Anti-Speciesist Interiority? Jerzy Skolimowski's EO and the Limits of Human Imagination

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Anti-Speciesist Interiority?Jerzy Skolimowski's EO and the Limits of Human Imagination Eileen G'Sell (bio) [A]nimals are not lesser humans; they are other worlds whose otherworldliness must not be disenchanted and cut to our size, but must be respected for what it is. —Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology It isn't often that six Sardinian donkeys star in one of the most critically acclaimed dramas of the year. A New York Times "Critic's Pick," winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, and Poland's official submission for the 2023 Academy Awards, Jerzy Skolimowski's EO is as visually daring as it is, quite often, thematically disturbing. Less a story about a donkey (played by six different animal actors) named "EO" (the Polish phonetic spelling of a bray) than a loosely connected series of vignettes from said donkey's perspective, the film sojourns with its humble hero from a flailing one-ring circus across a motley range of rural locales. EO is patted, feted, and paraded about; he is also confined, neglected, and brutally attacked. Not since Robert Bresson's 1966 Au Hasard Balthasar, upon which EO is roughly based, has a donkey's existential concerns become so much our own. (Martin McDonagh's 2022 tragicomedy Banshees of Inisherin might run second, followed by Disney's 1978 animated The Small One, whose eponymous lead, let's not forget, was almost sold to a tanner and wound up hauling the Virgin Mary on his back.) Light on dialogue and rich with cinematographer Michal Dymek's point-of-view shots taken at the creature's eye level, EO resonates most when inviting us to experience its protagonist's travails as foreign from human reach, while insisting his experience is, morally, of a piece with our own. But as much as the donkey's interiority reigns supreme, it is reined in by our own infernally human set of assumptions about autonomy, freedom, and happiness. Rather than praise the film for what it reveals about human nature—dark as it is, especially with respect to the treatment of all other animals—we learn more from EO for all it suggests we cannot know. Suffused with a hypnotic red strobe light, the opening scene visually anticipates the many others in which EO endures trauma: he has collapsed mid-act with his beloved Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), the waifish [End Page 155] acrobat with whom he performs. Hooves aloft as she conducts a form of mouth-to-mouth, the donkey is resuscitated, standing up to the sound of rapt applause. When the circus goes bankrupt—possibly as a result of public protests against its animal abuse—EO is, like his other creature coworkers, repossessed, and ripped from the one person who has shown him tenderness. "Don't you touch him!" Kasandra threatens the ringmaster, who whips the donkey when he refuses to pull his cart. EO's sole defender, she is pushed by the face out of her boss's way, faring only mildly better, as a woman, than her equine friend. Of course, liberating a group of animals trained for the circus by the circus does little to ensure any quality of life once that circus no longer exists. If anything, EO suggests the donkey might have had it best when he was touring alongside a companion he cared for, and who cared for him in return. For much of the film, we're encouraged through flashbacks to assume that he remembers and misses Kasandra, his desire to escape so many gates and fences a desire to find her again. These moments are certainly moving—who doesn't want to think their animal companion would pine for them?—but it is just as likely EO is simply seeking out the scents and sounds with which he's most familiar, discontent to stick around the stables, farms, and pens in which he is sheltered in exchange for his physical work. When Kasandra pays him a surprise late-night visit, swigging from a bottle of beer as she dismounts her boyfriend's motorbike, EO accepts her carrot muffin gift, but no less gratefully than he chomps the hay handed to...