The result is a condescending reduction of the wonders of nature to its usefulness as a foundation for human meddling. He is so eager to believe that this octopus, whose life he keeps f**king up to the point where they lose a limb, is grateful for his presence, that they need him as much as he’s grown to become dependent on their imagined love. It’s not just that this animal has to be anthropomorphized: they have to be specifically gendered in order to satisfy his fantasy of the ultimate bond. Foster bends over backward to humanize this creature as his feminine companion. ![]() Yet for Foster, this octopus he encounters becomes overburdened with the weight of his Disney-esque expectations for its awareness of him and the relationship he craves. In an essay for the London Review of Books, Professor Amia Srinivasan notes that the octopus is probably ‘the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ They are animals so wholly unlike humans in every conceivable way, harder to anthropomorphize than, say, your pet cat or the majestic horse in the field by your house. The result is a surface-level film that reinforces a lot of messy notions about the natural world and its creatures as conduits for human drivel. For him, it’s just another playground for a mid-life crisis, and the filmmakers seem utterly uninterested in interrogating him as a subject. ![]() Foster talks about the wonders of the oceans but seems blind to the true power of the sea. This is all about the homo sapien who doesn’t want to raise his own kid or be around his wife because he’s too busy projecting his emotional nonsense onto an animal. A human finds himself through the magic of a common octopus, while the animal… well, actually, we don’t really know what they’re supposed to get from it. My Octopus Teacher wants to sell the story of this incredible moment where man meets nature and common ground is found. That’s not to say that this is a uniform voting tactic or that the wins are undeserving, but it’s a reminder that, for all the bells and whistles and claims of high elitism, the Academy’s brows are thoroughly middle. Consider how, for example, the glitzy musical documentary 20 Feet from Stardom beat the startlingly original and immensely difficult The Act of Killing, or cutesy animal fare like March of the Penguins beating films on Enron, colorism in American politics, and disability. Frequently, the pricklier, more politically radical or complex documentaries are overlooked in favor of palatable fare that’s easy to categorize. This is standard stuff for the Academy in this category. I personally really do not like this film, and by the looks of it, many fellow critics weren’t wild about this win, sharing frustration on social media.Ĭritics didn’t hate the film but in comparison to nominees like Collective and Time, it could not help but feel like a lightweight. There were ‘monster-f**ker’ jokes a-plenty and viewers seemed truly moved by this man’s relationship with nature. The documentary seemed to find its audience organically through access on Netflix and became a much-discussed Twitter topic. ![]() No, he doesn’t f**k the octopus, but he does describe their dynamic in very romantic terms. Foster spends 85 minutes regaling audiences with the tale of how he formed an indelible bond with this creature, becoming incredible friends and maybe kind-of lovers. My Octopus Teacher follows a South African filmmaker named Craig Foster as he decided to essentially ditch his own family to have a midlife crisis on the Cape Peninsula with an octopus.
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