Ep. 20 – Gabriela Cowperthwaite on the legacy of “Blackfish”

“When I see people standing on the faces of cetaceans, what is it that they’re doing? We’re mastering,” Cowperthwaite says. “We’re trying to be bigger than and better than them. What does that say about us?”

The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of SeaWorld, and make her an unexpected enemy of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Cowperthwaite wasn’t a marine mammal activist before she made the documentary Blackfish. She was a mom who had taken her kids to SeaWorld, and she was a talented filmmaker, with over a dozen years of experience creating TV documentaries. She set out to tell the truth, and the truth — told by Cowperthwaite — proved to be, like the orcas themselves, complicated and powerful.

Blackfish is the story of a single 12,000-pound protagonist, a performing orca bull named Tilikum, who killed three people while in captivity. In tracing Tilikum’s narrative, from his violent capture in the wild as a two-year-old orca to his life as a highly feeling and intelligent animal becoming psychotic while living in what one interviewee calls “a bathtub,” Cowperthwaite reveals the orcas’ extraordinary nature, the horror of how we have treated them in captivity for so long without understanding or acknowledging the consequences, and the profound regret of trainers who once cared for Tilikum. In doing so, Cowperthwaite illuminated for the American public the profound disconnect between Sea World’s public image and the reality of what it means for humans to treat orcas this way.

“As a little kid, the thing you do when you go to [zoos] is knock on the glass,” Cowperthwaite says. “It’s the first thing you do. Even as an adult you have to stop your impulse to tap on the glass. It’s not that you want to see [the animal], it’s that you want it to see you. The idea that we will be acknowledged by something ‘out there’ is electrifying to us.”

Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful and successful documentary films of all time. Sea World’s stock price plummeted 60 percent following the film’s theatrical premiere, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to provide $1 million toward a study on the effects of captivity on orcas, and celebrities, airlines, fast food giants and musical tour groups spoke against and dropped associations with Sea World. Eventually, the company responded to public pressure by announcing changes at its theme parks, including officially ending its orca breeding program and phasing out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. Cowperthwaite’s David slayed SeaWorld’s Goliath not with a sword, but with a story.

Cowperthwaite is one of the most powerful on-screen storytellers at work today illuminating the complexities, nature and psychology of humans’ relationships with non-human animals — a topic she continued to explore in her moving 2017 feature drama, Megan Leavey, which tells the true story of a young marine played by Kate Mara and her combat dog, Rex. Together, they saved countless lives in Iraq while searching for roadside bombs.

Recommendations:

Grizzly Man directed by Werner Herzog (2005)

The Painter by Peter Heller

The Cove directed by Louie Psihoyos (2009)

The Moo Man directed by Andy Heathcote (2013)

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