I saw Letter to a Pig in the package of this year’s Academy Award-nominated animated short films. This may be my pick for number one. Certainly it’s an emotionally powerful film. A good portion of it is obscure enough that I’m not confident of how it is to be interpreted. Actually, I don’t know if there even is a specific meaning, a specific message, or if it is intended to be more open-ended, where the viewer is invited to take what they will from it, to interpret it in their own way. That is, is the film ambiguous, or does it just seem ambiguous to me because I’m not clever enough about these things to “get it”?
My uncertainty over whether to pick this one as my favorite of the nominees, or merely as being among my favorites, is a reflection of my having mixed feelings about that kind of obscurity in a film. On the one hand, all else being equal, I’m the sort of person who would rather know exactly what someone is attempting to convey to me. On the other hand, I’m not consistent in always disliking such obscurity to the same degree; sometimes my only having a vague grasp of a piece of art is something I experience as neutral or close to it, and maybe, in very few cases, as slightly positive.
Letter to a Pig is an Israeli film, set, initially at least, in a classroom. The class is being addressed by a visitor, a Holocaust survivor. (I read a little bit about the film later, and learned that this is a very common occurrence in Israel, that schoolchildren are routinely exposed to this element of Jewish history by having Holocaust survivors visit schools.)
The elderly man tells of how he survived an encounter with Nazis by successfully hiding out in a pigsty. (The fact that it is pigs specifically is a meaningful twist to the story, given that Judaism is one of the religions that is irrationally anti-pig.) He tells of how when his pursuers made a cursory search of the pigsty, the pigs gave no indication that anything was amiss, no indication that there was an intruder hiding amongst them. For this he is grateful, and in the aftermath of his experience he composed a poetic letter to one of the pigs who, in his perception, saved his life, which he commences to read to the class.
The kids are moderately receptive to all this, but no more than moderately. There is a giggle here and there, a little chattering of one student with another, a pig noise or two, a few looks of boredom like they’ve heard tales like this too many times already, etc. Nothing extreme—it’s not a classroom full of Eric Cartmans—but they’re kids, so they’re far from ideally respectful and engaged listeners.
One schoolgirl, though, does seem more fully engaged. She listens closely, looking pained, allowing the man’s words to sink in.
The man eventually becomes dismissive of the students. You can’t be expected to understand any of this or truly care about it, he says, since you’ve never experienced it. He tells them that as a result of being on the receiving end of such murderous hatred, he realizes that people who have sunk to that level of inhumanity do not deserve to live, that they are proper objects of revenge.
Hearing all this, the girl drifts off into a dream. The rest of the film—roughly half—is an extended fantasy sequence. As she wanders along, sometimes alone and later accompanied by other young people (presumably her classmates, or the present generation of Israeli Jews), she sees many disturbing things. At times, her face, and the faces of those with her, take on a more piglike appearance.
She sees a man (representing the Holocaust survivor I would think, or those calling the shots in present day Israel who agree with his worldview about the necessity and justification of countering hateful and anti-Semitic violence with violence) accompanied by a ferocious looking pig who he then sics on his enemies (reminiscent of Nazis siccing attack dogs on Jews). She comes upon a fearsome giant pig that leans down into her face and snarls threateningly at her, but who turns all to be all bluff as he backs off and collapses to the ground, looking weary and sickly. She sees those with her form a mob and excitedly and gleefully attack the terrified pig, trussing it up and hanging it high up off the ground. She then reaches up, her fantasy arms extending way up to where the pig is, rescues it from its bindings and gently brings it back down to earth. In her hands, the pig slowly shrinks, becoming more and more harmless looking, until she can hold it in one hand like a docile little mouse, which she frees.
So, what does it all mean?
Like I say, I don’t claim that I know that with certainty. I’m sure what I see in it is influenced by my being a Gandhian believer in a moral philosophy of nonviolence. It feels to me like the girl is resisting the call to combat hate and violence with hate and violence, that in remaining calm, thoughtful, gentle, and kind, she is refusing to get caught up in the endless cycle of revenge.
I mean, in terms of moral philosophy, I understand that there are two sides to all this. The Holocaust survivor is not unambiguously a monster in arguing for revenge, for concluding that people like the Nazis deserve to be killed. On the surface, there’s an inconsistency or hypocrisy to claiming that hate and murder are so far beyond the pale morally that people who exercise them deserve to die, but at a deeper level there are those who would point out that while both the Nazis and the elderly Holocaust survivor are advocating killing, the cases are morally dissimilar in that the correct moral law should not be that one ought never kill a person, but that one ought never kill a person who has not himself first been guilty of killing or attempting to kill, that killing to defend against or punish killing is relevantly different from killing from a motive like Nazi anti-Semitism or claimed racial superiority.
Then there’s also the potential claim that whatever the correct moral position is on something like how to respond to the Holocaust (and to existential threats to the Jewish people today), one has no standing to take a position on the matter unless one has lived through the Holocaust, like the man addressing the class.
Again, as a Gandhian, I know where I stand, and insofar as I can interpret the symbolism of the film, I am heartened that there are young Israelis like the schoolgirl who wish to break the cycle of violence. But I know that there are plenty of people who will disagree with, and plenty who will be offended by, any advocacy of a nonviolent ethic in this context.
Philo on Movies 