It’s Oscar night and I’m happy about the feature documentary category. Some great choices in there but my gut feeling is that The Cove will take the award – - but that’s out of my own belief the category is transforming into an “adopt-a-cause” program for Hollywood. Though, that’s not to take away from the movie itself. It’s well-deserving and has turned a magnifying glass on the dolphin slaughter in Taiji.

In an e-mail convo with my friend, he critiqued the single-issue approach of the movie for focusing exclusively on dolphins when the exploitative system behind whaling has also created much human suffering. In many ways we can create the parallels, whether it be to the prison-industrial complex, the US defiance over it’s torture policy or about the capitalist structure in general – however the discourse about the “dolphin abusement park industry” (to use Ric O’Barry’s words) usually stops short at complaining about greed. This does present a problem in working towards a solution. While chalking it up as greed only makes the whalers motives seems that much more barbaric, it speaks for the mindset of a few rather than damning the system as a whole.

This is a growing problem in this meta-genre of documentaries. By the end of the film, the door is left open to an audience of voters expecting to accomplish something through representative politics. It comes down to convenience of choices or political power of purchase that is solutionized at the end of a documentary like An Inconvenient Truth (also in this meta-genre). Solutions never agitate the viewer to rise up out of their seat and organize. Instead it’s turning to a voter-by-wallet crowd and hoping a choice by guilt reaches enough to make a change.

In The Cove, our hope that the dolphin slaughters comes to an end are in the hands of tech savvy and stealhy – - Oceans 11 style eco-operatives which brought us the footage of the slaughter. While this is powerful imagery, the social medium to display it is lost beyond when the select time the film is shown. Remember the ending with Ric O’Barry standing with the monitor in the streets as countless numbers of people pass? In a sad way that’s an analogy of what the problem is with these meta-documentaries. The awareness reaches up to the point of one person with a sign attracting a few passers-by. It will inspire few, be seen and catch the glance of many but everyone will continue on with their day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good O’Barry did this but the action is without teeth which is a fault of this meta-genre and not the film itself.

The heroes of The Cove are something out of a Mission Impossible operation yet other heroes are lacking, and as with An Inconvenient Truth for that matter, it is the masses that are missing. In contrast, a movie of similar caliber, Sharkwater, turns the lens on the masses of protesters in Costa Rica who assemble on their government and put forth the demand for changes to be made despite threats of the mafia. While The Cove gives us glimmers of hope with the city council members who stepped up against the school food program, we don’t see the masses demanding change. Does this mean the masses in Japan are for it? Hardly. As the film demonstrates, there are large numbers of cosmopolitan and urban Japanese (largely permeating from corridors in youth culture) who object to whaling. But we don’t see them organize. It’s reminiscent to our own problem of relying on representative politics (a choice system of convenience) to be the guide for what should be a moral outrage.