Modern Mask: Can you give a brief overview of Animal Studies and Sacrificial theory for those who may not be familiar?

Dr. Kristin Dombek: Humans have always studied animals, from Aristotle, who wrote The History of Animals. Biologists have always studied animals. But the term Animal Studies, sometimes called Critical Animal Studies, or the study of animal-human relations, refers to the work of a group of academics from all different disciplines in the last several decades who have been thinking about how we relate to animals, how we represent and imagine animals, and how we use animals to construct the idea of what the human is. And there are groups of people in Animal Studies, which are sort of parallel to feminism. There was a first wave where figures are arguing that non-human animals should be included in a human centered social contract, so they should be considered to have rights and avoid suffering, and Peter Singer is perhaps the best-known member of that group. Then there is a second group that wants to call humanism itself into question. The grandfathers and grandmothers of that group are posthumanists, a lot of them from France, like Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Girard, and Kristeva. Those people are trying to rethink that humanist language of rights and reason and the centrality of language. I am most interested in what’s happening in Performance Studies, which Una Chaudhuri leads, which is thinking about how we use animals in performance and how we perform animals, which she has called zooesis.

Many people have written about sacrifice because most cultures throughout history have done sacrifice in one way or another. But the person who has been the most influential in my thinking, and has a lot to say to Animal Studies, is René Girard. What he argues is that if we take a so-called primitive culture that does ritual sacrifices, they would say that they are doing it because God demands that they do a sacrifice: that God asks them to give a person or an animal or something to God so that the people can continue to live, can continue to use the Earth, and so on. Girard says let’s bracket what they say they’re doing, and take the theology out of it and notice what sacrifice does for the group that does it, and what it does is it defines the boundaries of a community and creates unity. So even though it’s a sacred ritual, he says let’s pay attention to the fact that it is actually murder, that it is actually violence. Let’s look at the performance itself, and the way that the performance creates a group identity and their belief in God. His main ideas that are important for talking about film are that when groups have internal dissention, they choose a sacrificial victim that is both like enough to them that the victim can stand in for them, and different enough that it will not upset the group to get rid of that person or that animal. Then they imagine that God has asked them to sacrifice this person, all the while it helps them to channel their own violence into a single source so that they can get along with each other. In modern cultures, we still do violence on groups or individuals in order to perform abstract notions like Justice--like capital punishment is a sort of a ritual sacrifice that we say Justice demands, but we also create the idea of Justice by doing it. I am always asking when and how the performances through which we put animals, both real and imagined, operate as ritual sacrifices that perform our ideas of the human into being.

How did you first become interested in Animal Studies and Sacrificial theory?

I write about conservative, evangelical popular culture and I am really focused in a lot of my work on writing about the culture wars between religious and then so-called secular people in the US. So I’m obsessed with showing the religiosity of secular humanism along with many other practices that support capitalism. The sort of hidden religiousness of areas of our lives that we consider to be secular.  So sacrifice is one of those traces of the religious within so-called secular culture. And our representations of animals are often bound up in this humanist religiosity. Though it’s a religion where humans try to be God, I think.

Why do we often see links between animals, religious ceremonies, and religious doubt in films such as Equus, King Kong, and Jurassic Park?

Equus is the one that really stages all three of those things in relation to each other. We mourn what we have expelled from our self to define our self. That is what Equus is about. If in becoming modern, we expel religious ritual, we will miss it terribly. So Dysart, the psychiatrist, is going through that. Actually, Dysart doubts the religion of psychiatry. He doubts his own profession. He contemplates this boy who has this passionate Pagan and Christian religion that he has made about horses. Peter Shaffer, the playwright, is definitely interested in all of those things. In general, animals and the divine are both at the edge of the human. In the great chain of being we dangle between God and animals. Both the divine and the animal make up the two boundaries of how we understand ourselves; and now machines as well. That is more in Jurassic Park or in the making of King Kong: machines or technology. Filmmakers and artists in general are always interested in those boundaries of the human. So animal images are often tropes of the religious and vice versa. In Equus, I keep thinking about the boy having an image of Jesus above his bed, wearing a crown of thorns, and his father rips it down and replaces it with a picture of a horse. I think that unconsciously Equus, and a lot of pop culture narratives about animals, like King Kong and Jurassic Park, will reveal for a moment the way that animals serve the religious function of sacrifices to maintain the centrality of humans. But they will reveal it for a moment then shut it down.

On this idea of worship and sacrifice, this question comes from a very simplistic place in my thinking, but why do the inhabitants of Skull Island worship King Kong the giant ape, when dinosaurs also exist on the island?

I think that in the world of the film, the reason is that King Kong can kick all of the dinosaurs’ asses. That is why the natives worship him. But the real reason that the natives worship Kong in terms of the bigger picture is because it is Kong that has to be killed for the film’s story to work, even though it is not portrayed as ritual violence. But for us as filmgoers, it comes at that cathartic moment. It is the tragic catharsis. That is why we attend such films, to experience tragedy. Tragedy has its roots in ritual violence and sacrifice. So Kong has to be sacrificed because he exists in what Donna Haraway has called the borderlands of nature and culture: he is animal, but he is all too human; he is like us, but he is not like us, and so he is a perfect sacrificial victim according to Girard’s theory. But to get back to your question, he is also a God. This is a very Christian idea, to sacrifice a God.

In their ceremony, the Skull Islanders are dressed as apes and dance, sing, and chant Kong’s name, preparing to sacrifice a woman to Kong. Yet, when Kong is on Broadway, he is chained in Christ-like pose with the elite New York audience worshipping him: an equally religious set of images. Is the film suggesting that there are primal, religious undertones in what urbanites consider high art and culture?

The image of Kong on stage in both the 1933 Merian C. Cooper and the 2005 Peter Jackson film has Kong on a cross in some ways. I think that the 1933 film--even though it does have that framework, the conceit of the director searching for a film and then the film turning into a sideshow performance on Broadway-- is not as self-conscious a critique of the way that Kong is used in the performance. Peter Jackson did some work to frame it more self-consciously. One of the first shots in the opening montage is of the Central Park Zoo, juxtaposed with shots of the poor during the Depression.  He also takes longer to elaborate this framework of it being about making a film and then adds Anne’s disgust at Kong being displayed, as well as her refusal to participate. And the performance is more extended, and it is more of a farce. But I feel like the basic message of the 1933 film and the end of The Lost World: Jurassic Park is not about the religiosity of this performance, but simply that human civilization will always fail to contain the monsters it creates or uses for entertainment.

Jonathan Burt comments on Alexander Wilson’s remarks that wildlife movies are “documents of a culture trying to come to terms with . . . ‘the end of Nature.’” Burt continues, “The notion of the corrupt image signals in effect, another version of the Fall. Yet, keeping with the religious tone of this idea, we might say that the image can also be presented as a means of redemption.” Where do you think Jurassic Park and its technologies falls within this spectrum of nature ending or redeemed?

That reminds me of John Berger’s essay about zoos coming into existence when animals are beginning to disappear from daily life. In Jurassic Park, that is what it is all about. Jurassic Park is the extreme of that, where we have images of animals long disappeared, but, in the end, offers a false redemption. In the end it seems that it is a criticism of the things that we do to animals and all of the ways that we don’t allow life to find its way, which is the Ian Malcolm quote. It wants to draw our attention to our participation in the end of Nature, but most of the film’s pleasures, which are considerable for us as we watch it, are rooted in this fantasy that scientists can bring back extinct species; that they can heal us from the effects of our own actions on the Earth that have driven so many species out of existence. Jurassic Park’s pleasures are also about the way that filmmakers can bring species back. So there are two technologies here: the technology depicted in the film and then Speilberg’s technology, which brings back the extinct species. So in the end, as long as filmmakers can bring them back, then who cares what we do?  It offers redemption, but in terms of protecting human and non-human animal’s lives on this planet, it rings false to me. 

I am fascinated by the links between the old King Kong and Jurassic Park, then Jurassic Park and the new King Kong. Ideas of sacrifice, animals as entertainment, technology of animals representation in film are all in dialogue in these three films. Jurassic Park even makes the parallels overt with its massive wooden doors. What do you think was the influence of the original King Kong on Jurassic Park, from both a narrative perspective and a filmmaking perspective?

Both of their narratives superficially could be seen as a critique of the use of animals in tourism or the circus. There is the scene in Jurassic Park where John Hammond, who owns the island, talks about the flea circus. But I also think that in terms of the narratives, they undermine that critique by offering us these cathartic sacrifices of animals and humans. I think that it is much more explicit in the second The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which brings the T-rex back to San Diego. That is very derivative of King Kong in that narrative moment. Certainly one thing that is interesting in the history of film is that there are these huge films that are these moments in film history with King Kong at the beginning and then Jurassic Park as a turning point in the technology of replicating animals. So the history of film is a history of increasingly adept ways of representing animals and some of the most momentous films have been ones that have succeeded in doing that better.

What do you think was the influence of the three Jurassic Park films on the new Peter Jackson King Kong?

I feel so conflicted about Peter Jackson’s King Kong because on one hand, the dinosaur scene seems so deliberately to be like Jurassic Park on crack. You’ve got one T-rex, and then you turn around and there is another one, and on and on. It’s unnerving and it seems that Jackson is having fun with us. The portrayal of King Kong, on the other hand, and I think many people disagree with me, is so much better in some ways, in that it makes us think about animals and animal representations. When Jackson talks about it, he wanted him to be not a monster, but an animal throughout. He wanted him to be terrifying and dangerous, but then to show compassion. That’s what he said as he was making the film, reportedly. And although we understand compassion as a human quality, it may be a quality of primates in general.

In some ways, compared to the first two, just in terms of the movements, the 1933 and the 1980 apes are more human than Jackson’s gorilla in the physicality and the performance. On the other hand, in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, there are all kinds of human stories and human ideas being projected onto him. It’s this terrible falling in love with the kidnapper narrative. It’s the abusive boyfriend that is knocking her around. There is this racism bound up in the history of the film. When it first came out, apes were deeply connected to African Americans in the white imagination. King Kong the animal has always just been this mirror for human stories, but there is something about the technology of the Peter Jackson film and the way that the performance was produced that gives us a bit of an animal, and I think that this may be a good thing. That is because of Andy Serkis, who was the model for Kong. He spent hundreds of hours watching silverbacks. So we are really in a hall of mirrors here. In a way, the ape is then more human. But at the same time it is a human imitating an ape. In this midst of all the human stories projected onto the animal Kong, there is something about the faces, and the way that technology could make his face work, and make Naomi Watt’s face work. Maybe I’m being a little romantic here, but when you’re watching her face in the film, you’re watching her respond to a human actor. I have this theory that she makes facial expressions that one would only make in response to a human, but she is making them, in the film’s frame, in response to something that we recognize as an animal. I think there is something really promising about that.  Something that goes beyond the simple anthropomorphism of the first two films’ representations of animals.

How will the religiosity of animal images be affected by the evolution of digital representation technology?

Filmmakers work miracles. That is why we go. Special effects are our secular miracles. And they’re complicated because we go because we want to be fooled, but we also enjoy knowing how they’re done: we want to see how they work. But I do think that we want to experience them as miraculous and marvelous. In that way, filmmakers are like priest or theologians. As they get better and better at it, I think that films can become more religious, in a bad way. But on the other hand, one of the things that many religions try to do, and Christianity among them, is to give you ways to train yourself to encounter strangers and others in empathetic ways. I do think there is something in this new technology that can be used to help us learn that.

Kristin Dombek writes about rhetoric, pedagogy, and performance in a range of contexts, including evangelicalism, popular culture, and the college writing classroom. She is co-author of Critical Passages (Teacher’s College Press, 2004). Currently, she is completing her book Shopping for the End of the World, and collaborating with Stephen Wangh to create The Testimony Project, a documentary theatre piece about conservative evangelicalism and the "culture wars." She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Princeton Writing Program.