigating the questions raised by the posthuman condition, which, according to Theodora Tsimpouki, Konstantinos Blatanis, and Rachele Dini, “arises as a result of the increasing intermingling of humans and intelligent technology on the one hand, and the dissipation of differences between humans and other species on the other” (4). While Braidotti grants a capacity for overcoming anthropocentrism to posthuman multiplicity and community (71), my essay will show that, while complicating established dualisms, seemingly posthuman becomings in Star Trek ultimately fall short of the posthuman promise of egalitarian community and mutual transformation.

6 At the same time as acknowledging Sherryl Vint’s claim that representations of aliens and animals in sf texts may offer a non-anthropocentric, posthumanist perspective, I argue that alien-animal interrelations in Star Trek provide a look at the animal via the alien. They thereby turn the alien into human in what becomes a perpetuation of the aforementioned separation of animal and human. However, this process of humanization of the other is not a linear evolution of identity and allegiance but an ongoing, rhizomatic activity of (dis)connection and negotiation of multiple and fluid identities, leading me to appropriate Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophical concept of becoming. I propose multiple, mutually-transformative, interconnected becomings of pets and posthuman aliens in Star Trek that may be convergent and divergent, but are temporary and fluctuating rather than permanent. If Deleuze and Guattari’s logic follows that “a nonhuman animal cannot come to be other because ‘the animal’ is becoming” (Iveson 39), I will show that the animal in Star Trek actually becomes utterly other while generating a becoming-human for posthuman aliens. My application of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept to Star Trek thus presents converging and diverging becomings via language and affect that set off a divergent becoming for nonhuman animals. The power that pets are endowed with, therefore, is the power to effect a becoming which is not their own. Similar to nonhuman animals providing human access to becoming in Deleuze and Guattari (Iveson 43), pets in Star Trek provide an entry into becoming-human for alien others.

7 Complementing Star Trek scholarship that calls the series’ seemingly inclusive multispecies utopia into question by pointing out colonial undercurrents and underrepresented minorities beneath innovative—from a 1960s point of view— portrayals of alterity, my article likewise unmasks Star Trek as a distinctly humanist utopia. The representation of nonhuman animals uncovers a normative humanism that conflates Western, and especially Anglo-American, with human and is thus another instance of Star Trek not living up to its utopian, posthuman promise. Whereas the franchise presents many extraterrestrial species, it uncritically fuses, even in its portrayal of individualized pets, the animal into a single category, isolated from both humans and humanized aliens.5 The incorporation of animals in Star Trek is thus

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testament to a continuing need to “recuperate” the human (Kern 99) by setting it apart from the nonhuman animal.

8 I identify three intertwined becomings, which are not to be seen as linear-progressive, but may be divided into representations of (1) alien-as-animal, (2) animal-as-alien, and (3) alien-as-human. Thus, even in the portrayal of these “shifting … categories of inclusion and exclusion” (Vint 51), Star Trek perpetuates a human exceptionalism whose roots lie in the single human-animal boundary.

2. Becoming-Animal: Posthuman Aliens and/as Pets

9 The representation of animal alterity in Star Trek takes various forms, many of which have the animal and the alien intersect: A great number of episodes feature terrestrial as well as extraterrestrial animals, animal-like aliens, and anthropomorphized pets. In fact, despite the occasional reference to animals used for food or experimentation, Michéle and Duncan Barrett observe that the only animals seen on board of Star Trek ships are pets. The fan wiki Memory Alpha lists 26 named pets in the franchise’s television series, four of them recurring: Data’s cat Spot, Captain Picard’s lionfish (informally named Livingston by crew and fans), Captain Archer’s Beagle Porthos, and Chief O’Brien’s cat Chester (“Individual Animals”). Importantly, these four animals are all terrestrial individuals (as are their owners, with the possible exception, depending on definition, being Data) and carry names (with the exception of Picard’s lionfish, which is never referred to by name intradiegetially). Compared to the human-pet relations, the interactions between Data and Spot take up significantly more screentime.

10 In addition, various episodes present storylines of animal-human reversion. Some form of hierarchy can usually be detected in the portrayal of these interactions, although it is reversed when used for humorous effect or in stories where humans are treated like animals. Complementing these episodes of human-animal reversion, a very recent publication, Star Trek Cats (2017), completes the triangular structure of my analysis by providing the human-as-animal aspect. Contrary to what the title suggests, namely an investigation into Star Trek’s feline characters, such as Spot, it is in fact a reconceptualization of human Star Trek protagonists as cats (see Figs. 1 and 2). Illustrator Jenny Parks’ drawings envision the human crew as human-feline hybrids, endowing them with speech and adopting the characters’ usual linguistic habits and mannerisms on the one hand but presenting typical feline traits—including Scotty licking a bottle of “Scotch milk”—on the other. Combining extraterrestrial and terrestrial pet, the cat crew is visualized in their interaction with tribbles, a small, furry alien species.

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Figs. 1 and 2: “Where no cat has gone before”: The crew of the original Enterprise reimagined as cats. Images taken from Jenny Parks’ Star Trek Cats © Chronicle Books, 2017.

11 The human-turned-pet crew in Star Trek Cats themselves interacting with pets points to the aspect which unifies alien and animal in Star Trek: their treatment by human characters. Yi-Fu Tuan argues that an essential dialectic of dominance and affection informs the pet dynamic. The same can be said, to a certain extent, of parent-child, or

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any other kind of caretaker relationship. In this way, then, posthuman aliens become human children at the same time as they become pets in Star Trek.6 The benign indulgence with which they are mostly treated by humans contradicts their status as autonomous, sentient adult beings. Likewise, the way in which they learn to adapt to what is essentially a human community—their socially inept behavior and seemingly “innocent” outlook are oftentimes exploited for comic effect—is reminiscent of the learning curves of children. The stories of Star Trek’s posthuman alterns, chiefly android Data, Vulcan Spock, former-Borg drone Seven of Nine, and the holographic Doctor are thus stories of initiation and interpersonal growth. In the cases of Data, Spock, and Seven of Nine, obvious parental figures are the respective captains (Picard, Kirk, and Janeway) who all happen to be human. A commonality between these posthuman figures as well as between them and pets is their liminal status: Data is an android, a synthetic life form constructed by a human, who strives to become human, while Spock is a human-Vulcan hybrid—his father Vulcan, his mother human—who struggles with his hybridity and usually renounces the human (read: emotional) part of his identity, favoring the Vulcan (rational) one. While my analysis will focus on these two characters, contrastive examples—in regard to their treatment of pets—are Worf in TNG, the holographic Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager7 and, to a lesser degree, T’Pol and Phlox in Star Trek: Enterprise.8 While Spock is a human-Vulcan hybrid who grew up on the Vulcan home world, Worf is a Klingon who was raised by humans after his biological parents died. In their longing, Spock and Worf are diametrically opposed to Data: Whereas the android’s ultimate goal is to be human, Worf and Spock reject their human sides and continually stress that they are not human (while their representation belies this insistence and frequently shows their distinctly human behavior).9 Interestingly, these affiliations are mirrored in the characters’ pets: Data owns a terrestrial feline, while Spock’s (former) pet is extraterrestrial.

12 On the whole, humans treat aliens with the same mixture of benign indulgence, dominance, and affection that these aliens treat (their) pets. Indeed, I claim that both their childlike status and their bond with animals turn these alien others into some of the best-loved characters in the Star Trek universe (Barrett and Barrett 166). Seven of Nine’s rehabilitation from Borg drone to full human being in VOY is paralleled by her friendship with a mixed-species child, pinpointing the close connection between posthuman hybrid and child hybrid. Their otherness, their naiveté, and their liminal status link these characters.

13 Steve Baker ascribes boundary-blurring on a different level to a particular animal: the pet. For Vint, “Pets, like aliens in sf, speak to a longing on the part of the human species to connect with another being we can recognize as a subject, but whose mode of being in the world is nonetheless different from our own” (52; my emphasis). Deleuze and Guattari exclude the pet from their theorizing, claiming that animals that are too closely linked with humans do not challenge human ways of thinking. I, however, maintain that placing these two others—alien and pet—alongside each other results in polyvalent connections and disconnections that complicate binary oppositions.

14 Star Trek’s posthuman alien characters seem to be perfect specimens of others, by seeking to align themselves with, and being represented as, pets. However, Spock, Data, and Worf are also, in terms of gender and sexual orientation, representatives of exactly that norm that Derrida’s concept of phallologocentrism sets up as binary opposition to the other. Indeed, depictions of interactions between female characters and pets in Star

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Trek are far less common than portrayals of male figures and their pets. All of the four recurring pet relations—Data and Spot, Picard and Livingston in TNG, Archer and Porthos in ENT, and O'Brien and Chester in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—feature male pet owners.10

15 Similar to the illustrations in Star Trek Cats drawing parallels to the physical appearance of the human characters (see Figs. 1 and 2), Data’s golden uniform and yellow eyes could be argued to reflect his orange tabby’s fur and eyes, and Worf’s and Spock’s pets respectively reflect the Klingon and Vulcan cultures. Worf’s targ, the Klingon version of a boar, is a particularly evocative case in point by being clearly marked as a “warrior pet.” Nevertheless, targs are unusual pets, as they are also hunted and serve as food to Klingons. More so than terrestrial cats, targs and sehlats are thus ultimately liminal animals, challenging the boundary between wild and domesticated.

16 As this section has demonstrated, a triangulation of liminality, dominance, and affection governs both the alien-pet dynamics and the alien-human interactions in Star Trek. Pets inhabit a hybrid role as much as these posthuman aliens who become pets at the same time as they become human children. The human-turned-feline crew in Star Trek Cats presents a noteworthy addition, pinpointing the important interconnections between humans, aliens, and pets.

3. Becoming-Alien: “Everybody’s Human” (Except Animals)

17 So far, I have considered individualized, named pets as portrayed in Star Trek. However, what many viewers think of as the “quintessential Star Trek animal,” due to its memorable first appearance in TOS and numerous references throughout the franchise, is an extraterrestrial pet that hardly occurs in the singular. Tribbles, “fur balls” in the truest sense of the word, are pets-turned-pest featured in the comedic TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (season 2, episode 13), as well as in the TAS sequel “More Tribbles, More Troubles” (season 1, episode 5) and the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble- ations” (season 5, episode 6), among others.

18 The depiction of tribbles and the human crew members’, as well as Spock’s and the Klingons’, interaction with them exemplify the dialectic of domination and affection as well as the non-linear alignments between humans, aliens, and animals. The following exchange between Spock and McCoy illustrates these changing affiliations and the central issues of affect and language: Dr. McCoy: It is a human characteristic to love little animals, especially if they’re attractive in some way. Spock: Doctor, I am well aware of human characteristics. I am frequently inundated by them, but I’ve trained myself to put up with practically anything. Dr. McCoy: Spock, I don’t know too much about these little tribbles yet, but there is one thing that I have discovered. Spock: What is that, Doctor? Dr. McCoy: I like them... better than I like you. Spock: Doctor? Dr. McCoy: Yes? Spock: They do indeed have one redeeming characteristic. Dr. McCoy: What’s that?

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Spock: They do not talk too much. (“The Trouble with Tribbles” 29:45–30:15)

19 The humorous banter, which is characteristic of the Spock-McCoy relationship, finds McCoy as well as Spock distancing himself from the other by using an indirect insult. Spock articulates preference for the silent pets by contrasting them with the speaking human. Both thus align themselves with the pets rather than with the other crew member. However, on the meta-level, the dialogue constitutes a language exchange between two beings who obviously share the same form of communication; or, rather, whose languages are translated by the Star Trek device of the universal translator. 11 This sf tech conceit clearly marks animals as without a translatable form of communication, differentiating them from alien beings.12 Setting language, the “anthropological tool par excellence” (Braidotti 67), and emotion apart, “the animal is a primary agent of the inarticulate affect-phrase” for Lyotard (qtd. in Lippit 49). Affect is the second significant aspect to consider in the above exchange: McCoy identifies the love of pets as a particularly human characteristic, which, in another scene, exposes Spock’s humanity (overriding his rational Vulcan half): Petting a tribble, Spock remarks that the tribble’s “trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system,” adding that he—being Vulcan—is, of course, immune to this. However, while uttering these words, it becomes obvious that he is, in fact, affected, as he pauses while speaking and almost enters a trance-like state (“The Trouble with Tribbles” 16:04– 16:16).

20 The issue of the fast-breeding tribbles is eventually resolved by simply beaming them off the Enterprise, exemplifying the centrality of domination in the traditionally dual construction of the other. Likewise, it ties in with one of Tuan’s constitutive aspects of pet culture—dominance. The second characteristic, affection, echoes affect and points to the importance of embodied emotion in relations with pets.13

21 In contrast to the example of the convergent becomings of Spock and tribbles, language and affect are decisive tools of othering the animal in the following example from TNG. In “Schisms” (season 6, episode 5), Data recites a poem he wrote to honor his pet cat. Again, the scene is exploited for humorous effect: Riker falls asleep during the performance and applauds before Data is finished while cross-cuts to the other crew members listening to Data’s recital show bewilderment and amusement at his poem. It is obvious that nobody is entertained or takes Data’s poem seriously and instead hopes for the performance to be over soon. In fact, the mixture of slight annoyance and benign indulgence mirrors the treatment of pets and children alike, as pointed out above.

22 Data introduces his poem by informing the audience that poets used to compose odes to “individuals who have had a profound effect upon their lives” (02:45). The piece of creative writing suggests that it is also a profound affect the animal has on Data. Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses. I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, A singular development of cat communications That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection. A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents; You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.

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And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion, It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion. O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array. And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend, I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend. (02:40–04:06; my emphases)

23 Even though his friend Geordi LaForge, when asked later in the episode by Data whether the poem produced an “emotional response” (08:17) in the other crew members, answers in the negative, I argue that it does in the viewers. Data articulating feelings for Spot many viewers share about their pets facilitates identification with the android. Yet, in treating Spot like a human would treat their pet, Data assumes the anthropocentric position and turns Spot into an absolutely othered animal. With the viewer affiliating with the altern that behaves like a human, this represents a powerful example of a divergent becoming.

24 The appeal of the piece of writing itself clearly lies in the alternation of verbalized matter-of-fact descriptions of the mode of being of a cat with illuminating examples of affect in the animal-alien relationship. While Data grants Spot a form of communication and emotions, he denies him sentience and intelligence. Data thus simultaneously sets himself apart from his pet, while also stressing that their affective tie is not dependent upon a shared language system, but rather on a form of communication relying on haptic and pre-verbal perception. While Data “through a rhythmic stroking of [Spot’s] fur … demonstrates affection,” the cat “illustrates the state of [his] emotion” through his tail and his “subvocal oscillations,” which, in turn, intrigue Data. In the same way that affect is transmitted from the tribble to Spock and vice versa—Spock petting the tribble, the tribble trilling to express pleasure, and Spock calming down—Data demonstrates affection by petting Spot, who in turn purrs. In addition, Data paradoxically addresses Spot in the second person, as usual of odes, while simultaneously pointing out the cat’s inability to comprehend. However, the scene is clearly set up to be a mere humorous lead-in to the episode and the other crew members’ mocking reactions invalidate Data’s sincere emotions.

25 While Data oscillates between portraying Spot as object and subject in the poem, s/he is clearly objectified as an insignificant plot device in other ways in the series. Originally introduced as a male long-haired Somali cat in the episode “Data’s Day” (season 4, episode 11), Spot is subsequently turned into a male orange tabby until being referred to as female in the seventh season (“Spot”). In “Genesis” (season 7, episode 19), she gives birth to a litter of kittens, which mainly functions to alert Data and Picard to the fact that newborns are unaffected by a disease that has struck the whole crew, thereby pointing them to the cure.

26 Countering this plot-based interpretation to a certain degree is Data likening himself to an “expectant parent” in the same episode (01:25), pinpointing the dominance/ affection dialectic representative of parent-child, owner-pet relationships indicated above. Significantly, to be an expectant parent of Spot’s offspring, Data would need to be Spot’s partner of sorts. Additionally, ship counselor Troi comments on Data finding his cat in the debris of the crashed Enterprise with the words, “another family reunited” (Generations 1:46:53; my emphasis).

27 However, if Vint highlights the potential of sf for “subversive and new ways of conceiving species interrelations” (21), this potential remains largely unexplored and

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the subversion is decidedly limited in Star Trek’s portrayal of pets. Nonhuman animals persist in being conceived of as animals throughout the series, their status only subtly challenged. While one could argue for an isolated example of a nonhuman animal gaze, the point of view of the animal is never shared by the audience, a pet is never transformed into a human animal or given the ability to speak sensibly, as would be typical of plotlines in sf texts.

28 Moreover, an integral feature of both Haraway’s notion of companion species14 and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal—mutuality—is turned on its head in that convergent becomings serve to create mutually-exclusive becomings severing the just-established alien-animal bond. In treating Data as a human being, Spot turns Data into a human. In treating Spot like a human would treat their pet, Data absolutely- alienates Spot. The mutual metamorphosis, the “becoming-other” of animal and alien together is clearly at the expense of the nonhuman animal and in favor of the wanna- be human.

29 Adapting Kirk’s inclusive humanism, famously articulated by him telling Spock that “everybody’s human” in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991; 1:27:46), it seems as if every alien in Star Trek gets to be human, but no animal does. If, as Vint claims, “[a]nimals … ‘haunt‘ sf, always there in the shadows behind the alien or the android” (12), this proves, in many ways, to be a literal shadow for animals in Star Trek, outshone by aliens, who seem, in contrast, always-already human.

4. Becoming-Human: Transmission of Affect in the Alien-Animal Relationship

30 The examples of convergent and divergent becomings created by way of affective and linguistic (dis)connections discussed so far illustrate the ambiguity at the heart of these becomings. While Richard Iveson argues that Deleuze and Guattari only appear to “give to nonhuman animals an access to a ‘becoming’ that is equal—in power, in affect—to those valorized becomings open to the human animal” (34; my emphasis), I suggest that this promise can actually be fulfilled when considering a particular aspect of interactivity that Teresa Brennan terms “transmission of affect.” Brennan does not locate affect within the interior but as a transaction between bodies. Her analysis repudiates the idea of the modern subject as self-contained and goes back to premodern, “more permeable ways of being” (Brennan 11) that correspond to mutual, convergent becomings outside of language.

31 In her analysis of cyborg subjectivity, Sharalyn Orbaugh postulates that, for the posthuman, “affect is the only remaining marker of self” (161), thus defining the subject not so much by sentience or intelligence as by the capacity to feel. A perfect example that “affect does not allow for neat distinctions between subjects and objects” (LaMarre 83) are Data and Spot. It is the interactive nature of affective states that allows Data to align himself with his pet at the same time as becoming human by replicating distinctly human interactions with animals.

32 In the depiction of Data’s relation to Spot, different modes of being in the world are connected on a level that defies the animal-(post)human boundary. Transmission of affect as a pivotal channel of interspecies communication complements, and in fact, surpasses verbal language. Even though Data instructs Worf to speak to Spot, “tell him

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he’s a pretty cat, and a good cat” (“Phantasms” 30:07) and talks to Spot himself, e.g. wishing him “good night” in “Phantasms” (season 7, episode 6), with Spot seemingly meowing in response (10:54), it is the fusion of their pre-verbal, affective states that is crucial in the depiction of the animal-alien relationship. The fact that Spot feels about Data as about a human being speaks for the breaching of bodily boundaries and the successful transmission of affect. This also renders insignificant wherefrom the android’s emotions originate.15

33 Furthermore, the representations pinpoint the individuality of these beings, portraying Data and Spot as significant others in Haraway’s sense. For example, Spot frequently purrs when shown being in the presence of Data, whereas s/he hates almost all other crew members: Spot scratches Riker, which has him exclaim that he hates cats (“Timescape” 00:43) and hides under the bed, hisses at and runs away from LaForge, who threatens to kill the pet (“Force of Nature” 00:33). Worf’s discomfort at having to sit Spot is mirrored by the feline’s obvious distress (“Phantasms” 29:50–30:23).

34 In “Phantasms,” Data experiments with a dream program in his endeavor to become more human and experiences violent nightmares, causing the “unfeeling” android to feel emotions of fear and confusion. In a key scene (see Fig. 3), he watches Spot sleep, then draws a parallel between his dreaming and that of Spot, concluding that the cat’s “twitching and rapid breathing” suggest anxiety as well. He thus conflates his own experience with that of his pet on an emotional, affective level. Nevertheless, Data’s observation powerfully emulates the human gaze directed at the animal which does not return the look (Derrida 11).

Fig. 3: Transmission of Affect: Data watching Spot dream. Screenshot taken from the Next Generation episode “Phantasms.”

35 A contrastive example may be found in Data’s attempts to train Spot to jump off his work console. For a brief moment, Data’s and Spot’s eyes meet when Data calls Spot’s

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name (see Fig. 4; “Force of Nature” 15:18–15:47). Haraway argues that a mutual gaze, demonstrating respect (which derives from the Latin re-specere, which translates as “looking again”) is the basis for a social bond with animals as companion species (When Species Meet 19). When utilizing language, however, Data loses the just-expressed respect for Spot and marks her as inferior by using something akin to caretaker speech: “this is down, down is good, this is up, up is no.” Yet, shortly after, when LaForge is at the door, Data apologizes to Spot for the interruption in their “conversation” by saying “one moment.” This could, again, be interpreted as a form of respect. A humorous conversion takes place at the end of the scene, when Spot meows at Data, Data “asks” for clarification by saying “Hm?” then nods in understanding as he realizes Spot wants to play and grabs a toy. While Data laments that his training has not been successful and Spot might lack the intelligence to understand his commands, LaForge, who has been watching the interaction, comments: “I don’t know about Spot, but it seems to me your training is coming along just fine” (“Force of Nature” 15:45–16:46).

Fig. 4: Returning the Posthuman Gaze? Spot being unsuccessfully trained by Data. Screenshot taken from the Next Generation episode “Force of Nature.”

36 While the previous examples are primarily used for humorous effect, the following alien-animal interactions are crucial in terms of characterization of Spock and Data, as they are serious in tone and display strong emotions. The movie Generations (1994) marks an important milestone in Data’s journey of humanization, as he has an emotion chip installed that allows him to finally feel the full array of human emotions. At the end of the movie, after the Enterprise has crashed, as the crew is looking for survivors, Data discovers Spot alive. Spot meows, seemingly in greeting and Data hugs her, at which she purrs. Data presses her to his face and cries tears of joy (see Fig. 5). Unable to make sense of the paradoxical emotion, Data tells Troi, “I am happy to see Spot… yet I am crying,” and concludes that the emotion chip might have a malfunction. Troi

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responds by saying, “I think it’s working perfectly,” indicating the critical step in Data’s emotional evolution (Generations 1:45:50–1:47:22).

Fig. 5: Transmission of Affect: Data crying tears of joy at ﬁnding Spot alive. Screenshot taken from Star Trek: Generations.

37 Similarly, the TAS episode “Yesteryear” (season 1, episode 2) fleshes out Spock’s human side by telling the backstory of Spock’s childhood pet I-Chaya that was alluded to in the TOS episode “Journey to Babel” (season 2, episode 10). The episode has Spock time- travel to his childhood to save his younger self from being killed in the desert. Spock's former pet sehlat, the Vulcan version of a sabertooth, aids him in this endeavor. As he protects young Spock from a predatory creature, I-Chaya is, however, fatally wounded. Young Spock has to make the decision to have I-Chaya euthanized, mourning his death (see Fig. 6). In the episode’s conclusion, Spock tells Kirk that the original timeline has been restored, at the cost of one significant detail: “One… small thing was changed this time. A pet… died.” Kirk wonders, “A pet?” and continues, “Well, that wouldn’t mean much in the course of time.” However, Spock stresses, “It might. To some.” (“Yesteryear” 21:50–22:01). In opposition to Kirk’s off-hand remark at the animal’s insignificance, Spock’s wistful statement unravels his strong, human emotions, even thirty years after losing his pet.

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Fig. 6: Transmission of Affect: Spock mourning I-Chaya in the Animated Series episode “Yesteryear.”

38 The examples discussed are powerful illustrations of “posthuman subjectivity retain[ing] important elements of human affect” (Orbaugh 159). They illustrate how language and affect may serve to unite the modes of being of aliens and animals at the same time as having the potential to disrupt this bond by humanizing the alien.

5. Ambivalent Affiliations and the Absolute Altern— Alienated Animals and Humanized Aliens

39 Basing the discussion of species interrelations in the Star Trek franchise in critical posthumanism, the present paper has considered central aspects of liminality, becoming, and affect. In examining the alien-pet relations through a triangular structure of interconnected becomings, namely alien-becoming-animal, animal- becoming-alien, and alien-becoming-human, I have identified convergent and divergent becomings that complicate a dichotomous categorization and rather present rhizomatic (dis)connections. The pieces of dialogue between Spock and McCoy on the issue of tribbles, between Spock and Kirk on Spock’s pet sehlat I-Chaya and Data’s ode to his pet cat Spot reveal the centrality of language and affect in interpreting the vascillating allegiances formed between human, pet, and alien. Furthermore, instances of transmission of affect between Spock and I-Chaya and Data and Spot are evocative examples of affect disavowing binary distinctions between subject and object.

40 As my examination of the representations of tribbles, Data and Spot, and Spock and I- Chaya has illustrated, language, affect, and humor serve to both connect and disconnect these alterns. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari remove the pet from their considerations and maintain that animals are excluded from becoming, I have demonstrated that pets in Star Trek show a capacity to effect a becoming, which is, however, notably not their own. Instead, the converging and diverging becomings

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presented in the Star Trek franchise that set off a divergent becoming for nonhuman animals effectively reduce them to absolute alterns and mere catalysts of alien becoming. Similar to nonhuman animals providing human access to becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing, pets in Star Trek provide an access to becoming- human for alien others.

41 Albeit focusing on relational affiliations of liminal alterns, the posthuman potential of these interactions is thus stymied, as the representations fail to live up to the symbiotic promise of mutual becoming of equal value. Safe for an isolated example of a brief mutual gaze between Spot and Data that turns them into equals, the subversive capacity of these relations is not fully exploited by far. Although the relations between these alterns are posthuman in their affective becomings involving human, animal, and machine, they ultimately revert to an anthropocentric vantage point, perpetuate human exceptionalism, and fail to radically reconceptualize posthuman subjectivity. In line with other criticisms reproaching Star Trek for normalizing a worldview derived from, and barely changed since, the Enlightenment (Booker 206), my investigation into alien-pet relations likewise exposes Star Trek’s multispecies utopia as limited to humanoid species.

42 Even though Star Trek betrays its motto in regard to animals by not showing them venturing “where no one has gone before,” Ursula Le Guin points to an optimistic reading of the humanization of others, arguing that sf challenges our notions of allegiance and thus might expand our sense of kinship (see Vande Berg 52). Portraying alien characters affiliating with both animals and humans might point to such a gradual expansion of kinship. However, for nonhuman animals in Star Trek, the human- animal boundary remains the final frontier.

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NOTES

1. I am greatly indebted to Stefan Rabitsch for mind-melding his Star Trek expertise and providing me with the kind of detailed, insightful feedback that could only come from a scholar and true fan. 2. The first time I mention a series of the franchise, the full title will be used. Thereafter, Star Trek: The Original Series will be abbreviated as TOS; Star Trek: Enterprise as ENT, Star Trek: The Next Generation as TNG, Star Trek: The Animated Series as TAS, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as DS9, and Star Trek: Voyager as VOY. 3. The groundbreaking inclusion of racial and gender diversity in the multicultural crew of the original Enterprise, with Nichelle Nichols (playing communications officer Uhura) portraying one of the first female characters of African descent whose character is not a servant, pan-Asian helmsman Sulu (George Takei) and Russian crewmember Chekov (Walter Koenig), is legendary (see Booker 197). Gene Roddenberry’s original pilot envisioned a woman as First Officer, which was rejected by the network (Booker 208) and resulted in a male semi-alien (Spock, portrayed by Leonard Nimoy) filling the role (Schlegel 36). Additionally, Kirk and Uhura’s kiss in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” (TOS, season 3, episode 10) is frequently cited as the first scripted interracial kiss on US-American television. 4. Descartes sees nonhuman animals as automata, animal-machines (fr. bête machine) which lack reason and soul. While granting them the ability to react, he denies them—in line with his famous cogito and Cartesian mind/body dichotomy—the ability to respond and to suffer (see Descartes’s “Animals Are Machines” in Discourse on the Method). This view is contested by the anti- humanists, most famously Jacques Derrida (see Animal).

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5. Thomas LaMarre has pointed out that the ability of Klingons, Vulcans, and other humanoid aliens to bear offspring with humans marks these alien “species” rather as “races” than “species” from a biological point of view (91). The species boundary is then clearly drawn between humans and animals, animals and aliens, but not between aliens and humans. It must be noted, however, that terminological distinctions between “races” and “species” in a non-biological context are highly problematic, with categorization being subject to cultural discourse. 6. In this respect, it is also worthy to note a frequent analogy drawn between android Data and Pinocchio (e.g. TNG “The Measure of a Man”), the journey of humanization framed as a coming- of-age story for children. Tellingly, Carlo Collodi’s cultural icon was also appropriated to epitomize an android’s quest to become human in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. 7. The Doctor takes offense at a holographic, speaking iguana and deactivates the animal (see “Individual Animals”; VOY “Life Line”). 8. Sub-Commander T'Pol is appalled by the smell of Captain Archer’s dog (“Broken Bow”), which both distances her from the pet at the same time as it equates her heightened sense of smell to that of an animal itself. Dr. Phlox keeps animals for experimentation and treatment in his sickbay (see Barrett and Barret 63). 9. This disconnect between direct and indirect representation functions as a source of humor as well as facilitating viewer identification with the alien characters (Schlegel 36). 10. The only pet relation including a female owner and her Irish Setter—Janeway and Mollie in VOY—is mostly represented through references rather than actual on-screen interactions. 11. For a detailed discussion of Star Trek technology and media culture, see Alan N. Shapiro’s Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. 12. A case in point is a scene from ENT in which a Ferengi attempts to communicate with Archer’s dog Porthos. His colleague reminds him that the dog constitutes a “lower life form,” speculating that it is possibly “the Captain’s next meal” (ENT “Acquisition”). 13. Many scholars in affect theory distinguish affect, the biological, non-conscious, nonverbal, bodily expression of feeling, from emotion—a social expression—and feeling—a personal expression (see Shouse). While I am mostly using “affect” interchangeably with “feeling” and “emotion” here, I do point to the decidedly affective, visceral expressions of emotion in the discussion of the representative examples. 14. Incidentally, in a piece of personal correspondence published in When Species Meet, Haraway compares her dog to a “Klingon Warrior Princess”: “Ms Cayenne Pepper has shown her true species being at last. She's a female Klingon in heat” (192). 15. Data’s emotional capacities are brought about by tech conceits: the dream program in “Phantasms” and the emotion chip in Generations.

ABSTRACTS

As humanity defines itself through an animal other, one could likewise claim that the human in sf texts is demarcated by being non-alien. This viewpoint establishes an intimate connection between alien and animal, both representing the other, that which, in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. While one might expect that this absolute alterity harbors the posthuman potential for overcoming the species boundary through an alien-animal bond, the interactions between alien and animal alterns in Star Trek actually belie

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the franchise's utopian promise of multispecies community. Examining alien-pet relations in Star Trek: The Original Series, The Animated Series, and The Next Generation through a triangular structure of interconnected becomings, this paper argues that, while convergent and divergent becomings complicate established dualisms, the affective alien-pet interrelations in Star Trek ultimately effect a becoming-human for humanoid aliens while they mark the nonhuman animal as absolute other. Complementing Star Trek scholarship that calls the series’ status as inclusive utopia into question, this article likewise unmasks Star Trek as a distinctly humanist utopia that eventually promotes an anthropocentric position in the representation of animals as much as in the representation of other alterns.

INDEX

Keywords: alien, alterity, android, becoming, pet, posthumanism, Star Trek, transmission of affect

AUTHOR

MANUELA NEUWIRTH Manuela Neuwirth is a graduate student in the English & American Studies program at the University of Graz in Austria. She studied at the University of Minnesota and has presented papers at conferences in Austria, Germany, Croatia, Turkey, and the United States. Her research interests include film and television studies, health and illness studies, and the Gothic.

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Horsing Around: Carnivalesque Humor and the Aesthetics of Dehierarchization in Mister Ed1

Stefan L. Brandt

1. The Sitcom Genre and Carnivalesque Humor

1 “An animal sits at a desk, writing”—thus Philip Armstrong begins his study of the meaning of animals in fictions of modernity (What Animals Mean 1). The scenario of an animal writing a letter while sitting at a desk may seem absurd; yet, this is the exact setting that viewers of the TV sitcom Mister Ed are confronted with in the 1962 episode “Horse Sense” (season 3, episode 6): The show’s animal protagonist, a white palomino horse named Mister Ed, stands at a desk and produces a letter on a typewriter (Fig. 1).2 By acting like (but not necessarily as) a human, Mister Ed embodies ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous dictum that natural species are “good to think with” (89). In cultural practice, animals thus function as symbols, epitomizing ideas such as equality, liberty, and justice. According to Lévi-Strauss, animal characters teach us what the tenets and limits of our culture are and how they are fashioned. Such fictionalized—and often anthropomorphized—animals may thus figure as “stand-ins for humans,” as Margo DeMello has put it (334).3 Their prime function is to represent human concerns and sensitivities, not those of animals. What is true for literature and cinema is perhaps even more applicable to television—a medium which aspires to connect to our imagination in a place where we are most susceptible to aesthetically encapsulated messages: our own homes. Tellingly, U.S. television in the 1950s was teeming with dogs and horses—a vague echo of their popularity in various films since the 1920s.4 Touching upon socially explosive topics such as authority and independence, animal representations in the 1950s shied away from being overtly political, however. This situation changed significantly in the 1960s.5

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Fig. 1: Mister Ed typing a letter in the episode “Horse Sense” (1962). Screenshot taken from the Mister Ed: The Complete Series DVD distributed by Shout!Factory.

2 As I will postulate in this essay, the sitcom Mister Ed, which ran on CBS from 1961 to 1966, offers some of the most daring, yet carefully packaged, political statements in sixties animal television. The titular horse lives with his eccentric owner Wilbur Post, a likeable daydreamer and architect, and his accepting wife Carol. Mister Ed’s home in the San Fernando Valley, California, is a stable, which, however, more resembles a residence, furnished with a TV set and a typewriter. Ed is not only intelligent, but has the ability to talk—a skill that he only demonstrates in the proximity of his owner Wilbur. One of the show’s running gags is that Ed immediately becomes silent when other people join him and Wilbur (which leads to a couple of comical situations in which Ed’s owner is seemingly talking to himself, often being mistaken for a mentally- ill person).

3 Despite its rather atypical subject matter, Mister Ed became one of CBS’s most popular shows in the early sixties.6 The original title for the project (when it was first developed in 1958) was The Wonderful World of Wilbur Pope, indicating the show’s initial focus on the owner, Wilbur Pope (later changed to Wilbur Post and in the original played by Scott McKay), rather than the horse (Terrace 151). The eventual shift of focus from Wilbur to Mister Ed renders possible the show’s thematic emphasis on the world of animals (and on its equine protagonist, in particular), implying an increased awareness of marginalized figures.7

4 More so than its preceding formats, Mister Ed assumed a politically informed stance, weaving the social concerns of the turbulent sixties into the realm of mass entertainment. In my reading, the show deliberately employs the aesthetics of popular culture in order to formulate its subversive criticism of American culture (and the representation of minorities, in particular).8 Following Terry Eagleton, I define “aesthetics” as a set of sensory interactions between the world and the body that

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reflect “the whole of our sensate life together” (13). Similar to art itself, aesthetics figures as a historically shaped array of cultural discourses, permeated by ideologies. It is precisely this political dimension of aesthetics that I will discuss in this essay. Popular culture is tied to the realm of aesthetics in a unique way, since it necessitates specific modes of targeting large audiences (see Shusterman 289–307). Aesthetic pleasure cuts across the lines between “high art” and “popular art,” finding its own idiosyncratic expression in the ephemeral nature of modern-day culture. “[M]ost pleasures of beauty, art, and entertainment,” Richard Shusterman has argued, “are not only valuable without being everlasting but are more valuable because they are not” (307). These observations enable us to link aesthetic pleasure to the dynamics of popular culture, and to the sitcom, with its seemingly volatile, jocular rhythm, in particular.

5 The genre of the sitcom plays an important role in the cultural practice of comedic subversion.9 Marked by its “television-ness,” the sitcom makes use of the generic aspects of mass entertainment to reach its audiences (Mills, Sitcom 13). The sitcom employs a set of carefully elaborated aesthetic patterns to develop its unique type of humor, often subverting ideologies and prompting audiences to think about the nature of the represented acts. In this sense, the genre makes use of the potential of aesthetic acts to subvert established narrative patterns and to emphasize counter-hegemonic forms of cultural practice, thereby articulating social criticism (see Eagleton 118–119). As a genre, the sitcom became “mass-compatible” during the 1950s, connecting itself to a kind of “hysterical” humor which, according to Ed Sikov, dominated during the postwar era.10 “Comedy, as a stimulus to laugh,” John A. Fisher states in his contribution to The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, “has always been cast into the realm of the lower art” (530). Popular culture, Fisher explains, often recurs to formulaic patterns of representation, offering audiences mass-produced items in the form of commercial feature films and television productions (533; 535).11

6 The sitcom genre is a prime example of this “formulaic” reconstruction of reality (see Mills, Sitcom 43). Sitcoms, John Mundy and Glyn White have explained, are usually “designed around a star, a double act or team, or have a carefully constructed ensemble cast” (106).12 In the case of Mister Ed, the main focus undoubtedly lies upon its title character Mister Ed—not a human performer, but a horse who functions as the show’s key focalizer. Notably, Ed introduces himself to audiences at the beginning of each episode (“Hello …. I’m Mister Ed” 00:03–00:07). By turning a horse into the star of the show, Mister Ed simultaneously uses the formulaic strategy of many sitcoms (revolving around one particular performer) and subverts it (by making the talking horse the main focalizer and, in some cases, even the narrator of the show).13 According to Brett Mills, “the sitcom’s artificiality marks it off as different to the majority of the medium’s fiction” (Television Sitcom 75). In Mister Ed, this “artificiality” is enhanced by the unrealistic—and physically impossible—perspective of a talking horse. Through this absurd narrative device, the show enables viewers to imagine situations marked by a disruption of hierarchies and power structures. This constellation calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “[c]arnivalesque humor” (Rabelais 15). According to Bakhtin, this type of dehierarchizing humor generates a subversive effect upon audiences by valorizing grotesque characters and settings. In its celebration of the absurd and ludicrous, the “carnivalesque consciousness” (Rabelais 275) lets us share the viewpoints of characters which are otherwise usually placed on the periphery of society.14

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7 In the following, I will discuss the marginalized animal, which Mister Ed accentuates, in three interrelated steps: First, I will examine the idea of the “animal subaltern” and its significance for the sitcom Mister Ed. This section will demonstrate that the protagonist’s actions and utterances showcase his agency. Second, I will explore the concept of “bestial ambivalence” and its relation to Mister Ed’s shapeshifting persona. This section will suggest that Mister Ed constantly oscillates between different subject positions designed to familiarize viewers with a wide spectrum of identity options and ridicule established conventions of Western thinking. Third, I will turn to the political dimensions of the show by drawing on the notion of “animal denizenship.” This concept will allow for a dissection of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. Rather than trying to convince audiences that Mister Ed is a real horse, Mister Ed plays with the fiction of what Philip Armstrong has called “non-human agency” (Animals 3). 15 Thus, the series uses an aesthetics of dehierarchization in order to encourage audiences to question existing categories and experiential modes of connecting to minority subjectivities.

2. Rendering the “Impossible” Possible: Postcolonial Theory and the Animal Subaltern

8 In Mister Ed, the eponymous character becomes (politically) empowered in a double sense: Not only does the show humorously promote the political agenda of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (for example, by turning its title character into a “beatnik” and amiable spokesperson of the “disfranchised”), it also toys with the idea that animals may possess a form of agency that could go beyond their mere ability to “suffer” (Derrida 28). In Mister Ed, the animal’s “vulnerability,” characterized by Jacques Derrida as the core of its ultimate inability and powerlessness in the face of human domination, transforms into a grotesquely empowering and dehierarchizing force. Since conventional power structures are repeatedly turned on their head in the show’s comical universe, audiences gain the impression that animals do, indeed, possess the potential for disruption and rebellion—even though this illusion is formulaically destroyed at the end of each episode. Ed’s continual suffering in the face of injustice (including his symbolic fight against this unfair system) is a case in point for the condition of animals in human society that Derrida has called “a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible” (28). In the world of the show, Mister Ed, the anarchist horse, overcomes the phase of suffering and gradually begins to change his environment. By using subversive strategies, the show visualizes hidden aspects of a potential reality that seems, in Michel Foucault’s terms, “impossible to think” (Order xv), such as the notion that a horse could develop its own horizon of perception and figure as an independent agent of events.16 Referring to Donna Haraway’s seminal observations in her essays “Situated Knowledges” (1988) and “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” (1989), Philip Armstrong offers the following comments on the issue of animal agency: “The possibility of treating non-humans as something other than passive objects of study was anticipated in a paper by Donna Haraway that espoused the recognition of the non-human world as a ‘witty agent and actor,’ a ‘coding trickster, an active collaborator in the construction of meaning, or a rebellious obstacle to it” (Animals 2).

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9 By imaginatively suggesting that animal agency is, in fact, possible, Mister Ed toys with ontological questions posed by the discipline of animal studies, especially regarding the dogma of anthropocentrism. Whereas anthropocentrism assumes that humankind is “the central or most important element of existence” (“Anthropocentric”), Mister Ed enquires into the nature of anthropocentrism, asking questions such as: What distinguishes the human species from the species of animals?17 What happens to these boundaries once the “animal subaltern” begins to speak? These questions point to the usefulness of postcolonial studies for analyses of animal representations. Various academic studies have suggested that there are, indeed, parallels between the position of the oppressed in colonial imperialist systems and that of non-human species in a world dominated by humans (see, for example, Ahuja; Armstrong; Chagani; Moore; Willett). Conceived in this manner, animals are placed in the position of the “subaltern,” deprived of a sense of agency. Some authors have stepped beyond the discipline of postcolonial animal studies, pointing to a need for what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin call “postcolonial ecocriticism” in their book by the same title. “Postcolonial ecocriticism,” the authors propose, combines the theoretical interests of aesthetics and the political goals of animal advocacy, thus “preserv[ing] the aesthetic function of the literary text while drawing attention to its social and political usefulness, its capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world” (14).18

10 In his influential essay “The Postcolonial Animal” (2002), Philip Armstrong points to the opportunity that postcolonial theory offers for better understanding animals as existentially independent agents: “Encountering the postcolonial animal means learning to listen to the voices of all kinds of ‘other’ without either ventriloquizing them or assigning to them accents so foreign that they never can be understood” (7). Neel Ahuja, in his “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World” (2009), praises the potential of “species studies” as a discipline that “offers new tools for rethinking transnational circuits of power and identity” (556). Following Ahuja, “species studies” allows us to shed new light on the position of minorities within a larger imperialist discourse, which necessarily involves the treatment of non-humans: “By tracing the circulation of nonhuman species as both figures and materialized bodies within the circuits of imperial biopower, species critique helps scholars reevaluate ‘minority’ discourses and enrich histories of imperial encounters” (556–557).

11 Indeed, the sitcom Mister Ed revolves around a “minority discourse”—that of the animal other, epitomized by the “figure” and the “materialized body” of the horse protagonist. Not only does Mister Ed take the proverbial spotlight in all 143 episodes, the character also “materializes” as a real horse (and not just a figment of Wilbur’s imagination). Mister Ed’s disenfranchisement as a citizen is taken literally in the 1961 episode “Ed the Voter,” in which the show’s title character demands his right to vote. Ed’s democratic fervor is underlined in one of the episode’s first scenes, where he exclaims, “If a horse ever runs for president, I’ll make a speech” (1:29–1:33). When it turns out that it is harder than Ed thought to exercise his right to vote, Ed resigns in frustration, telling Wilbur and viewers, “I still wish I could vote” (23:26–23:28).19 In view of the show’s (humorous) accentuation of Ed’s exclusion from elections, one could easily argue that the main character figures as what Cynthia Willett has called “the animal subaltern” (26).20

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12 The sitcom’s humor plays a decisive role in establishing Ed as a likeable character, whose concerns regarding his right to vote we fully understand. Laughing with Ed about the pitfalls of bureaucracy and the inertia of democracy enables a valorization of the subaltern through the show’s microstructure. “Subaltern studies,” Cynthia Willett reminds us, “have established that ridicule and other forms of humor serve not only as accessories of cruelty and props of power but also provide discourses and technologies of reversal, leveling hierarchies by turning stratified structures upside down” (30; my emphasis). These observations lead Willett to the rhetorical question: “Can the animal subaltern laugh?” (29). Analogously, Fayaz Chagani, in a more recent essay, asks: “Can the Postcolonial Animal Speak?” (619). Mister Ed, I contend, literally lets “the subaltern speak” (2117), to cite the metaphor from Spivak’s original essay (1988).21 One of the first theorists of what later came to be known as postcolonial studies, Frantz Fanon, already pointed to the analogies between the “colonized” and the “animal” in the rhetoric of colonialism—a rhetoric which can be countered by the colonized with “roaring laughter”: “When the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms …. The colonized know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know that they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory” (7–8).

13 In Mister Ed, the title character is empowered through this laughter. In numerous episodes, Ed “sharpens his weapons,” to take up Fanon’s metaphor, in order to rebel against the human system of oppression. Mister Ed has the viewers on his side through the use of ridicule and laughter, which are generally directed against the world of humans. Here, the sitcom uses the strategies of comedic reversal and grotesque distortion to advocate minority issues. In placing the marginalized character of a horse at the narrative center and endowing it with a powerful subject position (manifested through the force of laughter), Mister Ed turns an impossibility into a possibility. The show playfully challenges our assumptions regarding the “nature” and “function” of human and non-human species in society, enabling us to re-imagine marginalized identities and associate ourselves with the liminality of such positions.

3. Horseplay: “Bestial Ambivalence” and the Aesthetics of Shapeshifting

14 In this grotesque play with hierarchies, Mister Ed figures as the epitome of what Paul Wells has termed “bestial ambivalence” (51), which denotes a radical shifting between oppositional representations of body, identity, gender, race, ethnicity, and species. Instead of confronting us with a static image of animal-ness, key texts in Western culture (such as Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book) toy with a “set of oscillations” which portrays animal (and to a certain extent human characters, as well) in a “representational flux” (Wells 51), vacillating between intermediate stages of “animal” and “human.” Wells argues that these texts reveal a kind of “discourse-in-flux” that represents “animal-in-the-making” (125; my emphasis) rather than the presumably “essential” entities of either human or animal. Following Wells’s notion of “bestial ambivalence,” Mister Ed figures neither as “pure animal” nor as merely a “human in animal disguise.” In fact, Ed’s owner Wilbur acknowledges this “bestial ambivalence” when he quips, “I just expect you to act like an… uhmm… normal human horse” (“Ed

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the Beachcomber” 14:07–14:08). Constantly ridiculing the other (human) characters with his wisecracks, Mister Ed is the epitome of the young rebel who mocks social norms and values, thereby often questioning the boundaries between animals and humans. As such, Mister Ed is more than simply a “stand-in for humans,” to pick up DeMello’s phrase, but actually replaces—by means of his “bestial ambivalence”—human characters as the focal point, creating narrative space for concerns which go far beyond the realm of human interaction. To use Haraway’s terminology, Mister Ed functions as both a “witty agent and actor” (209) and a “coding trickster” (201), who is all but passive in the choice of his actions.

15 Likewise, throughout the series, Mister Ed is characterized as a constant shapeshifter: grumpy, cynical, naïve, but also kind and loving. As part of this strategy of shapeshifting, Ed is also associated with an archetypal Hollywood character—the lonesome western hero. Equipped with the sonorous voice of a cowboy (which, incidentally, was that of former cowboy actor Allan “Rocky” Lane), Mister Ed reflects the values of individualism and non-conformism cultivated in American western films, but from the perspective of a horse. “I’m a westerner myself,” Ed declares in one episode, “I was born under the saddle” (“Ed the Desert Rat” 01:36–01:40).22 The show’s key joke is that a horse performs the role of the western hero—the animal which, in the western formula, functions as a vehicle, not as an agent of events. Here, the classic formula of westerns is humorously reversed, turning the horse into the narrative center of the plot. While, in the typical western, horses are no more than mere background props, Mister Ed is very much at the center of our attention and the focalizer of all narrated events. The tongue-in-cheek dimension of Ed’s transformation into a “westerner” becomes even more obvious in the ensuing scene from “Ed the Desert Rat” (1964; season 4, episode 17), in which Ed performs the role of a western loner, with a cowboy hat on his head. “You know what we ought to do someday, Wilbur?” he addresses his owner, “We ought to get out in the wide open spaces … and rough it. The sky for our roof and the ground for our bed” (01:45–01:57). In the ironic reversal of the show, the horse, not the rider, serves as the admired hero. “I belong out in the wide open spaces,” Ed affirms in the same episode (02:17–02:19), jokingly putting himself in the position of the western hero and his owner in the domesticated, passive role.

16 The symbolic reversal between “horse” and “rider” likewise appears in the 1963 episode “Ed Discovers America” (season 4, episode 3), in which Ed’s owner Wilbur is commissioned to design a museum. Looking for an idea about which statue to place in front of the building—“something that symbolizes the spirit of America” (02:35–02:38) —he turns to Mister Ed. The ensuing conversation reveals fundamental differences as to whom this statue should depict. “Aaah, something that symbolizes the spirit of America, huh?” (02:40–02:43), Ed repeats. While Wilbur makes various suggestions (“a statue of the American Indian,” “the pilgrim,” and “Washington in a rowboat”), Ed keeps repeating monotonously, “What about a horse?” (02:45–03:03). Even after Wilbur rejects the idea, Ed insists: “There’s gonna be a statue of a horse in front of that building” (03:32–03:35). The “argument” brought forth by Mister Ed—that horses represent the American spirit of westward movement—must have rung true to many television consumers. As countless movies and TV shows of the postwar era conveyed, horses did indeed accompany the treks of settlers into the Wild West and across the frontier (see Ahmad). The show exploits its conscious reversal of roles—between

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human and animal, pioneer and horse—to declare the horse the crucial agent of American progress, doing the job even better than its human counterpart. “Never send a man to do a horse’s job,” Mister Ed quips in the episode “Ed the Desert Rat” (07:24– 07:27). Horses, the plotline suggests, are simply more competent and more in tune with the American spirit than humans. The horse protagonist of Mister Ed thus figures, in a Bakhtinian sense, as a “carnivalesque” character. By laughing with Mister Ed (rather than about him), we partly identify with his outsider status and begin to understand the ramifications of his “otherness” within human society.23 “Carnival laughter,” Bakhtin explains in Rabelais and His World (1965), “is the laughter of all people. … [I]t is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity” (11). The dehierarchizing potential of carnival laughter becomes obvious in “Ed the Voter” (1961; season 2, episode 6), in which Ed is asked what he would change if he was elected U.S. President. “For one thing,” he answers, “horses would be riding people” (23:41–23:44). Ed’s second plan seems equally emancipatory for the world of horses: “Every time a horse won a race, the winnings would be put aside for his old age” (23:47–23:52). Mister Ed’s “carnivalesque” humor here accentuates the ambivalent and liberating dimensions of its aesthetics: We may laugh about the very fact that a horse is talking and making jokes at the expense of its owner; at the same time, we laugh about the world of humans which, to use Bakhtin’s phrase, is shown “in its droll aspect.”

17 The laughter evoked by Mister Ed is “ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 11–12). The comedic emphasis on the formulaic in Mister Ed thus generates a spectacle that may be called “a syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort” (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s Poetics 22; original italics). In this type of pageantry, Mister Ed’s protagonist functions as a “grotesque character” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 316), flagrantly oscillating between the world of humans and that of animals. Thus conceived, the show puts forward a narrative in which the human/non-human relationship gradually tilts in a carnivalesque fashion, generating new angles with regard to the issue of animal agency. Notably, the illusion of seeing a horse talk is evoked by a trick designed by the makers of the show: While the rest of Mister Ed’s body usually remains still (or barely changes its position), the horse’s mouth is constantly moving during Ed’s monologues.24 As Bakhtin observes with regard to the carnivalesque performance, “the most important of all … features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all else” (Rabelais 317). Mister Ed’s formula is so absurd and fantastic (showing the protagonist in the role of a cowboy, writer, politician, and so on) that it creates an imagery of empowerment on the part of the animal figure in the audience’s imagination.25

18 Throughout all six seasons of Mister Ed, Thomas Paine’s 1776 treatise Common Sense, a highly influential founding document of the United States, is used as a point of reference. However, in the show, not “common sense,” but “horse sense” moves the action forward. In an episode titled “Horse Sense” (1962; season 3, episode 6), Mister Ed writes a newspaper article and later even a book that Wilbur sells as the product of his own efforts. When the fraud is revealed, Ed dryly remarks: “Looks like my brain has gone to his head” (15:38). This episode highlights that Mister Ed does not only revolve around its animal character in plot and dramaturgy (this would be a criterion fulfilled by many 1960s programs such as Lassie, which ran on CBS from 1954 to 1971); rather, it rejects the predominant anthropocentric agenda of other shows, making its protagonist the center of the show’s sentient universe and sharing the character’s

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interior values and perceptions.26 This departure from television’s dogmatic anthropocentric conventions is illustrated in another Mister Ed episode, aptly titled “Ed Finally Talks” (aired on February 18, 1962), which, once again, employs the show’s key motif of “horse sense.” In a comedic dream sequence (Fig. 2), Ed not only receives a university degree but also becomes an army major and even a member of the U.S. Senate, where he gives a passionate speech on the topic of common sense: “Fellow congressmen, we’re getting nowhere with people sense. It’s time now for a little horse sense” (20:59–21:50). In this episode, Mister Ed is equipped with a strong, rebellious voice. He speaks up to his owner—“Get lost, boy, I’m introducing a new bill” (21:37– 21:39)—and is repeatedly awarded for his irreverence. “Animal sense” and “people sense” are thus humorously juxtaposed. Through its tongue-in-cheek humor, the show makes it clear which one the audience is expected to favor. The notion of “horse sense” toys with an idea heralded by Spivak in her Foucauldian critique of postcolonial reason, namely that “the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated’” (2115).

Fig. 2: Mister Ed giving a speech in Congress in the episode “Ed Finally Talks” (1962). Screenshot taken from the Mister Ed: The Complete Series DVD distributed by Shout!Factory.

19 In Mister Ed, this subjugated knowledge is attributed to animals, which are, indeed, “located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity,” to use Foucault’s terminology (Power/Knowledge 82). 27 Mister Ed is “knowledgeable” in a literal sense: He does not only have profound insights into the world of animals, but is also sophisticated and eloquent when it comes to human cultural practices. He writes brilliant essays, outwits each character with his jokes (including his owner Wilbur), and has read the classics of American literature such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper, as clarified in “Ed the Voter” (24:21–24:34). In the episode “Ed the Beachcomber” (1962; season 2, episode 23), Ed recites witty odes that he performs as “Henry Horseworth Longfellow” (14:09–14:29).

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Mister Ed may be smarter than all those around him; yet, with the exception of his owner Wilbur, no one knows about the horse’s extraordinary intellectual capabilities. However, by exhibiting his talents to Wilbur and the viewers of the show, the character steps out of the “Self’s shadow” (Spivak 2114) and develops his own unique Self, which is a carnivalesque compound of human and animal. Resisting his position as “the Other,” Mister Ed recreates his “subjugated knowledge” as what the show calls “horse sense.” Modeled after Paine’s “Common Sense,” this comical concept valorizes the fundamental rights of animals as sentient creatures that deserve equal treatment. In Picturing the Beast (1993), Steve Baker argues that “our ideas of the animal … are the ones which enable us to frame and express ideas about human identity” (6; original italics). Mister Ed negotiates these ideas as pertaining to the fundamental rights that every individual in society should enjoy, no matter to which species they belong. The show thus offers a subtle denouncement of what Peter Singer has described as “speciesism” (Animal Liberation 185), humans’ irrational and unjust discrimination against animals, and, more particularly, different types of discrimination against different types of animals—friends or food.

20 In this context, it is highly suggestive that Mister Ed is not just any animal, but a horse. Horses are not only connected to the American westward movement, but also to a sense of injustice and suffering in general. As early as 1828, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham remarked that “a full-grown horse … is beyond comparison a more rational … animal than an infant” (qtd. in Garrard 147). Bentham went on to explain that the decisive question concerning non-human subjectivity is not if animals can think but if they can suffer (Garrard 147). More than other animals, horses have a history of being abused as effective tools of the economic system. According to Harold F. Hintz, horses are marked in our culture as both powerful and easily tamable (12–13; 117). For hundreds of years, horses had to serve as tools of transport and labor power.28 In 1890, 70% of urban traffic in the USA depended on horse-drawn tram. In light of these horrors, it is no wonder that J.D. Salinger’s youthful hero in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) exclaims: “A horse is at least human, for God’s sake” (117; original italics). This paradoxical message from Salinger’s bildungsroman—that horses are, in a way, also “human”—which permeates almost every episode of Mister Ed.

4. Pushing the Boundaries of Human and Non-Human: Mister Ed as a “Liminal Animal Denizen”

21 Through the show’s liminal aesthetics, Mister Ed endorses what Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have termed “[l]iminal animal denizenship” (244)—a type of identity position that situates the non-human in the space between domestication and independence (but with certain additional and inalienable rights that a wild animal would not be granted). As Donaldson and Kymlicka explain in their book chapter on “Liminal Animal Denizens,” this type of animal is marked by both confinement and a relative sense of freedom. “Liminal animal denizens” enjoy protection and security within the civilized home, yet they never become fully “domesticated companions of humans” (241).29 Mister Ed, too, belongs to this group of threshold animals “who live amongst us, even in the heart of the city” (210). The show suggests that Ed stays with Wilbur of his own volition—simply because he appreciates him as a friend and soulmate. In this sense, he is a resident of two worlds, that of humans and that of animals, partly domesticated,

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yet also partly autonomous. Donaldson and Kymlicka “call this group liminal animals, to indicate their in-between status, neither wilderness animals nor domesticated animals. Sometimes they live amongst us because humans have encroached on or encircled their traditional habitat, leaving them no choice but to adapt as best as they can to human settlement” (210; my emphasis).

22 A chief characteristic of “liminal animals” is that “these animals are invisible in our everyday worldview” (211). In a similar fashion, Mister Ed, too, is “invisible” to his diegetic observers, except to his owner Wilbur and to the viewers. The other characters in the show can see the physical appearance of a horse but are unable to see Mister Ed as Wilbur and audiences perceive him—as a witty, wisecracking genius who is more intelligent than anyone in his environment. In this sense, the position of Mister Ed as a “liminal animal” is “highly paradoxical” (211). After all, Ed carries all the traits that would normally qualify him as a “person” and full member of society (including voting and property rights), yet he is not given these privileges, since society does not recognize his fundamental status as a citizen. “Liminal animals,” Donaldson and Kymlicka state, “are not domesticated, and so do not trust humans, and typically avoid direct contact” (214). Mister Ed, too, avoids contact with humans. The only human he ever trusts enough to engage in conversation is his owner Wilbur Post. The special privileges that Ed enjoys, thanks to Wilbur, include a bed, a telephone, a typewriter, and the right to be heard in problematic situations. This enhanced status as a co- resident is comparable to what Donaldson and Kymlicka define as “denizenship”: Denizenship captures this distinctive status, which is fundamentally different from either co-citizenship or external sovereignty. Like citizenship, denizenship is a relationship that should be governed by norms of justice, but it is a looser sort of relationship, less intimate or cooperative, and therefore characterized by a reduced set of rights and responsibilities. (214)

23 This “reduced set of rights and responsibilities” includes two components that Donaldson and Kymlicka isolate as key markers of “liminal animal denizenship”: (a) “[s]ecure residency” and (b) “[f]air terms of reciprocity” (241; original italics). Ed enjoys both of these privileges. His denizen position in the Post residence is not endangered (although Ed repeatedly breaks out of his home). In addition, the relationship between Ed and Wilbur is based on mutual trust, exchange, and interdependence. Here, the liminal dimension of Mister Ed becomes obvious. While recognizably a horse (indeed, one that is proud of its species in its own right and never shows any aspirations to become a human), Wilbur, nevertheless, treats Mister Ed as a human, who is a responsible and equal partner in the home. Ed’s “humanity” (in the philosophical sense) becomes visible in the character’s constant resistance to acts of injustice and his generally contrarian attitude toward his environment. When asked, in the 1961 episode “Ed Agrees to Talk” (season 1, episode 20), if he has been eavesdropping, Mister Ed has a snappy answer: “Yes and no. Yes if you saw me, and no if you didn’t” (01:30–01:32). Ed’s disobedient reactions throughout the show indicate the sense of empowerment he feels toward his owner, which may result in gratification on the part of the viewer (Shillinglaw 248). Time and again, the horse proves to be unruly and non-conformist, rejecting traditional norms and challenging expectations.

24 As Ann Shillinglaw observes, Mister Ed is marked as a prototypical boundary crosser that “transgresses space, action, realism, and logic, moving into living rooms, neighbors’ homes, the desert, lines at the bank …. Ed is barrierless, even fitting into physically impossible spaces such as the cockpit of an airplane” (248). In this regard,

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Mister Ed is a kind of alter ego of his human counterpart, articulating desires that Wilbur does not dare to express, let alone turn into actions. Mister Ed becomes, as the administrator of the internet blog HorsesforDiscourses has put it, a kind of “Mister Id.” He is the substantiation of Wilbur’s repressed and perhaps forgotten wish to trespass the boundaries of social norms. Mister Ed dares what Wilbur dares not. If Wilbur is characterized as rather shy and restrained, Mister Ed proves bold and confident. Yet, Ed is never fully marked as either horse or human, but rather inhabits a liminal space “in between” these two subject positions.

25 This sense of liminal subjectivity on Ed’s part is illustrated in the episode “Ed the Beachcomber,” in which Mister Ed joins a number of beatniks that Wilbur’s old- fashioned neighbor Addison aspires to expel from his private beach property. Ed’s solidarity with the beatniks is motivated by the fact that he also feels alienated from his environment. In a key scene, Ed transfers the sentiment of the beatnik outsider melodramatically—and comically—to his own species: “There’s no place for us horses today” (12:25–12:28). Using almost exactly the same words previously articulated by the rebellious juveniles, Ed exclaims: “We’re rejected, neglected, befuddled, bemuddled” (12:29–12:36).30 Ed’s anguish in the face of his subjugated status in society evokes Bentham’s question “Can they suffer?” which, for Derrida, highlights “the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” (25; original italics).

26 As Derrida explains, “[b]eing able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible” (28). While reminding its audiences that Ed’s rebellious performances are in vain and doomed to failure toward the end of each episode, the show nevertheless stages them as understandable and ultimately necessary acts that merit admiration and perhaps even emulation. Thus, we actually see Ed celebrating with the beatniks and enjoying some sense of emancipation. Mister Ed’s temporary breaking free of social bonds is an act that his civilized owner Wilbur would likely never allow himself to perform. Yet, we assume that he would very much like to, since he, too, is treated as an outsider by society. Repeatedly, his wife and neighbors ask him to see a shrink, since they do not believe his assertion that Ed actually speaks. “[T]he similarity between the name Ed and the word ‘id,’” Shillinglaw notes, “cannot be unintentional in a show which, in a variety of episodes, presents Wilbur consulting with psychologists” (251).

27 As his owner’s alter ego, Mister Ed fulfills the hidden dreams and fantasies that Wilbur cannot realize due to the omnipresent constraints of society. This is where the “possibility of the impossible” Derrida assigns to animals is turned into a reality, after all. While the human character is unable to transgress boundaries and go beyond the assigned sphere, paradoxically enough, the horse Mister Ed is allowed to control airplanes, give speeches to Congress, and so on. This reversal of roles between humans and animals is illustrated in a hilarious plot twist in the episode “Ed Finally Talks,” where we see both human and animal trying to study the mind of the other. While Wilbur reads a book on animal psychology, Ed peruses a scholarly study on human psychology. In asserting that “animals are smarter than humans” (07:56–07:59), Ed mockingly reverses the cliché that humans are more rational. Mister Ed’s actions continuously highlight the actual agency of his species and reject the arrogance of humans. In this regard, I disagree with Ann Shillinglaw who, in her article “Mister Ed Was a Sexist Pig,” holds that Ed’s actions are mainly motivated by misogyny. Ed’s disparaging attitude toward his environment is not just directed toward women, but

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humans in general. In fact, the character is marked by a strong sense of misanthropy. Wilbur is the only human character with whom Mister Ed speaks. For most other human characters—perhaps with the exception of one-time guest star Mae West—Ed has nothing but contempt. In the comic universe of the show, Mister Ed’s misanthropic attitude makes perfect sense. After all, it is the humans who deny Mister Ed—and other animals—basic personal rights.

28 Most notably, the character of Mister Ed is an outspoken advocate of an attitude which Gary L. Francione has described as “abolitionism” (xi). Referring to the historical movement against U.S. slavery, Francione defines “abolitionism” as a radical defense of basic personal rights for animals. If we are about to consider, as the title of Francione’s book suggests, “animals as persons,” we also have to promote “the interest of nonhuman animals” (148). This radical approach is similar to that of “critical anthropomorphism” (Garrard 157), which proposes that we should “align [our]selves with the views of animals that are commonplace outside science” (Garrard 158). In this context, “Ed the Emancipator” (1963; season 3, episode 24) repeatedly references the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Tellingly, this episode aired on March 24, 1963; that is, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and just five months before the “March on Washington.” In the episode, Mister Ed is revealed as an avid reader of Abraham Lincoln’s writings, especially of the Gettysburg address. Ed’s provocative question “Does that go for horses, too?” (01:08–01:10) summarizes the main argument of the animal liberation movement, which demands a deeper understanding of nonhuman animals’ needs and necessities. We almost expect Mister Ed to reiterate the famous abolitionist slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” so evident are the links between the historical abolition of slavery and the possible abolition of animal subjugation raised in the show.

29 The fact that Mister Ed is a horse (and not a dog or cat) is significant in this context. As Donaldson and Kymlicka explain, horses played a key role in the technological revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main reason for the transition from horse power to the combustion engine was that horses were feared by their owners as a “disruptive workforce” (115; see also McShane), being potentially rebellious and unwilling to work. In this context, Mister Ed’s constant refusal to work alludes to the numerous stories of zoo and circus animals that tried to escape their captivity and caused serious damage—acts the authorities later construed as unintended accidents or results of random behavior (see Donaldson Kymlicka 115–116). Mister Ed leaves no doubt that its main character’s actions in the name of emancipation are intended. This sense of fundamental agency on the part of the animal protagonist imbues the show with more than just the average sitcom humor. The fact that the horse Ed is elevated to the status of a “Mister” while its owner is simply called by his first and last names underlines the impression of comical destabilization and reversal of the roles humanity has assigned to the respective species.

5. Conclusion

30 In this essay, I have argued that the CBS sitcom Mister Ed employs an aesthetics of dehierarchization, embracing subjectivities that seem closely linked to the world of the “animal Other”—the subjugated, the repressed. The show employs the fiction of “nonhuman agency” to pose fundamental questions regarding the positioning of the

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“animal subaltern” in society and the role of humans in this subjugation. The sitcom genre plays a crucial role in this politics of reversal, allowing viewers to laugh with the animal character (rather than at it). In this sense, Mister Ed participates in a carnivalesque spectacle which, by celebrating the absurd and the grotesque, embraces peripheral viewpoints and identity positions. Likewise, Mister Ed can be interpreted as a colonialized subject, a kind of “animal subaltern” (Willett 26–29) that speaks up against an oppressive system. The laughter evoked in these episodes assumes, in a postcolonialist sense, an emancipatory quality, associating us with what Donna Haraway has called “subjugated standpoints” (191–192)—those symbolic hinges within hegemonic culture that help valorize “situated knowledges” (Haraway 149–201) and generate a more complex understanding of cultural practice as a whole.

31 The show’s title character, oscillates between various “situated knowledges,” serving as a prime example of what Paul Wells has called “bestial ambivalence” (51), a radical fluctuation between oppositional notions of body, identity, gender, race, ethnicity, and species. Ed partly reflects the human mindset of his eccentric owner Wilbur Post (who is likewise portrayed as a liminal character) and partly celebrates a non-human subject position (e.g. when the horse replaces the cowboy as the true hero of the West). The show’s anthropomorphism, I have argued, invites us to re-think established modes of agency and question our own perception with regard to what is possible and what is impossible. By generating “structures of feeling” (R. Williams) that connect the human and the non-human, the divide between species is imaginatively suspended. Hence, in some episodes, the horse protagonist transforms into a “Mister Id,” expressing the secret yearnings of his human companion Wilbur to the viewer. “I belong with the rejected,” Ed declares in “Ed the Beachcomber” (14:21)—a statement that must have found fertile ground in 1962, the heyday of what James Baldwin once described as the “New Lost Generation” (659). In view of the flourishing civil rights movement of the early sixties, Mister Ed’s blatant commitment to emancipatory causes would have probably sounded revolutionary, had it not been concealed in the shape of a sitcom, that highly formulaic and often conservative television genre which emerged as a popular format during the fifties. Yet, Mister Ed subverts many of the genre’s ritualistic patterns, for example, by choosing an animal as its title character and by having that protagonist converse and joke in an amiable fashion. Just a decade earlier, during the “paranoid fifties” (to use Richard Hofstadter’s famous phrase), the figure of Mister Ed, being endowed with such a rebellious attitude, might have easily been ostracized as a “Mister Red.”

32 When confronting the gaze of animals, historian John Berger has maintained, we are looking “at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal” (34; original italics). In Mister Ed, this marginal dimension of animals is combined with a set of political messages. Continuously marked in the show as “the Other,” the non-human character becomes a representative of emancipatory causes, thus mocking existing hierarchies and transgressing the established boundaries between identity positions and even species. Embellished with comical elements, the format visualizes and reverses what Derrida has termed, with regard to animal subjectivity, the “possibility of the impossible” (28), allowing the talking horse to figure as a spokesperson for a whole array of political and social issues—equal treatment of African Americans, rebellious youth, even animal rights. Constructed as a “liminal animal denizen” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 210–251), a resident of two different worlds, the character of Mister Ed rejects

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the binary assumptions of the human/non-human dichotomy, endorsing a series of fluid identity positions instead. Similar to its main character, the show Mister Ed occupies a niche within social and cultural practice, encouraging viewers to do the same and inhabit the space between “human” and “non-human,” “civilized” and “wild,” “assimilated” and “rebellious.”

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NOTES

1. Horsin’ Around is the title of a mock sitcom in the animated television series BoJack Horseman (Netflix, since 2014), which is about anthropomorphic, talking horses. 2. Similar scenes of Mister Ed using a typewriter appear in several other episodes. For example, in “The Blessed Event” (1963; season 3, episode 26), Mister Ed learns that he will become an uncle, whereupon he walks straight to the typewriter to create a list of suitable names (09:47– 10:00). Similarly, in “Ed Writes Dear Abby” (1964; season 5, episode 3), Ed types a letter for a newspaper column to complain about the restrictions he has to endure at home (08:57–09:02). 3. According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, “anthropomorphism” is defined as “[t]he attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object” (“Anthropomorphism”). On the one hand, the character of Mister Ed seems anthropomorphized in that it displays “human attributes” and touches upon sensitivities of human society. On the other hand, the discourse of “bestial ambivalence” inscribed into Mister Ed allows for a reading that underlines Ed’s “animal- ness” (especially with regard his status as an “animal subaltern”). 4. Examples include The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (ABC, 1954–1959) and Lassie (CBS, 1954–1971; syndication 1971–1973). Although these dog characters were designed to maintain the postwar illusions of newly discovered peace and domesticity, they also harken back to a tradition of political animal agency. For example, in the eponymous 1943 movie, the “Son of Lassie” was portrayed as a devoted freedom fighter and enemy of the Nazis. The theme of emancipation became present, once again, in the television show Fury (NBC, 1955–1960). Its title character was an untamed American Saddlebreed horse that refused to be ridden by anyone else but the orphan boy Joey, who is adopted by a rancher in the Wild West. 5. The bottlenose dolphin Flipper in the eponymous NBC series (1964–1967) politicized a whole generation of young consumers, laying the ground for the “dolphin-safe tuna” movement of the 1990s (see Körber 475–509). Other TV formats, such as Daktari (CBS, 1966–1969), directed the viewers’ attention to the need to protect wildlife (see Traïni 170). 6. Mister Ed won a Golden Globe in 1963 for “Best TV Show—Comedy.” Much later, the show won TV Land Awards for “Favorite Pet-Human Relationship” (2003) and “Most Heart Warming Pet- Human Relationship” (2005)—a prize presented to Alan Young, the actor playing Ed’s owner Wilbur Post. 7. The show’s basic idea originated in a film series titled Francis the Talking Mule from the early fifties that also revolved around a likeable, wisecracking animal character conversing with its owner. Around mid-century, Americans were already familiar with comical metaphors involving horses. The 1932 pre-Code Marx Brothers comedy film Horse Feathers about a college football team made clear reference to the common expression “horse feathers” for “complete nonsense.” 8. In his book The Politics of Aesthetics (2000; English translation 2004), Jacques Rancière describes “aesthetic acts” as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (3). The politics of aesthetics takes its recognizable shape in “the distribution of the sensible” (7), namely the “regime of the arts in general” (9) and its “system of representation” (13). 9. The term “sitcom” (short for “situation comedy”) defines a fast-paced, often serialized comedic format on television that is marked by highly formulaic patterns, including the infamous “canned laughter” suggesting appropriate moments for amusement. As John Mundy and Glyn White elaborate in Laughing Matters (2012), the situation comedy “developed out of the variety sketch adapted to the regular broadcasting radio to become the most efficient form for delivering comedy within television” (105). Following Brett Mills, the sitcom is “the result of the

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interplay between the comic impetus of all comedy and the specifics of television” (Sitcom 23). In the contemporary era, the sitcom is “the predominant comedic form in television, being the favourite television genre in the USA and the second favourite in the UK” (Mundy and White 105). 10. In his study of 1950s Hollywood cinema, Laughing Hysterically (1994), Sikov identifies the “generalized hysteria” (19) of the postwar era as the basis for the emergence of various “hysterical” screen comedies. While some featured Jerry Lewis and other comedians with a decisively vaudevillian kind of humor (18–19), others were directed by Frank Tashlin who combined an anarchic sense of humor, borrowed from the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes series with elements of subversive humor (179–242). 11. Fisher cites Carroll’s book A Philosophy of Mass Art as an example of a scholarly study in which the boundaries between high and low culture (and especially its allegedly formulaic structures) are called into question. High art, Fisher insists, can be highly formulaic, too, in its aesthetic structures and form of expression (534; see Carroll 196). 12. In Mister Ed, we also find both the “double act” and the “ensemble cast.” For example, the show strongly emphasizes the relationship between Ed and his owner Wilbur (played by Alan Young). It also develops much of its humor through minor characters as well, especially Wilbur’s wife (played by Connie Hines) and the Addisons, the Posts’ neighbor couple (played by Larry Keating and Edna Skinner). 13. In this respect, Mister Ed stands in contrast to other TV shows with animal protagonists such as Lassie and Flipper, who are at the center of their respective plots but are never allowed to talk to audiences directly or narrate events from their perspectives. 14. For a discussion of Bakhtin’s “theory of the carnivalesque,” see Richard Shusterman’s essay “Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics” (291). 15. “[T]o speak of ‘non-human agency’,” Armstrong states in What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, “immediately invites the allegation of anthropomorphism” (3). However, “mobilizing a concept of animal agency need not imply ‘assumptions about what specifically constitutes animal subjectivity or interiority’” (3; see also Burt 31). In fact, “the allegation of anthropomorphism itself derives from an anthropocentric and ethnocentric understanding about what agency is” (Armstrong, Animals 3). 16. In The Order of Things (1970), Foucault encourages us to reconsider “what kind of impossibility [we are] faced with” when looking at the gap between social practice and representation (xv). Sometimes, the grotesque and absurd may challenge our established modes of thinking and facilitate social and political change. A critical analysis of the human/non-human dualism, Erica Fudge argues, is capable of stimulating “our own ability to think beyond ourselves, to include within the orbit of our imaginations … those beings of other species” (22). 17. Literally speaking, Mister Ed opposes the patterns of anthropocentrism, since it revolves around the world of its horse protagonist, even creating a material setting (a bed, a typewriter, etc.) that focuses on Ed’s existence as an independent character. Within this setting, Mister Ed is always a liminal character, embodying human and non-human features alike. 18. Coming from a similar angle, Ian Baucom proposes uniting the concerns of postcolonial studies with those of planetary or global studies, creating an environmentalist discourse that takes questions of imperialism into consideration (20). For a detailed discussion of “animals” as a discursive theme in ecocriticism, see Garrard (146–180). 19. The ordeal of assuming the right to vote and finding one’s way through the “red tape” of bureaucracy is described in detail in this episode, reminding us of the obstacles imposed upon the African American minority in the form of the ‘Jim Crow Laws’ (making literacy and possession of property prerequisites for voting). Notably, the ‘Jim Crow Laws,’ which had dominated since the 1890s, were still in place when “Ed the Voter” aired on November 5, 1961. Seen in this light, Ed’s statement from the episode’s final scene, “I sure am lucky to be living in a

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democracy” (24:11–24:13), could easily be seen as ironic, since the Civil Rights Act, which ended the most outrageous elements of voting injustices, was only signed into law by President Johnson three years later. 20. Oxford Living Dictionaries defines the term “subaltern” as “[o]f lower status” (“Subaltern”). Originally used by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to label the “popular mass,” postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak picked up the concept of the “subaltern” in a 1988 essay, which positioned itself within the discourse of “subaltern studies” (launched by a number of Indian researchers surrounding Ranajit Guha). A combined definition of the term enables us to use “subaltern” both in a postcolonial sense (indicating the animal’s “otherness” within the colonial system of human hegemony) and in the general sense (pointing to the “lower rank” of non-humans in Western societies). 21. In her essay, Spivak investigates what she calls “the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow” (2114). Within the symbolic order of constant “Othering” that characterizes the imperialist system, the subaltern is prevented from articulating its oppressed and marginalized status. Combining “subaltern studies” with thoughts developed by Foucault and Deleuze, Spivak raises the question whether “the oppressed, if given the chance … can speak and know their conditions” (2117; original italics). 22. The irony of this episode is enhanced by the fact that Ed simultaneously transforms into a human (a western hero) and (metaphorically) into another animal, a “desert rat,” as the title suggests. This doppelganger image supports Ed’s ambivalent status oscillating between the world of humans and non-humans. 23. In this context, it is important to note that Mister Ed usually encourages us to laugh with its animal protagonist (who provides most of the show’s jokes and witticisms). Here, the show employs an aesthetic constellation symptomatic of the American sitcom genre. “While American sitcom often invites the audience to laugh with characters, Britcom instead offers pleasure in laughing at them” (Mills qtd. in Mundy and White 113; my emphases). 24. This effect was achieved by an intense training program, during which the gelding Bamboo Harvester, who initially played the character of Mister Ed, “learned to move his lips on cue when the trainer touched its hoof” (Spiotta-DiMare 33). 25. According to Terry Lovell, “[t]he stronger the referencing to social reality, the less ‘subversive’ sitcoms tend to be” (qtd. in Mundy and White 106). Following Lovell’s logic, Mister Ed, which creates numerous fantastic and unrealistic scenarios, must be considered subversive. 26. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘anthropocentric’ is defined in two ways: “1. Considering human beings as the most significant entity of the universe” and “2. Interpreting or regarding the world in terms of human values and experiences” (“Anthropocentric”). The sitcom Mister Ed comically discards both criteria, declaring a horse ‘the most significant entity of the universe’ and considering the world in terms of ‘horse sense’ and ‘animal experience’ rather than ‘common sense.’ 27. Spivak takes the term “subjugated knowledge” from Foucault who defines it as “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated” (Power/Knowledge 82). In her collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Donna Haraway uses the related term of “situated knowledges” (196), that is, types of knowledge which are not fixed but oscillate within the dynamics of cultural hegemony. “Subjugated standpoints”— specifically, viewpoints that are not allowed to be part of hegemonic knowledge but nevertheless play a crucial role in cultural practice, since they “promise more

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adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (191)—are central in this context. Both of Haraway’s concepts—that of “situated knowledges” and that of “subjugated standpoints”—point to the need for a more balanced view of such identity- forming processes. “A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detachment is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated in order to see well” (Haraway 192). 28. It is estimated that 3,000 horses died at the Battle of Gettysburg, and 8 million in World War I (Donaldson and Kymlicka 271). 29. Donaldson and Kymlicka point out that the group of “liminal animals” is often neglected by the discipline of Animal Studies. Yet, “we are not dealing with a few anomalous species here, but rather a large variety of non-domesticated species who have adapted to life amongst humans” (210). 30. Viewers encounter a similar scenario in the episode “Ed Writes Dear Abby,” in which the character demands to have his own independent home, whereupon Wilbur calls him a “teenage rebel” (05:20–05:24).

ABSTRACTS

This essay discusses the aesthetics of dehierachization in one of the pioneering sitcoms in American television—the CBS-produced Mister Ed (1961–1966). Drawing on the concepts of “the animal subaltern” (Willett), “bestial ambivalence” (Wells), and “liminal animal denizenship” (Donaldson and Kymlicka), I argue that the show constructs its protagonist, a talking horse named Mister Ed, as a shapeshifting character who humorously challenges established assumptions regarding the human/animal dichotomy. Designed as a sitcom, Mister Ed employs a technique that I describe, following Bakhtin, as “carnivalesque humor.” Within this aesthetic framework, the title character figures as an ambiguous and grotesque character who rejects social conventions and restrictions, oscillating between the position of a stand-in for humans and that of a liberated animal. Mister Ed playfully advocates a radical move toward alternative representations of body, identity, and species, even postulating an analogy between the African American Civil Rights Movement and the discourse of animal liberation. Following a long tradition in animal fiction, the show sets out to expose hierarchies and injustices in society by employing an animal as its chief focalizer. Conceived in this manner, Mister Ed challenges what Jacques Derrida has termed “the possibility of the impossible,” namely the notion that animals can never be endowed with a sense of subjectivity. In the comedic, fictional realm of the show, the “impossible” becomes a subversive reality. Mister Ed assumes the position of a powerful subject which is endowed with “non-human agency” (Armstrong). In this sense, Mister Ed creates a scenario in which the “absolutely marginal” (Berger), indeed, returns the viewers’ gaze, inviting them to share and valorize this outside perspective, if only for the duration of one twenty-five minute episode at a time.

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INDEX

Keywords: Mister Ed, carnivalesque humor, body, identity, species

AUTHOR

STEFAN L. BRANDT Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has published three monographs, most recently The Culture of Corporeality: Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945–1960 (2007), and five (co-)edited volumes, including Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City (2018) and In-Between: Liminal Spaces in Anglo Canadian Literature (2017). In addition, he has authored numerous essays on American literature, film, and popular culture.

European journal of American studies, 13-1 | 2018