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MAY 14/11: Project Nim - A Review
CROSS POSTED FROM MAXIMUMTOLERATEDDOSE.ORG ***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*** It feels strange, as a filmmaker, to take to the website of my current project to review another film that is currently showing around the world on a related topic. That being said, I was so moved (in sadness and anger) by this film, that I felt like I had to write something. I saw the film about a week ago, and gave myself a bit of time to process it. I don’t think I could’ve written something readable directly after the fact. I went to the screening of Project Nim (from HBO Films and James Marsh, Director of Man On Wire) at Toronto’s HotDocs festival with high expectations. It hasn’t been released widely yet (it’s premiering on July 8th), and the Isabelle Bader theatre was packed with doc-watchers. Before the film began, the woman introducing it spoke about the idea of “giving an audience credit,” and noted that James Marsh is a director that gives the audience a lot of credit to think for themselves. This only served to increase my expectations, as that is really my primary goal with any documentary project (whether photography or film): asking people to consider the images, and interpret them for themselves. This does not mean that I believe in objectivity - indeed, so many documentaries fall flat because they refuse to acknowledge the positionality of the filmmakers - but I think that images and film footage can be presented in such a way that is honest and not manipulative. I greatly value any documentary that strives for that goal. Project Nim is ostensibly the story a chimp christened Nim Chimpsky (yes, after the great Noam Chomsky), who was bred for use in a Columbia University study looking closely at animal language acquisition. Born of a captive chimp named Carolyn, the film opens starkly with a reenactment of Nim’s birth, and the almost instant removal of him from his mother (who had borne 5 other previous children, all taken from her for use in studies). It moves on quickly, and shifts to Nim’s early life living with a family, being dressed in human clothes, and essentially being treated as a cross between a housecat and a toddler. As he gets older and considerably more dangerous to his adoptive family, the study is ended and he is sent to a larger facility where he lives with other chimps, though the conditions are far from ideal. After several years there he is moved to LEMSIP in upstate New York and after several years there, he is “rescued” by a LEMSIP vet, the notoriously conflicted James Mahoney. He winds up alone at a “sanctuary,” the Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, where he lives alone. Isolated from any social contact whatsoever, Nim descends hard into madness and depression, and eventually dies from a heart attack at 26 years of age. Now, let me qualify what I meant in the previous “ostensibly.” What I described above is a very rough sketch of Nim’s life, how he was used and where he lived. The film does indeed tell this story, but the central problem lies in the fact that it is told through the incredibly narcissistic (bordering on solipsistic) voices of the humans who had contact with Nim throughout his tragic life. As they guide us through the narrative, the film becomes less about the life and trials of a particular individual non-human, and more about the ethical abstractions of a group of people who have quite clearly made little effort to truly understand Nim’s perspective. Instead, there is constant hand-wringing, and lack of clarity and analysis: Nim’s first adoptive mother describes the connection she felt with him and the way he was made to be part of the family by dressing him in human clothes (not recognizing the psychological impact of such actions); his “dangerousness” as he gets older is framed in terms of animalistic violence (instead of framing it more honestly in terms of instinctual chimpanzee social dynamics); one of Nim’s handlers admits to having given him marijuana and being happy it calmed him down, while instantly absolving himself of the unethical behavior by saying that it was a “crazy time” in the early 80s; when Nim’s first adoptive mother visits him over a decade later in his solitary confinement at Black Beauty Ranch and insists on going into the enclosure to see him, she is viciously attacked and beaten, and remembers it wistfully by saying words to the effect of “he could’ve killed me but he didn’t, and that says a lot about his love.” This is just a smattering of the intense displays of narcissism throughout the film, and doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the interpersonal relationship politics of the people involved, which had just as much of an effect on Nim’s life as their direct relationships with him.
There is, of course, a difference objectionable interviewees, and an objectionable film. Unfortunately, Marsh provides virtually no context as to how Nim’s tragic life was made possible by a constellation of factors. While there is a great deal of information provided through titles and the interviews, Marsh does not give a broader history of the use of chimpanzees in research, any supplemental information about the different players involved in the research industry, or how much similarly damaging research on chimps still continues to this day. Furthermore, he fails to provide greater context for Nim’s life in particular, such as what happened to his mother, how Nim spent his last several years, and how he resisted his years of captivity in different ways. Instead, what we have is the presentation of an individual biopic, isolated from the factors that made it possible, and told from the perspective of anyone but the central subject. It’s a tale of abuse that is presented as relatively unproblematic, told from the perspective of the abusers, not the abused. If it were a human subject at the centre of the film, I would like to think that the audience would have been outraged. To say that James Marsh gives his audience a lot of credit is to say that his film asks tough questions and that the audience was forced to grapple with them. It doesn’t and they didn’t. The audience at the screening, for its part, seemed content not to be challenged too directly. The most audible reactions to the film were bouts of laughter when images of Nim in human baby clothes were shown, or when his handler discussed him being drugged with marijuana, or when Nim did anything identifiably “cute.” Other than that, the audience generally sat in silence, and clapped heartily when the film was done. As I left the packed theatre weeping at the tragedy, the conversations around me swirled about the beauty of the film and the cuteness of Nim. I hope that those conversations evolved into something more considered as they continued into the world outside the theatre, but that is sheer optimism. In a disconcerting sleight of hand, Marsh ends his film with the voice of Jim Mahoney. “Chimps have an amazing capacity to forgive. And they forgive us.” With everyone’s hands washed clean, a final title screen then appears, noting that Nim died at the age of 26 of a heart attack while still in captivity at the Black Beauty Ranch. Information that chimps in the wild often live to the age of 40 (and sometimes beyond into their 50s or 60s) and don’t generally die of cardiac arrest is left out, missing one final chance at providing any level of context to Nim’s life. It’s so sad for such a technically masterful documentary, beautifully shot, edited, and presented, to stop so painfully short. The line that separates Project Nim from being an embarrassingly narcissistic exercise in human navel-gazing to being a powerful story of a unique individual caught in a systemic hell is a thin one. When it premieres, it will be up to audiences to smash that line, to be critical of the entire structure of the film and the assumptions made by its human characters (and its director), and to do their own outside research to give Nim’s life the context it deserves. |
