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Abstract
The documentary film Blackfish (2013) follows Tilikum, a captive SeaWorld prisoner-orca responsible for the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau and two others. The film has had a profound effect on public perceptions of orca captivity creating the “Blackfish Effect.” Our critical analysis of the film engages Plec’s (2013) internatural communication categories of complicity, implication, and coherence. We argue that the film illustrates the flawed hierarchy within the binary/dualistic system. In deconstructing a dualism, we must recognize the physical power and actions of captive orcas that could be seen as a form of protest rhetoric. The case example of orcas in captivity as a whole illustrates that regarding orcas as unique actors with intelligible behaviors offers a way of understanding how to listen to the more-than-human world. Our article has been one attempt to illustrate how captive orcas can be heard as extrahuman citizens who participate, and even instigate, policy making.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Science and Environmental Communication, a section of the journal Frontiers in Communication
In a National Public Radio interview on March 17, 2016, SeaWorld President and CEO Joel Mamby collaborated with the Humane Society of the United States after just 10 months of working for the company to announce that SeaWorld had agreed to stop breeding orcas in captivity and would be phasing out all orca performances by 2019 (SeaWorld to End Orca Breeding Program in Partnership with the Humane Society, 2016)
We claim that that the shift to coherence is one contribution to the “Blackfish Effect” and the sustained movement demanding the release of Tilikum and others like him based on prisonerorcas legitimate communication
Summary
We discuss the film and the “Blackfish Effect” thematically through an “internatural communication” (Plec, 2013) lens. We extend their work, claiming that financial donation might not be the only measure of public participation but adding that social media participation or “e-tactics” (Katz-Kimchi and Manosevitch, 2015) could be viewed as a form of direct action and pro-environmental behavior In this way, documentary film and other forms of media that potentially offer audiences alternative structures of meaning for understanding their internatural relationship become part of an ongoing sustained environmental justice movement such as the “Blackfish Effect.”. In reference to these ruptures, we have chosen to model our language after a whale/orca term, “breach,” in an effort to have our language mirror more-than-human behavior These breaches might create “boundary transgressing moments” (Milstein and Kroløkke, 2012) of witness for the audience moving them from complicity into implication and eventually toward coherence, as we will discuss later. The ability to “like,” “share,” and “re-tweet” are forms of active participation
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