Going Where No White Man Has Gone Before Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies Michael Fuchs “Of course you will. You’re white. You can do anything.” Indian foreman Abdullah to Irish engineer John Henry Patterson The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) In 1898, two maneless male lions obstructed the construction of the Uganda Railway and, hence, the progress of the British Empire in Africa. Workers believed that the lions were reincarnations of native chiefs trying to stop the railway from penetrating their land. This article draws on this idea of man-eaters as stand-ins for colonized and racialized human Others’ resistance to colonialism and discusses five movies featuring animal monsters, The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Anaconda (1997), Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004), Prey (2006), and Rogue (2007). Set in various former colonies, from South America to Australia, the films not only reveal the foundations shared between Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism, but also spotlight the social and environmental cruelties which have been perpetrated in the name of capitalism. In 1896, the British started to construct a railway line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Five years later, the line was completed, incurring costs of about £7.2 million (close to £1 billion in 2020 pounds), about £5.5 million of which were covered by the British government (Hill 1961: 422). Due to its prohibitive cost and numerous difficulties and delays, the construction of the railway was considered a “gigantic folly” during its time (Henry Labouchère in UK Parliament 1900). Officially, 2,498 men died (Wolmar 2009: 187); there were constant “quarrels and fights” between Hindu and Muslim workers (Patterson 1907: 51); hands repeatedly tried to kill British AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0020 Michael Fuchs 198 officers (Patterson 1907: 56-60); and the project failed to achieve the lofty goal of curbing the Arab slave trade in East Africa (McDermott 1893: 185- 189; Umbricht 1989: 8). However, the arguably “most interesting story” (Robins 1961: xi) took place between March and December 1898 when two maneless male lions repeatedly attacked the camps. Workers in Tsavo “were quite convinced that the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs had taken this form [i.e., lions] in order to protest against a railway being made through their country” (Patterson 1907: 21). To be sure, colonialist discourse fashioned “a resemblance between native and animal” in order to reinforce “the supposed gulf between coloniser and colonised” (Miller 2012: 2), which “helped justify imperial land seizure, eugenics, and other ‘civilizing projects,’” as “violence was enacted against colonized human beings through the differentiating logic of animalization, racialization, and dehumanization” (Deckha 2012: 539). The racialized and colonized human Others accordingly seemed to acknowledge the marginalization they shared with nonhuman Others, as they viewed the lions as symbols of rebellion against colonial oppression. Whereas the British Empire was driven by capitalist principles and thus committed to the cheapening of nature (Moore 2015: 62-79), the lions staged an uproar in an attempt to put an end (rather: a momentary end) to colonialism. Hence, the story of the Tsavo lions spotlights that “the very ideology of colonisation is […] one where anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism are inseparable” (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 5). After all, John Henry Patterson, who was sent to East Africa to build a bridge across the Tsavo River for the railway and eventually slew the lions, “f[ought] for the triumph of Western technology and persist[ed] against a hostile, cruel environment” (Reichart- Burikukiye 2012: 66). This article will explore these ideas by surveying a selection of films produced since the mid-1990s in which monstrous animals interfere in colonial and neo-colonial endeavors. I will focus on movies, as film “is the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene” (Fay 2018: 4). The discourse surrounding the Age of Man is relevant to colonialism because scholars have established various histories of the Anthropocene, this “loose, shorthand term for all the new contexts and demands - cultural, ethical, aesthetic, philosophical and political - of environmental issues that are truly planetary in scale” (Clark 2015: 2). One of these histories locates the start of the epoch in 1610 and views global trade and colonialism as two of the Anthropocene’s driving processes (Lewis & Maslin 2015). To return to film, cinema “makes the familiar world strange to us” by transforming material reality “into an unhomely image” (Fay 2018: 3). Jennifer Fay evokes the uncanny quality of film here, for “[g]hosts have been with cinema since its first days” (Leeder 2015: 4). Similarly, monstrous animals have been a mainstay on the silver screen at least since King Kong (1933). Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 199 Monsters such as Kong “ask us why we have created them” (Cohen 1996: 20). According to David Quammen, animal monsters - and potentially dangerous predators, in particular - tap into a kind of human evolutionary memory: apex predators have always frightened and fascinated hominids (2003). As a matter of fact, sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich has argued that the constant threat posed by large carnivores influenced “every aspect of human evolution” (1997: 56). Fictional encounters with monstrous animals accordingly evoke an earlier stage in human evolution, which civilization seeks to suppress (Fuchs 2015: 39-40). These encounters, as Mathias Clasen has explained, provide “a jolting, visceral reminder of a biological truth” (2017: 104) - that for “most of their history, extinct and living hominids have represented little more than a vulnerable, slow moving, bipedal source of protein” for large predators (Kerbis Peterhans & Gnoske 2001: 8). Approaching the question of animal monsters’ meaning from a different vantage point, Andrew Tudor has suggested that they function as cultural projection screens which reflect “unanticipated consequence[s] of human activit[ies]” (1989: 61). In the films discussed in this article, monstrous animals try to stop colonial expansion, the uncontrolled extraction of resources, the extermination of wildlife, and the reckless exploitation of labor and thus bring with them “echoes of the land’s resistance” (Rooks 2020: 139). The affiliation between monstrous animals and colonized and racialized human Others across Anglophone cinemas and across a variety of former colonies thus allows us to rethink “transnational circuits of power and identity […] within the circuits of imperial biopower” (Ahuja 2009: 556). The Lions That Stopped the British Empire Patterson’s book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures (1907) begins in a way that is characteristic of late nineteenth-/ early twentieth-century colonial tales, as Patterson describes the scenery: I was much struck with the strange beauty of the view which gradually opened out before me. Contrary to my anticipation, everything looked fresh and green, and an oriental glamour of enchantment seemed to hang over the island. […] As our steamer made its way to its anchorage, the romantic surroundings of the harbour of Mombasa conjured up visions of stirring adventures of the past, and recalled to my mind the many tales of reckless doings of pirates and slavers, which as a boy it had been my delight to read. (1907: 1-4) This passage would offer quite some material to unpack, but for the present purposes, two aspects are of particular significance: Patterson imagines the voyage to East Africa as (a) a travel back in time and (b) a decidedly fan- Michael Fuchs 200 tastic journey. Concerning the latter point, one should remember that Patterson wrote in a non-fiction genre. The book’s paratexts repeatedly stress this point; for example, the preface emphasizes that “readers […] will be inclined to think that some of the incidents are exaggerated. I can only assure them that I have toned down the facts rather than otherwise, and have endeavoured to write a perfectly plain and straightforward account of things as they actually happened” (Patterson 1907: vii). However, the fantastic seeps into the narrative when Patterson mentions the “oriental glamour of enchantment” and surfaces more explicitly when he likens his experience to the dime novels of his youth. This interconnection between fictional and real-life adventures reveals “anxiety about the waning of opportunities for heroic adventure” (Brantlinger 1988: loc. 4704). After all, “terra incognita disappeared from European maps” in the Victorian age (Phillips 1997: 7; italics in original), which “led many writers to seek [adventure] in the unreal world of romance, dreams, [and] imagination” (Brantlinger 1988: loc. 4704). The fantastic undercurrent in Patterson’s account also comes to the fore when he likens reaching Mombasa to traveling to the past. European imperial projects of the nineteenth century assumed that “modernity […] became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it” (Chakrabarty 2000: 7; italics in original). In the colonialist discourse, European progress situated other cultures in an earlier stage of human evolution. This “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983) legitimated colonial ventures, as colonialism was believed to be for the benefit - the advancement - of humankind. The “persistent and systemic tendency to place” non-European cultures “in a Time other than the present” (Fabian 1983: 31; italics and capitalization in original), “consigned Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty 2000: 8). In the nineteenth century, railways promised the “capitalist emancipation from the limits of organic nature” (Schivelbusch 1986: 7) and “expanded the limits of the civilized world” (Neilson & Otte 2006: 1). The railway was both a product of modernity and transported modernity across the world, but it also functioned as a means to differentiating between European civilization and other cultures’ backwardness. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo taps into this “railway mystique” (Koponen 1994: 300): “It must be remembered that at the time these events occurred,” Patterson remarks in the preface, “the conditions prevailing in East Africa were very different from what they are to-day.” He continues, “The railway, which has modernised the aspect of the place and brought civilisation in its train, was then only in the process of construction, and the country through which it was being built was still in its primitive savage state, as indeed, away from the railway, it still is” (1907: vii-viii). However, as work on the bridge across the Tsavo River was underway, “[t]wo most voracious and insatiable man-eating lions appeared upon the Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 201 scene, and for over nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and all those connected with it in the vicinity of Tsavo” (Patterson 1907: 20). The lions became increasingly adept at snatching humans, even dragging workers out of their tents at night. Patterson originally indicated that the lions killed “no less than twenty-eight Indian coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate African natives of whom no official record was kept” (1907: 106). In an account written on the occasion of selling the lions’ skins to the Chicago Field Museum, the number increased dramatically, as he claimed that the animals “killed and devoured […] one hundred and thirty-five Indian and African artisans and laborers employed in the construction of the Uganda Railway” (1925: 89). 1 While the fabled figure of 100+ human deaths has enshrined the two lions among the most skilled man hunters in modern history (e.g. Ludwig 2012), recent studies suggest that they killed no more than 72 humans, with about 35 kills being the most likely scenario (Yeakel et al. 2009: 19042). The Tsavo lions’ attacks on humans have repeatedly inspired fiction, including several cinematic treatments. The film that arguably stays closest to the source material is The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In fact, even some of the more unbelievable scenes in the movie, such as (fictional) Patterson’s (Val Kilmer) rifle failing when he stares one of the lions into the eyes and some workers’ inability to shoot a trapped lion from a few feet away, were inspired by episodes in Patterson’s book. Since the movie draws on Man-Eaters of Tsavo, The Ghost and the Darkness is very much aware of its role in re-fashioning a late-nineteenth-century story, as evidenced by its opening sequence. As the camera follows Patterson into a building, Samuel (John Kani), an African worker and Patterson’s right-hand man in Tsavo, begins to narrate: This is the most famous true African adventure. Famous because what took place at Tsavo never happened before. Colonel John Patterson was there when it began. A fine Irish gentleman. A brilliant engineer. He was my friend. My name is Samuel. I was there. Remember this: Even the most impossible parts of this story really happened. (Hopkins 1996) Beyond remediating the discourse of authenticity Patterson’s book engages in, the voiceover draws attention to the storytelling-in-progress and the pastness of the events that are about to unfold on the screen. Moreover, Samuel’s role as the narrator supports the notion that the story is an “African adventure” and (theoretically) allows Samuel to shape the story; as narrator, Samuel has a certain degree of agency, in contrast to the African 1 William John Ansorge (1899) reported a lion attack in the same region in October 1896. Likewise, when Ronald Preston reached the Tsavo River a few weeks before Patterson arrived, two men were quickly lost to lion attacks (Preston 1947). Michael Fuchs 202 hands and Indian laborers, whom the historical Patterson clearly considered inferior. At least, figuring Samuel as the narrator appears to grant him power; in fact, he is little more than a bystander to action put into mo-tion by the lions and Patterson and passive witness to the events unfolding. Moreover, the invisible narration of the camera frames Samuel’s narratorial voice. Whereas the physical manifestation of a narrator figure in the storyworld often emphasizes “the impossibility of equating the camera consciousness with a subjective narrator within the film” (Mroz 2012: 105- 106), in The Ghost and the Darkness, these two points of view converge. This aspect is crucial because the movie celebrates Patterson’s actions. By killing the lions, Patterson emerges as a white savior figure. As Matthew Hughey has explained, white saviorism “enables an interpretation of nonwhite characters and culture as essentially broken, marginalized, and pathological, while whites can emerge as messianic characters that easily fix the nonwhite pariah with their superior moral and mental abilities” (2014: loc. 66). Since the camera’s invisible narration absorbs Samuel’s voice, he implicitly applauds the white man’s destruction of the feline representatives of African nature, as well. By celebrating the obliteration of the rebellious beasts and Patterson’s heroics, the film communicates an important (and problematic) message. Even though a British character opines early on that the sole purpose of the Uganda Railway is “to protect the ivory trade; to make rich men richer” (Hopkins 1996), The Ghost and the Darkness depicts Patterson’s slaying of the lions in such a way that the film suggests the act were not driven by the need to continue the construction of the bridge in the service of colonial expansion and economic growth. Instead, Patterson’s determination to kill the beasts springs from his commitment to protect his workers and his ambition to be re-united with his wife and newborn child. Patterson is a benevolent colonizer who - true to the spirit of the 1990s - preaches multiculturalism to the various ethnic groups employed in the project. 2 He epitomizes the ‘benevolent empire’ that seeks to spread ‘civilization’ - and if that venture returns a profit, even better. In the end, the film erases the critique of the imperial enterprise that is expressed by human characters and embodied by the monstrous animals. The Ghost and the Darkness thus offers an interpretation of colonial history that has been “whitewashed in order to promote imperialist nostalgia” (Gilroy 2005: 3). In this way, the movie seems to have anticipated the statement by then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a 2005 trip to Africa that “the days of Britain 2 Slavoj Žižek’s assessment of multiculturalism seems rather pertinent here: “[T]he ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people - as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’ That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism” (1997: 44). Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 203 having to apologize for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologize for it” (qtd. in Pilger 2007). This connection to the more recent past is also established through the introduction of a fictional American character, Charles Remington (Michael Douglas), whom “every man who’s ever hunted has heard of” (Hopkins 1996). His name evokes the Old West by referring to both artist Frederic Remington and the Remington Arms Company (which was founded by a cousin of Frederic’s), one of America’s iconic firearm manufacturers. While Frederic Remington has been called “the epic mythmaker of the American West” (Watkins 2008: 232) because he recovered an image of the Old West that was infused with nostalgia at the end of the nineteenth/ early twentieth century (cf. Nemerov 1995), firearms emblematize white domination of indigenous populations and the natural world, calling to mind that “the violence of colonization [was] justified through the assumed violence of the colonized” (Dovey 2009: 29). If one combines these references to these icons of the West with Remington’s Southern character in the film, the fact that he views Africa as “the last good place” (Hopkins 1996) implies a longing for something that never was. In addition, the fact that the U.S.-American Remington lends the British Empire a helping hand in East Africa draws on historical reality, as American companies were involved in the construction of the Uganda Railway (cf. Tuffnell 2020). This connection between the British Empire and the fledgling American Empire takes on additional significance. As the film concludes, Samuel informs the audience, “If you want to see the lions today, you must go to America” (Hopkins 1996). Whereas subduing the rebellious lions and completing the “Lunatic Express” (Miller 1971) more than a hundred years ago was testament to the power of the British Empire, another empire incorporated the lions’ remains in 1925 when Patterson sold them across the Atlantic. In this way, the movie not simply hints at the historical transition from colonial powers to informal empires, but also emphasizes continuities between the British Empire and the American Empire and suggests that the contemporary Empire (Hardt & Negri 2000) is an heir to a “continuous historical process” (Krueger 2002: xi) which centers on the exploitative, extractive, oppressive, and destructive practices characteristic of capitalism. Avoiding and Returning the Imperial Gaze In addition to functioning as a vehicle for colonial expansion, railways helped implement a particular “way of seeing” (Berger et al. 1972) the colonies; a particular visual relationship between the imperial powers and faraway colonies. Describing his journey on a train to the railway head in Tsavo, Patterson wrote, Michael Fuchs 204 For twenty miles after reaching the mainland, our train wound steadily upwards through beautifully wooded, park-like country, and on looking back out of the carriage windows we could every now and again obtain lovely views of Mombasa and Kilindini, while beyond these the Indian Ocean sparkled in the glorious sunshine as far as the eye could see. (1907: 12-13) This passage acknowledges that the carriage windows frame the colonial world. Looking at the world outside becomes akin to looking at a painting (or, in more contemporary parlance, a television screen or computer monitor), as the windows separate the relatively safe and civilized space of the train from barbaric and wild - but beautiful - Africa. E. Ann Kaplan has explained that “looking relations” such as this “are never innocent. They are always determined by the cultural systems people […] bring with them” (1997: 6). Indeed, this “colonial gaze distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at” (Rieder 2008: 7). The Ghost and the Darkness emphasizes this “practice of looking” (Sturken & Cartwright 2018) and its related politics early on. As Patterson and Angus Starling (Brian McCardie), a Scotsman sent to Africa to help Patterson build the bridge, are riding on a train, the camera captures the natural abundance and natural beauty of Africa. The colonial gaze reduces the landscape and the animals roaming the savannah “into objects and renders them passive, inert, manageable, and controllable” (Ivakhiv 2013: 3). This controlling look is accompanied by knowledge about the African continent: While Starling cherishes the view, Patterson explains that giraffes “only sleep five minutes a day,” that female spotted hyenas are bigger than the males because the latter “eat the young,” and that hippos “fart through their mouths” (Hopkins 1996). Patterson’s knowledge about Africa testifies to the significance of knowledge production to the imperial project: “[R]ecording the Empire, making a vast record of it using the new knowledges,” Thomas Richards has explained, “bec[ame] tantamount to controlling it. […] The familiar Victorian project of positive knowledge divided the world into little pieces of fact” (1993: 6). However, the lions cannot be controlled, as they “refuse[] easy categorization” (Cohen 1996: 6): “It’s not that simple,” Patterson notes in the film, for “[t]hese lions are not like lions” (Hopkins 1996; my emphasis). Within the diegetic world, the lions’ exceptional role pertains to both their atypical behavior and the onto-epistemological problems caused by being incapable of properly placing them (i.e., are they actual lions or ghosts? ). Notably, the lions’ opposition against established systems within the Western worldview also takes a visual dimension. Describing the visual relations between humans and animals, John Berger concludes that “animals are always the observed” (1991: 16). However, the Tsavo lions also repeatedly look back at their human observers. Moreover, the camera allows viewers glimpses through the animals’ eyes. These point-of-view shots “signif[y] Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 205 some type of negative vision” (Galloway 2006: 46). This ‘negative vision’ is highlighted by visual effects which help distinguish between the animals’ vision and the human (or, rather: camera’s) point of view. This difference between the lion’s and the human’s point of view becomes particularly significant in a scene preceding the killing of the first Tsavo lion. Patterson takes position on a “Machan,” which the historic Patterson described as follows: It “was about twelve feet high and was composed of four poles stuck into the ground and inclined towards each other at the top, where a plank was lashed to serve as a seat” (1907: 87-88). Once the sun had set, Patterson quickly understood that the construction was anything but secure, for “the lion began to stealthily stalk” him (1907: 89). The Ghost and the Darkness remediates the tension of this episode by constantly switching between Patterson’s point of view and the lion’s. Whereas Patterson is effectively blind in the pitch-black African night and nervously tries to spot the lion or get some sort of an idea as to where the beast might be, the lion is well aware of where Patterson is and what he does at all times. Through the lion’s eyes, the white man - despite his rifle - is a fragile piece of meat. In his essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2002), Jacques Derrida reflects on his cat seeing him naked. One of his conclusions is that the cat’s “bottomless gaze” exposes “the naked truth of every gaze, given that that truth allows me to see and be seen through the eyes of the other, in the seeing and not just seen eyes of the other” (2002: 381; italics in original): The recognition of the animal’s gaze incites inquiries into the nature of the visual relationship between human and the Other. Indeed, after their second confrontation with the lions, the lion-hunting Masai come to understand that the big cats are, in fact, “not lions” (Hopkins 1996; my emphasis) at all. Ceci n’est pas un lion: This is not a lion, but rather a symbol; a symbol, which is anchored in the historical reality of about three dozen eaten humans; a symbol whose material manifestations still haunt humankind, as lions continue to prey on humans. 3 However, as Derrida implies, by imagining to see oneself through the eyes of another (or: an Other), one begins to wonder about oneself and one’s role in depicting and imagining the Other. In short, Derrida asks his readers to shift their perspectives and perceptions. The star-studded adventure horror film Anaconda (1997) explores this question in more detail, as the movie focuses on looking and the technologies used to make looking possible. 4 In the opening minutes of Anaconda, filmmaker Terry Flores (Jennifer Lopez) and Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz) discuss Cale’s search for 3 In Tanzania, for example, lions attack humans about once a week (cf. Kushnir et al. 2014). 4 Jonathan Burt (2005) has explained that ‘looking’ is an activity, whereas ‘seeing’ is the passive reception of sensory input. Michael Fuchs 206 the lost Shirishama tribe in the Amazon, which Flores is expected to capture on film. “You get me there and I’ll shoot it,” she remarks (Llosa 1997). Although Cale’s thirst for knowledge (and renown) drives the expedition, Anaconda exposes the documentary film’s complicity in the project of discovering the native tribe, which is rendered explicit when (the tellingly British) host Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde) introduces the narrative thrust of Terry’s documentary film: Our adventure begins 1,000 miles from the mouth of the mighty Amazon, deep in the heart of the rainforest. From here, we will travel by river barge up through shallow tributaries and unexplored backwaters in search of the elusive people of the mist: the Shirishama tribe - one of the last great mysteries of the rainforest. (Llosa 1997) The film crew’s willingness to take risks repeatedly gets them into trouble, such as when Gary (Owen Wilson) and Denise (Kari Wuhrer) venture into the jungle at night to “get some wild sound” (Llosa 1997), only to be chased back to the boat by a wild boar. Despite the various dangers they encounter, despite warning signs erected by the native populations, and despite a literal “wall that’s blocking [their] way down [the] river” (Llosa 1997), the crew advances deeper into the jungle. After Cale is stung in the throat by a large wasp, his drive to deepen knowledge about the Amazon tribes is replaced by Paul Serone’s (Jon Voight) hunt for the large snake which has started to thin out their numbers. This change in motivation manifests only on the level of the movie Anaconda, not the documentary-within-the-film, as its production is momentarily suspended. The giant anaconda - in combination with Serone’s Ahab-like urge to chase it - thus prevents the expedition from finding, studying, and filming the Shirishama. Once Terry and her cameraman Danny (Ice Cube) have killed the snake, a group of Shirishama appears. The human beings native to the region are depicted in the most stereotypical way imaginable: ghost-like, they emerge from the mist on boats apparently made by hollowing out tree trunks; the men wear loincloths; and both men and women wear necklaces and earrings that denote ‘native tribe.’ In this way, the native population is prepared for visual consumption as the film comes to a close. In these concluding moments, Serone’s earlier statement that the crew should not consider him “a monster” because he “didn’t eat” the ship’s captain takes on particular resonance (Llosa 1997). Besides his apparent disregard for human life, one of the traits which renders Serone monstrous is that he is willing to make money by removing the snake from its natural habitat and hence “upsetting the ecological balance of th[e] river” (Llosa 1997). The snake, however, resists and kills him, thereby punishing Serone’s various transgressions. Cale and the film crew, on the other hand, perform a dual role throughout the movie - both threatened subject and threatening subject. When Mateo (Vincent Castellanos) finds himself in the Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 207 anaconda’s deadly embrace, the degree to which the crew is threatened becomes manifest visually, as the captain becomes both the focal point of the spectacle of death and the object of the snake’s look. Yet when, in the final moments of the movie, Danny announces, “I’ll get the camera” (Llosa 1997), as the Shirishama appear, the filmmaking project not only becomes threatening to the native tribe’s way of life but also threatens to package their way of being-in-the-world into easily consumable images and narratives. Disrupting Exploration and Obstructing Resource Extraction While Anaconda primarily spotlights the production of images and gaining information from South America, the standalone sequel, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004), explicitly focuses on the extraction of a resource from a former colony. After an opening scene in the jungle of Borneo, the film moves to the concrete jungle of New York City. In a conference room, Gordon Mitchell (Morris Chestnut) and Jack Byron (Matthew Marsden) try to convince the board of the pharmaceutical company Wexler-Hall not to cancel their contract because an expedition has discovered an orchid that blooms for six months every seven years. The preliminary analysis of some samples “indicates the presence of a chemical […] that can significantly prolong cellular life” in the orchid (Little 2004). Since the Wexler-Hall board believes that the resultant drug might be “bigger than penicillin” and “bigger than Viagra” (Little 2004), they fund a trip to Borneo to collect orchids. The party’s drive to extract resources from the region extends far beyond the orchids, though. For example, when they come across a spider whose venom can paralyze humans, Gordon and Jack are quick to conclude that they “may have just discovered a valuable new anesthetic agent” which they can sell “to the highest bidder” (Little 2004). As it turns out, the orchid lives up to its promise. However, its life-extending ‘magic’ not only affects human cellular life, but also other members of the animal kingdom. And this is the idea Hunt for the Blood Orchid exploits: Reptiles grow throughout their entire life. Accordingly, if reptiles can get older, they also become bigger. In view of the movie’s title, it is not incredibly surprising that the expedition party discovers a group of giant anacondas guarding the orchids. The mere presence of animals native to South America on a Southeast Asian island could be said to point at the effects of globalization on ecosystems; however, such a reading would likely take interpretive freedom a little too far. Nevertheless, when Jack emphasizes the urgency of collecting the orchids, he highlights the consequences of globalization for the island: Waiting for seven years, until the orchids will bloom again, is not an option, as the entire region might have turned into “a giant rice paddy” (Little 2004). Jack’s delivery implies that his line is meant as an insult to low- Michael Fuchs 208 income countries, which cannot keep up with globalization, turn to agriculture and production, and blindly destroy other natural resources. Of course, such a simplistic view of globalization ignores both contemporary realities and historical processes that (co-)shaped the current situation. In Southeast Asia, the displacement of subsistence agriculture may be traced to commercial rice cultivation during colonial times (Chirico 2014: 421- 422), with plantation economies only taking shape toward the latter half of the nineteenth century (Kratoska 2008: 78). However, uneven as the power relations may have been “in favour of the colonising culture, such exchanges were […] often more complex in practice than th[e …] simple pattern of invasion, land-clearing and destruction” might suggest (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 8). Although Jack’s remark about Southeast Asia’s role in the global rice economy touches on the topic of globalization, the conscious destruction of the natural environment in an attempt to become part of global trade networks also raises the issue of humankind’s role on the planet. In this context, the charter boat’s captain, Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner), notes at one point: “Everything gets eaten out here. It’s the jungle” (Little 2004). The first sentence, of course, implies that humans are reduced to a source of protein in this environment. In this way, this short and poignant statement communicates two key messages. Western ‘civilization’ has manufactured an image of “ourselves as set apart [from the natural world] and special” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 16-17). In turn, this self-aggrandizing view has rendered the inhabitants of the Global North blind and deaf to their natural surroundings, which raises the potential threat of transgressing natural boundaries and limits they are blissfully unaware of. The late philosopher and ecofeminist Valerie Plumwood reflected on these issues years after a saltwater crocodile had attacked her in Kakadu National Park. During the confrontation, she (understandably) felt powerless. In part, this feeling of powerlessness was due to having entered a world she was aware of, but which she consciously ignored - she “was in a place that was not [her] own” ([1996] 2012a: 20). Although she knew that she was kayaking through ‘crocodile country’ and knew that she was surrounded by hundreds of reptiles, she did not view them as threats. However, she later came to grasp that by entering the crocodiles’ space, she had entered “a world in which we are all food” (2012b: 36). The Australian crocodile horror film Rogue (2007) perfectly illustrates these ideas. The narrative focuses on American travel journalist Pete McKell (Michael Vartan), who participates in a river cruise in Kakadu National Park. Tour guide Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell) announces early on that “[t]he Northern Territory is home to the biggest population of saltwater crocodiles in the world” (McLean 2007). When they pass a bigger boat, which offers one of these ‘jumping crocodile cruises,’ Kate’s group becomes a bit worried of crocodiles jumping into her boat. Clearly, the tourists perceive the salties as potentially dangerous animals. Whereas Kate initially Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 209 tries to calm down the tourists, she later emphasizes that the saltwater crocodile “is […] the most dangerous member of the crocodilian family. […] Croc can’t swallow you in one go, he will literally tear you to pieces” (McLean 2007). Although they seem aware of the risks, when they “stumble[] into [a crocodile’s] territory” (McLean 2007), the group are caught off-guard by the ways in which the ‘living dinosaur’ brutally challenges “the superior status of humans” (Aaltola 2002). Neil (Sam Worthington), a local, explains the situation: “Us being here, that’s gonna be driving him crazy. He’s gonna feel as if we’re moving in” (McLean 2007). 5 In other words, the group have not simply entered the crocodile’s territory; they have rather occupied it and want to make it theirs; they want to colonize the land. The crocodile responds in the only way he knows - through violence. By reducing human bodies to meat, the monstrous animal thus “provide[s …] us with a perspective that can help us to see ourselves in ecological terms” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 16). Stopping Touristic Exploitation Besides this ecological topic, Rogue addresses touristic exploration and exploitation. After all, the group trespasses into the crocodile’s territory on a tourist cruise. Indeed, the touristic invasion of the Northern Territory becomes an issue in the first few minutes of the movie, when Pete enters a backwoods general store. The owner explains, “A few years back, you’d be lucky if you saw any tourists up here at all. Too remote for most people. It’s changing pretty quickly; I can tell you” (McLean 2007). Despite its constant - albeit latent - presence in the background, Rogue never explores tourism in more detail, however. The 2006 lion horror film Prey is a different beast. Loosely inspired by the Tsavo man-eaters, the story centers on an American family on a business trip/ vacation in South Africa. Tom (Peter Weller) hopes that his young wife Amy (Bridget Moynahan) and his two kids from a previous wife, Jessica (Carly Schroeder) and David (Conner Dowds), will spend some quality time in Africa while he manages the construction of a nearby dam. On the second day of their journey, Tom goes to work while the other three family members take a safari tour. Their guide takes the tour off-road, as they can barely see any animals on the main road. During a toilet break, lions attack David and their guide and kill the guide. Amy, Jessica, and David barricade themselves in the ranger vehicle until Tom and the hired big-game hunter Crawford (Jamie Bartlett) discover them two days later. Crawford shoots 5 In the film’s opening scene, a saltwater crocodile (which is native to Australia - and parts of Southeast Asia) takes down a (feral) water buffalo, thereby transporting the topic of colonization into a different dimension of meaning. Michael Fuchs 210 one of the lions, but then gets quickly disposed of. In the end, Amy somehow manages to blow up the vehicle, with the male leader of the pride trapped inside. When discussing tourism, one must always remember that “[t]ourism takes place in the context of great inequality of wealth and power” (Nina Rao qtd. in Gonsalves 1993: 8). Indeed, the “view that modern tourism is an extension of colonialism (with all the attributes of a master-servant relationship” (Gonsalves 1993: 11) may be traced at least to Louis Turner and John Ash’s book The Golden Hordes (1975), in which they argue that once package tourism spread beyond Europe, tourism became “an agency for the consolidation of Empire” (1975: 58). As Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt have explained, “Both the characteristic First World ownership of much Third World tourism infrastructure and the origin of tourists from the First World have for many become an irresistible analogy of colonial and imperial domination” (2016: 58). This inequality and the (not-so-)latent colonialist imprint become manifest in the upper-class tourist lodge in which the Newmans reside. A secluded haven of civilization in the middle of the African wilderness, the lodge offers ‘traditional’ food and various performances of ‘Africanness,’ among others. On the first evening of their stay, the Newmans eat warthog roast for dinner. The scene taps into the semantic power of the “remarkably concentrated signifier” (Poole 1999: 3) that is food. By eating the warthog, the Newmans quite literally incorporate Otherness. Tellingly, when David tries the warthog, he concludes that it tastes like chicken. As the exotic food thus becomes an everyday meal, difference is flattened and absorbed. In fact, the Newmans (as stand-ins for tourists from the Global North) feed off difference in order to create experiences that they can base their identities on. As the hunter Crawford puts it: “You tourists - you come here and stay in your posh tents by the pool, and you go back, and you tell about your adventure stories” (Roodt 2006). In this context, Jessica’s vegetarianism and her attendant refusal to eat the warthog is significant, as she rejects consumption of ‘Africanness’ the other characters participate in. Likewise, on their way to the lodge, she is the only one not interested in the wildlife roaming the savannah. Her reaction to an elephant is laden with meaning: “So what? I’ve seen one at the zoo” (Roodt 2006). Similarly, when her dad offers her warthog, she remarks, “I don’t eat characters from The Lion King, especially not Pumbaa” (Roodt 2006). For Jessica, animals have found their habitat in zoos and Disney movies. In other words, the staging of animals in zoos and the representation of animals in film and television have become the primary reference points for what animals are and displaced actual, wild animals from her experience. The violent encounter with a pride of lions returns the material existence of wild animals to her life. At the same time, the Americans’ notion of a sheltered life collapses, as the lions make them understand that Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 211 humans live “in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (Grosz 2004: 2). When Jess and Amy are about to be “reduced to food” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 12), poachers shoot a charging female lion in the very last second. Since the two men do not respond to the women’s attempts to communicate, Amy becomes increasingly frightened. Prey suggests that she views the two black men as potential sexual predators: the first thing Amy does back in the car is put on another shirt, she asks Jessica to wear her jacket, and she remarks that she thought they “would be of greater interest” to the poachers (Roodt 2006). That Jessica convinces Amy that she “will be fine” (Roodt 2006) if she accompanies one of the poachers to a waterhole thus indicates either that the teenager is desperately naïve or that society has yet to ingrain racist stereotypes in her belief system. Beyond representing the threat of black male sexuality, the two poachers tap into other stereotypes of Africans - and the Global South, more generally. In particular, their participation in the illegal trade of endangered and protected species and the attendant disregard of animal life in order to earn money renders them complicit in the cheapening and exploitation of nature. Of course, this stereotypical representation simplifies matters. After all, “today’s African political economy” - and hence also these poachers’ lives - “is profoundly shaped by its colonial roots as well as the contemporary forces of neoliberalism and imperialism” (Wengraf 2018: 11). In view of this colonial imprint, the American tourists’ survival - while the poachers and other locals become lion food - suggests a longing for (neo-)colonialism; as if the Global South was dependent on the Global North to thrive. Opposing the System—Changing the System? Although Prey’s final moments suggest that other lions are still lurking in the high grass, in all of the films discussed in this article, the animal foes are killed. Of course, killing animals is the most extreme form of dominating them by taking control of their lives. The eradication of the monstrous animals hence reveals humankind’s “pathological belief in our ability to control the […] natural world” (Williston 2015: 35). The monstrous animals in these films, which try to stop various (neo-)colonial ventures, from the colonization of land and the extraction of resources to imposing the colonial gaze on the Other and the touristic exploitation of the Global South, expose the interconnections between capitalism and colonialism, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Notably, the monstrous animals might obstruct capitalist exploitation, but they do not succeed in dismantling the system. These symbols of rebellion accordingly do not suggest that capitalism and its side-effects of globalization, development, and progress can be bypassed, let alone stopped. Michael Fuchs 212 However, the monstrous animals spotlight the social and environmental cruelties which have been perpetrated in the name of capitalism. By turning the tables and (momentarily) turning humans into the hunted (if not even prey), the animal monsters suggest that “a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the human place in nature” requires the “interrogation of the category of the human itself and of the ways in which the construction of ourselves against nature […] has been and remains complicit in colonialist and racist exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day” (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 6). Problematically, the films (practically) erase (Rogue, Hunt for the Blood Orchid), sideline (The Ghost and the Darkness), and/ or stereotype (Anaconda, Prey) the (neo)colonized human Others. Through their affiliation with the monstrous animals, the human Others are relegated to “a borderlands between human and animal, a fraught zone of ambiguity, menace, and transgression” (King 2015: 24). 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