As a general rule, I am not a big fan of “mockumentaries” – if you’re making stuff up, then why not just describe it as fiction? And if you are a channel like Animal Planet which makes factual documentaries about (real) fauna and flora for its seventy million viewers, it seems at least deceptive if not actively fraudulent to start showing made up stuff as if it is a “documentary”. This is not the first time they’ve done it; they had previously tried to make us believe they had found evidence of dragons and mermaids. So an untrue ‘true-crime’ documentary about a fake cannibal locked up for supposed cannibalism which was actually carried out by an extinct species of hobbits seemed pretty tame to the Ethics Department of Animal Planet I guess.
I should concede that some of the classics of cannibal texts are mockumentaries or “found footage” inventions. Many of the Italian ‘cannibal boom” films attempted to appear as factual records, particularly the classic Cannibal Holocaust, for which the director, Ruggero Deodata, secreted away the actors to make it appear they had been killed, then had to produce them in court to avoid facing homicide charges. More recently, District Nine, Ghoul and Long Pigs have all made somewhat desultory attempts to persuade us that we were watching the actual killing and eating of humans by humans.
In this week’s offering, The Cannibal in The Jungle, the director Simon George presents a feature-length ‘true-crime’ special about an American scientist accused of murdering and consuming the remains of his fellow explorers while on an expedition in 1970s Indonesia. The murder/cannibalism case is told through interviews with an Australian anthropologist Richard Hoernboeck (played by Scottish actor Jim Sturgeon with a broad Australian accent), who says he found evidence of a tribe of very small hominids which he calls hobbits, and subsequently chose to investigate the murder/cannibalism case, 25 years after it happened. He tells us that in 1977, an American ornithologist was convicted of killing and cannibalising two colleagues in the jungles of Indonesia while on a quest to study eagles, as well as hoping to find a supposedly extinct owl. Instead, Dr Timothy Darrow, branded ‘The American Cannibal’ by the press during his trial for murder and cannibalism, claimed in his (unsuccessful) defence that they had been attacked by a lost species of early humans. These hobbits, he said, were responsible for the murder and consumption of his friends. Nobody believed him. Cannibalism is easier to believe than hobbits.
In fact, the remains of a species matching Darrow’s description were found in those jungles of Indonesia in 2003 by an anthropologist from Wollongong University, although his name was Mike Morwood (a hobbit name if ever I heard one). In what is now regarded as one of the most important anthropological finds ever, a team of scientists discovered the bones of an entirely new species of human, one that stood only 43 inches or 110cm tall. Homo floresiensis (popularly called Flores Man or more popularly Hobbits) lived on the island for perhaps over a million years before going extinct. Some recent research suggests that a tribe of the hominins known as Homo erectus became isolated on this remote Indonesian island, perhaps a million years ago, and evolved a dramatically smaller body size.
But did they really go extinct? An indigenous tribe on the Indonesian island of Flores, where the remains of the ‘hobbits’ were discovered, have their own accounts of little wild men that climb trees and walk on two legs. They also describe them as cannibals. And according to their legends, they may never have died out at all. This story claims to follow Hoernboeck’s expedition into the jungle of Flores, Indonesia, seeking to discover if hobbits still exist, whether Timothy Darrow’s ill-fated expedition really encountered the supposedly extinct creatures, and if the ‘American Cannibal’ was therefore innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted more than three decades previously.
The local people of the island, the Lio, claim that the hobbits were around until very recently, and may still be hiding out in the forest. In the fake doco, they are shown suggesting that they would kidnap and eat children, although being a different species to Homo sapiens, I suppose this would not technically be cannibalism.
The program is ingeniously done. Hoernboeck, the modern-day anthropologist, shows purportedly real video of his interviews with the imprisoned Darrow (played by Richard Brake, who was in Game of Thrones and Hannibal Rising, so there’s a giveaway for the alert horror fan), and his expedition to trace the journey on which Darrow supposedly found the hobbits. Interspersed with this, we are shown what we are told is a reenactment of the original expedition by Darrow and his friends/victims. The implication is that we can believe the rest is real, because they told us what was staged. We move to the present to see the anthropologist tracking down Darrow’s tape recorder which contains the taped call of the hobbits, then eventually the actual film taken by Darrow that proved his innocence but, alas, not until after he died in the brutal Kerobokan prison.
With a modicum of willing suspension of disbelief, it’s actually pretty convincing, and quite sad, unless we keep reminding ourselves that the whole thing is a fake. Those who watched it when it first came out, unless they recognised the Night King or the war criminal who ate Hannibal’s sister, did not discover that it was all fictional until the very end, when there is a (very) short statement. Most viewers probably wouldn’t even have noticed it.
What I found interesting is the depiction of the totally credible outrage of the Indonesian authorities, furious that an American would eat the Indonesian guide. Yet when the Flores locals are shown talking about the hobbits capturing and eating their children, there is inaction. Nature is red in tooth and claw! Animals eat each other, and eat people if they can, so if some unidentified ape ate your child, well, that’s unfortunate. But anthropocentric ideology denies our animality, so for a human to eat a human still manages to shock. The false binary of human/animal has led science to tie knots in the language, with some calling the hobbits “ape-men” and one learned anthropologist, Gregory Forth, calling his book about them Between Ape and Human. Like this documentary, the idea of a lacuna between apes and humans is fictional. We are a species of great ape, and our DNA is 98.8% identical to chimps.
Dr. Darrow’s supposed cannibalism was more horrific than nature’s mundane bloodbaths, not because he was genetically similar to the victim, but because he was a post-doctoral scientist, a ‘civilised’ man. If either party to slaughter, the one wielding or the one enduring the blade, can be defined as ‘animal’, all bets are off. The cannibals we consider in this blog are simply better than most people at dehumanising, objectifying the other.
The full movie is available, at the time of writing, at Daily Motion.
The Cannibal Guy 