Cow

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🎙️ EPISODE 450: 04.21.22 starts around ~42:01 Watching this immediately after Lamb was perhaps not the best choice, at least when it comes to the "Damn, that's a lot of live farm animal birth sequences to watch" department. This is a cinéma vérité production in the truest sense. I like that style but the realness of it can sometimes feel overwhelming. Shot over the course of a few years, Cow follows the life of Luma, a balding insurance saleman. Just kidding. It's a cow, a dairy cow. The film makes you consider the process of how we get our milk. And when you step back and think about this process, it is totally insane. The humans are all barely seen. Just a hand and an arm here, maybe a leg part of the torso there. Very occasionally a face. And these are not evil faces. These are just the faces of farmers. The transition from farms to factory farms was either or a long or short one, depending on you look at it. But these people don't wear any of that weight. It just is.

The cows are never being outwardly "abused" but this still felt awful to me, if not completely and literally unnatural. What I struggle with, perhaps, is who exactly this movie was made for? For the persons fully unsympathetic or even the largely ambivalent ones, what are they gleaning from what — to the best of my knowledge — is probably a baseline example of these procedures and how they operate ethically (or what we've come to accept or tolerate as ethical standards)? But maybe I'm overthinking it. Because as a straight document it's fascinating and stands on its own. I read a few interviews with director Andrea Arnold (best known for her narrative fiction and for directing every episode of the HBO series Big Little Lies' horrible second season) and she doubles down fully on that point: take from this whatever you want; it's not for her to say.

These are the tough realities of the world mankind created. We chose to live this way, not the cow. I've dabbled in veganism throughout my adult life and I'm currently back on the tip right now. I want to keep it up forever. This isn't the world I want to live in. I'm just not sure I want to or have the strength to preach that mantra, and the ultimate beauty of Cow might be, not that it doesn't know that either, but that it actively chooses not to engage in the debate. The film ends with Luma getting shot in the head with a handgun. Maybe she was too young to die, but she was too old to effectively meet the standards of the cow milk economy.

After spending much of the first hour of this film inside grim, shit-covered concrete facilities, we see that the cows are allowed time on the pasture to graze, and they seem to enjoy it. And sure, maybe they seem to enjoy it more because of the delicate camera work, capturing the sun at a perfect angle as the animal cranes its neck skyward with a wad of grass in their mouth. Trying to find a nice little moment, just like everybody else: cow, human or otherwise. What else is there to do?

I didn't find this film to necessarily be a "cop-out," as I've seen suggested. I think it's good to have documents such as this, with as close to zero editorializing as you're ever gonna find. But I've made up my own mind. And maybe it is apathy or cowardice to say that I don't really have the energy to care whether or not you've made up yours.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 450B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 450D ⫸

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Cow is a 2021 British documentary film by Andrea Arnold, revolving around the life of a female dairy cow. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It was released on July 15, 2021.