Performance and Personhood in Free Willy and Dolphin Tale

Abstract

An examination of the politics of animal performance in the context of historical changes in the whaling industry reveals an ambivalence about cetacean subjectivity in Western culture. Venues such as Marineland or Sea World make use of the uniqueness of whales in order to attract audiences who may not be able to observe them in the wild. Susan Davis (1997) and Jane Desmond (1999) have both recently examined marine parks in the context of cultural tourism, situating them in the history of zoos as a commodification of nature. Desmond in particular identifies Sea World’s presentation of the orca body as simultaneously transgressing and upholding species boundaries; according to Desmond, Sea World does so by alternately foregrounding both their differences from and similarities to humans in the script of the animal show. She asks,

Can whales “return the gaze”? To do so, they would have to possess a subjectivity capable of understanding themselves as both watcher and watched. This might be going too far, but the question of the animals’ subjectivity, which is heightened in so many ways throughout the park [Marine World Africa] and in a great deal of the popularization of the research on marine mammal intelligence, is interestingly brought to the fore. Do we grant them a subjectivity but not a consciousness, or a self-consciousness? (pp. 212–13)