Whenever being asked about my vegetarianism, I am coy to speak about it. It has caused various awkward situations due to bad timing and/or certain virtues imposed on me. For the latter, it was largely shaped by the recent forms of evangelising under the banner of environmentalism, sustainability, health and wellness, even spirituality. I have no tact in that matter. Anytime I voice my decision to not eat meat or explain the sliding-scale of it being relative to interacting with others, it tends to lessen the viscosity of the matter. Murky, fluid and muddled, is how I often see the situation at hand.
With this sentiment, I am careful to consume media revolving around the topic of food ethics, animal rights and sustainability. To the extent of not to succumb under simple explanation or motivation in my consideration for food and skepticism against Anthropocene.
What distance?
leviathan plunges into the dark sea. The title loans itself a metaphor of a powerful beast, which I am left pondering whom amongst those in the film plays that role. The cast to this film includes, but not limited to, the New Bedford fishing boats, the men they hold, creatures in and out of the ocean, dead or alive for that matter, and the dark waters. Majority of the film were shot under mega close-ups, abstracting the hunter and the hunted, the harvest and the haste to pack or discard. While being in an all-consuming sense of nausea, I find myself contextualising the scenes from the crackling sound of conversations over the two-way radios, and the metallic smell of blood (in a convincing, visceral sense), being jostled by body of stale water mixed with what is reduced from sea creature to detritus, then to be dispensed. The breaking of waves captured by an other-than-human perspective, simultaneously presents beautiful droplets of water fluttering, sea birds in flocks on indistinguishable border of ocean and sky, and water sloshing and gushing turned grumous red. The images were arresting, and possess the power to haunt.
‘(cameras) passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavours.’ 1 leviathan show us the tender belly of this heavy, clumsy, symbolic beast with portraits of those who rinse away a day’s bloody work in the shower, and doze off to tv sound in the cradle of the ship’s galley. We hear their voices muffled by machine clanking. We see hairy, freckled, tattooed arms jolting to music, gutting, and shucking sea creature in boatload. Repetitiveness and mundane of their labour does not resemble a triumphant or majestic feat. The moment the heavy chain that hauled the dredge slacks and swings loose, I felt a gut-punch watching the seaman catches it with rugged heavy gloves. Tell me we are not at the mercy of nature, and the machines we forged.
[28] And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1 Verse 28 , The Bible (KJV)
What dominion?
It was hard not to associate leviathan with religious or historic context given the gothic typeface as the film’s suggestive graphic. With that notion, I would like to outline two texts, one religious and one philosophical, in order to wrap up this prolonged reflection.
Leviathan was mentioned in Books of Job in the Bible. As a dare, a challenge of faith (“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope?”), as a prize granting one the importance among merchants, and giving one an upper-hand in bartering(“Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants?”)2. The prose were made up of a list of questions, both egging one on, and making one calculate the cost-effectiveness of this faith-based decision. (Coming from my own christian trauma, I see the tendency of the Bible giving out promises in the form of questions. Lol.)
Leviathan, title to English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ book, in argue “for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign.”3 He wrote that “…civil war and the brute situation of a state of nature ("the war of all against all") could be avoided only by a strong, undivided government”.
Grateful to M+ Cinema’s curatorial vision I watched leviathan as a double-bill with artist Lo Lai Lai Natalie4’s Deep Flight, a film reflecting on humanity’s hope and desire adhere to something as fickle as _ (insert metaphor). By wilful neglect or measured genius, did we take nature’s bounty as an invitation to name and to reap? That’s about as much as I can put my thoughts together on the experience in retrospect. It was my intention to get this writing done earlier, thinking more time would help with articulation. As the write-up foreshadowed, mediating the wrestles among men, nature and machines is indeed no clean gutting matter, and in no way these films lead audience to a definitive moral. Walking out the cinema with a metallic taste in my mouth, a whiff of Victoria Harbour situates me at a place I ever only knew by name, and not by nature. I set off with a sense of fearful awe for its force and mystery.
Job Ch41 V1, V6 , The Bible (NIV)
More of Lai Lai’s work via lolailai.com