This essay explores animal alterity and anthropomorphism in Charles Foster’s Being a Beast and the 2021 film, Lamb. ‘Alterity’ can be defined as the otherness or difference that animals have when compared to humans,[1] whilst anthropomorphism is “ascribing any human attribute to something other than man”.[2] Both terms feature prominently in animal writing, and are associated with a range of critical issues, as this essay will unpack.
Lamb is set in rural Iceland where María and Ingvar, a farmer couple, live.[3] The text is centred around the concept of a human-sheep hybrid. This anthropomorphised creature appears in the form of Ada (the lamb-child, who the humans raise as their own child), and the ram-man hybrid, who eventually shoots Ingvar dead. As Amelia Keen puts it in her critical essay, “the hybrid nature of anthropomorphic Ada transgresses boundaries of species… she straddles both human and animal spheres”.[4] The anthropomorphism in this film is bizarre and at times unsettling to the audience.
A prominent cause of conflict in the film is the human character’s differing views of anthropomorphism. At 53:00, an over-the-shoulder shot is used as Petúr (Ingvar’s brother who visits the house) shouts, “What the f*** is this?”, asking Ingvar why they “play in the house with that animal”. Ingvar tells him that it is “Happiness… Don’t interfere with how María and I live our lives”, before picking up Ada and walking to the red house in the background of the shot. This is one of the only bright colours used in the film, and the red may symbolise the love Ingvar and María have for Ada, compared to the grey of the barn behind Petúr, which reflects his lack of love towards her. The mise-en-scène which places the house in the background behind Ingvar and Ada symbolises how she is part of their family.
A similar confrontation emerges when Petúr feeds Ada grass, calling her “little lamb”. A close-up shot shows Ada enjoying the food, before Ingvar suddenly pulls her away in anger, and confronts his brother. Petúr tells him “It’s not a child, it’s an animal”, which shows his reluctance to accept the anthropomorphism of which his brother is so keen. The fact that Ada was enjoying eating the grass before being pulled away shows her to be conflicted between human and animal. Despite living as a human, her innate desire for a lamb’s diet remains.
The cinematography in the scene at 56:00 strongly conveys the duality between Ada’s human and animal identity. As she sits by a stream, a bird’s-eye shot is used from the perspective of behind and above her as she looks into the water. The shot shows the jumper that she wears, making her look ‘human-like’. This then cuts to a worm’s-eye shot from under the water. Here, all that is visible is her head, and the lack of clothes make her look solely like an animal staring into water. These two shots juxtapose the different ways we can view Ada – from one perspective, she is an animal, from another, she seems more human.
The woolly clothing that Ada wears is significant because it is a sheep product. Here, a paradox is presented – despite anthropomorphising Ada and treating her as a human, the family are still exploiting her half-species for clothes. In the scene at the end of the film, an eye-level shot is used to show Ada (wearing clothes) being led away by the ram-man hybrid. Despite not wearing clothes, the ram-man does not come across as ‘naked’ to the viewer. This juxtaposition of wearing and not wearing clothes in this shot brings to mind Derrida’s thoughts regarding nakedness in animals: “with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself” (p.114)[5]. It could be argued that this scene supports Derrida’s assertion that “There is no ‘nudity’ in nature” (p.114)[6], because the ram-man does not come across as naked to the audience. If anything, Ada appears more out of place for wearing clothes.
At 1:28:00, Ingvar asks Ada to turn off the radio, which she does. This shows that she understands language, however she does not speak throughout the film. This creates ambiguity surrounding her lack of dialogue – it is unclear whether she is too scared to (she seems shy), or unable to. For this reason, it is ambiguous whether or not she enjoys her human life. As Sundhya Walther points out, animal silence “separates human from nonhuman in ways that serve human privilege”.[7] Ada’s lack of dialogue forces the audience to infer her emotions. This is done through cinematic techniques, such as close-up shots of her face to convey the emotions in her eyes during the more upsetting parts of the film. This also draws to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s suggestion that “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him”[8]. If applied to Ada, this quote means that her life is so different from ours that if she spoke, it would make no sense to us as her life and experience as a non-human is so different to ours. Her lack of speech is an example of Ada’s alterity, despite being a highly anthropomorphised being.
Throughout the film, the bleak weather is used as pathetic fallacy, foreshadowing the dark ending. The opening scene features a ‘handheld’ shot moving forward towards a group of ponies who run away. The background diegetic sound of growling breaths “signal a threatening force that will complicate the binary oppositions between human and animal.”[9] The first sign of anthropomorphism comes from the two footsteps that we can hear – giving the impression that it is an upright human, not an animal. When this creature is later revealed to be the ram-hybrid, it is portrayed to have taken revenge against the humans by shooting Ingvar. This is an example of anthropomorphism, because in reality sheep are not capable of vengeance like humans are. In addition, the fact that the film opens from the point-of-view of the ram means that we experience both human and animal perspective at different parts of the film.
Despite the anthropomorphism of Ada and the ram, the rest of the animals are ‘othered’, and cinematic techniques highlight their alterity. In one of the early scenes, a medium-length shot shows a sheep looking out a window from inside the barn. Icicles run along the window on each side of its face, resembling the bars of a prison cell and symbolising the animal’s captivity. Similarly, at 23:00 we see a low-angle shot of Ada in a cot (anthropomorphised by being wrapped up like a baby), however thick wooden bars obscure the audience’s view of her. This suddenly cuts to a wide-angle shot of the sheep outside. The mise-en-scène of these prison-like bars and the sudden scene switch represent Ada’s entrapment, when she should be living outside like the sheep.
One of the more dramatic scenes features Petúr considering shooting Ada. As he takes her outside, a low-angle shot from behind both characters shows him walking with a gun in his left hand and holding Ada’s hand in his right. This powerful image contrasts the two behaviours of which humans are capable towards animals: compassion or violence. (Notably, a similar angle shot is used to show María dragging the dead body of Ada’s mum with her right hand after shooting her). By shooting this at Ada’s eye level and using close-up shots to show her innocent expression, the director helps us to empathise with her. The extra-diegetic drumming sound creates tension, yet leads to an anti-climax as Petúr decides against killing her. Interestingly, this scene almost tricks the viewer into thinking that Ada’s hybrid kind are powerless and non-violent towards humans. The bloody ending of the film shows that this is not the case.
One of the more subtle but equally eerie scenes involves a zoom in towards a painting of sheep on the wall. The view starts by showing the whole painting (which consists of hundreds of sheep walking towards the observer). As the zoom increases, the extra-diegetic sound of sheep bleating rises to create an unsettling atmosphere. This is another example of anthropomorphism, because the sheep are symbolised almost like a human army, plotting against the household (which in reality, sheep would not do).
The climax of the plot acts as a critique of anthropomorphism. Ingvar is killed by the ram-man after the humans took anthropomorphism ‘too far’ and killed Ada’s mum. After taking the shot, a ‘down the barrel’ angle is used, where initially the gun is in focus, followed by the ram’s head. This acts as a shock to the audience, and the dark presence throughout the film is revealed. This ‘down the barrel’ camera angle is identical to the one that was used when Petúr pointed the gun at Ada. Whilst this anthropomorphises the ram by showing him to be capable of using a gun, it also shows an alterity between the ram-hybrid and humans. When Petúr contemplated using the gun, he controlled his emotions and refrained from it. By comparison, the animal-hybrid did not, which perhaps reflects the idea that animals are less advanced in dealing with their impulses to make decisions. The fact that humans ultimately have their own invention used against them is also significant, perhaps critiquing an anthropocentric idea that would suggest that have more power than animals.
Ada’s reaction to the death is initially sadness, as she clings onto Ingvar as he dies. However, she soon decides to walk away, holding hands with the ram-hybrid. As they walk off into the distance, the sky appears to brighten, perhaps symbolising that these creatures are doing the ‘natural’ thing by separating from humans and going to live in the wild, which further acts as a critique of anthropomorphism. A worm’s-eye shot from Ingvar’s view on the ground is used as the hybrids walk away, perhaps reminding the human audience that it is ‘animals’, not us, who have won.
In Being a Beast, Foster explores “what it is like to be a wild thing” (p.xiii,[10] all subsequent quotations are for Being a Beast, unless otherwise stated with a footnote), by trying to live as a range of different animals. In doing so, he experiences the alterity of their different lives. Foster takes an interest in the permeability of boundaries between humans and other species: “species boundaries are vague and porous. Ask any evolutionary biologist or shaman”. The fact that he offers the expertise of both a scientist and a shaman to the reader shows that he is not just concerned by the biological, but also the ‘spiritual’ similarities between humans and animals (shamans believe in a spirit world through connecting with nature in altered states of consciousness). He goes on to dismiss our evolutionary differences with badgers: “a mere 30 million years – a blink of an eye on Earth – since badgers and I shared a common ancestor” (p.4). Whilst he is correct to point out the relatively short time since we evolved from other species, Foster’s attitude could be critiqued as over-simplifying our similarities with these animals. He describes it as “an intimate sort of shared ancestry” (p.4) and states that: “All the animals in this book are pretty close family… If it doesn’t seem like that, our feelings are biologically illiterate” (p.1). A further example of this over-simplification features on page 27. He asks: “You want to be a fox? It just takes a bit of practice in a dark ended room with a candle and chicken”, which seems to downplay how different a fox’s life is compared to ours. Despite at times trivialising these differences between human and animal, he makes clear that the book “is not a mandate for anthropomorphism. To say that something is comparable is not to say that it is the same” (p.35). He also describes anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism as “Two sins that have beset traditional nature writing” (p.xiv) in the introduction.
Despite his attempt to avoid anthropomorphising, he engages with that discourse at times, especially when comparing human life and ideas to that of the animals that he observes. For instance, when discussing otters, he says “Being an otter is like being on speed” (p.71), describing them as “twitching bundles of ADHD” (p.72). Another example features in Foster’s attempt to become a fox, when he discovers a decaying pizza whilst scavenging among bins in London: “The underside was a metro system, its tunnels packed like a rush hour station… Black beetles were directing the crowds” (p.130). This eloquent prose is an example of anthropomorphism, as it uses a metaphor to describe the insects in human terms by comparing them to rush-hour commuters. At the same time, it draws attention to their alterity compared to us, because they are able to make a thriving habitat out of a decaying pizza that would appear repulsive and useless to us.
These examples show how difficult it is to describe something to the reader without associating the animals with human concepts. In other words, Foster cannot help but anthropomorphise when describing his experiences as another animal, because his brain is still that of a human. In the epilogue, he acknowledges the difficulty of avoiding anthropomorphism in the project: “For the past 200 pages I’ve been terrified of anthropomorphism, and here I am, apparently guilty of the very worst kind” (p.210). As New York Times critic Dwight Garner puts it, “Foster is humble about the limitations of his project. He tries to avoid the pitfalls of nature writing, such as anthropomorphism… ‘Of course I have failed’, he adds. His awareness of his failures makes him all the more winning.”[11]
One of the issues that Foster brings to light is the human consumption of animals. He uses personification to describe meat as he writes: “fill ourselves up with meat from condemned cows” (p.26) and “the fat of unhappy pigs” (p.130). Describing beef and pork in this way highlights the fact that we label animals that we eat as ‘meat’, rather than as their species. By doing so, we euphemise and take away their recognition as a life form, perhaps to lower our guilt. Similarly, we use different words for animals depending on whether they have been killed for human consumption or not. For example, a pig that dies naturally might simply be called ‘a dead pig’, whereas if killed for human consumption may be euphemised as ‘bacon’ or ‘ham’. There are many names for the different parts of cow meat, however you never see ‘cow’ on a supermarket packet. This is an example of alterity because our ‘othering’ of such animals is used to justify our actions towards them. By refusing to other these animals as meat, Foster shows that anthropomorphising and recognising them as their species could have a positive impact (we may be less inclined to eat them). Put simply by Feiyang Wang and Frédéric Basso in their paper, “Anthropomorphism leads to less favourable attitudes toward meat consumption by inducing feelings of anticipatory guilt”.[12]
Foster also critiques how our treatment of animals is affected by how different they are to us. In other words, animals that are more ‘alien’ and less like humans tend to receive worse treatment. He uses the example of a rabbit and a fish, pointing out: “A man who wouldn’t dream of accelerating his BMW over a rabbit will happily winch mackerel into the air” (p.103)… “we have a complete lack of empathy when it comes to fish” (p.104). Foster’s observation is supported by recent statistics which have shown a 4.1% drop in meat sales in recent years, yet a steady continuity of seafood demand.[13] David Foster Wallace draws on the same argument in his essay as the reason why brutal methods of lobster killing are accepted: “everything gets progressively abstract and convoluted as we move farther from higher-type mammals, into cattle and dogs and rodents, birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”[14] Our lack of empathy for fish, as Charles Foster highlights, may also be due to their inability to make noise like mammals do. As John Berger points out in his essay, animal silence “guarantees its distance… its exclusion from man”.[15] The ‘silence’ of fish, therefore, may justify our ‘othering’ and consumption of them.
Foster’s attempts at ‘becoming’ other animals embodies what could be described as reverse anthropomorphism, whereby he attributes animal characteristics to his own behaviour. On pages 143-144, we read an amusing account of his attempt to chase a cat whilst trying to behave as a fox: “I chased him across the yard… He jumped over some planks. So did I. He cleared a flowerpot. So did I. He leapt onto a fence and ran along it. So did I. He did so with balletic elegance. I did not”. The repetition of “So did I” shows Foster’s persistence to behave like an animal (reverse anthropomorphism). Simultaneously, he experiences the cat’s alterity as a far more suited animal to that lifestyle and environment (he eventually falls off the fence but the cat does not). In this way, by trying to anthropomorphise and live as another animal, he experiences how different and better adapted they are compared to us.
The book cites a Fundamentalist view of the Genesis story in the Bible as something that humans have used to justify animal persecution because animals “are not made in the image of God” (p.39). Foster draws parallels with “the nasty condition” (p.39) of Colonialism, explaining how this same attitude was used by settlers towards natives in the past. In other words, the ‘otherness’ of animals justifies our treatment of them, just as the otherness of different races was used by colonialists. This comparison of ‘speciesism’ and racism is well put by Peter Singer: “the racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of his own race… Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his species to override the greater interests of other species”.[16] Interestingly, Foster admits “I share more in common with a fox than with a Fundamentalist” (p.206), showing his dislike for ‘speciesism’.
Foster touches upon C. S. Lewis’ suggestion that animals “probably do not have a consciousness of their suffering, because they have no consciousness and delimitated self.”[17] Foster dismisses this as “nonsense” (p.78) and believes that “consciousness is certainly present in some animals” (p.17). However, he reveals that observing otter behaviour made him wonder if Lewis’s suggestion might be true: “I come nearest to believing it in the case of those maniac otters, too consumed by their desire to consume to have anything spare for the construction of a self” (p.79). He goes on to suggest that perhaps badgers have more of a consciousness: “There’s less in a brown head underwater than a black-and-white head under earth” (p.79). It seems as though Foster thinks that otters may lack a consciousness because they are less similar to us than badgers, for instance he says that “Otters are circuit boards. There is nothing else there” (p.78). If this is the case, it means that Foster is more able to empathise with and find a consciousness in animals that are more similar to humans. In terms of alterity, this means that we may be less likely to attribute a consciousness to animals that have more alterity to us, than those that are more similar to us.
To conclude, both texts engage with the discourse of animal alterity and anthropomorphism in a variety of interesting ways. Lamb uses cinematographic and narrative techniques to present a chilling critique of anthropomorphism, while Being a Beast uses a kind of ‘reverse anthropomorphism’ to explore the alterity between our lives and that of animals.
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Blank, Christine, ‘Pescetarianism a fast-growing trend to watch’, SeaFoodSource, 21st July 2016, <https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodservice-retail/pescetarianism-a-fast-growing-trend-to-watch> [accessed 24/5/22]
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Garner, Dwight, ‘Review: In ‘Being a Beast,’ Charles Foster Eats Roadkill and Channels Otters’, New York Times, 14th June 2016, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/books/review-in-being-a-beast-charles-foster-eats-roadkill-and-channels-otters.html> [accessed 17/5/22]
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[1] Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993)
[2] William I. Grossman, Bennet Simon, ‘Anthropomorphism’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 24:1 (1969) 78-111 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.1969.11822687> [accessed 19/5/22]
[3] Lamb, dir. by Valdimar Jóhannsson (Black Spark Film & TV, 2021)
[4] Amelia Keen, ‘Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021’, Zooscope, 5th February 2022, <https://zooscope.group.shef.ac.uk/lamb-dir-valdimar-johannsson-sena-2021/> [accessed 17/5/22]
[5] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, in Animal Philosophy, ed. By Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (Great Britain, Continuum International: 2004), p. 114
[6] Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, p. 114
[7] Sundhya Walther, ‘Refusing to Speak: The Ethics of Animal Silence and Sacrifice in Coetzee and Derrida’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 12:3 (2014), pp. 75-79
[8] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Blackwell: 1958), p. 223
[9] Amelia Keen, ‘Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021’ (para. 2 of 10)
[10] Charles Foster, Being a Beast, (Great Britain: Profile Books, 2016), p. xiii
[11] Dwight Garner, ‘Review: In ‘Being a Beast,’ Charles Foster Eats Roadkill and Channels Otters’, New York Times, 14th June 2016, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/books/review-in-being-a-beast-charles-foster-eats-roadkill-and-channels-otters.html> [accessed 17/5/22]
[12] Feiyang Wang and Frédéric Basso, ‘“Animals are friends, not food”: Anthropomorphism leads to less favorable attitudes toward meat consumption by inducing feelings of anticipatory guilt’, Appetite, 138 (2019), p. 153, <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666318305634> [accessed 20/5/22]
[13] Christine Blank, ‘Pescetarianism a fast-growing trend to watch’, SeaFoodSource, 21st July 2016, <https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/foodservice-retail/pescetarianism-a-fast-growing-trend-to-watch> [accessed 24/5/22]
[14] David Foster Wallace, ‘Consider the lobster’, Gourmet, (2004), p. 62 <http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf >
[15] John Berger, About Looking, (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 6
[16] Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 150
[17] Gabriele Greggersen, ‘C.S. Lewis ‘s Insights on the Suffering of Animals’, ” Inklings Forever, 4 (2004) pp. 2-5
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