“Seaspiracy”

Seaspiracy (2021) is a documentary that was made by Ali Tabrizi and recently released on Netflix. Covering a broad range of issues surrounding the production and consumption of fish, this documentary addresses the impossibility on relying on sustainably or ethically farmed labels concerning fish, the neo-imperial tensions of European countries stealing fish from Africa, the human rights violations of fisheries using forced labour as well as the brutal reality of plastic pollution and bycatch.

Yet, despite its potential to spark conversations and bring the issue of pollution, animal and human rights abuses to a mainstream audience and consequently into public discourse, its failure to address intersectional and cultural issues concerning the consumption of fish, its ‘othering’ framing, and neoliberal conclusion cannot be ignored and sadly point towards larger problems within contemporary ‘sustainability’ activism.

Before I go into my criticism viewed from an intersectional feminist perspective, I want to highlight some of Seaspiracy’s productive aspects that I think could be a potentially new way of narrating contemporary documentaries intended for a modern audience.

Since the goal of Seaspiracy is to raise awareness and make the audience empathise with its messages, using the narratological technique of first-person focalization was a smart choice. Tabrizi constantly lets the audience know about his feelings and shares scenes where the documentary seemingly pauses only for him to process shock, sadness, or disappointment. Opening Seaspiracy too with Tabrizi admitting how ignorant he has been although he always wanted to save the turtles is really effective in bringing the audience in and starting from a very honest place rather than simply shaming viewers that might have not been as aware about the devastating truth of the extent to which humans exploit the ocean. This then also formally aids to bring a vast network of problems that is addressed down to a ‘human’ and individual level and therefore directly provides an empathetic anchor for the audience to relate to.

The deliberately ‘low budget’ feel of this documentary’s cinematography too plays into being relatable. At times feeling more like a YouTube video than a produced documentary on a large platform such as Netflix successfully enables its message to connect with younger audiences who grew up with the Internet and who are used to the YouTubey ‘vibe’ with its somewhat clumsy presentation style, with its rawness and focus on emotional reactions of the person who is filming.

These formal techniques, be it narrative story arcs, first-person focalization or YouTube-esque flair, can thus be viewed as fruitful in connecting with a contemporary audience and potentially a future route for the current documentary genre that would require both transparency concerning the cinematographical construction as well as emotional labour from the filmmakers themselves.

That being said, now I have to address some of the many problems that Seaspiracy has.

The first issue I had when watching was the blatant cultural ignorance and frankly ‘orientalising’ framing that the documentary used. Spending the majority of the time in Asia and thematising issues concerning whaling practices in Japan, fish markets in China, and forced labour used for fishing in Thailand, this documentary addresses all these issues without ever touching upon the cultural significance of these practices or the reason why these human and animal rights violations are happening. More crucially, Seaspiracy never interviews any locals who can shed light on these issues from their cultural and historical point of view, but rather chooses to interview other white people or Westerners who simply explain away these cultural practices as ridiculous, backwards, or unethical. In one instance, a white Australian shark advocate, passionately frames the cultural status of shark fin soup in China as a wasteful, pointless and by implication a ‘stupid’ tradition that serves no purpose anymore and therefore should be abolished. Rather than countering this outsider account with listening to a person who actually is embedded and emotionally invested in the portrayed culture, Seaspiracy chooses to ignore complexifiying the issue and aligns itself with the tried and tested method of white people simply shaming non-Western cultures and traditions.

The primary focus on Asia when constructing the documentary obscures how these fish markets only exist because Europeans/Westerners create such a high demand that have led to increasingly unsustainable and unethical fish productions, aiding in the convenient shifting of blame away from the real cause to the symptom, whilst deliberately denying those cultures and people a voice and platform to tell their point of view about the situation and to give some cultural insight into why certain practices such as shark fin soup are actually meaningful and what its history is. What I am not arguing is that hunting whales, dolphins and sharks is a good practice, but I am simply stating that this documentary deliberately does not distinguish between commercial fishing and cultural traditions and in doing so helps to further demonise or ‘other’ non-Western cultures.

This is particularly noticeable when we compare how the documentary demonises Japanese whaling practices and then ends the entire film with showing white whale hunting traditions in Faroe Island. Particularly, whilst they do not interview any Japanese whale hunter or spokesperson about the reasons why they hunt endangered animals, Seaspiracy literally and tonally breaks with the previous segment about forced labour at the end of the documentary, when they show whale hunters in Europe. Including an extensive interview where the white male interviewee explains his ethical reason for taking one whale life rather than taking several cow or chicken lives, Seaspiracy out of a sudden wants to add complexity to the issue two minutes before it ends. Particularly, the Faroe Islander argues that killing one larger animal that provides more meat for a community is more ethical for him than killing several animals for less meat. This point was really interesting, but because Seaspiracy’s messaging cannot touch upon the entire ethics of eating meat, the documentary sadly (but understandably) abandons that discussion. Nonetheless, what we can see here is that Seaspiracy falls into a long Western patriarchal documentary tradition of lending white man the active voice that can represent and justify itself, whilst demonising non-Western practices by denying these people agency to represent and explain themselves.

And despite Seaspiracy uses one interview with a local former forced labourer who escaped working on a Thai fishing boat, it is the only one featuring an Asian person and exclusively focuses on the man’s suffering for entertainment purposes. Specifically, the documentary uses the man’s testimony to provide Western audiences excitement through shock and horror, since they use dramatized drawings to visualise and indulge in the man’s awful experiences on the boat, be it the captain’s deceiving behaviour to lure the man on deck only to then treat him subhuman or illustrating how they stored a dead body wrapped in plastic in the holding tank. Seaspiracy then only lets non-Westerners speak and represent their experiences when it suits its own ‘othering’ narrative. More crucially, when it aids to paint Asia as not only having unethical fishing and whaling practices but also knowlingly (implication: barbarically) seeming to commit human rights violations against their own people. The man’s suffering is then utilised to at once provide entertainment for Western audiences, whilst on the other hand subtly reaffirming anti-Asian sentiments present in Western ideology of white superiority, that present Asians countries as either deceiving, barbaric or backwards.

Another and last example that I will give concerning how this documentary deliberately ‘others’ Asian cultures can be seen in how they utilise these cringey cartoons for the purpose of illustrating an assassination to silence a fishing inspector from the Philippines. Namely, when talking about the assassination of this inspector who was tasked with reviewing fishing practices on boats, the documentary not only disrespectfully illustrates the assassination itself for dramatization purposes again, but also shows a piece of paper with some “exotic” writing on it that apparently should say “death” in Filipino. Yet, as several people familiar with the language have stated online over the last few weeks, this ‘writing’ isn’t a language at all but literally just some random scribbles.

Constructing this ‘othering’ narrative of Asian cultures then seems particularly dangerous right now, given the fact that hate crimes against Asian communities living in the West have reached new heights due to the pandemic and right-wing politician’s already spreading racist propaganda that blames Chinese people, and by extension Asian people at large, for the spread of the virus. And although the insensitivity and disrespectful treatment of Asian countries in the West is nothing new sadly, this kind of blatant ignorance and wilful one-sided, mystifying and orientalising misrepresentation still shocked me when I was watching Seaspiracy.

On a different and more general note, the messaging of ‘stop eating fish’ that is being repeated throughout the documentary is culturally insensitive, because it ignores how some cultures rely on fish to sustain their communities and that finding alternatives for fish is related to geographical and budgetary privileges as well. In general, Seaspiracy often deliberately paints a very unnuanced picture concerning the unsustainability of fishing, that not once addresses how there already are several island nations outside the West that not only protect their seas but already established sustainable fish consumption patterns.

The Western vantagepoint is also visible in how Seaspiracy carefully ignores how the exploitation of nature, animals and humans has historically been caused by Westerners and how it therefore is primarily a task for the West to remedy the damage that we have deliberately produced and from which we have benefited for so long. The colonial baggage that still is baked into every socio-politico-economic structure to this day therefore cannot be ignored when talking about wanting to create a more sustainable future. And although the documentary has an entire segment dedicated to addressing neo-imperial tensions, more specifically, how the EU steals fish from African coasts, this insight is never fruitfully developed let alone brought up in the interview with one of the European parliamentarians. Thus, rather than bringing the ongoing exploitation at the hands of Europeans concerning resources, labourers or ecosystems of past colonial countries to the forefront and highlighting how this issue must be primarily stopped and solved by Western governments who caused it in the first place, it appears as if the documentary prefers to simply address the issue and then conclude on a more satisfying and simplified message of just “don’t eat fish, you guys”.

This conclusion ultimately truly highlights the problem that a lot of Western activism surrounding sustainability and saving the planet has. Namely, caught up in neoliberal ideologies, they all often rally behind messages about what YOU, the individual, can do in your everyday life and how YOU can ‘change the system from below’ by minimally adapting your lifestyle, instead of advocating for drastic political action ‘from above’, detailing what has to be done on a systematic level and giving people the tools to hold their local politicians accountable and advocate for a more sustainable, and more just world.

So, to conclude, I want to stress that I truly think that Seaspiracy has the potential to spark important conversations around the consumption of fish, especially for people who generally are not as involved in discourses about saving the planet, and I truly appreciate that the documentary attempted and to some extent successfully highlighted the interconnected and vast array of issues surrounding fishing.

Nonetheless, I think that despite drawing many separate issues together, the documentary conveniently stopped at thematising the complex intersectional issues of eating fish, be it is cultural significance, its necessity for survival, and other privileges that come with stop eating fish. And in doing so, Seaspiracy ultimately falls into the exact harmful colonising and male gaze that constructs other cultures not only as the cause of the problem and making no attempt to letting these communities speak for themselves, but also avoids talking about how Western governments continue to exploit other nations through quasi-colonial economic systems and political contracts and how real change cannot be achieved by simply changing your individual diet and consumption pattern.