Humans and Farm Animals in Documentary Film Narratives: A Romantic Perspective on the Problem of Capitalist Meat Production

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of Romantic notions in understanding contemporary human–animal relations. I examined how three documentaries dealing with the problem of farm-animal exploitation construct the relationship between farmers and meat producers on the one hand and farm animals on the other. Using the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, I examined audiovisual and linguistic levels of documentaries. I argue that documentary narratives have a dual function in exploring these relationships. First, they produce anthropocentric narratives that focus on the farmer’s perspective and their experience of the relationship with farm animals. The anthropocentric narrative legitimizes the notions of traditional forms of sustainable agriculture in which animals graze freely, and a relationship of trust exists between farm animals and farmers. In this narrative, farm animals are portrayed as anthropomorphized and thus equal to humans. Ideologically, it follows the premodern idea of pastoralism. The second narrative is biocentric in that it focuses primarily on animals. This narrative consists of a critique of the exploitation of farm animals in large, industrialized fattening farms and slaughterhouses. I argue that the origins of both narratives lie in Romantic notions about the relationship between humans and animals. Ultimately, both narratives propagate a Romantic return to preindustrial pastoralism, advocating a harmonious coexistence of land, animals, and people, and rejecting industrial, mechanical, and technological forms of farm animal husbandry. I conclude by asking how Romantic ideas contest late capitalist forms of commodification of animals and what the limits of these ideas are in eliminating the exploitation of farm animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropomorphism
• capitalism
• documentary
• farm animal
• human–animal interaction
• Romanticism

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for helping me improve this manuscript. I also thank Domen for all the support given. This paper was partially written during my sabbatical at the University of Colorado, Boulder that was supported by the Fulbright program, for which I am also thankful.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a more precise analysis of the development of Western food-focused fiction and documentary films, see Carson et al. (2013).

2 To my knowledge, there are some exceptions to animal-rights activism. These are pro-meat activist documentaries, such as Beyond Impossible (2022) and, to a certain degree, Sacred Cow (2020), that advocate against veganism.

3 One such solution, for example, relies on ecomodernist ideas in which high-tech meat products are developed. This involves plant-based meat analogues, insects, and meats cultivated in laboratories. In addition, vegetarianism has been on the rise since the 1980s, which again speaks about a shift in how society and consumers see the problems of farm animals in the meat industry (Fiddes, 2004).

4 Documentaries were selected using the Google search engine, with the keywords documentary AND meat. I limited my search to the 2012–2022 period, as I was interested in recent depictions of animals and meat in documentaries. A list of nine documentaries dealing with meat was created. The transcripts of the documentaries were coded into MAXQDA2020 along with the visual and audio features. The next step was to select three documentaries from this list that focused most on human–animal relations, namely Eating Animals (Quinn, 2017), Dominion (Delforce, 2018), and At the Fork (Papola, 2016). Examples from these three documentaries are included and examined in this study. The specific examples I have shown are representative of many similar examples of the anthropomorphization and de-anthropomorphization of animals in the documentaries. Detailed information about the selected documentaries appears in Table 1.

5 Modality includes any unit of language that expresses the speaker’s/writer’s personal opinion of or commitment to what they say. Low modality shows less certainty and obligation, while high modality shows a high degree of the latter. Verbs such as have to, must, and ought demonstrate high modality (Machin & Myer, 2012, p. 186).

6 Presuppositions are forms of implicit intertextuality defined as propositions that are taken by the producer of the text (in our case the farmer) as already established or given. Presuppositions therefore engage with something taken for granted (Fairclough, 1992, p. 283).

7 See, for example, the painting Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe and a Hound by George Stubbs (1800) or The Death of the Stag by Benjamin West (1786).

8 The purpose of music in film helps the audience realize the meaning of scenes. It gives them dramatic and emotional value, and it supports the film narrative (Prendergast, 1992, 2013).

9 For those unfamiliar with the concept, speaking of utopistics in relation to utopias, Wallerstein defines utopistics as “the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment regarding the substantive rationality of possible alternative historical systems” (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 65).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Fulbright program.