To warm up to watching Meat, I thought I'd see Franju's 1949 classic short Le sang des bętes (Blood of the Beasts) again, just to get in the mood for viewing animal slaughter. A very good quality version is on YouTube with English subtitles. There's an obvious double bill here if one wants a program attempting to convert us to be vegetarians. Franju's film is remarkable, for mixing poetic realism with blood and animal guts. We will see beautiful countrysides, boats along a river, lovers kissing, intercut with three abbatoirs, first horses (it’s France), then cows and young veal calves, and finally sheep. It drips visual poetry but repeatedly shocks with its unflinching views. During a sheep butchering, there's a quote from Baudelaire. The film celebrates the workers doing this demanding job, and we hear both that it is "a difficult and often dangerous profession" and that there are common workplace injuries. Yet, while doing their job, one man sings a beautiful version of "La Mer". Franju was after cinematic lyricism, and the poetry probably wins out over the difficult subject matter. So, I was ready for Meat. If I have to, I can watch cattle dropped to the ground, bled out, and cut up. After all it's only three days since I watched a monkey be operated on, decapitated, and his brain sliced up. Wiseman went there and spent a good deal of time, so the least I can do is watch. Later I'll get to go to Aspen and the ballet and nightclubs, so let me see what's going on here too.
Wiseman's fascination with animal subjects is an interesting thread in his work. We'll have Racetrack and Zoo later, and as I said, Primate was only a couple of films ago. (And there's two more possible nights of animal-centered double bills.). We'll see about the others within a few weeks, but Primate and Meat already suggest provocative notions, that seemingly disparate institutions can have much in common, that the horrors in places like these can cinematically suggest past human horrors, and that whatever goes on in these usually unseen locations connects in lots of ways to our daily lives.
One big connection which maybe it’s time to think about a little is the idea of processing. Like “institutions”, this is probably too simplistic a term to apply across all of Wiseman’s films. But let’s put processing with education (learning, teaching), transforming, controlling, assisting, creating, healing, studying, and maybe even killing - all processes which seek to start with one thing and finish with another. Processes may require civic institutions, the military, or businesses, or might be done on one’s own. They are inherently cinematic because there’s a built in narrative - let’s follow the raw materials until we get to the finished product. Depending on the film, we might admire the artist or craftsmen or factory worker who contributes their talents, and we can appreciate cinematic beauty in the details of the process. If the “raw material” is alive, humans or animals, we can focus more on the transformed than the transformers, or see drama in their interactions. We can see either side or both as victims or heroes, and we can celebrate or attack qualities they possess. We might also either approve or condemn the entire process, or parts of it, or simply just view it in action. Wiseman’s films are very richly involved in processes - how groups operate, how things get done - that taken all together we can see these common qualities. How humans behave in communities, workplaces, or groups. What they’re striving to accomplish. What masters are they serving. What things they care about. It’s a rich and varied tapestry stemming from these particular types of interactions.
We also have to consider the difference between showing things and explaining them. Whether film-making is full of inherent biases so that there’s no such thing as just showing has been a much argued position. My current feeling is that we can see selection and attitude and opinion while still being left free to observe and think for ourselves. That’s what it means for film to be a medium. The film is assisting us in seeing the world, as well as being a thing which can be appreciated in its own right. How far one goes in altering what one has viewed is a great question in film-making. Film is itself a processing, transforming “raw material” and turning it into a “finished product”. What Wiseman does as a film-maker may not be so different from what many of his subjects are seen to be doing - observing, questioning, appreciating, disapproving, finding humor in - or any combination. He’s more appreciative of this interplay than most, as he sometimes directly references, as we’ve already seen on occasion. The slightly ironic distanced stance of an interested selective observer is a position he’s maintained, and I find it very appropriate and much to my liking. It beats either the supposedly objective recorder of everything or the militant let’s fix it all and explain what needs to be done positions of so many other film-makers.
An interest in processing is a first element of Meat that ties it to Wiseman’s other films, even if this time it’s a process of killing. Somehow, and like Franju’s film, it’s not just showing us how animals are turned into meat for human consumption. People do this, and unless we’re vegetarians, we’re all implicated. And, as always in Wiseman, it’s not so simple. Surprisingly, given the subject matter, the first animal isn’t slaughtered until about thirty minutes in. The first part plays like a brief elegy to the West, bison roaming free mildly controlled by cowboys on horses against sunlit skies, and then the first industrial processes are devoted to feeding, not killing. Fattening the cows up in an efficient manner is a serious undertaking in its own right, and one wonders if the busload of visiting Japanese businessmen learning about the feeding are also given similar guided tours of the slaughtering. But all seems pretty well, at least for that first half hour.
Maybe we have things coming we should be worried about, but that first half hour contains at least three opportunities to appreciate a regular Wiseman interest - the strange (to us outsiders) way of speaking in these businesses or communities. Auctioneers are always fun to listen to, and when this guy speaks of "A fancy set of black baldies, right here" and "we're gonna weigh 'em in twos, sell 'em in one" we might get some pleasure in it even if he’s selling off the lives of these animals. The Japanese tourist visit might have been more routine were it not for the considerable difficulties the translator in their group has in following the descriptions offered by their hostess. (Turn on the Kanopy closed captions and see that even the English speaker who prepared these couldn’t figure out some of the words.) And best of all is an extended salesroom scene, lots of guys on their phones saying stuff like "I can't get you any eight and downs. We ain't killin' any light heiferettes. All of ours are big steers, big eyed, thin skinned, no dirt under the skirt.” When one of them offers the aphorism "banks loan money and we sell meat" to a customer slow paying his bill, it feels as much Mamet as Wiseman.
When the slaughtering begins, it’s almost entirely wordless, and almost too mechanical and repetitive to feel horrible. (That’s a big and failed almost - it’s really a tough watch.) Somehow, watching one monkey cut apart was more heartrending than this mechanized slaughter. The level of specific detail outlining each and every step makes this feel more documentary-like than usual. Somehow systematic killing is hard to watch without thinking of concentration camps and the things humans have done to humans, and these feel other-worldly, like old newsreels of genocidal horrors. The first section of this lasts about twenty minutes, and when it’s over, you breathe a sigh of relief that maybe it will all be funny salesmen and economic discussion from there for the remaining hour or so. It does stay that way for maybe ten minutes, as we return to the salesman and then move to some of the higher ups, where we start getting grim statistics like “we killed 82223 cattle last week" and it’s explained that “the bad automobile years were good beef consumption years." We’re back then to watch now bloodless and well-washed carcasses each covered in a white cloth, doing macabre dances on their hooks as they’re moved along to more refined cutting up - eventually turned into the steaks, roasts, and ground beef we’d recognize from grocery stores. There’s no dialog again, but I’d be remiss not to mention that we get a song even here too - a full rendition on a radio of “What Kind of Fool Am I” while a man is stamping numbers and labelling the carcasses with a plastic label "Eat Beef for Good Health”. Another worker manages to furtively watch a football game while doing his bit in the cutting up.
Because this return to the inside of the slaughterhouse winds up with a finish product, this time an hour into the film, we might think the killing is over. But then, a herd of sheep appear, and I realize Wiseman has watched his Franju as well. Both start with horses, and even though the French film sees them slaughtered and in America we don’t do that, I think Wiseman is aware of the similarity. We get cattle as our middle section in both, and in the clearest nod to Franju, sheep are going to be next, something of a surprise here because it had looked like this place was only interested in beef. The Franju film does it quickly, but we do get the infamous “Judas” that leads the lambs to slaughter and then is allowed to go free for his troubles. There’s a narrator there to explain it as we watch. In Meat, as in Franju, there's a Judas goat who leads a huge bunch of sheep along a path - it's a pretty long wall along a fenced corridor, led by the goat. We see what must be a hundred sheep following him - we get views from the front and the back - a very dramatic trip. Eventually he gets them to take their final steps just as he’s supposed to. The look on the goat’s face as he turns back to his freedom while the sheep step to their quick death is one of the great performance moments in any of these films. Never has an animal looked so sly and so evil.
This third section of sheep slaughter only lasts about eight minutes, and maybe it feels like it goes faster because we’ve already seen the process. We’re getting used to what we’re seeing. I’ve been more focused on the animals so far, and haven’t mentioned what we see of the workers. As Primate might tip us off, maybe “Meat” is an ambiguous title too, and the processing of workers becomes a pretty explicit activity in the film. At the end of the first long slaughter sequence, we see the workers hosing themselves down as their job is done. Their white coats disturbingly resemble the cloths placed on each beef carcass, and they are washing themselves off just as had been done to the beef, and they do their own washing in a room still full of carcasses. The comparison seems fairly evident. The final part of the film shifts from animals to people, and we see an extended negotiation between management and the union over how many workers are needed for certain jobs. Management really digs in and when the main boss says "You've heard my statement from what management wants, and what they've said, and that's where we stand" it sounds as assertive as sticking each of them on a hook like one of the steers. They’re doing their own form of processing. There’s a nice accidental moment too in this discussion when the worker refers to the animals as “lambs” and then quickly corrects himself and says "product" and knows in front of management to excuse himself for his error. Following this meeting a group of workers discuss retirement concerns, where one older worker sagely observes "So whoever's 35 years old now is going to become 50. So this is something people should be thinking about." The assembly line may take longer, but the end here too can be pretty grim.
Oddly, Meat’s last discussion is between a reporter and a boss about ethics and international issues. The reporter asks straight out "What is the moral responsibility of the U.S. consumer as well as producer" and they weigh the merits of grain exports versus oil imports. The boss starts speaking about feeding people being more important than ideology as to why wars are fought, and it feels like Wiseman has reached another summary scene, moving to these large issues. Just when we think we’re done, we get a brief return to packing meat - some beef grinding and plastic wrapping, and boxes loaded on to a truck. There’s s deliberate mirroring, I think in the final shot, as the meat-laden truck drives off into the sunset, ironically echoing the opening shot of a cowboy on a horse against the sun. We’ve seen another kind of processing - the free Wild West of horses and cowboys is now a truck full of meat boxes on a highway.