Witnessing "The Witness"

by Joel Marks

Published as “Documentary potent concerning hypocrisy in dealing with animals”
The New Haven Register, January 19, 2011 

The movie begins with a man speaking in a New York City accent about his construction business in the Bronx. He mentions how they would find stray animals at some of their building sites, often in need of veterinary care. Meanwhile a girl friend asks him to take care of her kitten while she’s out of town. He does so reluctantly.

By the end of this 44-minute documentary we have learned how Eddie Lama, a person who had been at best indifferent to animals, was transformed into an animal activist. Somehow he made the connection: from the kitten cuddling in his lap to the meat on his dinner plate and the fur trim on a trendy parka.

I want to know: What will make this happen to everybody?

The Witness, which was produced by a charitable organization called Tribe of Heart, can be viewed in its 44-minute entirety online at http://www.witnessfilm.org/. It is a masterful film in that it reproduces its protagonist’s feelings in the viewer. By the middle of it I was in tears, which did not stop flowing until the end.

Many of the images are unbearable. Some are gruesome, such as animals skinned alive or electrocuted to death. Some are traumatizing: the clamping shut of a trap.

Even more agonizing for me were the clips of wild animals confined to cages just larger than their own bodies. These are animals who are used to roaming outdoors for miles, and now all they could do was turn round and round, going insane. I guess I could relate because I myself go crazy if I cannot take my daily walk.

In the world every single year there are as many animals undergoing tortures like these as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. More than one million are slaughtered every hour of every day in the United States alone. And the number is only growing.

This seems literally incredible – beyond belief – not only in its magnitude but in the disconnect between our normal attitudes of compassion toward the animals who share our homes and our callous indifference, even willful ignorance of the treatment of their cousins who are hunted and “harvested,” and our own complicity in it.

Yet this movie is not about evil, not about hatred, not about violence. Eddie Lama does not come across as a man seething with rage or as a moralist. Instead he is filled with empathy and compassion for suffering creatures. All he wants is for the suffering to end.

And the means are exceedingly simple, and nothing heroic at all. Simply stop eating and wearing and otherwise using animals.

Eddie Lama describes his own transformation as a miracle. Will an even bigger miracle be required to transform humanity as a whole and reverse the trend of animal exploitation?

Maybe The Witness could be that miracle. For all the horror, this movie conveys a message of hope, a message of empowerment.  Eddie Lama does not just succumb to despair as his awareness grows. Instead he is motivated to act. He wants everybody to see what he has seen. But how? He finds a way to show the people of his community what is going on.

Then, of course, the filmmakers created this powerful vehicle for spreading Eddie Lama’s vision even farther. Indeed, my awakening this morning with the conviction to write about what I had watched the night before is yet another example.

What I fear, however, is that some people could watch this movie … even some people who love their cats as much as Eddie Lama loves his … and still not be moved in the way he was by his cats, or I was by watching the movie. Some people might experience a mere sentimentalism, resulting in no concrete action. Others might shrug it off, if they watch it at all.

What, then, will it take?