Babe - a 1995 film directed by Chris Noonan and produced by the great George Miller about a pig who grows up in an uncommon arrangement and learns that she may have an unprecedented skill that challenges norms surrounding a pig's role on the farm.
Okja - a 2017 Netflix film by now Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho about a girl named Mija who tries to save her dear friend, a genetically engineered superpig, after the corporation who created it comes to collect.
PIGGY PROLOGUE
Pigs are fat, sweaty, and stupid. That's why we use their name as an insult for slobs. We weaponize 'pig' as a denigrating term against that most hated of genders, men, and that most hated of professions, police officer. Pigs are just about only good for the delicious meat that gets stripped from their bones. Right?
Turns out pigs are not fat; they are naturally lean when not overfed by humans. Pigs are not sweaty; they are incapable of sweating, which is why they wallow in mud to cool down. And pigs are not stupid; they are smarter than any other domesticated animal, with more training potential than even cats and dogs.
The discrepancy between the reality of pigs and our cultural consciousness of them is enormous, and it speaks to the power of culture to warp reality itself. We keep dogs and cats as pets and friends, so it is imperative that we think less of pigs as we slaughter them by the billions (!) annually. All of this appears to us to be the natural order of things, but that natural order is manufactured.
Babe and Okja are movies about pigs who are trying not to get eaten. Both films encourage us to look past common sense to find empathy for those who need it, even across species. But they are coming at this message from inverse orientations. This piece compares the humanist individualist ideology of Babe to the post-humanist communitarian ideology of Okja. The lives of animals is one of the great philosophical problems of our age, and these two films represent very different ways of looking at one aspect-- the mass killing of pigs.
HUMAN ANIMALS
Babe humanizes animals.
This is natural for a talking animal storybook fable targeted especially at children. Between the charismatic voice actors, the impeccable animal actors, and the flawless integration of expressive animatronics, we can't help but love Babe and the other farm animals.
Babe surprises us by being harsher than most talking animal movies. The film's central concern revolves around Babe grappling with her mortality. From the opening scene of separation from her doomed mother, to her dawning understanding that pigs are raised to be eaten, to the moment she stares into the barrel of a shotgun, director Chris Noonan never flinches away from the disturbing realities of farm life. These tone shifts hit hard after silly scenes of banter and hijinks. As with all good dramatic storytelling, hijinks have significant consequences.
So we have the story of a pig in existential crisis, as she learns more and more about her assigned lot in the farmer's ecosystem. As a way to process this trauma, Babe strives to become something more to the community than just a prospective meal. The filmmaking is so sharp and the characters so endearing that we can root for Babe wholeheartedly even as our bodies are digesting this afternoon's ham sandwich. In a way, the movie lets us off the hook of this contradiction, which we'll get to a bit later.
Okja does something different. Okja animalizes humans.
Okja, unlike Babe, is brought to life with subtly expressive CGI. The gestural relationship between Okja and her human companion Mija makes us fall in love with them immediately. The movie doesn't belabor the point-- the opening twenty minutes are more than enough to get us invested in the peril to come.
The focus of Okja is not the humanity of the superpig; Okja's empathy and ingenuity are established quickly and without question. The film focuses on the depravity, venality, greed, and basest instincts of the humans that inhabit the rest of the world (America, specifically). This is appropriate because Okja is much more biting satire than cozy children's movie. Okja advances its commentary by fashioning its American characters as over the top cartoons, like Tilda Swinton's double performance as CEO sisters, or Jake Gyllenhaal's spastic "animal-loving" television star. Okja presents the relationship between a little girl and a big pig as the only earnest and resonant thing in a sea of hollow and desperate relations of capital. It's not about elevating animals to our level. It's about ripping away the notion that we were superior in the first place.
This contrast is revealed in the different ways each film treats the act of consuming. When the Hoggett family slaughters a duck for Christmas dinner, the farm animals crowd around the window to watch the feast. The behavior of the humans appears grotesque to the animals, frivolity surrounding an altar of death. But the cinematography contrasts that grotesquerie by making the meat, held adoringly on a platter, look gobsmackingly delicious. The animals look upon this horrific but holy scene with a combination of queasiness and awe, as if they are witnessing a blood ritual of the gods. It is simultaneously completely understandable and far beyond their comprehension. The humans are their overlords, and they demanded this sacrifice on the holiest of holidays.
Okja's scene of consumption does away with the mythic culture and warmth of sharing a meal. CEO Lucy Mirando is tasting a sample of her company's new superpig jerky, and insists that her right hand man Frank share this moment with her. There is nothing glorious, cultural, traditional, or holy about this act of eating. Just two human animals chewing processed meat like cows eating cud, a shot that lingers for an uncomfortable amount of time. They do not laugh together, they do not smile, their vacant stares are only broken by occasional comments about how good of a product this meat is going to be.
So if humanizing animals and animalizing humans both level the playing field, what is the fundamental difference between these approaches?
SOME PIG
Babe starts the movie as just another pig in a commodified mass, and ends the film as a pig who has become something special. Okja does this in reverse-- it begins with a pig that is special, until it gets subsumed in a corporate system that funnels it inevitably into an anonymous mass killing field.
Both morals are about seeing past the delicious fleshy surface of these creatures, but the inversion is important. Babe's entire arc is about his uniqueness. This is the most common plot hinge for children's movies-- a weirdo loner is ostracized for what makes them special, until they can demonstrate to their community that it is exactly those unique qualities which make them valuable. There is a troubling subtext to this individualist ideology. Babe manages to demonstrate to the kind Farmer Hoggett that she is no ordinary pig; she is especially smart, and even capable of herding sheep. Yet the question remains... what about the 'ordinary' pigs? The pigs that don't have the wherewithal to command sheep? Do those pigs deserve the blade?
Okja upends the rugged individualism of the American Dream. Rather than a character transcending their surface to be seen as special, we see characters who are defined by their surface, and thereby dominated, exploited, and capitalized upon. Every drop of specialness is commodified, from Mija's earnestness, to Okja's superb physical health, to Animal Expert Johnny Wilcox's long-tainted love of animals. Only brands have power here, and the corporate bottom line destroys all humanity. At the end of the film, Mija doesn't prove her or Okja's worth to anyone... despite her heroic tenacity and willpower, she only manages to save her friend's life by purchasing her in a financial transaction-- she exchanges a golden facsimile of a pig that is worth more than the real thing.
The heroic climax of Babe makes for warm'n'fuzzy entertainment, but it is both naïve and insidious. Exceptionalism cannot be the response to exploitation; only collective action that rewrites the social fabric itself can liberate us from the cycles of violence that we perpetuate.
THE PATRIARCH
To grow up one must topple the patriarch. Learn that God is dead. Or, as Jesus himself put it, in order to be a true disciple you must hate your father and mother. When Mija's grandfather deceives her by selling Okja back to the company that created her, she learns the hard way that the patriarch cannot protect her. He tries to make amends by buying Mija a golden pig, a cruel joke of a replacement that replaces Mija's friendship with vulgar exchange value.
Mija's grandfather is not the only patriarch to cast a long shadow over the film. Tilda Swinton's characters are two CEO sisters who seemingly ping pong ownership of the Mirando Corporation back and forth based on who is better suited to lead at the moment. These two characters both speak with begrudging respect for how much of a bastard their father was-- 'hell of a businessman though.' Nancy Mirando attempts to channel her father's brutality, whereas Lucy tries to reinvent herself as a hip, friendly eco-CEO. Both are ultimately trapped and shaped by their father's legacy. They are the good cop and bad cop of the capitalist order, cheerful colonists, oppressive tyrants.
In Okja the father figure is demystified, and Mija realizes that she must forge her own path. God is dead but the system persists on the illusion of his potency.
Not so with Babe... God is very much alive. Babe has two father figures, in fact, and both of them are fundamentally good. Initially when Babe violates what is appropriate for her species, the sheepdog Rex reacts aggressively. But once Rex is symbolically castrated (muzzled) by the true patriarch of the farm, and once he comes to understand the good that Babe can do in this new role, he is converted to a warm and helpful mentor.
The true patriarch is Farmer Hoggett, a wise and beneficent man who holds life and death in his hands. He decides whether Babe is food, amusement, worker, or family based on the pig's aptitude. The responsibilities of his role as arbiter of life and death also demand that he be cruel when the time comes, as demonstrated when he nearly shoots Babe for supposedly killing a sheep.
In Babe the cruelty of the patriarch is portrayed as justified and necessary to preserve the order of things, but in Okja such violence is chaotic and arbitrary. Even the leader of the 'good guys' brutally beats his comrade for betraying the spirit of the cause. Capitalism demands these blood sacrifices, both practical and absurd. The major difference is that Babe justifies this world, whereas Okja challenges it.
As fables tend to do, Babe gives a mythological impression that there is a natural order of things which must be obeyed. We all have our role to play, and only the truly special can transcend their position in the social order. But when you apply the universal morality of a fable to the particular mechanisms of a sociopolitical system like the capitalist mass production of meat, you conjure the lie that this political structure is the eternal truth, one which we must subject ourselves to in order to be properly human.
If we are to discredit the patriarch, we must also realize that our humanity is not the sacred justification we thought it was. This is the crux of the Babe / Okja divergence. Babe postulates a world that is only worth what humans can take; Okja shows that the most humane act of all is to dismantle humanity, cease to exert dominance over nature, and learn to live in communion. The crushing truth of Okja is that the actions of one person, even one so spirited as Mija, cannot topple abusive social systems. At the end of the film, Mija must solemnly walk away from the killing fields having accomplished her mission, but also leaving countless superpigs unsaved. It is there, however, that we see the film's purest gesture of hope-- two superpigs squeezing a baby through the electrified fence in an effort to save a single life. Perhaps future generations can do better.
Although we can hear Babe's words, the farmer can never know what Babe has to say. Just the opposite with Okja-- she may not speak to us directly, but she whispers lovingly in the ear of one who has chosen to listen.
Ratings
Babe: 4
Okja: 3
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