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“My Octopus Teacher” defied convention
- noisy_boy 6y agoFor me the moment the Octopus overcame its outwardly appearance is when she was extending her arms and playing with the school of fish; exactly like a dog (which I can relate about much more easily). I could literally imagine myself in that spot extending my arms to play with the fish in the same way. If anyone hasn't seen this documentary, I highly recommend it. My kids loved it too.
- sneeze-slayer 6y agoYeah, that was a really cool scene. It felt like a dog chasing squirrels or a cat batting a string.
- an_opabinia 6y agoI don’t know. It’s a bunch of different octopuses for starters, so the whole premise is pretty flawed. It’s definitely not the same octopus. If you interact with them in the wild, at least I have, they are pretty easy to catch at daytime, and then they’re very curious and interact a lot, smelling your hair and touching everything (your scuba gear) after a moment of trying to jet. In some habitats they are not elusive at all, easy to find in very obvious preferred hiding places.
- potatoman22 6y agoThe documentary focuses on a single octopus, unless you're suggesting that the premise of the documentary is one big lie.
- scotty79 6y agoWhat's weird is that octopuses are not a social species. So it's a bit of a mystery how they evolved so high intelligence without having to outsmart other individuals of their own species constantly. It's theorethized that they have very rich environments and have to work very hard to hunt and to stay alive as they have no armor. But the puzzle still remains why their intelligence is similar at all to the one that evolved through forced social interactions.
- simmerup 6y agoI heard a theory that a large reason humans have complex brains is that we need them to do fine motor control with our hands and throw things accurately. Similarly, a octopus probably needs a big brain to control all the muscles in its arms
- viciousvoxel 6y agoOr, more accurately, one medium-sized brain in each arm
- LatteLazy 6y agoYou're correct that they are not social, but they appear social when it suits them: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2017/sep/18/octlantis-the-underwater-city-built-by-octopuses https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2017/sep/1...
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoI guess we're not so different after all.
- scotty79 6y agoOh. That might mean that some ancient octopuses that modern smart octopuses all come from might have been social and evolved intelligence modern octopusses inherited.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago“evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it.” ― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin
- taneq 6y ago> So it's a bit of a mystery how they evolved so high intelligence without having to outsmart other individuals of their own species constantly. It's not like they don't have myriad other creatures to outsmart in their daily lives. > But the puzzle still remains why their intelligence is similar at all to the one that evolved through forced social interactions. Is it? Every time I see 'octopus' and 'intelligence' in the same sentence it's someone saying how weird and alien they are. Possibly they have some similarities when it comes to theory of mind because they're modeling generic other intelligences, but everything else about their minds seems totally alien unless presented with a large ladle of anthropomorphization poured over it.
- Avalaxy 6y ago> The only thing to add to that, where you have to be slightly careful, is if an animal hasn’t got strong genes. And then you interfere and you allow that animal to procreate. You could potentially be making the gene pool weaker and more susceptible to mange. That’s where you have to be a bit careful. It's interesting that we can talk about this in such an objective and rational way when it involves non-human animal species, but when it involves humans this statement suddenly becomes extremely controversial.
- uyt 6y agoYea because humans aren't animals. Our behaviors haven't been dominated by our genes for quite some time.
- johnhenry 6y agoHave you even met us?
- LatteLazy 6y agoI'm not OP but I don't think either of those statements is accurate. We don't engage in eugenics and we do engage in medical care because people are more than animals and we value individual survival more than gene pool hygiene (might be the wrong term?)
- Sporktacular 6y agoHumans aren't the only species to tend to their injured. Even some ants do that. The motivation is still debatable - is it done selflessly or because cooperation improves our own chances? Could that mean empathy is just an evolved impulse to help ourselves that was naturally selected? In some animals there may be an element of maintaining appearances that complicates things further. But there's no evidence to suggest that we aren't animals too or that the line we draw to separate less from 'more' isn't just drawn in some arbitrary place.
- moritzwarhier 6y agoI share your sentiment in the regard that it highlights an obvious difference between how we think about humans and animals. I think you probably know why applying darwinisim to human society is "extremely controversial". On a side note, what constitutes "good genes" nowadays? The ability to exploit finite natural resources (including human health and lives) in a maximally efficient way? Accumulating as much money as possible? Would you prefer to reduce human population to a wealthy, healthy remainder and purge all people who cannot sustain themselves? What does sustaining yourself mean in terms of "benefit to society"? Is making money by burning fossil fuel - or facilitating and developing systems that (unnecessarily) burn more fossil fuel - a contribution to a "better human gene pool"? Can sustaining yourself make life worse for others? Would you approve eugenics, if yes, to what degree? These are ethical questions as old as humanity. Overcoming naive social darwinism is arguably one of the reasons that todays "civilized" society can even exist. I appreciate your comment as a start for a discussion, but I also dislike the implications that I read into it. People who earn obscene amounts of money and deplete natural resources hardly contribute to an improvement of the human gene pool. And to me it seems that most people with physical or psychological handicaps that deem them "unfit" already are poor, die young and often don't procreate.
- 1MachineElf 6y agodeleted
- smiley1437 6y agoIt might be useful to learn that the narrator was depressed and documenting the octopus helped him heal.
- sizimon 6y agoHuh? He only has one kid- a son, who appears in a lot of the movie diving with him. I'm no expert on the filmmaker's life, but I've not heard that he 'turned his back' on his wife. In fact, you can read her feelings about his relationship with the octopus here: https://stories.seachangeproject.com/my-octopus-teacher-and-menbsp https://stories.seachangeproject.com/my-octopus-teacher-and-... She ends by saying that she dives almost every day with the filmmaker.
- taneq 6y agoThat does make me feel a bit better about it tbh. My main takeaway from my first watch through was "what are you doing obsessing over an octopus while you have a family at home that you seem to have forgotten about."
- resters 6y agoI almost stopped watching it during the first few minutes for the same reason, you just have to get past that first bit and get to the first underwater shots. It's an incredible film, definitely my favorite nature film.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoAh, False Bay. A rare piece of Boolean Geography.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoOctopuses are intelligent animals but are not long-lived. The common octopus lives but "a couple of years". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_octopus#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_octopus#Characteristics
- BEEdwards 6y agoI did not like this documentary at all, i don't get the point of it at all... A privileged white dude complains about how he feels disconnected from his family, so he spends a year harassing an octopus. It literally tries to run away and he stalks it, it's creepy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- defterGoose 6y agoThe world must look a very gray place to you. Is our curiosity about the world not one of the fundamental features of humanity? The fact that a man is able to rediscover his fervor for life in something as lowly as an octopus seems to me to be nothing short of beautiful. The film is antithetical to our fractured modern society of ease, reason, disregard for our lowlier neighbors on this planet, and mindless consumption. Its frustrating to me that its expectedly relegated to the doc category while a vapid, shallow commentary on modern life such as Nomadland is nominated for best picture.
- shuntress 6y agoI was expecting some kind of mention of this guy's apparent privilege. As I recall, not even a single line in one of the talking-head section even as simple as "I've been incredibly lucky to be at a place in my life where I have the resources to make this film." I found this lack to be particularly off-putting when the general message (of this otherwise good documentary) is more-or-less "You can strengthen your soul by connecting with nature".
- awb 6y ago> I was expecting some kind of mention of this guy's apparent privilege. What's the goal of this though? Any popular documentary is the result of privilege somewhere along the line. Either it's self-funded by a privileged person, or it raised money from privileged people. Either way, all the content you're able to view on TV, streaming or in the movies is because someone along the line had the privilege to make the film, promote it and distribute it. And those privileged people are likely the ones benefiting the most from it. So is the goal to just acknowledge when the protagonist has privilege or should everyone involved in the film do it?
- js2 6y agoI enjoyed reading this interview a lot. I appreciate the perspective and knowledge that Craig Foster offers into the ecosystem he is so familiar with. But with the documentary, it was the opposite. The cinematography is gorgeous and many of the scenes that were captured were truly remarkable because he spent so much time in the water. The footage of the octopus and the sharks was just extraordinary. However, I really found the way Craig injected his own life story into documentary to be a real distraction and wished it had been more like a Sir David Attenborough documentary. (Actually, some of the footage made it into Blue Planet II, episode 5.) If he had conducted the documentary more like this interview, I'm sure I would've enjoyed it even more. > Octopuses don’t have tentacles as such. Huh, TIL. > The frustrating thing about a film is that you’ve only got 85 minutes. What you don’t see is that I have watched those pyjama sharks for years. [...] But what you don’t see is that I’m close to many different animals. All the different types of fish I got to know extremely well, otters, even some of the mollusks. Whales. There’re so many different animals. There’s no time to show all of that. I wonder how much unedited footage he has? Seems like he could make an entire season about it all, especially now that he has a relationship with Netflix.
- Avalaxy 6y ago> I really found the way Craig injected himself into the story to be a distraction and wish this had been more like Sir David Attenborough documentary Can you already see this 94 years old guy jumping into the water to build a personal relationship with an octopus? ;) I think the whole point of the movie was not capturing the life of the octopus, but showing the relationship between human and octopus. This would not be possible with the way Attenborough documents things (i.e. as a narrator).
- freewilly1040 6y agoThe thing I didn't much like about this movie was that the ending tried to put an activist spin on what the filmmaker was doing. One of the last shots is of him and a bunch of his friends going out on a dive (as opposed to just him), as if this will help the octopus somehow. In fact, the relationship between him and the octopus only works because the filmmaker has a large patch of pristine coast seemingly to himself. If it was some common thing to go diving there the habitat would likely be destroyed. As such the film is not really about activism at all, it's about a man enjoying privileged access to a natural resource.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y agoVery reductionist. But to carry it forward, this is more about a man's failure to extract labor out of an octopus and instead being forced to exploit its screen appeal. Imagine the output of an 8 armed ipad assembler, ah what could have been!
- ghawr 6y agoWhile I understand your sentiment, I think the primary objective of the filmmaker is to make a good film. Sometimes that means doing something to simply get an emotional response out of it. If it’s effective in giving people a deeper appreciation of the animal and that ecosystem, then I'd argue it was a good choice and not at all misguided as you're portraying it.
- sneak 6y agoJust because a film can make a large positive emotional response doesn't mean it was a good film, just as a film that can make a large negative emotional response is a bad film. I think GP was criticizing the cheap, low-hanging feelgood duct taped onto the end. It doesn't make the film better.
- sneak 6y agoedit: *is not a bad film
- 6y ago
- trhway 6y ago>The scientist you interacted with was probably a very nice person—but just didn’t seem to think that the animals they experimented on were very sentient and probably in enormous distress. just a bit more than 100 years ago they were cutting dogs and cats alive without anesthesia. and that is one of the popular calf castration methods which is still done without anesthesia even today - as described it is painful "only" the first 12-36 hours (left to your imagination what the calves feel during the next several weeks as the testicles and scrotum slowly necrotize and ultimately fall off) https://www.amazon.com/calf-bander/s?k=calf+bander https://www.amazon.com/calf-bander/s?k=calf+bander
- meristohm 6y agoGrowing up in a rural area I witnessed a “stovepipe castration” of a cat, and heard that rubber bands were commonly used for castrating other farm animals (sheep, cows, goats). I don’t remember seeing it, though.
- itsdsmurrell 6y agoI'm just going to leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwS4e1P1yF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwS4e1P1yF4
- timbaboon 6y agoI wonder how many non-South Africans get this :)
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoLets just say that I caught a glimpse of the Mountain at 1:30 and oriented myself from that.
- meristohm 6y ago> If we wish to continue living and if we wish to continue living healthily, we should be doing everything in our power to sustain and regenerate that biodiversity. While one person’s efforts are a drop in the ocean, they at least matter to that person. I’d heard the benefits of cold showers extolled since a guest speaker, an elderly maybe-Finnish guy, visited my elementary school classroom, and I’d dabbled a bit, but the practice didn’t stick until five months ago after I got a vasectomy. I didn’t want the incision point to open up, so I ran the cold water enough to get wet, washed with a soapy cloth, and turned on the cold water again to rinse. I haven’t strayed from that since, and sometimes extend rinse time for the perceived mental and physical benefits. It does very little to mitigate climate change, but our electricity bill is lower, and the act of turning on the cold water helps cut the groove of being better-able to face something I don’t want to do. I thank Craig Foster for his notes about swimming in the cold ocean and its possible effect on his health. For more impact, I’m regularly contacting my elected officials to lobby for regulations that effect all of us and promote a healthier and more resilient ecosystem. Will you do that too, please? Edit to ask: In the spirit of intellectual humility, what else (either to add to or replace lobbying) might be a good use of my free time towards this same ecological goal?
- canadianfella 6y agoWhat regulations? Give a few examples.