2008 Woodie Awards
Horsemen of a different color
Soheil Rezayazdi - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 7/9/07 Section: Arts
It's not just the sex. I love my horses. Adore them. Cherish them. Worship them … They just also happen to have giant penises.
This is the underlying logic prevalent in Zoo, an experimental documentary about a group of American men who share an atypical passion for animals. The haunting film uses audio interviews and lyrical re-enactments to explore the zoophile psyche and recount the story of a Seattle man who died from a perforated colon after having anal sex with a horse named Bullseye.
(Insert crude Seabiscuit / Mr. Ed / Secretariat joke, if you wish.)
Like many filmmakers and writers before him, director Robinson Devor attempts to humanize the monstrous. It's easy to write these men off as fringe-group deviants; it's a lot harder to listen to them as they ask themselves, "Why am I this way? There has to be a purpose."
The men lead relatively ordinary lives. One's an engineer. Another's a paramedic. They talk of living in "a classless society" on a farm in Washington, where they gather for a "potluck supper kind of thing" that often ends in videotaping sex with horses.
Though Devor doesn't justify the men or their orientation, he asks us to understand and empathize with them as animal lovers. To do this, he concentrates on the men rather than their actions - hate the sin, not the sinner. His footage features none of the gruesome, sleazy imagery you might expect from an indie shock-doc.
As creepy as it sounds, this is to the film's detriment. I'm sure Devor would argue that he left the men's videotapes out of Zoo in the name of good taste, but I suspect it was for another reason: It's pretty hard to construct a bleeding-heart case for tolerance if you actually show zoophiles in the act.
Plenty of films take this cop-out approach to taboo subject matters (The Woodsman on pedophilia, for example), but the exclusion here seems especially manipulative. Devor establishes a glaring double standard toward Zoo's end by showing us a horse's questionable castration. The result: We see doctors hurt horses, yet we never see a zoophile do the same. The film thus tricks us into feeling a disproportionate amount of sympathy for the "zoos."
This is the underlying logic prevalent in Zoo, an experimental documentary about a group of American men who share an atypical passion for animals. The haunting film uses audio interviews and lyrical re-enactments to explore the zoophile psyche and recount the story of a Seattle man who died from a perforated colon after having anal sex with a horse named Bullseye.
(Insert crude Seabiscuit / Mr. Ed / Secretariat joke, if you wish.)
Like many filmmakers and writers before him, director Robinson Devor attempts to humanize the monstrous. It's easy to write these men off as fringe-group deviants; it's a lot harder to listen to them as they ask themselves, "Why am I this way? There has to be a purpose."
The men lead relatively ordinary lives. One's an engineer. Another's a paramedic. They talk of living in "a classless society" on a farm in Washington, where they gather for a "potluck supper kind of thing" that often ends in videotaping sex with horses.
Though Devor doesn't justify the men or their orientation, he asks us to understand and empathize with them as animal lovers. To do this, he concentrates on the men rather than their actions - hate the sin, not the sinner. His footage features none of the gruesome, sleazy imagery you might expect from an indie shock-doc.
As creepy as it sounds, this is to the film's detriment. I'm sure Devor would argue that he left the men's videotapes out of Zoo in the name of good taste, but I suspect it was for another reason: It's pretty hard to construct a bleeding-heart case for tolerance if you actually show zoophiles in the act.
Plenty of films take this cop-out approach to taboo subject matters (The Woodsman on pedophilia, for example), but the exclusion here seems especially manipulative. Devor establishes a glaring double standard toward Zoo's end by showing us a horse's questionable castration. The result: We see doctors hurt horses, yet we never see a zoophile do the same. The film thus tricks us into feeling a disproportionate amount of sympathy for the "zoos."
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