On George Miller and Babe, Pig in the City
1.
The word says it all: movie – that is, something characterized by motion. Movies move. In more elevated discourse, we refer to the art form as the motion picture. Lumiere named his first motion picture camera “cinematograph” – that is, cinema (derived from the Greek kinein – to move) and graph (from graphein to write). Thus, Lumiere’s invention, for which he coined the portmanteau word cinematograph, means “motion writer”. From cinema, German and Russian derive the word Kino; this term also means “to move”.
Movement and action are, therefore, fundamental to the nature of films.
(This latter word “film” is another way of describing cinema. “Film” informs us that movies are light projected through a transparent celluloid strip or “film”. In Spanish, a film is called pelicula – a sort of skin; Swahili calls movies filamu – and, also, of course, sinema. Movies are now mostly digital and so the term “film” is anachronistic. However, the word “film” is also significant and reminds us that motion pictures are superficial, shallow, a representation of what can be seen – if a film has depth, it is pretending to that characteristic: the viewer supplies the “depth” that we experience when watching what is merely light passed through film.)
2.
George Miller, the director of Babe, Pig in the City, is fundamentally an “action” director. His pictures are characterized by frenetic action, tone poems to the muse of motion, velocity, acceleration and deceleration, explosions, gravity, things that burst, break, and fall.
3.
In 1923, the Turks and Greeks engaged in reciprocal bouts of ethnic cleansing. The Turks expelled the Greeks from their country; the Greeks responded in kind. A man named Dimitrios and his wife were driven from their home in Turkey; the couple emigrated to New South Wales in Australia where they settled in a small town named Chinchila. The film director, George Miller was born in that town in 1945. He is a twin; his brother is John Miller. (In the hope of blending into Australian culture, Miller’s parents had changed their name.)
As in many immigrant families, Miller’s parents were hard-working and ambitious strivers. They expected their children to succeed. George and John Miller were given an expensive private school education in Sydney and both attended medical school. George was interested in films and, so, he frequently skipped classes to go to the movies – it is said that he relied upon notes taken by John in the lectures that he skipped in order to pass tests administered in medical school. George received a degree in medicine and completed a residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
As he completed his residency, Miller worked part-time on weekends as a bricklayer. When a brick fell from the top of the building and narrowly missed him, Miller had some sort of existential crisis. He bought a tiny Honda motorcycle and drove from Sydney to Melbourne where he talked his way into a seminar on film-making. It was in that context that he met Byron Kennedy who became his closest friend. Kennedy was also very interested in filmmaking and the two men worked together to produce several short subjects. In 1971, Kennedy and Miller’s film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 was shown at the Melbourne Film Festival – as with many of Miller’s later movies, the picture polarized critics due to its gory content. Kennedy and Miller made two other hour-long features, including the docu-drama Devil in an Evening Dress about a ghost said to haunt the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. The two men formed a film production company, Kennedy Miller and raised money for a feature-length biker movie. The Australian film industry is heavily subsidized but Miller and Kennedy refused to accept government funds to produce the movie – they wanted complete control over the film and were willing to sacrifice funding in exchange for artistic freedom. In fact, Miller and Kennedy were making a grungy, feral exploitation film, Mad Max (1979) and, probably, wouldn’t have qualified for government money in light of the picture’s subject matter. Mad Max starred Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, an ex-cop who slaughters a group of bikers responsible for the death of his wife and child. The film is shockingly violent to the extent that it was banned in New Zealand. The first picture in a series of so-called “Ozexploitation films”, the movie made a fortune for its syndicate of private investors and skyrocketed Miller and Kennedy into the forefront of motion picture production in Australia.
Miller and Kennedy moved to Los Angeles where they were much feted and encouraged to work in Hollywood. It was in Los Angeles that Miller attended a lecture by Joseph Campbell, the famous author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a scholarly study of world mythology. In his books and lectures, Campbell posits that there exists an archetypal “hero” narrative that is common to all people and cultures. The so-called Quest of the Hero became central to Miller’s thought and, indeed, structures most of his films after Mad Max. Returning to Australia, Miller and Kennedy made Mad Max II, released in the United States as The Road Warrior (1981). The Road Warrior was an international sensation, demonstrating that the Australian director could orchestrate violent and destructive action even better than the Americans who were thought to be masters of the form.
Byron Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash in 1983 while scouting locations for Miller’s next “Mad Max” film. Nonetheless, Miller kept Kennedy’s name on his production company as a homage to his deceased friend. In 1985, Miller released Mad Max and the Thunderdome starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner – this was Miller’s first film with avowedly feminist themes and the movie that he made most influenced by Joseph Campbell’s theories as to the “mono-myth” of the hero purported to be common to all cultures. Miller had worked in Hollywood in the early ‘eighties, directing the astonishing segment “Terror at 40,000 Feet” for the omnibus picture, 1983's The Twilight Zone (the movie is notorious for the on-camera helicopter accident in John Landis’ contribution, a crash that resulted in three deaths and extensive civil and criminal litigation.) Miller returned to Hollywood to direct a big budget picture, The Witches of Eastwick (1987), based on John Updike’s novel and starring Jack Nicholson (as the devil), Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Miller had trouble with the picture and thought of abandoning it – he couldn’t really work successfully within the Hollywood studio system. Nicholson, however, taught him how to mislead studio executives and “game” the studios for financing and technical support – Miller credits the canny Nicholson with saving his career. The movie was problematic as far as critics were concerned and it didn’t make as much money as its star power warranted, but Nicholson’s exuberant performance was universally acclaimed.
Miller returned to Australia where he devoted his energies to producing films directed by others. In 1992, he made Lorenzo’s Oil (with Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte). The movie involves parents who defy the Australian medical establishment in the quest to save their ailing child – the boy suffers from a rare form of cancer. Based on a true story, Lorenzo’s Oil is medically detailed and clearly related to Miller’s training as a doctor. Babe sometimes known as Babe, the Sheep-Pig was co-written by Miller (based on a popular children’s book) with Chris Noonan. Miller didn’t direct the film; the 1995 movie was directed by Noonan. Babe was another international success and widely admired. In his production of the film, Miller and Noonan experimented with digital effects, that is CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Miller was fascinated by digital film-making and, so, directed himself the much darker and more ambitious Babe, Pig in the City (1998). The sequel didn’t make money. But it led to Miller working increasingly with CGI effects. Miller abandoned cameras for computers entirely for his next two very successful animated picture Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet Two (2011), both animated Pixel-style films about the adventures of a family of Antarctica penguins.
Around 1997, Miller was involved in raising money to fund an Australian national Cinemateque, an institution devoted to preserving (and restoring) movies made Down Under. The venture ultimately failed, but Miller made an well-regarded documentary on Australian cinema, Forty-Thousand Years of Dreaming (1997). (Miller regards movies as akin to the “dreamtime” of the Australian aboriginal people’s “song-lines.) In 2015, Miller released the fourth feature in his Mad Max franchise, Fury Road. This spectacular action movie was lauded as a return to form by the director and universally praised. The picture stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron as well as a colorful cast of mutilated goons and thugs. As with many of his earlier pictures, the film implicitly challenges the macho assumptions of Australian (and Hollywood) action films and is thematically feminist. With Fury Road, Miller returned to the “practical,” that is, live-action, staging of his frenzied vehicular duels that made him famous. He shot the terrifying chase scenes with three cameras using continuous sequence shots, then, edited the footage together into the dynamic, and completely coherent, montage action scenes. Miller followed Fury Road with Three-Thousand Years of Longing, an erotic genii in a bottle movie that seems to have bewildered most critics. His sequel to Fury Road, a picture featuring the heroine of the earlier picture, Furiosa is scheduled for release in 2024.
4.
Most critics were disappointed by Babe: Pig in the City. The movie was nothing like its predecessor, the charming Babe, the Sheep-Pig. Miller had used characters and situations to make something quite different, “very dark and alarming” as one critic observed. Audiences expecting a witty family-friendly romp found the movie disquieting and box office receipts were disappointing. The film industry relies upon its artists working to expectations established by their earlier work – any deviation from a successful audience-pleasing formula is greeted with skepticism. This rule applies even to sophisticated criticism.
Babe, the Sheep-Pig was a children’s movie, enormously successful in the world-wide market. The picture’s receipts exceeded 264 million dollars and the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards. The Sheep-Pig was regarded as “family friendly” and “inspirational”. The movie was based on a 1983 children’s novel and has, as its climax, Babe winning a prize as best sheep-herding animal. The picture has animal rights overtones and espouses the winning notion that creatures can overcome stereotyping to achieve success in fields that might otherwise be closed to them. (The movie is credited with converting many people to Vegetarianism.)
Pig in the City cost over 90 million dollars. Its total receipts were about 70 million dollars. A box-office disappointment, the film was also poorly reviewed, although some critics such as Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis praised the movie. Since it’s release, the film’s reputation has steadily grown and, now, it is regarded as one of Miller’s best, and most characteristic, films.
5.
Pig in the City invokes a pattern well-known from fairy tales. A naive protagonist, neither especially intelligent nor strong nor otherwise gifted, embarks on a quest to rescue someone or something – the object of the quest may be a princess, diamonds and gold, or some supernatural artifact (for instance, a ring of power). The protagonist’s only qualifications for his or her adventures involve dogged fortitude and, sometimes, an ignorance that disguises from the hero risks inevitably encountered along the way. After his friend and lover’s death, Gilgamesh sets forth to find the flower of immortality so as to revive Enkidu, his deceased comrade. The Blues Brothers embark on their adventures to raise $5000 to pay off a tax lien on the Catholic orphanage where they were raised. Babe and Esme Hoggett travel to the sinister big city so that the pig can appear at a fair and win a cash prize that will allow them to pay off the mortgage that is being foreclosed on the family farm. In the course of their quest, the hero will encounter various perils and temptations. This plot device animates myriads of narratives from tales collected by the Grimm Brothers to mythological themes illuminated by Joseph Campbell, an important influence on George Miller, in his books The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God.
In the case of Pig in the City, the crisis precipitating Babe’s visit to the metropolis is a bank’s foreclosure on its mortgage encumbering Hoggett’s farm. The bank’s foreclosure proceedings, in turn, stem from Farmer Hoggett’s serious injuries arising from an accident in the farm’s well. Hoggett is placing a pump of some kind in the well on the premises when Babe knocks part of the wall into the cistern, thereby, inducing a series of calamitous events involving a pulley, the heavy wooden cap to the well, and the pump machinery itself. At the end of the movie, Hoggett is shown again installing a pump system to extract water from his well. At first, the pump doesn’t work, then, it runs blood-red (rust in the system, of course, but a reference to Hoggett’s terrible accident) and, then, gushes clean pure water into a trough. The business with the pump inscribes a narrative arc between which Babe’s adventure’s in the city occur. Miller films Hoggett’s accident in a way that makes his various injuries (as the farmer is alternately pulled upward out of the well and, then, dashed to its bottom) both plausible and, even, rather excruciating – a hand injury that occurs when Hoggett’s digits are pulled into the pinch-point at the pulley is shown in close-up and particularly disturbing. Although the accident is shot as a sort of vicious gag, the pain involved seems all too real and this episode in the movie establishes the film’s fundamentally disquieting tone – there’s real danger in Pig in the City and real injury. Indeed, scenes showing Hoggett in traction, immobilized in cast and cervical collar with his wounded hand fixed in some kind of leather strap, are realistic and, even, gruesome. These sequences establish that Pig in the City will involve ostensibly humorous calamities with painful and disturbing consequences. Throughout much of the film, we don’t know exactly how to react to what is shown on screen – is this supposed to be funny? Or tragic? Or both? Many of Buster Keaton’s films have this same aspect – what we see is intended as an elaborate gag, a complicated pratfall or violent collision that seems to involve real and deadly danger. Is this supposed to be funny or frightening? Miller’s fairy-tale, like Grimm’s Maerchen, involve perils and gory mishaps. It should be noted that many of the animatronic animals shown in the movie are battered and have suffered various sorts of trauma – consider, for instance, poor Flealick, a small terrier with paralyzed hind quarters who uses a kind of canine wheelchair to move around.
6.
Of course, the fundamental terror implicit in the film is that a pig is raised for its meat – that is, to be slaughtered for human consumption. Babe lives under the threat of being butchered for his meat. This disturbing aspect of human-animal relations – that is, the transactions between predator and prey – underlies several scenes in the movie: the plucky little sheep-pig is called “HAM” by a skywriting plane until we see that the letters inscribed in the heavens, in fact, are intended to spell “CHAMP.” Similarly, the dour, dignified orangutan, Thelonius, says that pigs are “an inconsequential species that exist only to be eaten by humans.”
George Miller is famously progressive and humane in his view of the world. (Critics have hailed Fury Road, for instance, as an action movie with powerfully feminist themes.) There’s no doubt that Miller, like his compatriot, the Australian animal rights theorist, Peter Singer, intends the film to raise questions about human interactions with domestic animals. By what right, do we slaughter and eat fellow sentient beings? This subject is an inescapable aspect underlying much of the film.
The great German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, said that animals reside in a kind of hell in which human beings are tormenting demons. Something along these lines is suggested, at least elliptically, by Babe: Pig in the City. What are we to make of the climax in which the animals are herded from their refuge in the hotel, caged, and dragged to some sinister impound facility. The pound is located, it seems, on the grounds of a hospital and, probably, is intended to be an animal research station in which dogs and cats and primates are tortured and vivisected in the name of medical science. The grotesque society men and women preening themselves at the charity ball, accordingly, are complicit in a system of oppression in which animals are murdered, often painfully, in order to research cures for human ailments.
7.
The word “chaos” appears on several occasions in the titles announcing the film’s various episodes. These frequent allusions to “chaos” are thematic and provide us with clues to some of the picture’s meanings.
“Chaos” (Kaos) is a Greek word that originally meant “abyss”, referring specifically to the abyss through which souls fall on their way to Tartarus, the Underworld. The Romans adopted the word and Ovid, for instance, uses it to mean “a jumbled, formless, disordered mass.” Chaos, matter in disorder, opposes “cosmos”, a word used to denote matter organized into an ordered and meaningful system. Many of George Miller’s films are constructed around the clash between order and chaos – the refugee compound in The Road Warrior is under assault by the war lord Humongus, the “Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah”, an agent of chaos; Bartertown, the mercantile settlement in the desert in Beyond the Thunderdome is an example of a chaotic, anarchic enterprise opposed, at the end of the film, by the commune of women and children who have settled in the ruins of post-apocalyptic (“the pookie lips”) Sydney. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe’s five concubines, one of whom is pregnant, flee the citadel, a nihilistic and chaotic fortress, where people are used as “blood bags’ to transfuse warriors; the women led by Imperator Furiosa intend to form an all-female cooperative in the “Green Place”, a tract of land that has somehow survived environmental destruction. In these films most notably, Miller develops the contrast between chaos and cosmos –that is, the clash between the dark forces of destruction and order.
The interesting question posed by Pig in the City is whether the Metropolis (the city of all cities) signifies chaos or order. The daunting forest of skyscrapers rising over Venetian lagoons has a chaotic aspect, particularly when compared with the bucolic landscapes of the farming country from which Esme Hoggett and Babe have come. But it was at the idyllic farm that chaos ensued to severely injure the Boss. In Pig in the City, the concept of chaos means something like entropy, the tendency of things to fall apart, a force that Germans call the Tuecke des Objekts (“the malice of objects”), a main staple in anarchic slapstick comedy, a form that the film occasionally mimics: things don’t stay in place; they fall apart, collapse, and random fires break out. It is this hazard on a metaphysical level that order opposes – the tendency of things, including societies, to spontaneously fall apart and combust. (We can see this most clearly in the scene in the film in which the Fabulous Floom chimpanzee act deteriorates into fiery chaos.)
Miller’s most radical film is Beyond the Thunderdome in which he posits proto-capitalism as represented by the transactions in Bartertown as one of the roots of chaos – the notion that anything and anyone can be bought and sold; Bartertown has two competing rulers, the Machiavellian Auntie Entity (Tina Turner) and MasterBlaster (a dwarf riding on the shoulders of a mentally challenged giant) – Bartertown seems to be Miller’s critique of the free market capitalism, a system that he regards as fundamentally chaotic and dehumanizing. This critique is not explicitly applied to the action in Pig in the City. The City’s economic and political structures aren’t specified, although the place seems merciless and corrupt – the police are sadistic thugs, malign motorcycle gangs rule, at least, some of the neighborhoods (a persistent theme in Miller’s movies), neighbors spy and inform on neighbors, and the elites shown at the hospital charity ball are pompous and grotesque fools. In Pig in the City, the metropolis is less chaotic then simply diseased – its children are sick and, apparently, dying of cancer, at least, this is an aspect of the city that is highlighted in the film. (Clearly, the City perceives itself as under attack: the separation between Esme and Babe that drives the action is a result of goonish cops arresting the woman due to a drug-sniffing dog’s grandstanding – Esme is accused of being some sort of narcotics “mule.” So forces perceived as hostile make the City an embattled place, a compound surrounded by marauders.) At the film’s core, we see the league of animals, having established a truce between species ordinarily hostile to one another, attempting to establish an orderly society by consensus. The beasts distribute resources according to a systematic communist paradigm – each animal, regardless of merit, is given one jellybean. As in Miller’s other films, the animals set aside competing interests to form a kind of commune. However, this fragile structure comes under assault and is destroyed when the animal impound unit raids the hotel. (Utopian themes in the movie seem an elusive and faint reference to the so-called “Sydney Push”, an Australian activist and anti-authoritarian intellectual subculture that flourished in the early sixties – Germaine Greer was briefly associated with this social movement.) Miller’s theme is that hostile forces always threaten any attempt to create social order and that chaos is omnipresent – objects rage at us, resist, and things get broken.
8.
The metropolis in Pig in the City is an omnium gatherum, a collection of all cities in the world compressed into one place – among the skyscrapers, we can see Seattle’s Space Tower, New York’s Rockefeller Center, Big Ben, the Berlin Fernsehturm and a number of other famous, urban landmarks. The City of all Cities is a symbolic place – the metropolis stands in contrast with the country, the lush green landscape of New South Wales with its small farm and peaceful domestic animals. (As is generally the case with city slickers, the beasts in the metropolis are tough-talking, urbane, snarky, cynical, and ironic – most of the animals talk in New York accents, some using pompous malapropisms that are reminiscent of the city-lingo spoken by the Bowery Boys in the old movies featuring that gang.) Just as the City encompasses all cities, the film embraces many different styles – the intertitles seem to have come from a silent movie and the picture uses several silent film techniques, most notably irising in and out of Miller’s crowded canvases to emphasize details in the pictorial field (usually singing mice). The action sequences channel Miller’s earlier films and Spielberg’s vehicular action choreography. There are slow-motion sequences and montage cut to music in the fashion of a music video. The red-dyed poodle, imagined as a sort of canine prostitute, speaks with the southern intonations of Blanche (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire. The soundtrack foregrounds every kind of music from operatic choruses and arias (we hear singing from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and the Anvil Chorus from Verdi’s Il Trovatore), to “The Girl from Ipanema”, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore”, and, of course, Edith Piaf’s “No Regrets” (Non Rien). A mournful tune ( “Protected by Angels”) played by the Irish band, the Chieftains, underlies the scenes in which the animal impound officers disrupt the “peaceable kingdom” that the beasts have established. Randy Newman composed the song played during the credits, lyrics that reiterate some of the themes of the movie; the song is sung by Peter Gabriel.
Mickey Rooney’s role, a grotesque appearance that is more of a cameo than a performance, invokes the actor’s long career in movies. In Pig in the City, Rooney acts as the impresario for the Fabulous Floom’s monkey show. By contrast to his intelligent animal actors, Uncle Fugly (as he is called – that is “effing Ugly”) doesn’t seem capable of speech. When we first see him, he’s smeared with some kind of cream pastry and the sounds that come out of his greasy lips aren’t words. (His first appearance in the film reminds me of Rooney’s indelibly feral Puck, the actor’s first movie role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Apparently, the character is meant to be a terminal alcoholic and, in fact, after the destruction of his monkey act, Uncle Fugly collapses and, in a very disturbing scene, is wheeled out of the hotel on a gurney his face still disfigured by clown make-up. (Presumably, the character dies – we don’t see him again in the movie.) Fugly’s part as emcee to the animal act may remind us of his roles in a half-dozen pictures playing Andy Hardy alongside Judy Garland in the late forties – the kids are always determined to put on a show and, after many difficulties, succeed in this endeavor. Rooney also had an important part, the role of former jockey and horse trainer, in Lucien Ballard’s (1976) The Black Stallion and this seems to rhyme in some ways with his role in Pig in the City. An irony is here apparent: Mickey Rooney’s Fugly is obviously more bestial than the animals with whom he performs.
The most notable allusions to other films in Pig in the City are to Miller’s previous movies. Indeed, this aspect of the film is structural – Miller contrives the action in the picture to replicate some of the most noteworthy sequences in his earlier work. When Babe is flown to the City, the camera dollies forward in a chaotic-looking cargo hold – everything is trembling and shaking as the plane lifts off. Then, Miller cuts to the passenger cabin and again the camera dollies forward rapidly, trembling as it moves. This is the precise effect used in Miller’s “Terror at 40,000 Feet”, his contribution to John Landis’ The Twilight Zone. In the earlier short film, John Lithgow, playing a passenger with severe fear of flying, is agonized and shaking with terror, as his plane bounces through a violent electrical storm. When he glances out the window, he sees a monstrous gremlin squatting on the jet’s wing, attempting to tear the plane apart. In Pig in the City, the camera shows us the duck s flying just outside the window, struggling to keep up with the plane as it departs for the City. (The shot exactly imitates the view from the window in the nightmarish storm in “Terror at 40,000 Feet”.) The movie is replete with Miller’s signature action sequences – these scenes in The Road Warrior and Beyond the Thunderdome, feature large armored vehicles roaring across wastelands flanked by motorcycles and dune buggies that either attempt to destroy the truck or act to defend it from marauders on other eccentrically shaped vehicles (some of them have hooded hostages strapped to their fenders). Miller stages similar scenes in Babe – we see Flealick in his wheeled conveyance, for instance, dragged in tandem with big vehicles and there are several bravura action set-pieces involving heavy trucks or buses flanked by smaller attacking cars and motorcycles. (Esme encounters bullying by a motorcycle gang, an allusion to the malevolent bikers in Mad Max.) The scenes in which the primates perform for very sick children, presumably in pediatric cancer wards, invoke Miller’s Lorenzo’s Oil, a movie set largely in children’s hospitals – Lorenzo, a small boy, is dying from a rare form of blood cancer. Finally, the climactic scene at the charity soiree involves Esme, and several opponents, flying around on giant bungee cords under the domed rotunda of the ballroom. This scene reprises a famous duel sequence in Beyond the Thunderdome in which Max Rockatansky fights Blaster – the adversaries are armed with lances, giant sledgehammers and chainsaws, and they are attached to elastic bungee cords so that they can rocket around in three-dimensions in the eponymous “Thunderdome” gladiatorial arena. The spectacle of the plump Esme bouncing through the air while pursued by men in tuxedos makes direct reference to the duel in Thunderdome.
Why does Miller self-consciously allude to his earlier films in Babe, Pig in the City? My supposition is that Miller thought of this picture as his “masterpiece”, that is, the movie in which demonstrated his skill and mastery of film art and, therefore, reprises the earlier stages in his career leading to this picture.
9.
In a strange way, Pig in the City presages or forecasts imagery that will be important in Miller’s future movies. The chimpanzee mother giving birth to her twin babies in the atrium of the animal hotel seems a precursor to the scenes involving Immortan Joe’s concubine, The Splendid Angharad, whose pregnancy is the motive for the relentless chase that comprises most of the movie. (The Splendid Angharad is run over and dies, prompting an unsuccessful Caesarean section in which the dead child is proclaimed “perfect in every way.” ) Immortan Joe has controlled the mobs in the Citadel by thirst – he doles out tiny rations of water to his army of slaves. At the climax of Fury Road, the reservoirs at the Citadel are opened and great cascades of water anoint the ragged masses gathered under the cliffs from which Immortan Joe rules. On a much smaller scale, the huffing and coughing pump at the end of Pig in the City announces the end of the movie with a gush of water that is, at first, tainted, but, then, clears so that it can be drunk.
10.
Miller’s films often revolve around the establishment of a new society that arises from the ruins of an old, corrupt order that has destroyed itself. The Mad Max cycle of pictures confronts this issue directly. Pig in the City, as we have seen, includes scenes in which the animals organize themselves into a sort of polity when the humans in the hotel are absent. After the apparent death of Uncle Fugly, the beasts are free to establish their own society.
The idea of animals allying themselves into a new social order is intrinsic in many beast fables for instance Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees”. This ancient theme is most notably developed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Orwell had fought on the side of the Leftists in the Spanish Civil War, observed the lethal infighting among different communist and anarchist factions, and took a bullet in the throat for his efforts. In Animal Farm, Orwell devises an allegory based on the Russian Revolution. The animals rise in revolt and throw off the fetters imposed upon them by the humans who are driven off the premises. However, no sooner have the animals achieved their liberation, their revolution is hi-jacked by a corrupt pig, aided (as is Babe with his pit-bull ally) by a pack of German shepherds who act as enforcers for the new regime. In the end, the animals on the farm are no better off than when they were exploited by the human managers of the enterprise. They have cast off one set of villains for rule by another, equally vicious, dictator – in this case, the sinister Berkshire boar, Napoleon, Orwell’s thinly disguised representation of Joseph Stalin. Miller’s film is not an allegory so far as I can determine, nor a parable, mor, even, particularly political. At the happy end of the film, Pig is back on the farm, an orderly and harmonious kingdom, ruled by the benevolent Boss, Farmer Hoggett.
10.
What is Babe, Pig in the City about? The meanings proposed by the movie are fundamental and simple enough to state: it’s better to be kind than cruel; gentleness is better than ferocity; creatures should be treated with generosity in accord with their fundamental dignity. In the film’s first ten minutes, ethical and moral axioms illuminated by the film are explicitly stated:
Don’t take counsel with your fears.
Fortune favors the brave.
A kind and steady heart can mend a sorry world.
It’s all illusory – all you get is the actual nowness.
It’s a dog eat dog world and there’s not enough dog to go around.
These themes are articulated against a vivid background that emphasizes the essential dignity of the individual. When the helpful pelican releases the duck from his throat pouch high above the City of all Cities, the larger bird says: “Farewell, noble duck!” The worst indignity inflicted on the genteel orangutan, Thelonius, is to remove his butler’s clothing and take his picture unclad. At a key moment in the action, everything pauses for Thelonius to laboriously put on his shirt, waistcoat, and trousers. Flealick, although crippled, remains dauntless and courageous to an almost suicidal degree. Perhaps, the little dog’s reckless behavior is related to his grief at being disabled. When Flealick is knocked out, the film enters his imagination and we are shown a dream vision of the dog able-bodied and romping in sunlit meadow – he jumps into the air to chase butterflies. Beings are greater than the sum of their disabilities, beliefs, and, even, motivations.
And characters, even those who seem to be depraved, can have sudden changes of heart. The vicious pitbull, rescued from drowning by Babe, is converted from implacable hostility and aggression to being the pig’s loyal lieutenant. Mercy is better than revenge because it implicates the possibility of “mending a broken world.” Further, the pit bull, and his kind, are, perhaps, excused their violent predilections because, after all, they were “bred to be warriors.” The problem that these militant animals face is that it’s not clear in the modern world what it means to be a warrior and, certainly, obscure as to the forces against which they should wage war. (There is passing reference to Lee Tamahori’s Once were Warriors, a 1994 New Zealand film about the violence suffusing modern Maori urban culture – what happens when warriors are deprived of their reason for existence.)
So much violence and suffering in the world is avoidable, unnecessary, inexplicable. When the pit bull threatens Babe, the pig has only one question: “Why?” Babe, Pig in the City doesn’t answer this question. But, by posing it, the film has done its duty to its audience.
