Popular Media and Animals by Claire Molloy (review)

The gaze of an animal has always had a strange, or uncanny, power over us, dramatically illustrated in a photograph (reproduced in the book) of Phoenix, a 13-day-old white calf, who looks directly at the viewer as if stepping into the spotlight. In her introduction to Popular Media and Animals, Claire Molloy elaborates that the story and photograph of Phoenix appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror in April 2001. During the UK government–ordered culling of over four million animals in response to a foot-and-mouth outbreak, the calf was regarded as a “symbol of hope for everyone who has suffered during this crisis” and subsequently received a reprieve personally issued by the prime minister after a campaign, mounted by the Daily Mirror, on her behalf (p. 3).

The fate of Phoenix, reflecting how the domestication process alters conditions for life and for living, foregrounds Michel Foucault’s description of biopolitics as “making live and letting die.”¹ Yet, biopolitical thought, as Cary Wolfe has recently pointed out, has been hesitant, even reluctant, to include animals within its purview. By showing how the representation of animals in the U.S. and UK popular media impacts their lives, Molloy’s book both pushes against the biopolitical frame that determines which animals can be granted legal protection and impels media studies to take a crucial step—beyond species lines.²

To be sure, media depictions of human/animal relationships must negotiate a dynamic and shifting set of dominant cultural beliefs about identity, science, and power. Like tectonic plates constantly crashing into one another, these beliefs both support and fracture a liberal-humanist tradition of caring for animals. Molloy discloses a binary opposition between reason and feeling that guides the debates about animal ethics explored throughout the book. For example, late-eighteenth-century media coverage of animal experimentation sided with the upper-middle-class ASPCA against vivisection, but then gave precedence to scientific research as an emblem of rationalized progress, which stigmatized protesters as overly sentimental and emphasized that protests were led prominently by women, in the mid-twentieth century. The controversy was then nationalized in postwar Britain; the Daily Mirror highlighted a campaign that pictured the country as a “nation of animal lovers” against animal abuse—a conflict heightened by reporting on animals stolen for research. Such an image is subsumed, however, by the media depiction of activists during the late twentieth century—in particular, in television crime dramas like Murder She Wrote and CSI—as eco-terrorists. That feminine stereotypes have worked both for and against activism (an ethos of caring versus extremism) troubles the status of our feelings for animals as somehow seen as natural or given.

And so, in chapter 3, “Stars: Animal Performers,” we are reminded that media representations of animals must refer, in some way, back to us. If the whiteness of Phoenix is a racial enabling of her celebrity status, the larger process of Hollywood-animal star-making depends on a camp sensibility—that is, a gender-, race-, and class-based rearticulation of the aesthetics of cinema.³ What that means, according to Molloy, is an emphasis on “artifice,” on “commodifying animals” and depicting “the animal star in human terms” (p. 46). Following the film careers of Fagan the lion and Bonzo the chimpanzee (who famously appeared with Ronald Reagan), Molloy notes that the camp sensibility could only forestall the question of authenticity for so long—invariably, an animal star would act not like a human, but like an animal.

As the book unfolds, Molloy turns the issue of representation back on media itself. Her grasp of the technical language of wildlife filmmaking, displayed in chapter 4, “Wild: Authenticity and Getting Closer to Nature,” underlines the ethical issues in constructing narratives using animals. According to a BBC filmmaker quoted in the chapter, what is “true to life” depends on “the accepted conventions of film-making” that are always open to interpretation (p. 65). So...