Natural is not in it: Irony, Environment and Genre in Spoor (2017)

ABSTRACT

Agnieszka Holland’s animal rights horror-thriller Spoor (2017) can be read as a revenge tale wherein women, non-hegemonic men and animals join forces against the hunters and, implicitly, against what they represent: the conservative worldview of the current nationalist government in Poland. Spoor offers a feminist, queer and ecological response to these values and, in the process, expands our comprehension of how ecocinema might look or feel. While narratively human-centred, the film uses several strategies to foster an aesthetic attunement to non-human beings and non-anthropocentric politics. However, Spoor also transcends ecocinema by putting itself in quotation marks. In its self-reflexive use of extreme genericity, Spoor exemplifies Nicole Seymour’s observation that politically engaged cinema can sometimes fail to follow the available scripts for ‘appropriate’ environmental feeling. This paper argues that, by merging tenderness and despair with more distanced modes, including irony, humour and metageneric playfulness, Spoor departs from serious approaches prevalent in environmental filmmaking, questioning the authenticity and proximity central to the very concept of ecology. Spoor’s aesthetic and affective complexity rests on blending fakery and feeling, which problematises existing ways of understanding how eco-films engage us.

KEYWORDS:

• environment
• genre
• irony
• eco-aesthetics
• non-anthropocentric politics

Acknowledgments

My warmest thanks to Marta Segarra for her invaluable insights on early drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://twitter.com/cezarygmyz/status/830721679781408768.

2. Both Holland and Tokarczuk were called ‘targowiczanin’ in their home country, a communist-era term referring to traitor (Connolly 2017).

3. Boros, Matoga and Dyzio stand in contrast to the hegemonic masculinity enacted by the hunters, who throughout the film reaffirm their dominant position over women and animals.

4. As Holland pointed out, however, the film also speaks to the burgeoning cultural conservatism in other countries, reflecting a wider socio-political reality: ‘There’s a cultural counter-revolution going on, which we see with Jarosław Kaczyński, as well as in Russia and the US, which is represented by men who have a populist authoritarian agenda that places women’s rights and nature preservation in the front line of attack’ (Connolly 2017).

5. I employ the word ‘queer’ in the sense of its frequent use in queer ecology (Seymour 2018) to critique ‘natural’ categories of gender, sexuality, the natural world, etc. Following Seymour (2018, 7–8), I situate this article within queer traditions of parody and camp, as well as the affective turn in ecocriticism.

6. As the breadth of the current ecocinema research illustrates, any film can be read from an ecocritical perspective. However, some film forms and strategies seem to open themselves to environmental concerns more readily than others, or at least they have been more frequently addressed in the scholarship on ecocinema. Ecologically oriented approaches have tended to privilege Bazinian realism and Deleuzian time-image, two frameworks which seem particularly fitting for addressing the realm of the nonhuman (Pick 2011; McMahon 2019). For a comprehensive overview of the scholarship on ecocinema, see Rust and Monani (2013).

7. As Pick puts it, ‘Bazin is incredibly suggestive not only when it comes to the animal as a peculiarly cinematic being, but to the being of cinema as peculiarly animal’ (2011, 110; original emphasis). On Bazin’s ‘posthumanist ethics’ and his theory of the long take, which allows for moments of cross-species interplay, see also Fay (2008).

8. A film based on a true story of a sewer worker who sheltered Jewish refugees during World War II in the German-occupied city Lwów.

9. In his novel Enemies, a Love Story, one character, a survivor of the extermination camps, declares that ‘what the Nazis had done to the Jews, man was doing to animals’ (1972, 145). In his short story ‘The Letter Writer’, Singer writes that ‘in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka’ (1982, 271), which became one of the most quoted references in the discussions about the legitimacy of the analogy between animal cruelty and the Nazi extermination of the Jews (see Patterson 2002, 181–188). As Senior, Clark and Freccero put it, ‘The worry, of course, is that speaking of the lives and deaths of animals in the same breath as the Jews who perished in the Holocaust not only degrades the lives and deaths of the Jewish victims but risks reproducing the murderously animalizing vision of the Nazis’ (2015, 17). But, as they also argue, ‘the Holocaust doesn’t make comparisons between the killing of the Jews and of animals impossible; quite to the contrary, it activates the responsibility to bear witness to atrocity in all of its hideous forms’ (17). See also Fontenay’s ‘The Slaughterhouse or a Common Fate’ (2015).

10. See Barbara Creed’s recent discussion of the film in her book Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, in particular, of how Holland creates empathy for the caged and mistreated animals through the use of close-ups (2022, 142–155).

11. According to Shukin, studies on biopolitics often sidestep the question of the animal: ‘Actual animals have already been subtly displaced from the category of “species” in Foucault’s early remarks on biopower, as well as in the work of subsequent theorists of biopower, for whom animality functions predominantly as a metaphor for that corporeal part of “man” that becomes subject to biopolitical calculation’ (Shukin 2009, 9–10).

12. The mass and the sermon were, in fact, inspired by a contemporary Polish ritual, as Holland explains in one of the interviews: ‘I have seen young children dragged into the hunt, I have seen a priest, a very established priest actually, the primate of Poland, giving mass with dead animals in front of the altar […] and he was offering his blessings during a hunting mass with dead bodies of boars lying in front of the altar. It’s totally pagan, because he is using and showing sacrifice. The song that the children are singing is a very popular type of folk song celebrating the joy of hunting and killing animals. And the children are singing this song without thinking too much about the meaning of these words’ (Biret 2018).

13. Earlier in the film, he tries to convince Duszejko that the Ten Commandments do not apply to all creatures.

14. Following Timothy Morton, I ‘capitalize Nature precisely to denature it’ (2013).

15. As film critic Joe Blessing observes: ‘Holland often lets the camera survey the action from non-human vantage points – rustling through the underbrush like a dog, gliding through the air like a bird – and even when she uses more conventional camera set-ups, the intention remains of forcing the audience to view human venality through a non-human lens. For the first hour, nearly every interaction reveals something sordid – child abuse, spousal abuse, corruption – with animal eyes watching nearby’ (2017).

16. Holland was accused of ‘łopatologia’ (a colloquial expression coming from łopata/‘shovel’, which makes reference to explanations for ‘dummies’ or putting something in the simplest possible terms) (Piwowar 2017). A number of reviewers were considerably annoyed by the film’s supposed obtrusiveness, simplifications, artifice or the mix of genres. See Skwierawska’s (2020) analysis of this critical discourse. The filmmaker herself admitted that she struggled with translating the book into film language and that she ‘had to find a new form of narration that was not natural for [her]’ (Kudláč 2017). She also highlighted how her project differed from Tokarczuk’s source novel due to its overt engagement with film genres (see https://www.pap.pl/aktualnosci/news%2C827830%2Cholland-o-pokocie-janina-duszejko-to-postac-walczacej-mscicielki.html).

17. Interestingly, the book cover of Seymour’s book, Bad Environmentalism, features a deer-person in a turtleneck, thus like Spoor it underscores the motif of the disguise.

18. It is worth mentioning that the fictional Duszejko has become a symbol of protest in Poland. Her name appeared at the demonstrations to save the UNESCO-protected Białowieża Forest from logging. ‘One demonstrator carried a sign that declared “Janina Duszejko won’t forgive you”, an allusion to the character’s brutal revenge on those bent on destroying nature for profit’, writes Weber (2018) in her article on Tokarczuk.

19. Schoonover and Galt’s (2016) examples of this pastoral include She Male Snails (Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2012) and Papilio Buddha (Jayan Cherian, 2013).

20. Mary Harrod (2021, i) calls such genericity, specifically in the context of contemporary women filmmakers, ‘a heightened genre’, which ‘allows its authors to simultaneously address “intellectual” cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones’. Such a blurring of intertextuality and emotion (or artifice and feeling) is also resonant with Holland’s project.

21. Seymour argues that, in contrast to proximity, which is ‘built into the very concept of ecology’, ‘a distancing mode like irony seems utterly unecological’ (2018, 12). Like irony, I suggest following Seymour, extreme genericity can ‘disrupt the binarized logic of despair/hope and [...] dispute mainstream environmentalism’s claims to authenticity and straightforwardness’ (2018, 5).

22. Crime Scene Investigation.

23. For example, in the works by Angela Carter or Carol Ann Duffy. See also Pisters (2020, 180).

24. The poster that was circulated outside Poland, in turn, displays a figure of a deer and references some of the seven deadly sins, such as gluttony or greed (a possible reference to Fincher’s Seven, 1995).

25. According to Skwierawska (2020), who in their BA thesis contextualises the film within the realms of postmodernist irony and camp, Holland is performing ‘purposeful incompetence’, creating a temporary feeling that the film is a failure. The viewer ‘is lied to’ on several levels: by the film’s unreliable narrator, by the camera that suggests an objective point of view and by the film’s fairy-tale convention casting doubts on the ontological status of the diegetic world.

26. Croll (2017) writes that the otherworldly and sometimes nightmarish atmosphere the cinematographers bestow on the woods gives the feeling of Twin Peaks.

27. As Bowen (2017) observes, the scene showing ‘a cavernous hall of cramped and shrilly metallic cages’ where Wnętrzak locks the foxes is ‘lit so as to suggest a set from Eli Roth’s Hostel’.

28. As Marek Paryż (2020) argues in his analysis of Spoor, due to its revenge plot, the borderland setting (between the urban area and the wilderness, as well as its location near the national border with the Czech Republic and Germany), and its focus on the outlaws who remain on the fringes of society, the film could be read through the generic tropes of the Western. Matoga is traumatised due to his complicated past and has a history of mental breakdowns. Dyzio suffers from epilepsy and ‘his dissociation from the society at large is reflected in his obsessive reluctance to collect belongings’ (Paryż 2020, 214). Good News is trying to escape from a dysfunctional family and abusive relationship with her boyfriend.

29. For Bowen (2017), Spoor’s hybrid aesthetics allows ‘the genres to uncomfortably cohabitate’.

30. The story is told by the Mayor’s wife during the ball, after he mistreats her by ripping her wig off and telling her to wait for him in the car so that he can continue dancing with other women. She tells Duszejko that she is disgusted at how her husband brings home pieces of quartered deer and dumps them on the table. Whenever she walks past the fridge she thinks about ‘a quartered body inside’, and this reminds her of the legend.

31. In line with ecocinema studies, Tokarczuk understands tenderness as ‘a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself’ (2019a).

32. Sontag also sees camp as ‘the sensibility of failed seriousness’, which combines ‘the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve’ (1966). This definition resonates deeply with Holland’s film.

33. At the moment of writing, the government has successfully introduced an all-out abortion ban, and several municipalities in Poland have declared themselves ‘LGBT-free zones’, that is, unwelcoming of an alleged ‘LGBT ideology’.

34. The current fear of ‘gender ideology’ is associated with the Bishops’ pastoral letter entitled ‘Threats to the Family Stemming from the Ideology of Gender’ that was read in Polish churches in 2013 (Sierakowski 2014).

35. I am drawing here on Siedlecka’s (2014) article that brings together several responses from the right-wing media in Poland.

36. The same cartoon was used during the 2020 presidential election campaign to fuel the governing Law and Justice party’s homophobic agenda, which has been demonizing the LGBTQ+ community in the last couple of years.

37. The song that the children are singing in the church towards the end of the film traces a similar connection: ‘Did you see that [female] roe deer,//roe deer running down the hill?//Let your greyhounds off the lead//to chase the roe deer at full speed//to get it in the end’. In addition, the song is superimposed with Moja krew (My blood) by the Polish rock band Republika, which adds yet another layer to the film’s meaning (possibly pointing to the corporations that are destroying the environment for profit and exploiting the poor): ‘Bankers pump it into their secret accounts,//the secret weapon.//From my blood the secret weapon is made//so it can be incarnated even better,//even more beautifully, without pain.//From my blood guzzled by priests//on podiums and in discreet negotiations.//My blood, and your blood too!’.

38. Pointing to the hunters’ awareness of role-playing, the presence of spectators, and the theatricality of the mass killing, Sara Kruszona reads the hunting culture as ‘The Theatre of Death’, showing that the finale of this performance, pokot, is ‘played according to a strictly defined scenario and with strictly assigned roles’ (2018, 269). In such events, new hunters undergo initiation ceremony, sometimes being smeared with animal blood. The ritual also consists in reporting who became ‘the king’ of hunting.

39. See: https://www.britannica.com/place/Poland/The-17th-century-crisis.

40. As Skwierawska (2020, 10) observes, his name makes reference to Jarosław Kaczyński’s infamous slip of the tongue. In 2006, the leader of the Law and Justice party distorted the words of the national anthem: instead of ‘z ziemi polskiej do Polski’ (from the Italian land to Poland), he sang ‘z ziemi polskiej do Wolski’. Since then, the word ‘wolski’ is used by his political opponents to refer to the stereotype of unmannerly, pseudo-patriotic, backward right-wing men.

41. For Levinas, the human face sets us apart from animals, and it serves as the basis for our ethics. However, Levinas’s denial of the animal face, which has been the subject of several articles and heated debate, can be contraposed with the philosopher’s account of his encounter with a dog named Bobby, when he was a Jewish prisoner of war. As Barbara Creed relates, ‘only the dog understood, or acknowledged, one creature to another, that the Jewish prisoners were fellow beings. Bobby did not do this through facial expressions – or at least any facial expressions Levinas recognised – but through gesture and body language (waiting, jumping, barking in delight)’ (2017, 91).

42. As already mentioned, she is also a firm believer in astrology and legends, which contributes to the film’s tensions between naivety and vengeance. However, it also points to ancient, ‘alternative’ ways of knowing that are ridiculed by several men in Spoor. Paryż writes about Duszejko’s ‘pastoral liminality’: while driven by pastoral sentiments, she is also rooted in the civilised life, because through her profession, ‘she has contributed to the expansion of technological civilization’ (2020, 212).

43. See Lewis’s discussion of ethnonational nostalgia disseminated by the Law and Justice government, that is, the discourse on national memory relying on ‘the language of heroic martyrdom’ and reordering ‘the national hierarchy of mnemonic value’ (2019, 523). As an example of this discourse, he mentions the conflict over the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, ‘an institution designed under the previous government as a cosmopolitan, multinational house of memory, which was administratively repurposed in 2017 as a shrine of Polish martyrdom […]. Seeing the past through an ethnonational lens involves conceptual delimitation, constructing divisions between memory that is valuable (as “ours”) and that which is less valuable (because not “ours”)’ (535).

44. See also Paryż (2020) on the complex history of the Polish borderlands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project ‘Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene’ funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2019-110068GA-I00 (Agencia Estatal de Investigación - MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).

Notes on contributors

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

Dr Katarzyna Paszkiewicz is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her primary research is in film studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on popular film and women’s cinema. She also has an interest in questions of embodiment, affect and the senses, as well as in ecological thought. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola and Isabel Coixet. She has co-edited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition) and published her monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh University Press, 2018, the Honorable Mention in the ESSE Book Awards 2020). Her most recent co-edited collection Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2020) explores contemporary reformulations of the Final Girl in film, TV and literature. In May 2020, she was awarded a ‘Knowledge Generation R&D’ Grant to be Principal Investigator on the 3-year research project, ‘Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.