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Well, I watched "My Octopus Teacher" on netflix: a flawed but moving documentary about a straight man who has a lifechanging erotic relationship with a female octopus. I cried, then read out loud to my friends the entirety of @amiasrinivasan's 2017 essay ( https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker)
Writes Srinivasan: "The octopus threatens boundaries. ... Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens."
"The octopus’s body is... itself a thinking thing."
Implicit, for me, in Srinivasan's essay - full of disgusted quotes from bros like Aristotle & Victor Hugo reacting somatophobically to the bodies of octopuses - is the intrinsic queerness of octopus epistemology-cum-embodiment.
Implicit, for me, in Srinivasan's essay - full of disgusted quotes from bros like Aristotle & Victor Hugo reacting somatophobically to the bodies of octopuses - is the intrinsic queerness of octopus epistemology-cum-embodiment.
"Folds," "radii," openness, penetrability... the gynophobia of Hugo's take on octopi was particularly clear to me, on rereading @amiasrinivasan's piece, because I happened also to (finally) watch Eggers's 2019 maritime horror The Lighthouse, with its mermaid vulva, tentacles, etc
Watching MOT as a trio of acid-tripping queers, it made us hoot with laughter when the ur-straight diver first encounters what (to us) is so obviously a logic of femme excess, and reports back in total perplexity: "what is she doing?!" Duh! This is a queer slut from outer space!!
"Teacher" is about the conservationist Craig Foster's relationship with the octopus. At one point, they have a form of sex: "the boundaries between her body and mine disappear."
This is precisely what the diver says in Hokusai's famous print: "Oh! Boundaries and borders gone!"
This is precisely what the diver says in Hokusai's famous print: "Oh! Boundaries and borders gone!"
Foster is an amicable guy. I applaud his Sea Change project's effort to protect the kelp forest off the African coast. A Netflix doc is always going to be limited by daft narrative imperatives. Nevertheless My Octopus Teacher is often an object-lesson in scientific masculinity...
My Octopus Teacher frequently skirts the most wonderful aporias, vulnerabilities, semi-realizations of human-nonhuman interdependence & transsubjectivity. It asks sweetly curious questions about being-octopus. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow itself to dwell finally in that space.
e.g. The unmistakable substance of the film - the polymorphously perverse, intimate interspecies relationship - is hamfistedly, guiltily folded into an unconvincing framing narrative about Foster's human son (Tim). What is Tim doing in this movie? Reproductive futurism for days!!
Foster correctly maintains that helping her recover from the shark attack (she lost a whole limb) would be 'interfering.' He also seems intermittently aware that making the documentary is itself 'interfering in her world.' To what 'environment' do his emotions belong? Unclear...
What *is* clear is that getting weird with the octopus must be justified in the name of becoming a better dad. She becomes "nature" again, rather than a unique being, whenever it seems necessary to account for the purpose/benefit of that relationship. It cannot stand on its own.
If you track Foster's use of she/her versus "it" to refer to the octopus, his lapses seem to correspond to the surfacing of his shame about having made, well, a documentary about the maiming (by shark) & suffering of a nonhuman person w/ whom he was in a significant relationship.
I'm not saying I am sorry the docu was made, or that he 'should have' behaved differently - only that there's something conspicuously queerphobic, repressed, about the fact that (because 'science'!) Foster doesn't permit himself to hold her (even for a moment) when she is dying.
