JM Coetzee's novella The Vietnam Project begins with an epigraph by Herman Kahn:
"Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots visibly exhilarated by successful napalm bombing runs on Viet-Cong targets, react with horror and disgust. Yet, it is unreasonable to expect the U.S. Government to obtain pilots who are so appalled by the damage they may be doing that they cannot carry out their missions or become excessively depressed or guilt-ridden."
In Zoo, Robinson Devor's & Charles Mudede's new film, the late "Mr. Hands" emerges occasionally as just such a guilt-ridden character.
Mr. Hands was an aircraft engineer at Boeing; the quasi-documentary Zoo suggests he worked on an ultra-secret military project. Mr. Hands (the name was his chat-room pseudonym) was also a "zoophile" who died in consequence of one his sexual encounters with a horse.
In the film, an interview with Chalmers Johnson plays on the radio as Mr. Hands drives to his rural trysting place. The secret that few in the audience are likely to share with Mr Hands--having sex with animals--doubles for the secret nearly everyone in the audience does share with him: complicity with the war in Iraq. (A war that is still a secret, even though everyone knows about it; since the "end" of the war, "the United States has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq." The war in Iraq presents the paradox of the public secret.)
This structure of the secret is there, but to read Zoo in this way leaves out some things. Who was it who said that In Cold Blood begins with the murderers' boast that they put the Clutter family's brains on the walls, and that the tension of reading In Cold Blood derives from waiting to see that horrible scene -- from waiting for what you know is coming.
Something similar occurs in Zoo (another work of high-art reportage)--perhaps to its detriment. The film teasingly, gleefully shows and does not show the man-and-horse sex act. Darkness keeps falling, the zoophiles keep swooning into heavy-lidded sleep, barn doors shut and the screen goes black. In one scene, the police screen an impounded DVD for the barn's owners, who never dreamed such goings-on were going on in their barn. As the sex scene unfolds out of our sight, we hear lots of grunting and straining, we see the opera buffa reactions of the nauseated barn-owner and his weeping wife, and then we do see a few seconds of tape. Unless my imagination merely supplied the footage, having repeatedly been promised it in so many fades-to-black.
***
Post-script: One of Hermann Kahn's RAND papers, Ten Common Pitfalls [of Military Planning], gives Kahn's own theory of sexuality. "Modelism," page 12: "In the illustration we see a young man dancing with a dummy. He is either desperate or guilty of Modelism. ... It may or may not be desirable for a young man to construct his love life around fantasies, but the mature heterosexual male wants a girl! There really is 'nothing like a dame.'"
Final post-script: this Coetzee essay, which I think I got from Ads without Products.