First and foremost, Blackfish, the 2013 documentary from Gabriela Cowperthwaite, makes me regret visiting Sea World when I was nine years old.
More importantly as a documentary, Blackfish exposes a large tourist attraction as little more than a shady zoo for aquatic life and humans alike. Orca whales are the main attraction in both the documentary Sea World. In particular, Blackfish focuses on the 12,000 pound orca, Tilikum. A larger than life whale with sperm worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tilikum was captured in 1982 as a calf and brought to Sea World to grow alongside the audience looking to watch whales perform and get splashed in the process.
Tilikum is also the central figure in the February 2010 death of trainer Dawn Brancheau. Tragically, Brancheau was dragged underwater and drowned during a show. Subsequently, her death set off investigations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) into the safety of trainers at Sea World. In 2012, a judge ruled that trainers were not permitted to be in the water with orcas during shows, although Sea World has appealed this ruling.
In addition to Brancheau’s tragic death is the shameful that Sea World has responded to it, placing the blame on Brancheau for having her ponytail too long. Unfortunately, this is microcosm of the ignorance with which Blackfish indicts Sea World. According to the film and handful of former trainers who are interviewed throughout, the trainers have no formal training in any sort of marine-biology discipline. Rather, they are skilled as trainers, but not in aquatic life. The testaments about the aquatic creatures’ long, healthy lives in captivity are inaccurate. While the company line is that whales in the wild live to about twenty five years old, this totem of fiction is debunked when it’s revealed that free whales often live to seventy-five or one-hundred years old. More disturbingly, the trainers’ lack of knowledge allows them to believe that when orcas aggressively lunge or nip at their trainers it is just an occupational hazard, as opposed to a symptom of deeper problems with the whales being held in captivity.
Blackfish goes beyond creating a narrative about evil humans and benevolent whales. Rather, they depict the whales as aggressive creatures belonging in the wild. The viral video of three orcas methodically forcing a seal from a sheet of ice so that they can eat it for lunch is featured in its entirety. At the same time, the orca is illustrated as close to human, with a heightened sense of emotions, intelligence, and reasoning that rivals those of its human captors. More than just illustrating that the orca has feelings, Blackfish demonstrates how orcas focus on family, with the offspring never leaving their mothers throughout their lives. No more is this painfully shown than when the calves are taken from their mothers during an expedition to capture young orcas in Puget Sound, or when Sea World management decides to separate the mother and calf. In these scenes, the grief is palpable, and the fishermen and managements’ reactions become inhuman.
And it’s with this exposition of events in Puget Sound that Blackfish limns the entire process as a veritable slave trade, where the captor poaches the young and strong, keeps them in “20’ x 30’ dark modules,” “where they spend 2/3 of their lives.” In tandem, the trainers become indoctrinated with the fictions that captivity is better for the whales and that the “70+ killer whale / trainer accidents” is just an unfortunate occupational hazard.
Blackfishis necessary, not just for those who follow PETA, denounce the wearing of fur, or prefer Birkenstocks and canvas belts. Blackfish is an expose on the relationship between corporations and their employees, a fine look at how we gauge humanity.