Not unlike a lot of people I know, it began with a trip to the local market. While the parent had been busy picking up supplies, I had wandered off on my own intrigued by the noises, colours and smells around, and before long found myself staring at the head of a goat sitting on its own on a platform at a butcher’s shop. The head was just as it should have been; ears flopped on the side, little horns sticking out, eyes closed in solemn sleep. Its body – skinned, raw and sinewy hung next to two others from metal hooks attached to the ceiling. A large blade attached to a narrow wooden platform sat next to the head. The blade was stained with blood which had started to dry. The butcher sat next to all this paraphernalia nonchalantly reading the day’s paper. I remember wondering why he hadn’t gotten rid of the head, had he found some use for it? The tongue possibly, the cheeks surely? But why had he not disposed of it? Flies had started to buzz. There was a bed of red just under it steadily spreading on all sides. Eventually, the missing parent found me, and annoyed by my itinerant tendencies had whisked me away. I was around 10 years old. The memory is as fresh today as the smell of blood wafting from that decapitated head had been all those years ago. I had finally met my meat. It had a face and it had been asleep.
Modern-day tale of greed
I was one of the fortunate ones to see Bong Joon-ho’s Okja on the big screen, just before it released on Netflix earlier this year. Those days of strict veganism – writing to cosmetic manufacturers to stop animal testing, sobbing over PETA videos of chickens being debeaked and baby seals being skinned – may now feel like they happened a long time ago but a heartfelt film about a young girl and her superpig best friend who she will save at any cost was sure to awaken something.
For starters (no pun intended), there is the relentlessness of those who have big interests in the livestock industry. Images of farm animals being fattened with hormones so that they can produce excessive quantities of meat and milk, barely being able to move as a result of their bloated bodies, stuffed into tiny crates in factory farms deprived of movement, sunlight and all things natural can be found everywhere today. Eye-opening films like Earthlings (2005) and Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) have been around for a while and articles are regularly written about the potential risks of genetically modified (GM) foods. Then, there is the Animal Liberation Front and its controversies, in public discourse for years and documented by films like Your Mommy Kills Animals (2007). Okja is a commentary on all these, and then some more.
Strange and wonderful creature
Okja is not real. At least not just yet. Bong’s special effects team is said to have combined the features of a dog, a manatee and of course a pig to come up with Okja’s final form. No doubt, her affability is a result of all that we associate with these animals but the fact remains that Okja is nothing like anything we have seen before. Yet we feel for her – when she is tortured in the Mirando labs, when she is paraded before the public who are busy relishing the jerky that will soon be produced from her flesh, when she is put into the giant metal contraption that will lop her head off. We feel for her because we know her. We have met her. We know of her rituals with her human companion Mija – her massive dives into the river that make the fish fly out and fall flopping on the nearby rocks when Mija wants fish stew for dinner, the secrets that are whispered into her ear from time to time as a special act of affection and even the funny and rather useful waste disposal system that she has devised with Mija.
We also know that Okja is friendly, loyal and intelligent – we see her save her human from almost certain death early on when the duo go frolicking in the mountains – as well as kind, trusting and loving. She is an independent, sentient being with her own thoughts and feelings. And it is because we know this that we root for her throughout the film and hope for her release and safe return. Okja has a story of her own. She is Mija’s friend, not meat in the making. The young girl similarly treats her as her equal – nothing more and certainly nothing less. This is the idea at the heart of a film like Earthlings which condemns humankind for its presumed superiority and its merciless use of animals for food, clothing and entertainment.
Man and animal
Even films like Babe (1995) and Babe: Pig in the City (1998), for all their surface cuteness and idyllic scenarios of the farmer loving his ‘sheep pig’ above all else, fail to rise above this – the question of animals and their usefulness to man. Each animal on the farm is and must be of use to the farmer in some way. While the dogs herd sheep, the ducks and pigs await their fate to be carved up as Christmas dinner. The duck Ferdinand eager to avoid becoming roast tries to appropriate the rooster’s job. The eponymous Pig similarly proves his usefulness herding and protecting sheep and thereby eventually escapes his fate.
In Roald Dahl’s short story ‘Pig’, a young vegetarian gourmet eats pork for the first time in a New York restaurant. Enraptured by its taste, he asks to see where his meat comes from and is promptly sent to a slaughterhouse. In a typically Dahlesque turn of events, he along with his fellow visitors suddenly find themselves strung to the moving cable which carries the other pigs towards a cauldron of boiling water. Our vegetarian hero becomes the pig of the title. Apart from illuminating Dahl’s decidedly carnivorous sensibilities, what the story does is make us meet and get to know yet another hapless, ill-fated creature. But Dahl is no Bong Joon-ho. There is no Mija here to save the day.
