I
watched Blackfish (again) today. My
sister wanted to borrow my DVD to watch with her sons; it had been a few months
since I last saw the documentary, so I invited them over and we saw it together.
I did warn her that some parts of the film might be sad or traumatic for her
youngest child to see; I was very proud of him when my sister told me that she
had warned him about that, but he believed the movie was very important and he
should see it. So, my mom, my sister, her kids and I all gathered around the TV
to watch it. In a way, the movie is about the effect of captivity on extended (matriarchal)
families, so I thought it was appropriate that we were all going to see it,
together. We popped popcorn. My youngest nephew likes to add hard-shelled chocolates
to the popcorn, so I dumped some left-over Cadbury mini-eggs into the mix. My
oldest nephew—who is almost 15 and a genius with technology—helped to get the
DVD going in my dad’s (very complicated) Blue-Ray/DVD player.
The film
affected me as it has every time I have seen it: I felt sad, frustrated, angry
and even hopeful for the fate and future of these magnificent animals. This
time, I was able to watch Blackfish through
the eyes of two youngsters who didn’t know anything about the film or the
ongoing campaign to end captivity of dolphins and whales. Although my sister
and her boys have seen orca in the wild, the kids have never seen them perform
at a marine park.
Within
the first few minutes of the movie, the younger boy started to ask questions
and react to what he was watching: a dark screen, and then audio from the 9-1-1
calls start coming in. Someone is requesting emergency assistance to Shamu Stadium
because a female trainer is being attacked by a killer whale. “Wait. Did that
guy say the whale just ate her?” My
nephew wanted to know, his eyes big as saucers.
Later,
in another scene, trainers are shown interacting with some orca. Happy music is
playing in the background; the audience is cheering, my nephew is smiling. “Mommy,
can we go to SeaWorld?” I must have grimaced, because the next question he had
was whether the park was a good or bad place for the animals to be living in.
My sister replied, “Watch the movie and decide for yourself.”
By
the end of the movie, we had watched fishermen capture and separate orca calves
from their families to become stars in shows at marine parks. We had listened
to interviews with biologists and former trainers about behavior of captive
versus wild orca. We heard the trainers’ anecdotes about their interactions
with the orca they worked with and how they felt about that work then and now.
We had watched video analyses of the grief reactions observed in a couple of captive
female orca whose calves had been taken away from them to perform at other
parks. We had seen clips of accidents in which some trainers emerged from the
training pool with lacerations, broken limbs and almost drowned. My older
nephew observed sardonically that a bloodied trainer who was shown smiling and
waving into the camera was doing this because he was “happy to be alive.” He
added, “It wasn’t very surprising that when you keep a predator in a very
stressful situation around humans, that people get hurt!”
When images of
Tilikum’s family tree flashed on the screen and indicated that this orca had
sired more than half of the orca in SeaWorld’s collection, both of the boys
said in unison, “That isn’t good.”
Everyone
in my home audience finally breathed a sigh of relief and smiled when several
of the former trainers go whale-watching and finally see wild orca, swimming
free in the ocean. I was interested and ultimately gratified to observe how my
sister and her sons reacted to what they saw in the film. Of course, the
questions I had had about their reactions as a hypnotherapist (and observer of
human behavior) were: How and why did they react to Blackfish the way they did? Did anyone—and if so, who—influence these
reactions?
I
will address these issues in my next blog.
Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in
Southern California. She graduated with honors from the
Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about
Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
© 2014
