Pain and Murder As Voice: Understanding Alternative Symbolics Through the “Blackfish Effect”

Pain and Murder as Voice: Understanding Alternative Symbolics Through the “Blackfish Effect”

Julie K. Schutten Northern Arizona University ~ [email protected]

Caitlyn Burford Northern Arizona University ~ [email protected]

Abstract

The documentary film Blackfish (2013) follows the story of Tilikum a captive SeaWorld prisoner-orca responsible for the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau and two others. The film has had a profound effect on public perceptions of orca captivity, orca health as an apex predator, and related environmental issues, creating the “Blackfish Effect.” This e-tactic movement has had a detrimental impact on SeaWorld’s revenues and influenced public policy regarding cetaceans. We analyze the film using Plec’s (2013) internatural communication categories of complicity, implication, and coherence. We argue that the shift to coherence is what sustains the connective action supporting the “Blackfish Effect” demanding the release of Tilikum and others like him. Our paper expands internatural communication dialogues demonstrating how to recognize new symbol systems valuing other-than-human voices. As such, we discuss Tilikum as a political prisoner whose actions illustrate active consciousness and deliberate voice. A coherence paradigm necessitates that audiences take orca voices seriously and acknowledge them as key players not only in shaping public policy, but as active instigators of environmental social movements.

“Never capture what you can’t control” - Tagline from the film Blackfish

Blackfish was deemed “A mesmerizing psychological thriller” by Chief Film Critic Justin Chang of Variety in his review of the documentary which explores the death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau. Brancheau was killed by Tilikum a captive orca held in SeaWorld Orlando for the past 29 years. This review hails the sub-genre of psychological thrillers, a genre that typically emphasises its characters as unstable and living in psychosis. Furthermore, this categorization calls in the horror genre and began framing the response to the film by identifying it as a “psychological thriller” on the cover and in the movie trailer. Chang writes,

The protagonist of Blackfish is Tilikum, a 12,000-pound bull orca that has caused the deaths of three people in his 20-odd years as a theme-park attraction. The most recent victim was Dawn Brancheau, an experienced SeaWorld trainer whose February 2010 death is presented as a human tragedy that could have been prevented only by not subjecting the whale to the cruelty of confinement in the first place. (Chang, 2013, para. 2)

Chang goes on to write that this particular film, though similar in subject, goes further than the 2008 Oscar-winning film, The Cove (about dolphin slaughter in Japan), by launching a direct attack on SeaWorld. The incident became widely known when CNN broadcast Blackfish in 2013. In the first six months after it was aired on CNN, the documentary was seen by roughly 25 million viewers (Kaufman, 2014). Sparking a subset of the Environmental Justice Movement dubbed the “Blackfish Effect,” the film surprised many with its significant impact on SeaWorld’s revenues and stock value. Perhaps even more important, the film Blackfish has had a profound effect on public perceptions of captivity, orca health as an apex predator, and related environmental issues. Unlike other more-than-human animal documentaries, the “Blackfish Effect” has been sustained through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and has continued to draw support. It has also expanded beyond demanding the release of Tilikum to include oceanic preservation for salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and other interconnected environmental health cases.

In what follows we discuss the “Blackfish Effect” thematically through an “internatural communication” (Plec, 2013) lens. We view the “Blackfish Effect” and the film Blackfish simultaneously recognizing that the two are linked in a mediated process as the “Blackfish Effect” is an extension of the film itself. In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication, editor Emily Plec (2013) defines internatural communication as “the exchange of intentional energy between humans and other animals as well as communication among animals and other forms of life” (p. 6). Internatural communication is inclusive of previous definitions in environmental communication that work to expand how we understand the constitutive meanings of our world (e.g., biorhetoric, transhuman communication, corporeal rhetoric); however, Plec’s contribution is intended to be inclusive of their meanings as well as embracing new possibilities of human and more-than-human communication forms.

Plec’s (2013) anthology is organized around three ideas/categories: complicity, implication, and coherence. Complicity asks us to face the consequences of human subordination toward other-than- human entities. Implication calls for the building of a new relationship to the more-than-human world. Finally, coherence explores the shift to a new paradigm where interconnection is the ideological norm rather than the exception. Using Plec’s categories we explore how these frames are expressed in the documentary. First, complicity is expressed by SeaWorld’s dominant position that orcas in captivity are either happy or necessary for scientific research. Furthermore, publics who attend SeaWorld theme parks are also part of the complicit narrative. Second, through the lens of implication, Blackfish

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 3 of 7 critiques this dominant position by proposing an alternative narrative of psychosis arguing that Tilikum’s outbursts and neurosis (e.g. killing, grinding/breaking teeth on the cage bars) are post- traumatic stress disorder perpetuated by prison-like living conditions. Finally, the third lens brings to light a new paradigm of internatural communication where Tilikum and other captive orcas are seen as their own agents and their voices and actions would be heard as a clear choice to be freed (sea pens, release to the wild, etc.). We argue that the shift to coherence is what contributes to the “Blackfish Effect” or a sustained movement demanding the release of Tilikum and others like him. Using this lens, his homicidal acts are not a symptom of psychosis that can be fixed with, for example, a larger and more visually pleasing pen (proposed by SeaWorld). Rather, Tilikum’s actions disrupt complicity and implication and can be read as a “symbolic declaration of war” (Milstein, 2013, p. 177) creating a breach that bridges the divide of human/orca communication by illustrating alternative symbolics (Schutten & Rogers, 2011). Our paper expands internatural communication dialogues illustrating how to recognize new symbol systems via the public screen (Deluca and Peeples, 2002) by placing equal value on other-than-human voices. This is a key aspect of the success of Blackfish and by extension, documentary film in social movements.

Blackfish, the “Blackfish Effect,” and Documentary Film as Connective Action

Blackfish, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012 and acquired by Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films. The film was nominated for an Oscar and has created connective action against captivity in general and capture and care of wild orcas. Due to their global charismatic megafauna status, Milstein (2009) refers to orcas as “boundary creatures” (p. 97). Boundary creatures symbolize a “potentially enlightened and harmonious humanature” (Milstein, 2009, p.97) where “tourists” or audience members often leave an encounter with a sense of connection and, potentially, leave as an advocate for new “ecocultural alliances” (p. 97). Seen in this light, Blackfish from its inception presented engaging subject matter that would appeal to a large audience. It is also widely understood that popular nature documentaries typically focus on environmental use-value that specifically “encode and (re)code anything back into the logic of capitalism” (McHendry, 2012, p. 145). Framing nature in terms of its use-value maintains the subject (human)/object (nature) binary. As such, it becomes even more important to examine media texts that challenge ideologies that do not constitute nature as a resource for human use (Schutten, 2006, 2008).

It is important to understand how nature documentaries as a genre have the potential to encourage pro-environmental behavior. Documentaries allow for more accessible exposure to many types of nature encounters in a way that is less expensive, less time consuming, and more readily available as compared to zoos or other direct nature experiences (Arendt & Matthes, 2014). Similarly, Pezzullo (2007) writes “the use of documentaries by social movements to ‘mobilize viewers’ with ‘a committed eye’ positions them as desirable and potentially efficacious modes of communication that are relatively more affordable to circulate with broader audiences” (pp. 144-145). Blackfish presents a perspective of reality that can be “perceived to be an expansion of human vision, a means of entering into a world that was invisible to the human eye…” (Horak, 2006, p. 459). The film takes the viewer behind the scenes of Tilikum’s reality and other orcas at SeaWorld unveiling a much different picture than what the park portrays during a visit and via advertising.

Scholars have argued that nature documentaries contribute to environmental knowledge gain and attitude change (Barbas, Paraskevopoulos, & Stamou, 2009; Holbert, Kwak, & Shah 2003). In the

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 4 of 7 instance of Blackfish, nature documentaries emphasizing cetaceans may contribute to increased knowledge about whales and whale habitat. Milstein (2011) coins the term “whale insiders,” to refer to researchers, advocates, and others with “different orientation and aims” who may become advocates for preservation based on a direct nature experience with whales (Milstein, 2011, p. 7). Blackfish and other media sources related to the “Blackfish Effect” (e.g. Oceanic Preservation Society) may create new “whale insiders” that are not bound by socio-economic resources and access to direct nature experiences. Put another way, these new “whale insiders” do not have to afford a whale-watching tour or visit Seaworld.

However, does this heightened knowledge translate into pro-environmental action? In their study of nature documentaries, Arendt and Mattes (2014) examine how mediated nature experience such as a documentary could have a positive influence on an audience’s environmental behaviors. While they find that documentaries do not necessarily influence implicit environmental connectedness, or an individual's understanding of their own connections to nature, they do find that “exposure to the nature documentary increased giving behavior to non-profit organizations focusing on animals and environmental protection” (p. 16). We extend their work claiming that financial donation might not be the only measure of public participation but add that social media participation or “e-tactics” (Katz- Kimchi & Manosevitch, 2014) could also be viewed as a form of direct action and pro-environmental behavior. In this way, documentary film and other forms of media that potentially offer audiences alternative structures of meaning for understanding their internatural relationship become part of an ongoing sustained environmental justice movement such as the “Blackfish Effect.”

We locate the “Blackfish Effect” and the film as a part of the environmental justice movement in an effort to include all Othered humanatural voices. Social movements are continually evolving to work under a changing set of social conditions. Perhaps the most significant change in these conditions is the rise of technology and how it affects the public sphere where social movements take place. The mass media frame movements through the representation of “image events,” which are occurrences that rely on the visibility of the image; the image itself becomes the central form of rhetoric facilitated by the media that projects the image (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). In the film Blackfish, there are multiple discourses surrounding the murder of Dawn Brancheau. Discourses from SeaWorld are revealed and quoted placing blame on Brancheau for making various mistakes during the performance (e.g., having a her hair in a ponytail) and in turn continuing to defend the imprisonment of Tilikum and other orcas. Alternative narratives from trainers and other experts in the film posit that the events were not Brancheau’s fault but rather caused by Tilikum’s psychosis due to his captivity. While oppositional, both narratives from the film are similar in that they ignore Tilikum’s agency and mitigate his ability to act with intention. Despite these narratives the audience is repeatedly exposed to the aesthetically disturbing stories of three visceral murders by Tilikum and several other attacks by captive orcas.

In a culture where image events are the primary mode of communicating through mass media, documentary films have significant power via the public screen. Schutten (2006) supports the public screen’s ability to be used as a critical frame in the rhetoric of social movements creating “potential relationships between media and a movement's ideology and identity construction” (p. 332). Or, as the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) wrote in a meme, “A film can be the most powerful weapon in the world-a weapon of mass construction.”

As a weapon of mass construction, there are moments in the film that breach normative discursive narratives of human-orca communication. For example, the film dispels the potential

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 5 of 7 misconception that orcas, culturally labeled “killer whales,” are actually killers of humans in the wild. In fact, the only incidents of attack and killing on record have been by orcas in captivity. These breaches can be seen as “crystalized philosophical fragments, mind bombs, that work to expand the universe of thinkable thoughts” (DeLuca, 1999, p. 6). The film, seen as an image event, is not simply a way to gain attention, but the “mind bomb” goes further to break an individual’s comfortable interpretation of an event, and expands an individual's possibilities of thinking. In the above example, an audience’s consciousness can expand to acknowledge that orcas or not “killers” of humans in the wild, but become “killers” due to imprisonment. Blackfish functions as a mind bomb that challenges the viewers’ understandings of SeaWorld and their treatment of cetaceans. Furthermore, following Milstein and Kroløkke (2012) these ruptures could also show how “communicative moments [in the film] might point us to new understandings about the intersections of nature, culture, and the body” (p. 83). These mind bombs might create “boundary transgressing moments” (Milstein and Kroløkke, 2012) for the audience moving them from complicity into implication and eventually toward coherence as we will discuss later in this essay. It is the move into coherence that we argue has sustained the movement and created the “Blackfish Effect.”

If you would like to read more of our paper please contact [email protected] Thank you!

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