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COPYRIGHT 2002 Duke University Press
Can or should we understand the "anthropological" model of aesthetic practices as separate from Babe? And what methodologies will address these concerns?--Sylvia Kolbowski, "Questions for Feminism"
The 1995 film Babe (dir. Chris Noonan, US) culminates with the consolidation of a community in which social boundaries separating animals, machines, and humans are not erased but significantly reconfigured. The barnyard society shifts from an anthropological system, organized around the singular human, to a nonanthropocentric network, from which the human farmer becomes no less inseparable than the farm animals and machines. Moreover, Babe suggests that the formation of this network depends on the engagement of humans and other animals with a specific visual technology--television--for the purpose of cross-species communication.
In this respect, Babe's barnyard network approximates Donna Haraway's ideal "cyborg community" while at the same time offering an important corrective to thinking about such machine-organism integration from a human standpoint. (1) Through the film's multiple and fragmentary narratives, anthropocentric cyborg systems become broken down into component parts, shattering the illusion of individuated agency whereby an organism becomes a "self" only on the model of a singular human being. Rather than positioning Babe as simply imaging cyborgs, I want to invoke the way in which cyborg theory suspends the value of the human in relation to technology in order to trace a similar displacement enacted along the boundaries of technology and animals. By looking at the key role of television in the reconsolidation of these component parts into a singular system that emphasizes interdependence, this essay explores how Babe's social construction of agency frames larger questions about the role of visual media in constructing nonhumans as historical subjects.
Tracing the disjointed development of both narrative and character within Babe, I examine in this essay how the barnyard animal on television becomes a crucial site for investigating more than how cross-species relations become galvanized through shared experiences with technologies. Because the film postulates that specifically visual technologies shape reading practices that are necessary to nonanthropocentric conceptions of nonhuman agency, I argue that Babe positions television as intensifying rather than resolving conflicts between biological narratives (particularly those of gender) and stories of machine-mediated group belonging. In this respect, Babe uses television to historicize human-centered concepts of hybrid machine-organism agency (like Donna Haraway's cyborg) and to produce in their stead a collective of simulacral animals, or what I term animalacra. (2) As my reading of the film will show, animalacra emerge not as humans pretending to be animals, machines pretending to be animals (or humans), or animals pretending to be humans (or machines), but as animals pretending to be other animals in such a way that humans and machines are implicated.
Framing this film about how a pig learns to be sheepdog (or "sheep-pig"), the film's broad range of barnyard animalacra often overtly puts species boundaries under erasure. Some animal characters thrust different species' identifications on other animals, such as the sheep who protest their harassment by dogs they term "wolves." But more systematic challenges to biological schemas come from animals who clearly cultivate their own alternate identifications, notably the duck who pretends to be an alarm clock, which to him is a "mechanical rooster," or a machine that pretends to be an animal. Instead of a Darwinian, ever receding "origin" of species, these active border crossings involve machines in ways that foreground a range of connections between animal identities and human uses for animals. Within this spectrum, television emerges as the key technology by which barnyard animals gain power since it serves as the mediating ground between highly localized, individuated house pets and interchangeable, nomadic rodents, profoundly undermining the originary authority of the human.
In this way, Babe's complicated approach to technology--as both an economic factor (as it is represented in the film) and as visual media (as they are represented both in and by the film)--points the way to a particular postmodern path, the end of human-centered history. Critically departing from a tradition exemplified by George Orwell's 1946 novel Animal Farm, Babe implicates visual technologies in the construction as well as the regulation of divisions of labor, gender, sex, and species. (3) Orwell's novel, a parable of European totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century, depicts the violent takeover of a British farm by its animals. Human attempts to regain the farm, rebuffed at first, eventually succeed as certain pigs exploit the "stupidity" of the other animals, becoming in every respect indistinguishable from their human oppressors "to the creatures outside." (4) While machines are portrayed as both helpful and hurtful in each text, the use of machines to do work has a distinctly negative valence in Animal Farm. The never completed windmill, symbol of a technological utopia, fails to deliver the animals from exploitation as workers and instead becomes the means by which the pigs divide the farm labor inequitably. Painting, the sole visual technology imagined in the novel, nominally reinforces these divisions, serving as a means by which pigs manifest their power over other animals. (5) At the end, what makes Orwell's pigs indistinguishable from humans is their coterminous dependence on and mystification of technology as a means of production, in relation to which the other animals become naturalized neo-Luddites.
What is important to this discussion is not simply the generic or stylistic difference between these texts, but also the veritable sea change they gauge in the role of technology in production and in utopian thinking. Babe differs profoundly from Animal Farm by simultaneously thematizing and baring the device, that is, by presenting visual technologies as means of production as well as of revolution. By assuming panspecies, visual media literacy throughout, Babe disables the human power of self-determination made available through visual technologies by depicting these technologies as employed to produce the collective fiction of the worker as an individual. Whereas Orwell's novel reconfigures but does not displace the individual (human, nation, animal) at the center, and therefore typifies modernist approaches to agency, (6) Babe operates as a postmodern deconstructive text, depicting individuals and centers as "necessary failures" that, as Fredric Jameson explains, "inscribe the particular postmodern project back into its context, while at the same time reopening the question of the modern itself for reexamination." (7) At the end of the film, television frames the space in which barnyard animals both escape deadly objectification as essentially meat and engage in their own subject-formations outside the limited terms of human being of existence.
While the assumption that Babe is a postmodern text structures this analysis, in itself the claim that Babe is postmodern does not help explore how the text paradoxically creates certain universalizing structures in order to combat the encroachment of other universalizing structures. Powerfully connecting animals, visual media, and simulation, the animalacra of Babe pick up where Haraway's cyborg leaves off, negotiating the "non-centered" or "collective" component that Jameson posits as the "psychic subject" of postmodernism. (8) But the gains animalacra achieve in subordinating the illusion of isolated individuality to collective animal life as it circulates through visual media have a limit in this text, namely the reinscription of absolute gendered differences. Concluding by closely examining how the film's female characters become excluded from this televisually constituted barnyard collectivity, I want to suggest some ways in which the film's playful exploration of noncentered, nonhuman subjectivity also pessimistically imagines feminist relations to global capitalist forms, identity forms, and liberatory political forms alike. (9)
Babes in Arms, Legs, and Wings: Constructing Animalacra
In its formal qualities as well as its narrative, Babe unsettles the individual pig's bildungsroman condensed in the slogan, "The talking pig who made it big." (10) The precarious position occupied by the film's title animal, Babe the sheep-pig, points to the ways in which the barnyard animal's experience is not merely unaccountable through the concept of the "individual." More importantly, it outlines two critical problems: that we need to learn how to read animals as something besides individuals and that there are specific formal traits in the film that allow us to do so. Babe's uses of visual technologies offer a means of accounting for animal agency as mediating extreme poles of abjection (whether as food, vermin, or zoo attractions) and subjectification within the all-too-human terms of "pet" identities.
Perhaps most striking on a first viewing of the film is the way that it overtly involves its audience in the conflicted construction of the animal-individual. By haphazardly combining different modes of imaging in its barnyard characters, at the formal level Babe structures social agency as a construction site. The apparent constructedness of the film extends the limits of the animal film genre by imperfectly (even excessively obviously) inscribing filmic machinery into the animal subject. Customarily, three film technologies effectively negate each other as ways of representing animals in film: live action, puppetry, and animation. Each of these technologies, when used exclusively to depict an animal in film, bears the burden of masking the labor involved in effecting this kind of performance. Within this hybrid narrative form, the labor of asserting an identity within a diegetic community becomes sublimated as the labor of asserting an identity to an extradiegetic community, so that the animal body appears consistent, if not "real," to the viewer. By instead implementing all of these technologies with a startling disregard for the conventions of continuity editing, Babe foregrounds the labor of identity performance. The bared devices of the film disrupt automatic identification between human viewers (who see the animals as bricolage) and diegetic humans (who see the animals as "real" individuals) and thereby invite the viewer to read no individual as the film's center. Instead, it asks the audience to follow several interdependent communities as they emerge through the film.
Only the most willing suspension of viewers' disbelief blocks the recognition of Babe's constructedness. The integration of puppets, live animals, and animatronic manipulations often stretches the narrative seams, so that viewers easily isolate aberrations in the continuity of the film's editing to locate instances of each form of technology. The puppets' movements often lack fluidity, and the textures of the puppet bodies look all the more artificial as they are juxtaposed with photo-realistic animal fur and feathers. The parts of the live animals manipulated by animatronics move in a different color scheme, especially noticeable when they simulate the lip movements of English. Most obviously, the "bad-wig pig" shots--the long, toupee-like dark hairs growing from the live pig's head, which are inexplicably missing from the head of the puppet pig--disrupt the continuity of the film even within scenes. The destabilization of the animal subject, so common in film media where nonhuman organisms of similar shapes and colors continue to be used interchangeably, becomes even more apparent here because the colors and shapes have not been carefully matched within individuated beings, let alone within or across species. (11)
The film's erratically integrated formal properties underscore how it approaches the animal as a different kind of subject--one that in Teresa de Lauretis's terms is "not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as contradicted." (12) But they also call into question the notion that depth of "experience" is the defining property of "social beings" (18); the messy formal configuration of animal agency in Babe suggests instead the ways in which visual media animals confound inner/outer dichotomies of the self. While the combination of methods used to depict the animal subject certainly affiliates Babe's animals with their older kin in Jim Henson's Creature Shop (consider the sharp contrast of Kermit the Frog's stick-propelled arms and Big Bird's totally human-inhabited body on the children's television show Sesame Street), the mixture of media in the film represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the Muppet...
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