The Experience of Being Prey
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— Paisley Conrad —
WHEN VAL PLUMWOOD WAS NEARLY CONSUMED BY A CROCODILE, THE EXPERIENCE DEMONSTRATED TO HER THE FUNDAMENTAL EDIBILITY OF THE HUMAN
IN 1985, AUSTRALIAN eco-feminist Val Plumwood was almost eaten alive by a crocodile. Ten years later, she published “Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey,” a detailed and shocking account of her survival. The story goes that she finds herself paddling on a particular river during a heavy storm. She sees what looks like a stick floating stubbornly in the water before realizing that the stick has a set of gleaming marble eyes. Their paths converge, and she attempts to flee. The crocodile grabs her by the leg, drags her into the water, and rolls over, attempting to drown her. The crocodile death roll is an experience that few survive, as it simultaneously batters and drowns the prey. Plumwood experienced the roll not once, not twice, but three times, managing to pull herself to safety on the third. Adrenaline and bush knowledge propelled Plumwood forward until she was found by a search party. Ultimately, she survived, and was left with a glow of gratitude for her life, as well as the knowledge that she remains crocodile food.
As Plumwood narrates her experience of being the prey of an errant crocodile, she proposes that the experience demonstrated to her the fundamental edibility of the human. Counter to a conception of the human as the top of the food chain (or perhaps, as separate from it entirely), Plumwood recognizes herself as entangled in the thick of it and ultimately suggests that we humans must recognize that we are prey. Consumption is the orienting force of her alternative understanding of what it is to be alive. We eat. We are eaten. Understanding ourselves as fundamentally edible is not necessarily a movement towards self-objectification, but perhaps we need a little self-objectification in order to understand the complexity of the world that we live in.
Plumwood recounts the undoing of her “delusion” of her “invincible” self which “splits apart” as the crocodile drags her into the water. Later, she looks down and sees her thigh ripped open, exposing her tendons and muscles to the elements. Plumwood is not only the witness of the crocodile’s attack but the abjectness of her body. Her encounter with her own exposed body articulates how she is equally meat and soul, flesh and thoughts.
Plumwood does not see herself as outside of nature or separate from nonhuman animals. Rather, she argues that we actively resist acknowledging our own vulnerability to preserve a sense of invincibility. Recognizing our fragility and edibility threatens the continuity of what it means to be human in modern society. In the throes of the crocodile’s roll, she sees the world as “incomprehensible” and describes how she loses “the narrative of the self.” In this external, parallel view, she sees the natural world as fundamentally indifferent to her as an individual. She comes to grips with her own vulnerability as a settler subject in a land whose custodians did not grant her permission to traverse.
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Plumwood’s account leaves room for the ambiguous perception of the crocodile. While she attempts to psychologize the crocodile later in the essay, casting it as confused and defensive, the motives of the crocodile remain unknown. Indeed, it is impossible to ascribe motive to the crocodile. What is intelligible about the encounter is that the crocodile is indifferent to Plumwood’s uniqueness as a human, as an adventurer. She is either food or a threat to the crocodile, both generic categorizations that undermine her “specialness.”
Ten years prior to Plumwood’s terrifying encounter, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws (1975) was released to general and enduring critical acclaim. The now-familiar story of Jaws details a New England island plagued by vicious attacks of a great white shark. The film is a dense two hours of tension and foreboding, as the narrative shifts from the shark stalking the humans to the humans stalking the shark. The film’s central trio — local police chief Martin Brody, shark hunter Peter Quint and oceanographer Matt Hooper — find themselves in an unlikely alliance as they attempt to make the waters safe for the community again.
Part of the horror of Jaws stems from the strangeness of the great white’s presence in the waters at all—while some breeds of shark do frequent that region of the Atlantic Ocean, Hooper notes that its presence is “extremely rare.” The great white is not supposed to be there. Thus, the film introduces an undercurrent of an ecological imbalance or irregularity. Flashing forward to 2020, the waters along the coast of New England regularly see great white sharks due to rising ocean temperatures. Galeophobia, the fear of sharks, is not simply a straightforward fear of death but a fear of becoming prey within the waters that you play in.
The shark, while likely initially driven by hunger, is not characterized as purely animalistic. In fact, this shark is calculating, even malicious. He expertly evades capture, taunting his would-be captors, while picking off the residents in town who would most likely raise an uproar or some sort of reaction, including Harry Kinter, a child caught while swimming leisurely on a sunny day. Early in the film, Mayor Larry Vaughn balks at Hooper’s suggestion to perform an ad-hoc autopsy on a shark: “I am not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock!”. Worse than the child’s death is coming to grips with the circumstances of his death, that he has been turned from sweet child to anonymous meat.
Hunting the shark, then, is a real risk that acknowledges the possibility that anyone can become shark food. The film’s horror does not work because you imagine yourself as the relentless Quint or the cleareyed Chief Brody. Instead, Jaws’ horror works on the audience immediately because you recognize your own vulnerability in the mangled body of Chrissie Watkins, skinny dipping with reckless abandon in the first scene of the film.
Thus, there are two perceived ecological imbalances present in Jaws — the presence of the shark outside of its traditional territory, and the thing about humans being a part of the food chain. The second imbalance leads to the recognition that humans are edible, we are a part of the food chain, no matter how carefully we have tried to remove ourselves from it.
I don’t want to suggest that we open ourselves up to being eaten alive by apex predators — I, like Chief Brody, want to protect my communities and be protected. However, by recognizing that, like all living things, we are a part of a cycle and exchange with our environments, despite various attempted deliberate removals from it, our ethical entanglement with the natural world becomes unignorable. I’m reminded of Donna Haraway’s maxim to stay with the trouble. Haraway, a prominent feminist and theorist, urges us to make ‘kin’ with that which is creepy-crawly, abject, not recognizably lovable. I’m sure this can be extended to the shark, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Plumwood herself wonders if her experience with the crocodile was catalyzed by the extremity of the weather.
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Cut to Orca, a Canadian film released on the heels of Jaws. In November, fellow co-op member Neil Griffin wrote a fantastic review of this bombastic Canadian horror film. The story unfolds as the eponymous orca, bereft by the loss of his pregnant mate at the hands of Nolan, a local fisherman trying to pay off his boat, takes explicit and ingenious revenge on both Nolan and the town he inhabits. Orca repeatedly reinforces the orca’s ingenuity and cleverness, as he sets off a chain reaction that, in Neil’s words, “blow[s] up a fuel refinery.” Unlike in Jaws, the orca is not hungry for human flesh — instead, he actively conspires against Nolan to create distinctly human discomfort and pain. The humanity of the orca (and the recognition of his pain as a widower) makes this an interesting film — the character we root for is not the poor fisherman whose narrative we follow but the spurned orca, looking for revenge.
Like Plumwood and her confused crocodile, Orca humanizes its central monster. Perhaps this movement is not strictly anthropomorphizing the animal but instead considering the ways in which we are kin with predators. Plumwood herself considers whether or not the crocodile’s actions could be considered political; after all, "human beings are a threat to crocodiles, of a more dire kind than crocodiles are to human beings, through the elimination of habitat." Human activity threatens the orca, who responds to that threat in kind. Nolan, after all, is a predator in his own right, disregarding any sense of morality to capture the pregnant orca in the first place. The orca doesn’t start the fire, he merely stokes it, before ultimately putting it out himself. Likewise, Jaws is a film that details the disruption of habitat, or rather, the extension of habitat. The shark is in the wrong waters through no fault of his own — we can thank rising ocean temperatures for that.
Val Plumwood’s prescient placement — or re-placement — of the human within the food chain runs counter to the myth of human exceptionalism. While current food systems in urban centres radically alienate us from the production and cultivation of our food sources, this merely withholds from us what it means to be edible. We too can be eaten with indifference from the perspective of the crocodile or the shark, who may be hungry or confused, but still would not hesitate to place its jaws around us. These films challenge the narrative of human exceptionalism, yet Jaws ultimately falls prey to it through the triumphs of its hero. As Chief Brody manages to explode the great white using a scuba tank and a rifle, he removes himself from the food chain and becomes the apex predator himself. However, the film articulates the intense vulnerability of both our environments and ourselves. Ecological instability is everyone’s problems—and yes, that everyone extends to our nonhuman kin.
