beachbum

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/arts-culture/film/beach-bum/"></div>In The Beach Bum, Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) is having the time of his life. He wears colorful fabrics and sunglasses that flip up; he picks up a stray cat on a dock and then drinks heavily; he sits in the sun in a boat near Key West, then in Miami. He is not a drug dealer, no, nor a pimp, despite appearances. He is a poet. He writes — as he repeatedly says, with the word condensed into one bouncing syllable — poems: little pleasurable things that make no sense, like the characters in a Harmony Korine movie.
Late in high school, my friends and I loved and revered Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), a film about (if anything) the descent of four female college students into the seedier side of beachside party culture. Why were we so fixated? It was fun to watch (a music video, really), but also seemed to have something to say. We weren’t quite sure what; that was beside the point. Or, that was the point — its inscrutability lent itself to light pseudo-philosophical satisfaction. It makes you think, we said to ourselves, stoned. About what? We didn’t get that far. We played it on loop projected on the wall at parties. We had a great time.
I came into The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine’s latest, with my guard up. Korine couldn’t impress me so easily now, I thought. I had matured. I wouldn’t mistake sex, drugs, and mumbled aphorisms for profundity — not this time.
But while Spring Breakers starts dark with a masked robbery and descends from there, The Beach Bum starts in slovenly ecstasy and maintains the high throughout. Minutes in I was sporting a grin more shit-eating than Moondog, who, when we first meet him, is on vacation (even by his standards) in Key West, avoiding responsibility, reading poems, rescuing a cat. He gets called home to Miami by his wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher). He comes back, but never really touches down.
For the next hours, he and the rest of the characters stumble through a plot (his daughter gets married, his wife dies, he goes to rehab and then leaves), but none of that matters. Moondog’s body, clad only in the lightest and brightest textiles, stars. He has a lot of friends, makes them easily as he wanders, and likes to encouragingly narrate their actions and statements physically: a low fist pump accompanies mention of war-damaged genitalia that can still cum; rolled shoulders sympathize with a particularly bad fit of coughing after a bong rip.
Dialogue moves with the same indiscriminate confidence. It’s unclear what would be stranger: if these lines were all scripted and forced through the actors, or if they were improvised. Either way, the effect is the same. They come off as artfully awkward and awkwardly artful, equally. Flicker (Zac Efron), Moondog’s fellow patient in rehab, says things like “even Jesus was a sinner, so we clean, baby!” I roll my eyes, but I can’t help but give credit for effort. McConaughey pulls the nonsense off the best, a veteran Rust Cohle with the angst cast off. Lebowskian, he mumbles to two sets of security guards in two different scenes: “You guys don’t read a lot, do you?” and “Have you seen Magnum PI?”
The editing is painterly too. Moondog’s wife, Minnie, receives disjointed cunnilingus while getting her toenails done and planning her daughter’s wedding. Later, she dances drunkenly around Miami with Moondog to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” while also getting in a car crash. It’s not intercutting, exactly, but something more impressionistic.
As Moondog slurs and the cuts jump, all this can feel lazy. Was it intentional? My 16-year-old kid could come up with this stuff under the influence, if not do the cinematography or art direction, a cynic might object. But I’d give it more credit. Every scene is like a slow-moving painting, started with a prompt. What if Snoop Dogg and Matthew McConaughey smoked weed together? Let it roll. How about Matthew is on a boat with a literary agent this time? Okay, go. What if he gropes his new son-in-law’s crotch assessingly at his daughter’s wedding? Yes, and! Let the sun set, let’s look at Miami.
The setups might not sound sophisticated, but the pleasure is in the details. Each color bleeds and pulses neon; when two or more are put together, it’s astounding. Zac Efron’s character is wearing a Bluetooth earpiece and sporting a tiger-striped beard as he vapes out of one nostril in rehab. A Bluetooth! What an insane excess to get all these elements together and have them play, even messily. I’m grateful someone’s doing it.
Korine’s fun only occasionally comes at the audience’s expense. The third quarter of the film slips a little too far into an early-aughts-Adam McKay-turns-arthouse creole: in one scene a blind Rastafarian flies private planes, but only when high; in another, Captain Wack (Martin Lawrence) and Moondog talk graphically about the sexual habits of dolphins in front of a family. In these moments, Korine risks coming off as a dangerously overzealous server, catering to an imagined group of gullible stoners. The shock wears thin.
But the pleasure doesn’t. In the last act, the lazy arch of the narrative resolves. Moondog finishes his book of poetry. From the notionally Southern-accented lines of Lewis (Jonah Hill as Moondog’s agent), we learn that he has been nominated for a Pulitzer (“A pohlitzah,” Hill drawls twice, misheard the first time). The two eat fat ice cream cones in front of a saturated Florida sunset. “You was acting like a fuckboy there for a minute,” Lewis says, and the audience nods. But we’d been absorbed.
After the film, I encountered a Russian man named Alexei unlocking his bike outside the theater. He’d been seated a few rows in front of me. When I asked for his thoughts, he said he’d been rapt too, but unpleasantly. He felt immersed in something he didn’t enjoy. “In human filth,” he said. “Or an advertisement.” When he asked what I liked about the movie (“Colors?”), I wasn’t sure how to respond.
Near the end of the film, a journalist approaches newly Pulitzer-winning Moondog, notebook drawn. He asks, awkwardly, how he does it — how he has so much fun. I sat with my pen in hand in the theater, waiting. “I’m quite certain that the world is conspiring to make me happy,” Moondog says. I jot the answer down, though I know it won’t prove useful. There’s no sense in trying to make much out of all this. The joke is on the analyst. If we can join the party instead, let’s.
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Is That All There Is?: The Beach Bum

Is That All There Is?: The Beach Bum

captive-state

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/questions-captivity-captive-state/"></div>For a long time, the end of the world took place in Los Angeles and New York City. Sometimes Tokyo. The big shiny city burned and crumbled, and we got to watch. We liked it; we had fun. More recently, <a href="https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/top-lists/movies-where-hollywood-destroys-san-francisco/">San Francisco</a> has been the urban center taking the hit of massive destruction for us onlookers. Chicago has remained, as usual and fortunately for its fictional residents, <a href="https://patricksisson.com/apocalypse-how-chicagos-second-city-status-in-monster-movie-destruction/">overlooked</a>. There are exceptions (Divergent, notably). But for the most part, the Second City has managed to avoid speculative futures and alien ire.
Enter Captive State, released March 15 to brutally lukewarm reviews. The film is set in a near-future Chicago, the capital of an earth occupied by bureaucratic, largely unseen aliens, and follows a group of rebels on their mission to provoke the extraterrestrial hegemon. A former attempt at uprising left Wicker Park destroyed (a welcome development for Chicago’s stale Williamsburg), with the movement’s stronghold now housed in Pilsen (a nod to a newer wave of gentrification). The movie splits time between the insurgents, with a focus on Gabriel Drummond (Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders), younger brother of a famed rebel and unappreciated laborer at a “data reclamation center,” and William Mulligan (John Goodman), a toiling cop who attempts to recruit Drummond to help him sabotage brewing unrest. The world portrayed is low-tech and dark: outlaws send messages by carrier pigeon; a prostitute drowns out a clandestine meeting with music from a record player. Captive State has all the trappings of a thrilling sci-fi nail-biter: tension builds, a twist is revealed at the last minute.
I left the film confused. I had felt, as some reviews accuse, as if I’d stumbled into the middle of the movie multiple times without ever leaving the theater. Who is this character again? What are they doing? I wondered, but had no one to lean over and ask. At the end, a large drunk group walked out behind me, and one of them started explaining the ending to the rest. I gathered around too. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” one said, even after the plot had been elucidated. Awkward shrugs moved through the group, and we disbanded.
Meanwhile, on the internet, a litany of complaints poured forth, mostly slamming the film as either inscrutable or insufficiently awesome. Where were the aliens? Where was the world-building? Where was the world, even? Amidst the dim lighting, it was hard to make out.
But it was also the poor lighting and modest budget (25 million, only small in the world of Hollywood genre fare where costs regularly stretch into the hundred millions), along with the moody, frustratingly slow atmosphere, that lent the movie its charm. Chicago’s low brick apartment buildings, underpasses, interchanges, and straight, long, flat streets make good hosts for a story of captivity, with the reprieve of the city’s downtown foreclosed by alien occupation. The only release comes at the lake, where shadowy machines stand like statues on piers and the alien mothership flies (with endearingly unsophisticated animation) across the horizon.
I went to college in Chicago; my four years in the city influenced my viewing experience in conflicting directions. Jump cuts that portrayed an old part of US Steel’s former South Works steel plant as next to Soldier Field, when the two sites are really miles apart, left me confused, thrilled, and dismayed in the way one is when granted privileged insight into error. Fortunately, the other, stronger consequence of my familiarity with the place worked more in the movie’s favor. The Chicago portrayed was the one I knew: bureaucratic, alienating, hard to get a handle on, disorienting, subdued, unglamorous, and struggling, but still somehow mesmerizing.
The film has been accused of being heavy-handed in the current political climate. But I really don’t think that’s fair. This isn’t BlacKkKlansman or Vice. There are no winks and nudges to the contemporary. There is no Trumpian figure; we never even see anyone in charge. This is a Cold War villain if anything, either that or something harder to name and navigate. Modernity? Capitalism? The end of history? This world isn’t necessarily burning or collapsing, but rather being held at an intolerably mundane stasis, with the end times not approaching, but already come and gone. The aliens say things are going well — that there’s full employment and incredibly effective natural resource extraction — and we have no evidence to disprove them. What more do we liberators want, really?
The aim, repeated again and again, is to “light a match, ignite a war,” a cryptic mantra circulated among the insurgents. In one scene, Gabriel finds his way into an abandoned Wicker Park. There, he encounters his older brother Rafe (Jonathan Majors), who had been presumed dead. Rafe conveys the incendiary message to his brother, and things accelerate from there with little more examination. This is an obdurate rebellion, unclear of its imagined future, but rebelling nonetheless. Ultimately, the mission is accomplished; John Goodman’s cop character (spoiler) becomes an accomplice, and a fire starts a war.
In one of the internet’s wonkish tirades against the film’s narrative, Cooper Hood of screenrant.com <a href="https://screenrant.com/captive-state-ending-explained/">writes</a>:
But, since Wyatt decided to go with a completely ambiguous approach, it leaves the film with a messy conclusion that may leave you questioning what the point of this was and if there was any positive impact on the actions taken.
Awkward phrasing aside, Hood is right. The ending may leave you wondering what the point, exactly, of the whole mission was. They wanted to start a war, and they did. But it’s unclear what the aim of overthrowing the status quo was, or what the consequences will be.
And as we question the aims of the rebels, we might also start to turn the investigation on ourselves. What have we lived our lives for, under strange, murky oppression, with an invisible, ever-present enemy? If we did something radical, would it matter? Or would it just make us feel good? Would it even make us feel good? What did we want in the first place, and what kind of connections could we forge to get there? Who might be on our side?
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Questions in Captivity: Captive State

Questions in Captivity: Captive State

moss-blarb-1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/literature-upper-left-interview-moss/"></div>Connor Guy and Alex Davis-Lawrence grew up together in Seattle, Washington. Now they both live elsewhere: Connor works in publishing in New York, and Alex is a freelance filmmaker (among other things) in Los Angeles. In the summer of 2014, the two published the first issue of Moss, a literary journal of and for the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle too; my parents owned and operated a bookstore on a suburban island. On a trip back home, I discovered their journal. I was struck first by its design, then by its strong editorial vision.
Moss’s mission is twofold: to bring writers from the area to the national stage, and to provide a locus for and record of the region’s literary scene. It publishes regularly online and once a year in print. 
I reached out to Connor and Alex, and we spoke on the phone. We talked about their work, our hometown, and what the place has to offer and stands to lose, beyond Bezos and Schultz.
¤
LEWIS PAGE: How did you two come up with the idea of starting Moss? What sparked the decisions? 
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: Connor and I have been friends since high school. A few years after college, we both ended up living in New York. He was working at a publishing house as an assistant editor, and I was working in video production at an ad agency. Moss essentially came into being during a happy hour on the Lower East Side, at a bar called, amusingly, Home Sweet Home. We were having drinks and sharing various gripes, and one particular frustration that rose to the fore was this feeling that the literary and intellectual culture in New York didn’t really take the Northwest seriously as a creative center. We wanted the people around us to see the Northwest as we did — which is to say, as a place that’s bursting with creative energy, with writers and artists creating meaningful, exciting and innovative work. 
CONNOR GUY:  Back then I had just started working in book publishing. Now I work exclusively on nonfiction, but at the time I was working at an imprint that did both fiction and nonfiction. So I’d been reading a lot of submissions for work and I was being generally exposed to the literary culture and institutions in New York. And I just felt that the Northwest was underrepresented. It wasn’t necessarily that writing with a regional focus was taken less seriously, but it wasn’t as visible.
It was also that we…we missed home. We were both nostalgic for the place we’d grown up and we were seeking some kind of creative and emotional means of connecting with the region. 
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: Definitely. It was a combination of nostalgia for home and disillusionment with New York, perhaps. But also, as we started to dig deeper into the idea of creating a journal of Northwest writing, we came to realize that no one else was doing quite what we were aiming to do. There are a lot of journals that limit submissions by genre, or form, or subject, or theme, and there are some journals that emphasize a particular region as part of their mission — but there are very few that actually have a strict rule dictating that the writers they publish have to have a significant connection the region in question. Which I guess is just to say that from the start, we intended for Moss to be a very thesis-driven project. It’s about the Northwest and its merits, but also the idea that place is important to a writer’s work and identity, in and of itself. 
I know it’s a tricky balance between, on the one hand, saying that this literature from the Northwest has universal value and should be brought to the rest of the country, and then also saying that there is an inherent quality to Pacific Northwest literature. Without pigeonholing it, or saying everything has to conform, I’m curious if you do see any qualities or trends of literature from the region. 
CONNOR GUY: This is interesting, because that is actually a question we often pose to the writers we interview in Moss. We’ll begin by asking them about their lives and their craft and their work, but we usually pose at least one question to them asking: “How do you think the Northwest has shaped your work?” Or the same question you just asked: “Do you see any distinguishable qualities in writing from the region?” I would say there haven’t really been very many consistent answers. I don’t know if you can say that. I think that what we’re doing is interrogating the relationship between place and creative expression in a broad sense — rather than trying to nail down specific traits or qualities that Northwest writing might possess. 
Do you remember when you were sitting in the bar, what impressions at the time you had of Northwest literature—were there certain authors from the area or things you’d read or communities that you’d been a part of that you were thinking of? And then, over time, what revealed itself to you and what changed about your perception of the literary world of the Pacific Northwest? 
CONNOR GUY:  I think one thing that’s been great about this project is that we’ve had the opportunity to work with or publish, in one way or another, all these writers who we’d really admired from the beginning. So when we were sitting at that bar, I was thinking about books like Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist, which had come out around that time — it’s such a wonderful book, set in an extremely northwest landscape, about a man who has an orchard near Wenatchee — and it really has such an intense, beautifully rendered sense of place. Then fast forward several years and Amy Wilson, our director of outreach, was actually able to do an interview with Amanda Coplin. There are so many other examples like that — it’s really been incredible.
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: Another part of what’s been exciting about it for us is the process of discovery. For example, one of my favorite books that I read last year was Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilágyi, a writer whose work I had never encountered prior to working on Moss. And while a lot of my favorite writers growing up were from the Northwest, whether it was Ursula Le Guin or Neal Stephenson or Ken Kesey — I didn’t grow up thinking of these people as Northwest writers. I mean, Ken Kesey is part of the high school canon, but he really was not presented to me as “a person from this region.” He was just a writer. I think there’s just such great joy in discovering that someone I already knew and loved has been from the Northwest all along. And this extends beyond writing. I think of the painter Mark Rothko, whose work I have always loved and found to be incredibly powerful. Growing up, I always kind of took it for granted that he was from New York — and obviously he has a deep relationship to New York, that’s where he settled, that place is of course a central part of him — but I also learned recently that the first place he lived in the United States was Portland. He grew up in Portland, he went to Lincoln High School, and his first solo show was at the Portland Art Museum. And I keep stumbling on things like this and wondering, “why isn’t that part of the narrative of our region?” And the deeper you look, the more you realize how many people of interest and influence have moved through the region over time, and also how much the standard historical narrative about the place (which basically goes: Gold Rush, then nothing, and then, fast forward to the rise of the tech companies and Portlandia, or whatever) leaves out just a phenomenal amount of history. 
Can you speak more to that lost history? 
CONNOR GUY:  I think the political history of the region, especially, is extremely underrepresented in schools’ history curriculum. One of my favorite pieces we’ve run was a republication of a short story from the 1930s, “Hills Around Centralia” by Robert Cantwell, a leftist writer from Aberdeen, Washington, who wrote extremely powerful political fiction. But the literature of the labor movement in that time, which Robert Cantwell writes about, has just been erased. Alongside the Robert Cantwell short story, we ran an interview that Alex did with the scholar T.V. Reed, who wrote a whole book about Cantwell, looking at how during the red scare his legacy was really expunged from the record because of his leftist political views. I think that’s a huge loss, not just for the Northwest, but for the literature of the country as a whole. Our reprint of that story “Hills Around Centralia” was actually the first time it had appeared — anywhere — since its original publication in 1935. And this is someone who was praised by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and one of the most promising writers of his generation.
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: Absolutely. And even in terms of the writing happening in the Northwest today, I think we have to consciously fight against what I see as one of the biggest lies embedded in the rhetoric of this cultural moment, which is the idea that everything happening today is being preserved by default thanks to the internet, and that everything that happened before has been catalogued and uploaded somewhere online. But the reality is that things still get lost — both in terms of the context and history that give meaning to a piece of writing, and in terms of the writing itself. Sometimes it’s an active rewriting or erasure, similar to what happened in the case of Robert Cantwell, and sometimes it’s just the vagaries of time. Publications fold, archives get taken down, databases get corrupted. In many cases, things that seemed to have been permanently preserved on the internet are harder to find than something that was on paper in a library. So we really want part of the Moss mission to be a kind of reclaiming of the Northwest’s literary history, a documentation of that history, so that later people can better understand what was going on in this place at this time. 
You both grew up in Seattle, but both now live elsewhere. How has your perception of the place changed since you left?
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: I think there’s a very clear reality in Seattle right now that the city has changed — and still is changing — very rapidly, thanks to the outsized impact of Amazon and tech money in general. I go back to Seattle a few times a year, and seeing the city in those intervals makes the change viscerally apparent. It’s hard to understate the impact of Amazon on the city; it employs something like 40,000 people in a city of 600,000 people. That’s just an insane portion of the population. I don’t know the latest statistics, but around 2017 I recall hearing that Amazon was renting like 20 percent of the office space in the whole city. And there are clear statistics and measurements showing how inequality has grown, how housing costs have diverged from incomes, and so on, but just anecdotally, you can feel it in the texture of the city.
And one of the things that’s just insane to me is that Seattle is one of the wealthiest cities in the world right now, by a lot of metrics — prior to the passing of Paul Allen, three of the ten richest people in the world lived in Seattle at once. Yet, the arts organizations in the city struggle for funding. Public schools struggle for funding. And individual artists and writers — the younger, lower income creatives that really make a city vibrant — struggle to make rent, to make ends meet. To me, the most tangible cause of this is the lack of an income tax, which is something that almost everyone I speak to outside of Seattle is shocked to learn of, given the city’s reputation as a haven for progressive and liberal ideas. That’s something that needs to change. But I think it’s also just kind of a lack of imagination, and a lack of that sense of creative history and self-identity that we’ve discussed. For a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the wealth of this city’s companies, we could fund thousands of creative projects — or at least protect the basic standards of housing, healthcare, public transportation, and public education that allow the arts to thrive.  
I was wondering if you’ve had any interesting encounters with readers from outside the region. What have their reactions been?
CONNOR GUY:  I mean, they tend to like it. 
That’s good!
CONNOR GUY:  But they’re not as interested as people who are from the region. Even if we’re able to successfully cultivate a national audience, I think that on a certain level Moss will always be a publication built for and around a specific community. Others come to it for different reasons. Some literary agents I know here in New York, for example, have shown an interest in Moss as a way of finding talented new writers from the Northwest who are just starting their careers.
ALEX DAVIS-LAWRENCE: I think that was always a conscious part of what we wanted to do. We were putting this showcase together with the idea that people from outside the region could see what the Northwest has to offer. But I think as time has gone on, we’ve come to see Moss as primarily by the Northwest, for the Northwest. I’m actually really happy with that, and I’m glad that that’s where the feeling is strongest. It’s about engaging with and supporting the community — in practical ways, like putting on events and paying Northwest writers for their work, but also by being a place where people can look and see what’s already happening all around them. That was kind of one of the original concepts behind the name Moss — moss is this lush, pervasive organism that grows in all kinds of conditions, all across the region, and it’s a beautiful thing. But when you’re in the Northwest, you don’t even think about it. And when you realize that it’s there, you suddenly realize that this beautiful thing is all around you — and that it’s been there all along.
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Literature of the Upper Left: An Interview with Moss

Literature of the Upper Left: An Interview with Moss

rodents2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/inconvenient-animal-rodents-unusual-size/"></div>In 1869, in the wake of the South’s loss and economic collapse, Louisiana businessman Edward McIlhenny was living with his in-laws and tending to their garden. There, he brewed the original Tabasco sauce, hawking it around the region. In the 1930s, during another downturn, his son embarked on a business plan of his own: the import of coypu, also called nutria. These 20-pound rodents with long yellow teeth were shipped in from South America, kept in cages, and farmed for fur in an attempt to provide the ailing local economy with a reliable export. Before long, the rodents escaped captivity and settled in the swamps. For a while, things still worked out alright: fur trappers hunted the rodents and reaped the rewards. But then, in the 1980s, fur went out of fashion. Bad news for trappers; great news for nutria. They feasted and fornicated, proliferating unchecked. And as they did, they ate vegetation in the wetlands. When the tide went out, the loosened ground washed away. The coastline shrank.  
In the opening scenes of <a href="http://www.rodentsofunusualsize.tv">Rodents of Unusual Size</a>, a documentary making its television debut this January 14 on PBS’s Independent Lens, viewers accompany a lifelong Louisianan on his motorboat. He guides us through the wetlands, pointing out the receding grass and rising water. Then, he reveals the culprit: a nutria scampering across the low vegetation. “They breed so much. Every three months, she’s having a litter. There’s no natural predator. The only thing we got now that eats a little bit of ‘em is the alligator, and he can’t eat enough of them.”  
“That’s why they got a bounty,” he explains, holding up a nutria’s fat carcass. “Five dollars for this tail.” It’s true: for each tail collected, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries awards a $5 bounty. The aim is to fight coastal erosion, one dead nutria at a time.  
The film’s first nutria hunter lost his house in Katrina. His story is not uncommon, thanks at least in part to the rodents. The accelerating loss of land has worsened the effects of hurricanes, making coastal communities more vulnerable. Traditions spring up in response: one scene in the documentary invites us into a church service, where the congregation opens their small missals to the “Prayer for Hurricane Season.” They recite along together: 
We live in the shadow of a danger over which we have no control. The gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can wake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land, and spread chaos and disaster. During this hurricane season, we turn to you, oh loving Father. Spare us from past tragedies, whose wounds seem to refuse to heal with the passing of time.  
If prayers feel futile, the congregation could always take matters into their own hands and kill a few nutria. The pleasure of days out hunting in the bayou, the stipend from the government, and the contribution to coastal ecology all incentivize the activity. It’s a beautiful solution. The nutria make great villains, too, with yellowed teeth bared. If coastal erosion had a cuter face, maybe the bounty hunters wouldn’t be out in such force.  
Affection for the creatures does sometimes get in the way of extermination. The film introduces us to a nutria trapper on a golf course in New Orleans who tells us that the wealthy tend to protest his presence. Some of them see nutria as “a little golf course ornament.” They actively tamper with the traps. A man with a large house across from the country club tells the camera that he likes to feed them. “Yeah, I’ve been accused of being soft to the little guy, you know. […] But the kids love to see ‘em. And by showing them that kindness to that animal, they may begin to show kindness to another person.”  
Other times, human fondness doesn’t save the animals. We meet one man who keeps a nutria as a pet but still hunts them for a living. “I wouldn’t say nutria make a good pet. They require a lot of maintenance, and they don’t socialize with people they don’t know,” he says while bathing the animal in a kiddie pool. “The family, they think it’s funny, because I kill thousands of nutrias a year.” He laughs, tenderly, and rides off on his Harley, his furry partner bungee-corded to the back in a clear plastic box.  
Other odd alliances arise out of necessity, and out of hope: state-sponsored conservationists and rural hunters unite over the cause; chefs in New Orleans try to promote nutria as a new authentic Cajun cuisine (“I’m gonna tell them the next day so they don’t regurgitate”); a clothing company promotes nutria as an eco-conscious fur. The animal is used by a diverse cast towards differing ends: young women compete in skinning competitions; a young man pays his way through college by collecting the tails and reaping the government-sanctioned reward; pageant queens strut draped in the pelts. The nutria is made sport, commodity, and status symbol — anything to keep the population down.  
At times, it’s all almost too much. The interview subjects wax poetic about life, death, and change as if scripted, and for viewers not from the region the accents and traditions are stranger than could be dramatized. The film is set mostly in Delacroix, Louisiana, a coastal community with at least one sign (shown in the film’s first shot) that marks it as the “End of the World.” A little on the nose, yes? But this is the advantage of documentary film: if the heavy-handed metaphor exists in real life, we can’t put too much of the blame on the filmmakers. The rodents that represent global warming don’t induce eyerolls, but rather giggles. How did the world produce such a vile and apt motif? How can this possibly be real?  
The film leaves little room for doubt. See a rodent in the city and you might avert your eyes quickly; here, there’s no escape. The nutria are shown over and over again in endless forms: they waddle along golf courses, lie in piles in the back of boats, lie on their backs skinned in serving dishes, and crawl one by one through their underground habitat. What might flit through peripheral vision or hide in the gutters is brought up and out, over and over again. And by proxy, graciously, the nutria allow another unspoken horror out into the open. They serve as a physical (and mortal) symbol of the changing climate and its struggling ecologies. Both a locus for reflection and an irritatingly persistent material reality, the creatures help bring a difficult concept down to earth.  
If only there were always such an easy enemy.  
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An Inconvenient Animal: Rodents of Unusual Size

An Inconvenient Animal: Rodents of Unusual Size

Lewis Page is a writer, editor, and journalist. He was a 2019–2020 Luce Scholar at The Caravan magazine in New Delhi, India.

Lewis Page

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Lewis Page is a writer, editor, and journalist. He was a 2019–2020 Luce Scholar at The Caravan magazine in New Delhi, India.