Companion Species Versus Traumatized Pet in *White God*

Companion Species Versus Traumatized Pet in *White God*

White God showcases how the connections between humans and dogs can torture and nurture both species. Ultimately, though, it offers a way to build relationships based on Haraway’s companion species ideal instead of either pampering or torture. The opening title quotation from Rainer Maria Rilka establishes the primary argument of the horror drama White God (2014): “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” To support its claim, however, White God demonstrates how horrific mistreatment may also create the terrible, turning a house pet into a feral hyper-intelligent revolutionary menace.

Set in an alternate Budapest, the film’s conflicts begin when Hungary sets a severe tax on those who own mixed breed dogs, so pedigree and purebreds will be favored. To avoid the tax, mixed breed owners dump them on the streets or in overcrowded animal shelters. The film’s production notes argue the film serves as “a stark, beautiful metaphor for the political and cultural tensions sweeping contemporary Europe.” But its focus on one mixed breed dog’s responses to a lifeless urban environment and the hostile situations he experiences after abandonment by his young owner’s cruel father also suggest an expanded view of eco-trauma may be warranted. In White God, mixed breed Hagen battles urban ecological catastrophes and eco-trauma that transform him from loving pet to vengeance seeking monster.

For Anil Narine, eco-trauma is a product of the ecological catastrophes that “confront us directly, as experiences, or indirectly, as images circulating in the media” (1). Narine suggests, “these events tend to confound us and even paralyze us politically and psychologically” (1). Psychologist Tina Amorok argues that ideally, humans experience lives that are interconnected with others and the natural world. But, Amorok suggests, “The experience of interconnectedness contains paradox, for we sense not just the profound beauty of life but also the pandemic of human violence and the existential anxiety that it causes” (29). Our responses to the eco-trauma this dilemma causes may be violent, Amorok declares, and include

separation ideologies and practices (war, religious fanaticism, racism, and sexism), psychological defense mechanisms (denial, dissociation, psychic numbing), and an array of debilitating behaviors and responses that bear the signature of trauma, ranging from depression, anxiety, and addictive lifestyles to violence toward self, others, and nature. (29)

White God illustrates how a domesticated dog reacts with similar violence when facing eco-trauma and urban ecological catastrophes associated with it.

Dogs and Eco-Trauma: The Making of a Monster in White God Part I

After adopting several rescue dogs, all of whom suffered abuse and neglect, it comes as no surprise to us that both human and nonhuman animals may suffer the consequences of eco-trauma. As part of human society, dogs may also be traumatized by a toxic environment. As cultural critic David R. Shumway asserts, “pets … ought to be understood as elements of a healthy human society” (272). According to Shumway, “if humans have typically lived in a mixed community with animals, then our definition of ‘society’ should be expanded to reflect the fact that not all of the subjects to whom we relate are human” (272). As noted ecocritic Anil Narine suggests, “a traumatized earth begets traumatized people” (13), but a traumatized earth may also negatively affect other species. 

Films highlighting dogfighting reveal much about the complex connections between humans and their dogs. In this presentation, we argue that by exposing the abuse dogs endure during cruel training for and violent assaults in the dogfight ring, the fictional film White God(2015) powerfully demonstrates the repercussions of mistreatment in a toxic environment: eco-trauma. But it also offers a solution: love.

White God suggests a traumatized earth may also traumatize the pets we love, especially in an urban setting. The opening of White Godhighlights the consequences of such environmental trauma. A long shot reveals a starkly empty silent Budapest street where thirteen-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) rides her bike across a deserted bridge. The music is quiet as she passes an abandoned car and bus, suggesting a forced escape for their passengers. Cutting to a city street as she continues to bike, an enormous pack of dogs runs up behind and past her, as if responding to the trumpet in her backpack. This opening scene ends with a flashback to Lili playing with her dog Hagen to underpin the dramatic change trauma has produced in this once happy house pet.

When her mother leaves for three months to Australia, Lili and Hagen’s lives are disrupted when they are forced to move in with Lili’s meat inspector father Daniel (Sándor Zsótér), who lives in a small and insular apartment building. In this traumatic ecology, a neighbor (Erika Bodnár) reports illegal mixed breed ownership to authorities, claiming Hagen bit her. Canine officers warn Lili and her father they must pay a heavy state tax and register the mixed breed or lose him. Forced to sleep in a closed bathroom, Hagen howls. Only Lili’s trumpet can calm him. When Lili sneaks Hagen into her band rehearsal and disturbs the practice, her director throws them out. In retaliation, Lili’s father casts Hagen out of their car in the middle of a crowded avenue and drives off. His actions catalyze the series of traumatic experiences that nearly condemn Hagen to death. 

Ultimately, White God illustrates the similarities between humans and dogs. Both species respond positively to love, and negatively to cruelty. In White God,the hope is that love may counter the environmental trauma humanity creates.

EVFF EIU Student Film Contest

Mother! and the Cli-Fi Conundrum Part IV

When His story of Mother’s creation is suddenly published, the eco-disaster on display becomes almost unbearable to watch. The hallucinogenic sequences show a home invaded by ever- larger hordes of followers of Him. Him and the visitors take even more from Mother and her home. “But it’s not yours,” Mother tells the masses stealing food from her table, while Him orders her to “share it. They’re just things. They can be replaced.” 

Ever larger hordes of invaders intensify Mother’s pain.

Eagerly Him even shares their newborn son with the mob, perhaps because he knows another woman will fix the mess and call him “Baby.” The only way Mother can cope with such intense pain is immolation. In the end, Mother gives us the environmental message we crave: “You never loved me. You just loved how much I loved you. I gave you everything, and you gave it all away.”

In a May 2014 interview, deep-green activist Dan Bloom—arguably the first to use the term cli-fi for climate fiction and film—asserts, “I believe that cli fi novels and movies can serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it” (Vemuri). 

Bloom’s claims echo those of Rahman Badalov, who in 1997 declared, “Blazing oil gushers make marvelous cinematographic material…. Only cinema can capture the thick oil bursting forth like a fiery monster.” But Badalov not only views these oil gushers as monstrous nature. He also notes the dual message of monstrous nature cinema: to both condemn environmental degradation and entertain with spectacle. Bloom’s admission that “the impact of cli fi novels and films has been minor, very minor” may point to the same dual role of cli-fi cinema. 

For Badalov and Bloom, cinema has the potential to bring environmental issues such as climate change to the forefront. But the cinematic mechanism also has the potential to obscure that message with spectacular beauty. In Mother!, the treatment of women, of Mother, obscures any cli-fi message with disgust.