Zoo

Four months ago, when Robinson Devor's documentary Zoo screened at the Portland International Film Festival, I described it as "a smorgasbord of unintentional comedy." Since then, the movie has opened in New York and L.A., where it has garnered further descriptions: "bold and unforgettable," "breathtakingly original," "beautiful and beguiling." These plaudits come from fine, thoughtful critics like Scott Foundas and Nathan Lee—writers I respect even when they abuse the letter "b." What can explain this break? Have I been blinded by my bigotry against bestiality?
Bullshit. Zoo is a lousy movie, insipidly fawning in its storytelling. It takes a subject already doomed to inspire snickers and makes it a far sight funnier by being oblique and poetical about it. In 2005, Kenneth Pinyan died in Eumenclaw, Wash., from what the coroner diagnosed as "perforation of the sigmoid colon during anal intercourse with a horse." So there's that fact to deal with in any documentary about Pinyan, and what distinguishes Devor's movie (based on a series of articles by The Stranger's Charles Mudede) is how strenuously it avoids dealing with it. The Eumenclaw ranch is depicted in literally flowery tracking shots—re-enactments of men traversing petal-strewn fields in the moonlight to meet their equine loves. There are also allegations that Pinyan's death was a direct result of Bush-era geopolitics, and odes to the masculine Thanksgiving feasts enjoyed by the farmgoers, and even an interview with an actor playing an unnamed cop, who breaks character to ponder the meaning of life and death.
What there isn't, among all of this, is a single recognition of what defined the Eumenclaw gatherings: that a group of men wanted to experience the business end of a horse penis. This doesn't seem to interest Robinson Devor. Which is odd, because it certainly interested the men themselves. Whether or not you think having sex with a horse is wrong, you should agree that having sex with a horse has to be the central concern of a movie about a man who died from having sex with a horse. Otherwise, you're going to get a movie that's called "resolutely unsensational" when it is actually flat-out misleading—and so obviously deceptive that everybody in the audience should be tittering. But no one will laugh, or say that the movie is a joke, because that would be awfully small-minded, and God forbid we should make artistic judgments when they might be mistaken for intolerance. God forbid we actually have a conversation about this. God forbid that somebody should put their hoof down.

WWeek 2015