Documentary Pick: Blackfish (2013)
So far, three out of five of this year’s Best Documentary Feature nominees are available on Netflix, and others that made the short list are also available for you to enjoy in the comfort of your own home. Speaking of comfortable homes, the bathtub isn’t one of them. The analogy is used in Blackfish that life for the killer whales at theme parks like SeaWorld is akin to a human spending all their life in a bathtub. If that sounds less than appealing, and the idea makes you more than a little crazy, then you may understand the life of Tilikum.
Blackfish is credited, more than anything else, for the recent surge in activism related to shutting down SeaWorld and other similar parks in the interest of the wildlife kept there, particularly the killer whales. It’s understandable once you’ve sat down and watched the film because the abject lesson is that whales, like people, sometimes get irritable. And if your bathtub life included hours of performing the same old tricks and occasionally being, ahem, manually stimulated, you would probably get irritable too.
It might be easy to dismiss Blackfish as a throwback to the golden oldies of the hippie era like “Save the Whales,” but a convincing case is made thanks to the former staff members of SeaWorld that are interviewed. Although they were called “trainers,” they themselves had little actual training in the minding of whales. You wouldn’t hire someone to operate on their leg whose only immediate medical experience was playing the board game Operation, right? Of course not, but one job application later, these eager beavers are in the tank with some of the most powerful creatures on Earth. What do you expect will happen?
Like Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, Blackfish is about the dark side of nature, at least from a human perspective. It’s not saying that Tilikum is evil, or even bad, but it plays against the idea that the SeaWorlds of the world are doing something positive, the preservation and study of endangered animals. People may have good intentions, but the lesson is that nature sometimes does better by our absence. The final shot of the former trainers watching whales on from boats on the open sea really says something, for as we attempt to enjoy the majesty of these creatures artificially up close, it’s no match for the genuine majesty in their natural habitat. Fascinatingly, it’s now gone from “Save the Whales,” to “Leave the Whales Alone!”
