Horse and buggery

>> Filmmakers Robinson Devor and Charles
Mudede on Zoo, their disturbing, beautiful documentary about interspecies sex

by MATTHEW HAYS

It has become something of a tradition at the Sundance Film Festival for a project to stand out for its shock effect. There have been movies that touch on madness, serial killers and prostitution. But in January, two Seattle-based filmmakers trumped all that with their most recent film, Zoo.

The title itself sounds sweet enough, but this unsettling feature—which has mainly received positive reviews—is not about a family foray to a place where you look at various species of animals. The title itself is short for Zoophiles, the name that people who are self-identified as animal-(in this case horse-) lovers give themselves. As Zoo indicates, a small group of these people managed to find each other via the Internet (is there anything it can’t do?), and meet up to discuss their equine affiliations, and even to videotape themselves in the act of manimal love. All of this would have gone under the radar, as they say, if it weren’t for the death of a man after he’d had sex with a horse.

In July, 2005, the Seattle Times ran a story about a resident of Enumclaw, Washington, who’d been dropped off at an emergency ward of a hospital with serious internal injuries. The man would ultimately die of them; it was revealed by the police that the injuries had occurred as a result of his being penetrated by an Arabian stallion. Subsequent police investigation found that the man—who was an engineer for Boeing—possessed a number of videotapes featuring footage of people having sex with horses. Since Washington state had no bestiality law on the books, no charges were laid.

But, perhaps not shockingly, a media frenzy did follow. The stories the Seattle Times ran on the incident were among the most widely read in the paper’s history, and radio shock jocks across the country had a field day making endless jokes about the man’s death. Rush Limbaugh even chimed in on the case, chuckling and snickering as he deliberated about it on his morning radio show.

Taking on neigh-sayers

What struck director Robinson Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede most was the way in which the man’s death was treated by the media. There was either outright disgust, or else an excuse for obvious jokes. Devor and Mudede felt that they’d like to delve further into the story, to talk to members of this community of Zoos and learn more about their psychology, identity and motivation.

The result is an entirely intriguing, if often unnerving, film. Zoo reveals this small community of people to be social misfits who describe their acts with the horses as being powerful moments of intimacy. Given the media circus that surrounded the case, it’s a minor miracle that Devor and Mudede managed to get several friends of “Mr. Hands” (which was the Internet name of the man who died) to speak about their experiences and what happened the night he was dropped off at a hospital.

Gaining trust wasn’t easy, concedes Devor. “It took many months of e-mailing, meeting one and then the next, and then being vouched for,” he recalls. “I’ll never forget how scared one looked coming out of the shadows beside a local diner. Mostly, I emphasized to them that this was their time to talk, not the media’s, and most importantly, that we would not include people who would openly mock them.”

Zoo introduces us to several Zoos, known only by their Internet names (including “Mr. Hands”), with only one, “Coyote,” agreeing to appear on camera. Even beyond its topic, there is nothing conventional about Zoo. There are a great deal of scenes and moments that are dramatically recreated; there are no talking-head interviews; stylistically, the film resembles one of Errol Morris’s expressionistic documentaries (and Morris himself has even rejected the word “documentary” in relation to his work).

But Mudede and Devor say that despite admiring Morris, their main guiding influence was an entire national cinema. “I was thinking of Iranian cinema more than anything else,” says Mudede. “They tend to go between non-fiction and fiction a lot—they actually destroy the line between the two. The illusion of acting actually stops.”

As well, Devor argues that what they had available to them influenced their form. “When we started out we realized that we weren’t going to have any talking heads available to us. We knew a lot of people would never agree to appear on camera. We didn’t want to do any silhouetted talking heads. We saw that as an opportunity to banish all the traditional components of the doc and dream about how to do it in purely visual and cinematic terms.”

Beauty of the beast

But with that key stylistic choice has come criticism. Some have argued that Devor and Mudede have attempted to soft sell or even beautify the thorny business of people getting it on with horses. It didn’t help when influential L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan quoted Devor in an interview from Sundance, who said at the time that he’d “aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”

Devor laughed when I read the line back to him. “I hate that quote. It makes me sound way too dictatorial, like I could wave a magic wand and make it all seem a certain way. To allow the audience to enter into the story, we really had to go this way. We had to seduce or hypnotize, so that perhaps the audience could listen with a bit more of an open mind.”

Zoo certainly works in that way, with beautiful shots of horses, sweeping shots of dark caves and glimpses of stunning Washington wilderness (as attractive as it makes the state look, Devor reports that the Seattle Film Bureau was less than thrilled when he broached the idea of making a documentary on this topic). But rather than working like a spoonful of sugar, this bit of stylistic excess is actually a brilliant mindfuck; it creates a powerful tension between its visual style and its subject. “We like that people pick up on that,” says Devor. “People talk about the beauty they see in the imagery, but there’s always an undercurrent of horror that’s there.”

Animal wrongs

And Devor and Mudede also deserve credit for holding back on any overt imagery of manimal love, leaving it to the audience’s imagination, Hitchcock-style. That’s something for the culture of Jerry Springer. But at the same time, this is not a film of advocacy journalism; the beauty of Zoo should not be mistaken for the filmmakers’ stamp of approval.

“It’s not because we don’t have an opinion, because we do,” says Mudede. “But we wanted to make a film from their perspective. Everyone had seen what the media had to say. The radio jocks had had their fun. The state senate had voted unanimously to criminalize the act. The vast majority of people are going to be strongly against it, especially with horses. So if all we were to do would be to add to the larger, noisy discourse against bestiality, it wouldn’t have been that interesting.”

And while he’s no advocate, Mudede says these acts have to be put into perspective. “I feel a lot more moral distance from people who start wars for false reasons, than I do for the people in the film.”

Devor says the filmmakers have their own reservations about the acts discussed in Zoo. When I quote famous sex researcher Alfred Kinsey to them (who once famously stated that “the only unnatural sex act is one that can’t be performed”), Devor brings up the consent issue. This point is broached in the film by none other than Rush Limbaugh, who jokes on his radio show, “how could this not be consensual?”

“I think that consent is an issue for me,” says Devor. “The idea of trying to enter another creature’s consciousness is the most difficult aspect of it. I’m not sure it’s an entirely instinctual process for them. This does involve another intelligent animal—that’s something I still have to grapple with.”

Zoo screens on July 20, 7:30 p.m.,
and July 22, 9:30 p.m., at
Concordia’s J.A. de Sève
cinema as part of Fantasia