#because to be eaten -- that carries its own logic. a prey animal though holds fear and rage and desperation in the core of it. it Knows.

[frogspawned]

pet peeve is when a story tells us something is aberrant, but it seems to matter more about who does the behavior than the behavior itself. rorschach in snyder's watchmen isn't going too far; we watch nite owl and silk spectre ii snap necks and arms with gleeful, loving abandon, in slow motion no less, while they lecture the audience about rorschach's violence. heroes frequently torture the plot contrivance out of a villain and then moralize to the camera when the villains do the same. indominus rex's killing spree doesn't shock or appall me; all the jurassic world dinosaurs act like mindless killing machines, and the camera lingers, rapturous, on their cruelty. it's not an outlier. there's nothing interesting about it beyond as a set piece.

in a better script, the indominus rex would have had pathos; a chimera made for entertainment, for profit, stitched together with no regard for itself and placed in a lonely box. a freak among freaks. of course it would be mad. but the film wasn't interested in it as an animal, or a character, only as a moving piece of scenery for people to scream at or breathe tensely while it can clearly smell and reach them but doesn't, because it isn't a character and doesn't have motivations.

it's just sort of boring, i suppose. it tries like all other empty drab things do to cover it with bombast and roaring and soaring brassy scores but it's just sort of dull. a sprawl of nothing.

conversely peele's nope is a transcendent monster movie, imo, because it thinks about the the whys and hows, how jean jacket perceives the world, how the world perceives her, and lets that shape the narrative as much as jupe or emerald or gordy. they consulted biologists and behaviorists, digging into the meat of it. the creature as a camera as an animal as a device. nope has layers. it takes its own insane premise seriously, and has something to say, and is a goddamn good movie. i forgot where i was going with this.

[sleepysera]

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk and the Superiority of Human Nature

Oftentimes, people enjoy reading fiction to escape the harsh corners of reality. They like happy endings, and stories that entertain the more positive, lighter notions of life. If anything forces these people to confront the uncomfortable aspects of existence, many seem to prefer being guided through it with strength, resilience, and an overall restoration to balance in the end. In Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, a short story collection about personified animals, David Sedaris brings the reader’s awareness to the vividly darker shades of reality and, after forcing them to look, leaves them there to laugh or cry at what they see. Through the use of book presentation, personification, and allegory, Sedaris lures his readers until they are all at once trapped with the inescapable confrontation of the darker side of humanity. It is here, through the reader’s own concluding reaction of discomfort and disgust that the author brings the concept of human nature to its knees with humility, proving the notion that humans are not all that superior to the very nature of the animals that they would seek to always hold mastery over.

Beginning from the outset with a mirage of judgement, the way that the author and the illustrator, Ian Falconer, present the book gives the impression that each story will be a light read about animals, much like a children’s story to be read before bed. Each story is only a few pages long with a larger font, and comes complete with an entire page or two of illustration. This model mimics a children’s book, and the reader is almost invited to approach the stories with a childlike innocence, thus giving an initial illusion of a happy ending. On the first page of “The Motherless Bear,” there is a cute picture of a sad and crying bear. Although the drawing appears similar to that of a children’s book, the story immediately takes a darker turn as the bear’s mother suddenly dies leaving her to grieve. The reader follows her further and soon understands that the bear stays in her unresolved grief looking only for the attention that comes with sympathy. As her life begins to unravel due to her endless complaints in search of such attention, she finally finds someone undeniably much worse off than her: a male bear who was taken prisoner by a human village, where they treat him horrendously. They had knocked out his teeth and beat him, among various other mistreatments.

As the bear is about to complain again, she is ambushed by the humans and taken hostage herself. The male bear is disposed of, and the story ends as she becomes the new prisoner living under the horrible conditions. On the last page is an illustration of the same bear, still sad, but now she is covered in sores, missing teeth, and is missing fur all over. Through the power of presentation and illustration, Sedaris and Falconer present a misleading premise that slowly unravels as the stories and illustrations evolve, getting darker, more grotesque, and more violent with every page. This progression reflects and coincides with the growing suspense that this was a book meant to captivate the mind and force it to face that which it has always been too uncomfortable to face about itself. After being lured in, the reader is given no choice but to confront the truth that life is never wholly innocent, and that there are horrible realities to be reconciled with the nature of life itself.

“‘But the muzzle--,’ the bear said.

‘That’s just to make me look dangerous.’

“Oh,’ the bear said. ‘I get it.’

‘No,’ he told her, ‘I don’t think you do. See, I have got maggots living in my knees. I’m alive, but flies are raising families in my flesh’” (Sedaris 37).

Following the initial impression left by the illustrations, the reader then notices the obvious use of personification, as each story revolves around animal characters who act and speak as though they were human. The reader, as a human, is emotionally removed enough from the animal characters to see clearly and place judgement on the absurdities and faults that develop within each story. With a focus upon animals, there is an understood concept that they are not one of “us,” and the reader is guided to feel more objectively upon each glimpse into the animals’ lives. In one of the stories, “The Mouse and the Snake,” a mouse adopts a baby snake as her pet. Immediately apparent is the ironic concept of prey adopting predator, and as the story progresses, the metaphor of humans adopting dangerous animals as pets grows all the stronger. 

“In time she stopped using the word, ‘pet,’ as it seemed demeaning. The term ‘to own’ was banished as well, as it made it sound as though she were keeping him against his will, like a firefly trapped in a jar. ‘He’s a reptile companion,’ she took to saying, and thus, in time, he became her only companion” (Sedaris 43).

Even though humans do the same with their own pets, the personification of a mouse doing the same action encourages emotional removal to the point of judgement. The reader begins to place judgement upon the mouse. The mouse grows more infatuated with her “companion,” and begins to exhibit absurd behaviors such as trying to speak in hisses so that the snake could perhaps understand her. Yet, progress further, and the lighter reflections of human behavior towards pets continues into the extreme, and the mouse has slit her own tongue while covering up blatant murder to feed her “companion.” The reader journeys through this crescendo of absurdity until at the climax the reader discovers the snake has eaten the mouse. As a human being, the reader is led to view this ending as not only inevitable, but highly foolish--and yet, it leaves the reader with a subtle discomfort anyway, as though finding themselves at a crossroads in perception. The boundary between what is acceptable and unacceptable to humanity is blurred as this personification to the point of absurdity forces the reader to see that which humans would judge negatively in others, and that which humans would be hesitant to judge themselves for. The ability to objectively judge the personified animals was a mere illusion, for we as humans are forced to reckon with the recognition that we are no better ourselves.

To emphasize the absurdity of human judgement, Sedaris utilizes the structure of allegory to lead the reader into further acknowledging the faults of human nature. With blurred human and animal behavior through allegory showing such grotesque suggestions on humanity, the reader is left to react on their own, with humor or disgust. By establishing the reader’s attention with the illusion of innocence and judgement, the author then hones in precisely on the specific aspects of society he wants to address. In “The Judicious Brown Chicken,” for example, he allegorizes the concept of human reasoning and with a laser focus exponentially increases the absurd aspects of reasoning to the point of satire. The brown chicken witnesses several deaths around her, and in her desperate quest to survive, she reasons out how it was each victim’s fault that they died.

“The hawk could just as easily have abducted her, but it did not. The question was, why? A less spiritual being might have taken a practical approach: the guinea hen was smaller and easier to carry. But that wasn’t the answer, and the chicken knew it. The hen had been killed because she empathized too much and was strange to boot” (Sedaris 115).

Unable to cope with overwhelming anxiety about death, the fear of the unknown mixes bizarrely with the need for logical reasoning in a blind grab for the mirage of control over uncontrollable circumstances. Humans, as well as this chicken, often resort to explaining the unexplainable with spiritual rationalizations, even though these happenings are scientifically more likely dictated by chance. Through picking and choosing what to believe--even at the expense of logic and rationality--the chicken’s story mimics countless stories over human history, hinting at a deeper underlying aspect of human nature that is uncomfortable for us to face head on. With the amplified strangeness of the chicken’s reasoning, the human reader has no choice but to realize that human beings have been known to enact similar lines of thinking, and still do all the time. Throughout history we see civilizations evolve in similar ways, often intertwining politics with religion, such as with the witch hunts beginning in the 15th century. By placing blame on a victim for dying, the chicken feels comforted by the illusion of control over the chaotic nature of life and death. So too, would humans seek any explanation that could help them reject the chaos of existence; yet, as we can see with the chicken, the depths we go to in blaming others might very well have no actual foundations in reality. These stories confront people with uncomfortable ideas which they would often rather deny, and the reaction they have over them are telling in what shadows of human nature they would rather escape than admit are really there.

The end result with Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a collection of short stories dripping with irony, all of which are offensive first and foremost in their unflinching reflections upon the truth behind human nature. Though the reader may wish to deny looking at such darker aspects of life, the very presence of discomfort and revulsion in response to the themes illuminate a certain truth--a certain recognition. It is in this spark of recognition that Sedaris catches the reader off-guard, and it is in this recognition that the reader may react with disgust or humor. To cry is to deny the truth, but to laugh is to acknowledge and even accept such reflections that humans are petty, weak, and violent. With a piercing gaze, Sedaris unflinchingly expresses the hypocrisy, irony, and idiocy of human nature. With his ruthless satire, he forces his reader to acknowledge or deny these darker aspects, humbling human nature’s pride and wounding its ego with this final message: we are not as superior as we would like to think.

Works Cited

Sedaris, David. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. Little, Brown and Company, 2010.