Beyond the Multiplex

"Zoo": Dances with horses, or defending the indefensible
I recently overheard another film critic discussing Robinson Devor's documentary "Zoo," which she defined as "pro-bestiality." As subsequently became clear, she hadn't seen it. I can understand anybody's reluctance to engage with the issues raised in "Zoo," a lovely, subdued film, washed in midnight blue, that flirts with the outer edges of documentary reconstruction and poetic license -- and is certain to make you uncomfortable. But much of the outraged response to "Zoo," almost all of it from people who haven't seen the film (I heard a lot of this myself, after covering it at Sundance), is based on willful ignorance and incomprehension.

Devor and his co-writer, Charles Mudede, set out to explore the infamous story of "Mr. Hands," the Seattle man who died of internal injuries in July 2005 after having sex with an Arabian stallion at a remote ranch near Enumclaw, Wash. (Although he is never named in the film, Mr. Hands has been identified in media reports as Kenneth Pinyan, a divorced aerospace engineer.) The ranch in question was apparently a center for a small group of men who enjoyed, not to put too fine a point on it, being on the receiving end of anal intercourse with a horse. (At the time, there was no law to prevent this in Washington, and the animals were reportedly well cared for.) Tabloid reporters and shock jocks had picked the story clean of salacious details by the time they got there, so the filmmakers ultimately decided to penetrate (as it were) the hidden world of zoophilia, which doesn't simply signify bestiality but love of animals, whether erotic or platonic or both.

As Mudede said in a discussion after the film's Sundance premiere, "Zoo" morphed into a kind of thought experiment: "If someone can go there physically -- be there under that horse," he said, "then I should be able to go there mentally." To many people's evident discomfiture, the film allows several of Mr. Hands' fellow "zoos" (it's what they call themselves, as others might say they are gay or straight) to present their side of the story in extensive personal monologues. They seem mostly like lonely middle-aged men, poorly adjusted to human society, who know perfectly well that their conduct, or orientation, or whatever it is, is profoundly repellent to most people.

There's no sexual conduct in the film, although a brief flash of a bestiality video (possibly one of those seized on the ranch) can be glimpsed in one scene. Devor illustrates his interviews with languorous, half-dramatized re-creations of life on the ranch, using non-speaking actors to play Mr. Hands and his friends (since most of his interview subjects declined to appear on camera). Is the film pro-bestiality? No. It doesn't take a position on bestiality. It does not moralize or tell you what to think, which in the eyes of some critics may amount to the same thing. (See also the idiotic mini-tempest over the alleged moral relativism of Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book.")

Janet Malcolm once wrote that the only thing journalism can do is raise questions about who is good and who is bad; it can never answer them. I'm not sure "Zoo" is a great film, but it is a morally significant one, precisely because it invites us to suspend judgment (however briefly) and consider that guys who like to get slammed by horses are people too, with complicated life histories and motivations we hadn't thought about. For reasons I won't pretend to understand, it might almost be more difficult to raise such issues about a zoophile than about a Nazi death-camp guard or a child molester. As Manohla Dargis observed in her New York Times review, as a society we imprison and kill millions of animals for our own purposes. Is cajoling or coercing one of them into a sexual act worse than that?

I met Robinson Devor toward the end of a long, icy day of moviegoing at Sundance. We grabbed a couple of cups of tea in the cozy Park City condo rented by THINKFilm (his distributor), and talked about the reception for "Zoo" so far, and the murky moral issues that lie beneath it. You can hear a full audio recording of this interview here.

Obviously the story of Mr. Hands, or Kenneth Pinyan, and the way he died, was sensational. What made you think there was a film in it, and especially a film that's so unsensational in its approach?

Of course there was a lot of laughter and a lot of outrage. Laws were changed because of this. It became a political discourse. [Washington's state Legislature finally passed a law against sex with animals, which had not previously been illegal. The men involved in this case were never charged with anything except trespassing.] But there was a big hole in the story. We got such a clear impression that everybody wanted this case to go away. There was no discussion of who this man was, who these people were, and what they thought about having sex with animals. The challenge was to find that other side of the story, and see the world through the eyes of those people.

Next page: Can animals really consent to sex with a human?