America

Zoo (2007) movie review

Director: Robinson Devor
Starring: John Paulsen, Coyote, Russell Hodgkinson
Genre: documentary, indie
Release Date: April 27, 2007 (NY)

Okay, you’re going to think I’m a sicko, but when Chris told me there was a documentary made circumscribing events involving a richie being humped to death by a horse, I asked him to track the sucker down. Morbid curiosity I guess, but I didn’t actually want to see the “action”, I wanted to learn more about these zoophiles. Little did I know this was going to be the most beautiful documentary I’d ever seen.

Zoophiles are just what you expect: they love animals, and sometimes let the animals “love” them. It is a deep, acquired bond with an animal, sexual or not, that they feel they cannot achieve with fellow humans. Zoo masterfully unfurls the mindset of a zoophile through interviews and reenactments of events precluding the aforementioned fatality. Utilizing interviews and all but two of the actual people involved in the event as “actors”, you’ll hear the descriptive label pronounced and mispronounced several times, evidently foreign to even the self proclaimed themselves. “Zoo-fee-lay,” one man says. It attracts people from different caste levels, from the wealthy man who owns horses to the stable boy who grooms them. An empathetic yet far from sympathetic tone flows through Zoo, strongly sensitive to and appreciative of its subjects’ candid honesty, and you can feel the wavering doubt in their hearts only after society persecutes them.

What vaulted this event into spectator sport mayhem was that the man who bled to death from internal injuries had been an affluent Boeing bigwig. Bestiality was only made illegal in the state of Washington after this tragedy, unwittingly welcoming out-of-state curiosity for many years prior. The question of animal cruelty was presented at the time, but proved to clearly be the polar response. Zoophiles would never harm an animal willingly, their only crime may be caring a bit too much.

And a lot of care and effort went into the cinematic portrayal of the zoophiles, with gorgeously mysterious slo-mo scenes depicting open passages (i.e.: backlit doorways), light play, and heavy shadows. Besides being visually stunning, it was like a painted interpretation of the shame in having to hide something that elevated them, that spark that most people covet or lack, finally granted them solidarity, and painfully consenting to a world who could ever accept them, which drove them to zoophilia in the first place.

Zoo doesn’t condemn zoophiles and maintains an admirable neutrality. If anything, it raises a point against those like horse handler Jenny Edwards and her husband, who assume they know animals through their limitations and a human’s backwards impetus to place and enforce those restrictions. It’s not saying that there shouldn’t be man and beast boundaries, but Zoo takes us one step closer to broadening our acceptance of both people, animals, and the people who treat animals like people.

About the Author

Kris Kobayashi-Nelson says these directors/screenwriters rarely disappoint: Peter Greenaway, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Gus van Sant. Gregg Araki. Kris claims that Jake Gyllenhaal, Cillian Murphy, Desmond Harrington and Casey Affleck are much more than pretty faces.