Thylacines
Jan. 2nd, 2003 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDunno if anybody out there thinks thylacines (Tasmanian wolves/tigers) are as fascinating as I do, but if you're interested at all, you should check out The Thylacine Museum, which aside from all the other cool stuff (including information on the cloning project), has the films that were made of the last thylacine in captivity in the 1930s.
I can't explain quite why I find those films so fascinating. I mean, yes, partly, it's the absolutely fucking extraordinary jaws on the thing, and it being the only marsupial predator, and partly it's the fact that you're watching an animal that no longer exists. But it's more than that, or at least different. There's something about that low-quality, silent footage, a haze of melancholy and sadness that has only partly to do with extinction. I think perhaps it's the sense of imprisonment--not merely within the enclosure, but on film. People talk about "capturing" things on film, and maybe that's what I feel about the thylacine films. It's a captive, and it's captured, and the existence of the footage means, in some metaphysical sense, that it is always going to be captive, forever and ever, world without end. I think of that particular thylacine (called "Benjamin" but believed to be female), staring at the man with the camera and hating him, hating him personally, and yet knowing that there's nothing she can do. She's going to be captured for posterity, and years and years later, these strange traces of her existence will be available on the internet, to be gawked at by not just hundreds or thousands, but potentially millions of people. We have no right to stare at her, and yet she's so beautiful and strange that it would be wrong not to witness her existence, wrong not to know that this creature lived and paced (and yawned tremendously) and was wiped out by, once again, our ignorant, thuggish species, H. sapiens.
Even if they succeed in bringing back the thylacines (and I really, really hope they do), it won't change the impact of this footage for me. I look at her and I love her--even though she scares me--and I want to set her free. But of course I'm 70 years too late.
And I still don't think I've quite articulated what I wanted to, but it's the best I can do.
I can't explain quite why I find those films so fascinating. I mean, yes, partly, it's the absolutely fucking extraordinary jaws on the thing, and it being the only marsupial predator, and partly it's the fact that you're watching an animal that no longer exists. But it's more than that, or at least different. There's something about that low-quality, silent footage, a haze of melancholy and sadness that has only partly to do with extinction. I think perhaps it's the sense of imprisonment--not merely within the enclosure, but on film. People talk about "capturing" things on film, and maybe that's what I feel about the thylacine films. It's a captive, and it's captured, and the existence of the footage means, in some metaphysical sense, that it is always going to be captive, forever and ever, world without end. I think of that particular thylacine (called "Benjamin" but believed to be female), staring at the man with the camera and hating him, hating him personally, and yet knowing that there's nothing she can do. She's going to be captured for posterity, and years and years later, these strange traces of her existence will be available on the internet, to be gawked at by not just hundreds or thousands, but potentially millions of people. We have no right to stare at her, and yet she's so beautiful and strange that it would be wrong not to witness her existence, wrong not to know that this creature lived and paced (and yawned tremendously) and was wiped out by, once again, our ignorant, thuggish species, H. sapiens.
Even if they succeed in bringing back the thylacines (and I really, really hope they do), it won't change the impact of this footage for me. I look at her and I love her--even though she scares me--and I want to set her free. But of course I'm 70 years too late.
And I still don't think I've quite articulated what I wanted to, but it's the best I can do.
