The Oscar for Best Documentary that My Octopus Teacher won illustrates just how far Western modern perceptions of nature still have to go. On the surface, this film presents a triumphant, if not unexpected, kinship between two unlikely species: land-dwelling “man” and aquatic octopus.
It is well documented that octopuses are exceptionally intelligent beings and the story of encounters between one depressed Afrikaner man and the therapeutic ocean provides an intimate portrait of two creatures somewhat out of their element (so to speak). Filmmaker Craig Foster has amazing lungs and stamina; and the submerged salty world he cinematically captures is seductive. And yet, this is just the point: the film illustrates how easily humans are convinced of their own representation of things when presented with wonderment and awe for the sublime unknown. I am underwhelmed that my fellow humans are so easily guided into this perspective. I too spend significant time in a cold ocean and value world-building with multi-species kinfolk.
I’d like to turn to perhaps the most important narrative device within the documentary: the use of the octopus’s attack and subsequent loss of limbs which functions as both a catalyst for different sub narratives and the development of tension in the film. Despite the prevailing message that Foster and the octopus are friends offering mutual support, this is mostly a glamorous proposition by a depressed man. The relationship certainly seems to be one-directional. Is it not the goal of any meaningful bond to offer oneself wholly to the other? In fact, he is of the shittiest of friends. Imagine that you are coerced out of your safe home because a strange visitor who you partially trust arrives at your doorstep and as a result you are attacked by some predator, only to see your friend disappear under the embarrassing credo of human nonintervention into so-called nature? As though humans are not organic earthly entities; as though all the gallivanting around in the octopus's backyard, filming her, touching her, is nonintervention; as though the very premise of the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch in which humanity has irrecoverably influenced the entire earth system, however incomplete of an idea, is not a clear bellwether of the entangled conditions of nature and culture. Foster is more than happy to intervene when it serves his interest of a pretty shot—the worst kind of documentary work.
It is an under-examined component of the film that the very first sequence, this otherwise remarkable and potentially queer adornment that the octopus uses as a strategy to hide from predators, may in part also have been caused due to the filmmaker’s aloof presence in the ocean at that time. Instead of utilizing screen time to reflect on this, the filmmaker ogles at the beauty and awe that another entity besides humans utilizes its environment in a technical and aesthetic way. Most disappointingly, this observation, however uncritical, is deployed narratively as a form of poetics of reflection and recuperation for Foster. In other words, the representation of the octopus and of their friendship is refashioned for the purpose of self-improvement of the filmmaker. What I learn from this film is that I can inhabit other creature’s homes and risk their lives if it gives me peace of mind.
What feels particularly lacking in the Academy’s choice is that there is so much interesting writing, filmmaking, and art about human/nature entanglements right now. The high priestess of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler, is finally beginning to receive the popular attention she has deserved. Her Xenogenesis Trilogy offers a rich and nuanced interpretation of humanity, technology, and life, through the lens of trauma, slavery, multi-species kinship, and space travel. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Jenny Odell, artist and author of How To Do Nothing, has been thinking with birds for some time; Elisabeth Nicula’s similar kinship with her scrub jay friend, whom she nicknamed Frank, was a multi-year relationship documented through more than 80,000 photographs. Ecosexuals Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles, long-time queer environmental artists and activists, have actualized a performative route for making love with the earth. They readily admit the anthropocentrizing of the Earth that their work does. But, the point is they utilize this as a strategy to engage a complex ethics of shared cohabitation and love for this planet. All of these artists actively cultivate the perspective that representations of nature are not just environmental issues, but are fundamentally entrenched in racial, colonial, and gendered power relationships. Feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, author of the Companion Species Manifesto has been thinking with other kinfolk for some time. In her 2016 book, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene she says, “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (Haraway 2016, 101).
Instead of the kind of transformative meditation on Western human’s sense of entitlement to define what nature is, the film offers the portrait of a white guy who feels bad and seeks a multi-species entity to displace emotional labor on to (even if the emotional labor is purely of the representational sort). This film could have done some deep work in the water to re-orient how a multi-species ethics of care and maintenance might look—an octopus ethics—or the Oscar’s could have chosen a documentarian who is actually doing this, such as Ursula Biemann, among others.
Unfortunately, My Octopus Teacher only momentarily disrupts the all too common perception that humans are the center of all things. Once the distraction of our own amazement that an organism other than humans might actually have the capacity for culture, friendship, and emotions subsides, the film quickly reminds us that prevailing modern human values will quickly abandon planetary kin the moment it’s post as rulers of the cosmos is challenged.
With the Academy deeming this film the best in its class, it’s so crucial that this argument is taken up to continue reminding the Western human inhabitants of this rare Earth that multi-species relationships and stewardship of the planet must come from the perspective that humanity does not define the value of other entities.