Coetzee Part III

There is no doubt in my mind that poetry and literature in regard to animal rights can illicit extremely emotional responses. Literature, especially novels, require a certain investment of time and attention that is not necessarily present when watching film. That is to say, it usually requires less energy and focus than does a novel or poem. Therefore, when one takes the time to read a novel or even a poem, they tend to have gotten more from it than they would have an ordinary film. The purpose of a film, generally speaking, is to entertain. Most get nothing more from them than that. Literature, however, because of the investment involved, yields real comprehension. We are forced while reading to interact with the material and place ourselves among its subjects. When we are put into the mind of a narrator, we are usually prone to empathy. Furthermore, the affects of a novel usually have longer-lasting affects. We think about them for a long time after we've read them. There are many exceptions in film, of course, but the general movie-goer is looking for an escape from reality. As this escape is absolutely impossible when watching a film on animal rights, people will tend to ignore those, or get up and leave. Those who read animal rights literature have actively sought it out, and usually are already open to its ideas. Why else would they be reading it? So intellectually, we are engrossed in the subject and will retain more of the information.

But we aren't looking for a high retention rate here, we're trying to elicit an emotional response. Not only that, but our goal is to affect large numbers of people, as quickly as possible. It's not enough that they know the information, they have to be moved to act. In my opinion, we have no greater medium today for conveying or eliciting emotion than film. Sure, I felt a tinge of hurt while reading Disgrace, especially throughout Lurie's interaction with the young dog. "Yes, I am giving him up."It hurt to see those words, and also to realize that everything Lurie went through seemingly wasn't enough. And those words will probably stick with me for a long time. But the images I saw in  Earthlings will stay burned into my memory forever, whether I want them or not. And I can't accept what I saw passively either: I am overcome by the need to act and somehow change the situation. It's the combination of images, rhetoric, and music that caused those emotions. Prior to the invention of film (as in movies), poetry and other literature were the main source for information, entertainment, and persuasion. But now, the average person reads much less than they watch t.v. or see movies. While this is obviously unfortunate, we have to know our target audience and, as that's the entirety of humanity, cater to those preferences. It's a simple truth that film as a medium is more broadly accessible to a modern audience. The uneducated man may not understand that "Hughes [is] in a line of poets who celebrate the primitive and repudiate the Western bias toward abstract thought."(Anthology 144) More than likely they would not have read Blake, Lawrence, or Hemingway, and so would have no context. But force anyone, educated or not, to watch Earthlings, and they will walk away extremely affected. In this way, the fact that reading takes a greater investment is both its advantage and disadvantage. It's much easier to not read something than to push images of hacked and sawed dolphins from your mind. So I would say that film is the first step, and literature is the next. Let multimedia be the door through which they enter the subject of animal rights, and hopefully they will move from there to poetry and literature. All too often have I done just this: seen a film that sparked an interest, and done the subsequent research. From there they can read Kafka and Rilke and Coetzee. Then they can better vocalize their emotions, with more evidence for their claims. But if we are to persuade the general public of this cause, the first step is to hit their hearts, and that will start with film.