Animal Attacks:

An interview with Mark L. Berrettini, Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado.

Modern Mask: To start, can you give a brief overview of Animal Studies for those who may not be familiar?

Mark Berrettini: Animal Studies generally deals with issues that have been around in traditional disciplines for a while, and yet as an interdisciplinary study, it is a bit more of an emerging field. There is, in general, at least in the United States, more of an interest in the last couple of decades, in interdisciplinary work, and now we see people getting together around critical studies issues that might not have been linked before. For instance, my background is in film, media studies, cultural studies, but in beginning to work in animal studies I find myself reading not just art history, history text, literary text, but also more anthropology, more sociology, even kind of history of science writings, or science and the humanities studies we might call it. So that is the disciplinary housing of some of these issues, the institutional makeup. In terms of the theoretical or critical makeup, there are people who are interested in animal rights. There are people who are working on animals in space [laughs] not like shooting animals into space, but animals and geography, and animals and space issues.

Although they have shot animals into space.

Although they have shot animals into space, right, and there are probably people working on those issues too. I am particularly interested in questions of identity, representation, and subjectivity. A few years ago when I was beginning to think about these issues, and beginning to see some of the work myself in film and media studies, I found that, on occasion, when I said “I am interested in doing some work on representations of animals in film and television or thinking about subjectivity,” some of my colleagues were sort of perplexed and amused and would say, “So, Lassie? You’re going to talk about Lassie?” And I would say, “Yeah.” You start to really dig into it and there’s so much material. I am always amazed with what I see people coming out with or talking about because there’s a lot of material but we’ve overlooked it in critical studies.

How did you first become interested and involved in Animal Studies, especially coming from Film?

Some of my particular interest in film studies, media studies, has been around the questions of identity, subjectivity, representation, and traditionally for me that has meant the representation of the human animal around questions of race and gender. I have that theoretical background as an interest. And then, in a personal, anecdotal way, I became interested because my first job teaching was actually in rural Colorado, and when I moved there, this is a kind of a silly story but it’s true, right when I moved there happened to be a season of particularly high bear sightings in the local town, because the food supply was low for the bears in the mountains, so there were lots of bears coming into the town. And, it became this kind of local celebrity thing: sighting bears. The newspaper had a bear tracker column that would publish a map every day of where bears had been sighted. And something about that particular situation struck me. Around that same time I started watching a lot of Animal Planet. And I just started thinking about some of these issues that I had been interested in and then went back and sort of revisited some film and television, really starting with The Crocodile Hunter, right around the time that it became popular in the US, and it was the first time that I watched it for any amount of time. And I was sort of oddly fascinated by it because I couldn’t quite make sense of it really.

On The Crocodile Hunter and Animal Planet, you talk about those in your essay 'Danger! Danger! Danger!' or When Animals Might Attack: Adventure Activism and Wildlife Film and Television you have coined this phrase, Adventure Activism, meaning “representations that mingle wildlife conservation with dangerous, exciting and sometimes violent human-animal interactions.” Is that your own original terminology?

I guess it is. I haven’t seen it anywhere else. Certainly people have talked about adventure genres and adventure texts in film and television. I’m try to take up the idea of animal activism and animal rights in more unusual representations in film and television, that they are not necessarily representational sites that we would traditionally think of as being animal activism or animal rights. And I was trying to work that out with that essay, in part because I think activism in general in the US is represented as a kind of a very static notion of radical protest. And certainly animal activism has been increasingly represented in the US as radical-radical protest. So I wanted to take the idea activism as a frame to look at these different genres of film and television and some thematics of activism might play out and in particular with those two examples, Project Grizzly and The Crocodile Hunter, they are very much in the adventure genre that goes back to early cinema.

You talk about how complicated it is to market this Adventure Activism. How can those tensions be resolved, or can they ever be resolved, because it always seems that you are selling the animals that you are trying to save?

I think it’s more or less complicated as we look at case by case scenarios. The first time I saw Project Grizzy, I was so thoroughly entertained by it that I couldn’t get past that entertainment factor. In that film, I don’t think it’s the filmmaker, Troy Hurtubise’s issue, but I don’t know how much his work is really about conservation or animal protection. It is almost a weird, personal therapeutic hobby that he does, and I don’t think anyone would claim that he is trying to do serious animal study, but he claims that. That’s where he situates himself. That’s one example. The flip side of that is someone like Steve Irwin. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last week and the press coverage of his death is shocking to me. I don’t doubt Steve Irwin’s sincerity in terms of wildlife conservation, animal protection, etc. I don’t doubt that. But what I am interested in is the performance of a character that he is doing, and I think that gets really tricky in relation to the animals that he is promoting and protecting because there doesn’t seem to be any register within the representation that the encroachment that human animals make on non-human animals is exactly what we’re seeing within that show. So he is certainly promoting conservation, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of knowledge about what that would be.

You open your essay with a quote from Irwin, “Gone are the days of sitting back on the long lens tripod and looking at wildlife way over there.  Uh-uh.  Come with me.” But the odd thing about that quote is that he is wrestling with crocodiles, but there are millions of people just  watching him do it on television. So why do people watch it? And, why are these “when animals attack” or “might attack” scenarios so popular, especially when the goals of the people making the programs seem different than those of the viewers?

I am struck by that quote too, because what is wrong with sitting back on the long lens and watching? Why does he have to wrestle with these animals? That is where I think the adventure genre comes in and the kind of conservation activist goes out the window. Because, let’s be honest, he doesn’t need to wrestle with those animals. When he was filming his work, I’ve seen episodes where an animal would get away from him and he would go after the animal again and grab it. Someone like Cynthia Erb talks about this dangerous, close contact going back to early cinema. And films like King Kong, where part of it is about filming, but part of it is about this question of proximity between the human and the non-human. And I think someone like Steve Irwin is coming in that tradition, but with the explosion of cable television and other outlets, we have also seen a number of people doing similar things now, so perhaps more than ever we are seeing that sort of interactive wildlife show.

Do you have any idea why his death gotten so much coverage, headlining on cable news for the majority of the week? It seems similar to when Roy Horn was attacked on stage by a tiger during the Las Vegas magic show. But, why so much coverage?

I guess part of my surprise about this is that, I knew The Crocodile Hunter and the franchise was popular, but it’s such big news. The one thing that you just pointed out which hadn’t really occurred to me is that if we think about this not just as about The Crocodile Hunter, but as wild animal attacks on people famous for dealing with wild animals, like Roy Horn’s case, then that makes much more sense. That this is somehow a part of the celebrity circuit. There’s this unfortunate fascination with animal attacks that we get really hyped up about, so when a celebrity is involved, and especially when it’s a celebrity who is part of that world, it’s mushroomed. And especially in his case because it was so dramatic with the stingray and it was filmed.

I’ve seen some debate online and on television about whether the footage of the fatal stingray attack will be released, and some have said that’s “what he would have wanted.” Does the release of the film fit into Adventure Activism, or does it break the illusion of safety: that we can get up to wild animals and that is noble?

I would hope that’s not what he would have wanted. A lot of what I suggest about The Crocodile Hunter as an example is there is “Danger Danger Danger,” but Steve’s always going to survive it. If you’ve watched the show in any great detail, it regularly shows his bruises, cuts, and bites, and in a strange, masochistic way it categorizes a lot of his wounds. There’s an episode I remember where he goes through and talks about all of his different injuries, so that hypes up the masculine adventure part. It’s a strange thing to talk about now because clearly his whole methodology informed his death, so it’s not just a performance that had no consequences, it clearly had consequences for him and for his family. So setting that in the whole argument, would that be a kind of activism? I just don’t think it would. I don’t know what purpose it would serve to promote wildlife activism to see a person killed by a wild animal. The last thing I read about the video tape is that John Stanton, the producer for The Crocodile Hunter, said that he hopes that the tape will be destroyed. I can’t imagine that it would be part of The Crocodile Hunter franchise. But, as pure spectacle goes, I could absolutely see it being released.

Yeah, like something that is leaked to the internet.

Yeah. It is a bad, unfortunate comparison, but it’s almost like a celebrity sex tape, or a kind of snuff film, or something like that.

Or even execution videos that are posted online and circulate, that people have a bizarre fascination with.

Bizarre fascination, yeah. Actually, the other film that I was going to write about is Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and in it this guy Timothy Treadwell has filmed his excursions and interactions with Grizzly Bears for a number of years and he and his companion are actually killed by a grizzly bear, and it is not filmed, but the sound is actually recorded by the camera, so at one point in the documentary Herzog plays it for a friend of Treadwell, but he plays it through headphones and he won’t play it on the film, and he cuts and says something like, “No one should ever hear this. This should be destroyed.”  My initial reaction afterwards was by showing the woman listening to this tape and saying that it should be destroyed, and announcing it in such a way, it’s another kind of spectacle. And so, there’s almost a way in which not seeing it or not hearing it is still a way of participating in that same kind of train-wreck fascination. But I don’t know what will happen with the tape. If anything, I could imagine it being released up to the attack as the Crocodile Hunter last on video. I do know that the Australian government offered to give him a state funeral, but his family turned it down for a private ceremony. So maybe they won’t be involved in this kind of stuff anymore in a big way.

Switching gears a little bit while staying on the same topic, fictionalized film with animal attacks. Those are equally as popular in the media, and to start with the seminal “it could really happen” film of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. It’s rare to find pure animal readings of films, but do you think that Hitchcock had an Animal Studies viewpoint? And further, what is this anxiety about animals gaining agency, particularly through violence, and why do we see it so much in film?

I don’t think that Hitchcock necessarily had an animal interest per se going on in a film like The Birds. I think Hitchcock films are very much about provoking anxieties that viewers might have. And that can be anything from, there’s a crazy psychopath who owns a motel, to what happens if you think you see a murder out your back window. So I think that birds, as a representative of wildlife, come into play there in a similar kind of fashion: the sort of “what if” scenario. And part of it is this anxiety of what if animals were to take over, what if we were captured or trapped in such a way by something that is precisely not going by the rules of civilization; by something that is not within the bounds of supposed sentient beings. I think about this in some ways just in my daily life where I live in Colorado, because it is relatively common to have different kinds of warnings, or announcements, or just plain old gossip about what to do if you are confronted by a wild animal. How one should respond. Then to see that represented in a big narrative is attractive to a lot of people.

Do you think that is why a lot of these films are often set in small towns, not just The Birds, but Jaws and Arachnophobia as well, because it is the threshold between man and nature, and the lines are moving the other way?

I think it’s certainly part of that. The idea that these are the borders between the wild and the domestic, which is a category that a lot of people interested in Animal Studies have thought about. I also think that there’s the possibility of our horror film tradition of going out to the small town or rural area and things are not what they seem. There’s all these examples of the rural in the United States as a site of home and goodness, and all that is well in the world. And in fact the dark underbelly is there too. And often that can get represented with the wild animal, beast in the woods or beast in the water.

My final question is where do you expect genre of these animal attack films and adventure activism to go, especially since the death of Steve Irwin? Do you think it’s going to change? Will people have more difficulty watching adventure activism now that it has crossed the boundary of safety?

I have no idea what will happen. Who can say what will be marketed. I suspect that people who are working in a similar format as Steve Irwin will have an onscreen warning maybe, or more emphasis within the program of the commentator saying something about safety. I can’t imagine that this adventure genre involving animals is going to disappear. I think one of the things that is driving a lot of the animal programming that is on television right now is a real interest, on the part of audience and distributors, to have content. And there are so many developments in technology that allow for filming of animals in scenarios that we haven’t seen. Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet is interesting because it is really making use of these camera technologies that allow for no human hand involvement, which of course there is, but it is just so masked and so invisible. And there will certainly be a continuation of that, certainly with putting video of animal material on the web. I think it’s just part of what we’re interested in, maybe in a larger context of reality television and reality video.

Further Readings:

Berrettini, Mark L. “‘Danger! Danger! Danger!’ or When Animals Might Attack: Adventure Activism and Wildlife Film and Television.”

Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies.  Issue 1 (Feb. 2005). www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=1&id=5   

Mark L. Berrettini’s Animal Studies syllabus can be found at: 

www.h-net.org/~animal/syllabi/berrettini.pdf