MEATWORK: the first time to kill with your own hands after you've been killing for the whole lifetime

Good short films are sharp as a punch at the heart that you remember for good. The fact that regular cinemas or TV programs do not show short films makes them even more valuable. I might have subconsciously made effort to memorize the good works knowing that I would probably never see them again, so I still vividly recall 2 short films showed in Lux, the culture center of Nijmegen, last summer. It was then that I first learned about the international short film festival named Go Short. 

The sixth edition of Go Short took place last week. Here I’d note down one of the short films too great to fade away in time. 

MEATWORK

Director: Madeleine Parry / documentary / Australia / 2012 / 29'

One of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched. No music. No fancy cutting/ editing. So plain technically the message itself is powerfully concentrated. The film recorded the 24 days of a young Australian girl who wanted to learn how the meat she eats come from, works fulltime at a slaughter house. 

At first she learned to dismember the bodies, to hang different huge and heavy parts on hooks, to peel, to shave, to cut open lungs—or bladders—and pour out all the brown-green liquid (I was so grateful a film cannot convey smell!), to roll intestines from the bodies into a machine the way you collect the wire of a vacuum machine, to rinse thick layers of blood in work place over and over again. Everything is in large size and quantity. 

She begins to slaughter from the second week. Sheep, cows, and finally pigs. Animals are first gathered in a small court. The slaughter drives one animal into the connected room, shut the door, and have another waiting at the door to save time. The one in the room now stands in a tub enclosed with iron bars. There the slaughter uses electronic gun to kill. For sheep you stab the gun into their heads, leaving two holes afterwards. For cows you shot on the cross marked in advance on their foreheads. The action should be quick and accurate, otherwise the animals feel extremely painful electronic attack. After the shot, the tub flips over to dump the body on the ground. The partner slaughter immediately cut the throat long and deep to shed the blood; then he cuts open the belly to take out the organs; then the body was placed upside-down to have the four legs chopped off.... A slaughter kills 150 animals per week. All the wastes are piled onto trucks like mountains in the color of blood.

After killing several sheep in a row the girl realizes, “killing can never be kind, or nice, or pretty, but it can be quick.” She works hard on killing in the right way. Sheep are the easiest. Cows are big and more threatening if they try to run away. Pigs might be the only ones knowing what they are facing behind the door so they scream and struggle desperately. She tries to view it as a mere industry process instead of claiming lives. The only time she bursts into tears is when she misses a shot and thus causes a cow suffer. 

“There is no time to say thank you, or sorry.” She repeated the work and keeps asking herself, “Have I become cold-blooded?” The scary part is probably not how hard it is to kill, but rather how easy it is, when you get used to it.

When she finally returns home, she still eats the meat dishes made by grandmother. “I can see those animals suffer and still kill them efficiently. Did I lose my humanity? No, it’s part of the humanity. Now I can’t say that I care about the animals anymore.”

1 hour after watching the film, I found myself eating a sandwich with ham in it. At the very moment I connected what I was chewing with the process I just saw, another part of the brain did not withdraw from praising how well the ham goes with the Focaccia, nuts and corns. Human beings and their lifestyles are selfish and nasty. I am selfish and nasty. My wellbeing is established on the unfairness of the world. Most of the time we enjoy things for which someone else pay the price, and we don’t care at all. Like the young man in one of the Oscar Wild stories who tosses the rose to the ground when refused by a girl, without thinking of the nightingale who sacrificed to dye the rose red with its own blood. There are clothes, phones and all the other everyday products produced in sweatshops at the cost of labors’ health or even life. We know this is happening everywhere but we won’t bother to pinpoint or boycott each of those products. We know millions of animals are killed everyday for our meals after an inhumane life incomparable to our pet dogs, but we don’t let the fact ruin our appetite. We block the unpleasant truth out of our moral censor. Once realizing it, I am amazed by the capacity of people to confine their compassion to a certain zone and to take advantage of the rest. We might need this “selective numbness” to continue on our present life without going nuts (or changing it). But we should at least face the cruelty of ourselves and of the system in which we all take parts.

p.s. 

I’d like to learn about the reality directly in this way, too. To see with my own eyes. To kill with my own hands. To mingle with the groups of people I never get to talk to before, and figure out their feelings. That’s what my academic, theoretical education is seriously missing.