Let's Take Okja Seriously And Stop Eating Meat

There is no misreading Okja. It ends at a Mirando slaughterhouse, where an overcrowded paddock of super pigs is herded with cattle prods into a rotating barrel, only their heads poking out onto the killing floor. A bolt hits them in the temple, like a shotgun blast, and the rotating barrel drops the carcass. Another super pig is loaded. The man reloads his bolt gun. The electrified fence, intentionally evocative of Nazi concentration camps, leaves no room for ambiguity. This is a place where living, emotional beings are brought to be systematically killed in numbers that rack so high they lose all color. Death becomes statistical. And though there’s no such species as a super pig, Okja is only barely a metaphor. These are the animals we eat. We are the ones who want Okja dead.

By following the plight of its single, titular super pig, Okja focuses a tragedy too big for our brains to a single point of flickering light. Will it be extinguished? As Mija chases Okja from South Korea to New York, she embodies Mother Teresa’s words: “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Okja has shown us that one. Do we act?

After ten years living in a state of nature (which btw, produces the healthiest outcome: the very best super pig), Okja is taken from her family and chained down for transport. There is no concept of consent that applies to animals. They are given no self-definition of their own. But that dehumanizing (we don’t even have the words for their suffering) revocation of Okja’s life isn’t the end. It’s a gateway to a hell we’ve constructed for the super pigs. Okja is raped as part of a forced breeding program and chunks of flesh are torn from her under conditions as far from surgical as it’s possible to get. And then she is taken to an endless mud field, where tens of thousands of super pigs, each just as capable of love and fear as Okja, wait in conditions that would harrow the soul of any prison guard, until it’s their time to be driven up the chute to die and have their bodies chainsawed apart.

It’s just a movie.

You are well-practiced at compartmentalizing, as we all are. It’s easy and natural to bargain with Okja after watching. We can wipe away the tears and change nothing. Since it’s impossible to pretend Okja is anything other than an accurate depiction of the real-world horrors hidden from us by the detachment of industrialized meat industries, the only refuge is a surrender into a sort of willful ignorance. Knowledge that the meat on our plate suffered just like Okja can be set aside and marginalized. Many reviewers (and presumably many, many more viewers) have done just that. Hell, even director Bong Joon-ho hasn’t given up eating meat.

At The New York Times A.O. Scott writes “her tale is a clear and effective animal rights fable” as if sussing out the main theme, like a child’s book report, is sufficient. The closest he gets to the moral urgency of real life is admitting “something important is at stake” before insinuating Mija is a hypocrite for eating wild-caught fish and free range chickens.

That’s still better than reviews that ignored animal rights altogether, like The Guardian’s. Or Richard Roeper’s astounding dodge of a review, which mentions only “heavy-handed commentary on corporate greed and our consumer-crazed culture.”

They write as if it’d be embarrassing to admit Okja made them rethink or second-guess their relationship to meat. If you believe, as these critics presumably do, that film is an art form that’s capable of communicating human emotions and ideas across the walls that separate one ego from another, then it’s this, of all circumstances, where art is best looked in the face. If movies have the power to touch you and change who you are, what possible shame could there be in admitting that the message reached you? If you believe that movies are more than their runtime and more than an excuse to eat popcorn, then believe it here, when it matters, when lives are at stake.

This isn’t about statistics or pink slime or gruesome PETA videos. It isn’t about the food-industrial complex abridging free speech with ag-gag laws (because they know the truth would shock any conscience). Okja makes its own argument. And if you accept that argument, if Okja shook you as it shook me, there is only one honest reckoning. What we do to pigs and cows is an abomination that must change. It’s only marketing and our own desire to remain blind that lets us continue in the face of that evil and ignore our quivering hearts.

There is only one moral option: eat less industrialized meat or stop altogether. Too often this judgment gets obscured in our minds by easier rationalizations that turn the conversation away from suffering and toward our fellow humans. PETA is strident. Vegans are annoying. Shut up with that organic, crystal-worshipping horseshit. Get that fucking wheatgrass out of my face.

So just don’t identify as a vegetarian or vegan. That hamburger your friend’s cooking on the barbecue is going to get eaten, so it might as well satisfy your voracious lust for flesh. This isn’t about you and what you are. It’s about the real-world analogs to one adorable super pig. With each steak, pork chop or bacon slab you buy, there is a victim. Each an Okja. Conversely, each meatless meal is a rescue — a life spared.

Behind all those tedious, strawman vegans and our collective, willful blindness, there are the non-human faces, in their tortured billions. Each of whom will die in terror, after a life bloated and malformed by a totalitarian, roboticized regime against which we’d imagine ourselves The Resistance, were this a movie. The choice is stark: mitigate or participate in suffering.