Zoo USA, NR, 80 m, 2007
The world-famous Darwin Award, which was dreamed up by a klutzy neuroscience researcher named Wendy Northcutt, is a dishonor bestowed upon “those who improve the species...by accidentally removing themselves from it!” Past winners, who naturally received the prize posthumously, include a mentalist who was squashed by a freight train after he failed to will it to a stop, a drunk who roused the ire of a thousand or so bees when he tried to take a nip from their hive, and a convicted murderer who joined his victim in the boneyard after he carried out a half-assed operation on a faulty TV set while parked on the metal commode in his cell. Northcutt’s website, www.darwinawards.com, is jam-packed with such accounts, and while God knows every chucklehead referenced deserves his time in the stocks, the biggest chucklehead of them all has yet to receive a big clump of filth in his putrefied puss. (Maybe because his story is too indelicate, too prurient, too bloody disgusting for what is essentially a family-friendly site.). I’m talking about the late Kenneth Pinyan, the Boeing engineer and sexual deviant upon whom the documentary Zoo is largely based. Some enchanted evening in the summer of ‘05, the Gig Harbor-based Pinyan (or “Mr. Hands,” as he was known to his fellow pervs) was anonymously dropped off at an Enumclaw hospital and later died from peritonitis due to a perforation in his sigmoid colon. Was he just another unfortunate sodomite who got a little too chummy with a broom handle or a pool cue or a GE Chroma 75 fluorescent light bulb? Nope, he was a “zoophile” who gave up his backside to an Arabian stallion, a beast with a dong so big it makes John Holmes’ notorious member look like something you’d find in Michu the Midget’s pants. Seriously, folks, if you’re dumb enough to let a horse ride you, I can pretty much guarantee you that the only tears that’ll get shed at your internment will be ones of laughter. After all, there’s a good reason why (sane) societies generally look down on this type of behavior: it puts them at risk for potentially deadly zoonoses like brucellosis, leptospirosis, and henipavirus. Incredibly enough, bestiality wasn’t against the law in Washington when Pinyan was living out his boyhood dream of being Mr. Ed’s bitch (videotapes of the two horsing around were often made for other degenerates to enjoy), but the story (which was made known by The Seattle Times) brought on such a hue and cry that the act now carries a punishment of up to ten years in the slammer. Truth be told, the idea that a guy could play catcher in an unnatural act with a horse never occurred to me; I had assumed going into this doc that the weirdoes being profiled were the ones doing the pitching. (May God damn the filmmakers for making me even go there.) Director Robinson Devor doesn’t exactly pardon the zoophiles’ gross conduct, but he doesn’t take them to task for it either. (I suppose they might not have participated if he had, though I can’t think of many other groups more deserving of a ruthless lambasting. Perhaps necrophiliacs. And pedophiles. Definitely pedophiles.) These sorry bastards see their twisted sexual proclivities as just another lifestyle choice, often referring to themselves as “zoo” in the same way that homosexuals refer to themselves as “gay” or heterosexuals refer to themselves as “straight.” I don’t know what the horses refer to themselves as; Devor can’t get anything out of them other than the occasional “neigh” or “whinny.” In regards to the sordid material from which Zoo draws its inspiration, Devor crowed to the journalists at the Sundance Film Festival that he “aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.” The problem is that he also aestheticized the life right out of it. This is a dull, slow-moving, pointlessly arty affair—a minor anecdote padded to feature film length and bathed in Michael Mann-ish midnight blue. Devor won’t hear of giving his audience money shots, which I suppose is admirable, but he expends so much energy in dancing around the film’s main (and perhaps only) selling point that you wonder why he bothered taking on such a controversial subject in the first place. In fact, if you were to go into Zoo cold, you’d have no blooming idea what it was about until half past its first hour, but by that time you’d be too sleepy to give a horse’s patoot. (I’ve seen Robert Redford movies that had more get-up-and-go.) Though the featured zoos prattle on about this and that and that and this, we never gain a scintilla of insight into what makes them go gaga for horseflesh. As you would expect, most of the individuals (I’m loath to call them gentlemen) mixed up in the Enumclaw scandal were not about to appear on camera, so Devor complements the audio interviews they granted him with shadowy, overly stylized dramatizations. (The cinematography by Sean Kirby is both beautiful and haunting, and the inconspicuous musical score by Paul Matthew Moore effectively supports the images.) I normally can’t stand dramatic reenactments, but the ones here hardly qualify as dramatic—they’re stagnant, like those living nativity scenes. Zoophiles were once the most lonesome of biological errors, but all that changed when Al Gore created the Internet. It was in a chat room where Pinyan (or “Pinhead,” as I like to call him) learned of the rural getaway that would come to be his Waterloo, his Watergate, his White Water: a horse brothel, which, it should be noted, was operated by a ranch hand (whose Internet handle was simply “H”) without the knowledge of his employers. The fellows who made regular weekend pilgrimages to the ranch were of varied backgrounds, but their taste in sexual partners connected them in a way that most had never known before. Zoo spends an inordinate amount of time stressing their general everydayness as they eat, drink, and make merry, but there’s hardly any discussion amongst the men as to why they’ve all gathered. Land sakes alive, it’s not to stare at the moonlit mountains or sing old Stephen Foster songs or do the Curly Shuffle—it’s to get fricking laid! That time can’t come soon enough for Pinyan (played here by John Paulsen), who, after getting rip-roaring drunk, strips down to his birthday suit and makes a play for a particularly handsome equine. He strokes his nuzzle, fondles his testes, and whispers sweet nothings in his flea-bitten ear. (Believe me, this is not the kind of horse whisperer you want anywhere near your herd.) Well, one thing leads to another and soon Pinyan is joining Catherine II in the great stable in the sky. (Okay, that whole thing about Cat being flattened by her stallion lover is an urban legend, but damned if I could find anybody else of note who perished under the same crazy circumstances that Pinyan did.) Heartless as it may sound, I laughed out loud at the scene where Pinyan’s accomplice, James Michael Tait (who videotaped the entire tryst), deposits his dead friend at an ER in the middle of the night and then tries to vamoose before he has to explain anything to anyone. Tait (aka “The Happy Horseman”) was eventually collared, but because of Washington’s lack of a bestiality law, he was only charged with trespassing. In 2009, well after Zoo was first released, Tait (or “Taint,” as I like to call him) was busted in Tennessee for doing dogs. Once the barnyard bordello became fodder for the rags, the horse that plowed Pinyan into an early grave was gelded. But, gee, that hardly seems fair. After all, it was Pinyan who took advantage of the stallion’s randy nature. Whatever. You don’t have to be living in the Bible Belt to judge interspecies sex as just plain wrong, and any viewer who isn’t sick in the head (or a “progressive”) will have a hard time putting up with Devor’s attempts to humanize the stars of this touchy-feely freak show. And you may want to scream when you hear one of the zoophiles assert that it’s not so much about the sex as it’s about “the love of animals.” (Child rapists have been known to make bogus claims like that.) But if it’s not about the sex, why do these fuckwads make videos of their encounters for other zoos to jerk off to? I also find it perplexing when the morons in the press refer to Pinyan’s death as a “tragedy.” Look, a two-year-old boy dying after consuming E. coli tainted beef is a tragedy. Five children being drowned in a bathtub by their psychotic mother is a tragedy. Untold millions of babies being aborted before they ever get a chance to see what the world looks like is a tragedy. Some putz buying the farm after having receptive anal sex with a blankety-blank horse is not a tragedy. If anything, it’s the sort of yarn that’ll get you big yuks in a bar. It’s always fun to
read what some of the oh-so-enlightened critics out there have to say about a
thorny work such as Zoo. One reviewer, who likes to think of herself as
being open to “a wide range of sexual expression,” was surprised at how
queasy the film made her feel. (It speaks to what a debased culture we live in
when this poor soul sees herself as the one with the problem.) A few of
my other contemporaries expressed misgivings with Zoo’s moral
relativism, but were quick to laud the show for its surreal, tranced-out quality. I
agree with the columnist who wrote, “It
is a relaxing film to watch,” but who wants to be relaxed by a film
about bestiality? Zoo should have been fashioned in a way that would
shake audiences up, not put them under. Devor’s Vaseline-covered lens
ultimately gelds the last great taboo. This is the most ludicrous documentary
I’ve ever seen. June 22, 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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