by C.J. Sellers
Willy blasts into the air in an iconic splash, escaping the bad men’s wrath faster than I could have plunged into its ocean depths. And to see this, I should thus feel suddenly more human?
Of course, the movie pushed all the right buttons, I wept, I laughed, I felt suspense but because I am who I am, in some ways, predetermined, I get the sense afterward, that of some things, the human is too curious and vainglorious for its to-some-irrelevant revelations. We are too proud of our “inherent” sentience and emotion. We give the animal a human name–”Willy” for the kids. But that’s just where it begins, this anthropomorphizing anything from God to black fish.
“Free Willy”, a play on “free will”.
The sick plea behind this movie is that our prey must have a human face before we spectators, can’t help ourselves but agree not to contain, hunt, kill it, or call it prey. By omission of threat, we are free to call it friend. That is “Free Willy”.
Where is the respect for Orca as it is? It is not cute. It carries its steely knives at the fore whereall it goes, rather than behind its back as us. That is not a human face. Why pretend? It offends my sense of otherness necessary to understand this world’s true wholeness in which human is a pestilence.
Skinner would ask, why do we hastily determine an animal can be “freed”? Is it due to apparent sentience? We are sentient. Are we free? Are you sure of that? Do we all agree? This has yet to be confirmed through logic or dogma, so in Willy’s defense toward the nature of default, mankind’s “free will” is simply a matter of opinion.
Roman men named Orcus a god of the underworld. Orca is a hunter of whales, yes, which is the largest of all living things but he’s as complex as our senator or Caesar in his domain. Yet we’d make him a kid’s pet? Rather predictable, yes? Does it help to understand the Orca any better to do this, or not just us as slavers, saps, and showmen?
Wittgenstein would say if I had an interpreter for a dog’s language, what would it matter? Just as, can I know what it is to know the dolphin’s life or the nature of its fate? We both breath air, may eat the same foods, both birth live kin, we are both gods and demons, but touch his skin and my repugnance tells–it is alien. I could press my lips against its flesh but would I as I’d kiss some random human being? Even if I felt disgust, this distaste is not the same from whale to human.
If I could lock Willy in a pen and feed him mammals or fish, “amazing” what good friends we’d become. We’d be more than. I’d be master of him but am I master if I then compulsively serve Mammon?
Am I comforted that the Orca eats the thing that would eat me? Therefore, we are friends? This is as the proverb goes and again, “It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”
Because I am not to his appetite’s affinity then I am not his enemy?
Because I don’t eat the mammals he eats therefore, we are friendly?
What does this “friendship” mean? What is this obsession of human’s to find meaning? Is it shared by him? If so, how can I know what it means to him and not just what it would mean to me if I were him? As if I could ever be.
If “Free Willy” had been beached. I could walk a mile of sand to look into just one of his large eyes, imagined enormous to match his girth and wit, fierce and fiery as alleged thirst for vengeance. But what if it’s blank and dark and weak, as small as the palm of my hand? Is he then like us?
The sounds he would make, chirps and coos, more like a bird of prey than a baby man are these anything I could understand even if I had a dolphin lexicon?
Tell all this to the Orca. He could not care less. The sounds that come to him are as meaningless. I’m just saying, I stand at the shoreline, human. To his ocean, I can do no more than delve a toe in!
I could stroke his spanse as a connoisseur or a lover and he, with no arms to resist this, dumb to my language to even protest, and I of a species that contains rapists, he’d on land, succumb to the rape of my imposed friendship.
I exploit him now just to write about him much less make a movie about us or pay money to watch our adventure “together”. A spectator is not innocent.
On land, how easily I could skin him thus, strip him bare just to see what’s underneath and some humans do in fact, do this. Good thing he has no convenient, toothless orifice. Just let him try to grow legs and traverse the sand to look straight into mankind’s great and glorious face.
I could kill and eat this contender just as easily as he could hunt down a shark for its liver, in our avarice. But there’s a difference. He eats for food, Human consumes for mere amusement and entertainment.
I will prove to you I am his master, here he is “Free Willy” trapped on DVD. He is forever immortalized thus and his only escape is our thirst for novelty will eventually render this conception of him bland and tasteless.
Someday, the human, for its ignorance and proliferation that rapes the land and now the sea, may one day soon eat its own weak and while the Orca may hunger for the food it lost to us, its avarice and cunning is not as great as it needs to be to survive our trust.
It must grow armor and harden its teeth to torpedo our ships. It must toxify the fish with a poison to which it hopes to form a resistance. It must stake claim to its domain by freezing it with a glacial crust. And if it does all this, then it may become human. And then it will know of man’s inhumanity.
Already, I am developing a taste for Orca.
Someday soon, Willy, you’ll be mine.
But for now, while I can I would rather leave the Orca alone to its mysteries, free to be whatever it is, wherever, and at the very least,
blessedly, anonymously inhuman.
[Author's note: Title refers to behavior psychologist, B.F. Skinner and the movie, "Free Willy". ]