Tilikum takes as a starting point the media reception of a 2010 incident, in which Tikilum - a bull orca kept in captivity at Sea World in Orlando - killed a trainer. This occurrence opens way to a complex and unsettling research that intertwines entertainment industry, animal domestication, scientific experiments, and military researches in the Space Age scenario.

Adam Kleinman: Ignoring the elephant—or is it Orca—in the room, let’s start by talking a bit about some of the subplots of your film, which, as they build, do draw out some major themes. One in particular is the relationship between projects and the funding for them. For example, throughout the film you talk about how various researchers were either involved in side projects, such as using trained animals for commercial purposes, or how researchers partnered with the military as a form of sponsorship. Feel free to take this question in any direction you wish, but what do you think is the give and take, or even problematic of finding support for work?

Jan Peter Hammer: Science in the US benefited massively from the war effort, it is only natural that scientists would fictionalize enemies or make outlandish claims concerning their projects in order to keep the funding flowing. There is even a little anecdote concerning an article in Science magazine in 1959 in which the authors mock the “special reports” being produced by the dozen by funding-starved research teams, all claiming to be “of critical importance” for national defense. One of the facts that I left out of the movie was that the first trainer of the Marine Studios was Adolf Frohn, who came from a long-lineage of circus trainers. All in all, the results of the animal training methods of the Breland couple were not that far from what Frohn had already achieved, but clearly exointelligence research sounds more impressive than trampoline tricks.

AK: I recently read that also Leonard Kleinrock and the crew at ARPANET invented the whole post-nuclear scenario to get funding, and look what they created, the Internet – maybe we all need to be a bit more creative these days and invent some new ‘enemies’. However, to crack open a darker rift between science and politics, I’d like to invoke the classic micro history question: how do we ask larger questions in smaller places? While Tilikum and his story may be the star as it were in your film, the narrator often goes on tangents concerning behavioral science and its possible uses and abuses. One tangent concerns how the concept of ‘brainwashing’ was used to justify why American pilots, who were shot down and captured during the Korean War, would seemingly ‘switch sides’ and profess their love of communism and their disdain for capitalism. Of course this tangent comes home to roost when the narrator mentions how these ideas were then recuperated by the Americans, not only as a rationalization but to form the manual for various forms of ‘extreme interrogation’ techniques (aka physiological torture), such as those used in Abu Ghraib. How do you think that science is made instrumental in politics?

JPH: I believe it was Errol Morris who recently brought this up: in 1967, while writing about the strange appearance of a man holding a black umbrella in the background footage of Kennedy’s assassination, John Updike noted that there seemed to be something akin to a quantum dimension in historical research. The suspicious figure was the subject of massive speculation and featured in manifold conspiracy theories; yet as it turned out, his open umbrella was a protest against Kennedy’s father policies – he was against the US involvement in the war – when he was an ambassador to the UK in 1938, and the umbrella was a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella, which somehow turned into a symbol of appeasement. According to Updike if from a macro perspective events seem to be coherent and consistent, at a closer look one finds a whole universe of weird and idiosyncratic happenstance that resists narrative encapsulation.

When it comes to Tilikum I would say certain things make perfect sense, such as the link between conditioning and torture – in 1918 J.B. Watson was already trying to condition the fears of infants – but other are just plain weird, like Lilly’s cetophilia – Lilly was probably the first person ever to have experienced an erotic bond with marine mammals – and his Pygmalion complex – you know at some point he compares dolphins with the “negro races” and says they too needed civilizing –, and also the bizarre life journey of the ill-fated Dukes. To answer your question, no, science is not made instrumental by politics, that would entail politics being external to science. On the contrary, I think it’s hard to cull something like a “pure” scientific drive from the socio-political soil: politics is intrinsic to science, but the good news is – and that’s why I mentioned quantum historiographies – things never run smoothly, there is always some idiosyncrasy that will disturb the ideological continuum.

AK: I’m being a bit cheeky, and of course, what I’m hinting at in the above is the idea that science, or moreover its social application, can follow or obscure various ideologies, agendas, and so forth. Since we’re reading each other loud and clear on such, let’s continue along these lines.

Towards the end of the film you come full circle with this idea by addressing how neo-liberal theorists rely on so-called scientific studies – behaviorism again, and I think statistical modeling – as a means to advance policy issues, while at the same time, qualifying that their ‘scientific’ findings are beyond social debate, and thus irreproachable. If it's not a too loaded question, do you think that analytics are now growingly used as means to hide politics? That is, should we start asking if today there is such a thing as evil science?

JPH: Yes, science is full of metaphoric projections that we may deem evil, and yes, present-day ideology often masquerades as science. We could discuss molecular biology or evolutionary psychology for instance, but Behaviorism was, from the start, an attempt to deal with social issues without touching upon their political aspects; it promised to arrange social mobility in a society that only let a few people up the ladder at a time, as to prevent social tensions from taking a revolutionary form: individuals were welcome to rise from their class but not with it.

That said, there is a lot of back-and-forth between science and economics, at least since the dawn of the industrial age. The Behaviorist description of a feed-back loop between organism and environment was already present in the theories of both Malthus and Darwin, and runs parallel to Adam Smith’s description of free-market interaction, which (non-accidentally) is modeled after Watt’s governor, a self-regulating device that controls the speed of a steam engine, and which inspired the political rhetoric of the time, from the notions of “dynamic equilibrium”, “checks and balances”, “self-regulation”, to the famous law of “supply and demand”, all of which are still currently in use.

AK: Yes, and such requires mega-heuristic points of view interpretations, namely one in which culture is a closed system. In the sprit of a more open society, let’s take it easy on scientists for a second and end by taking a turn toward the wondrous and the extraordinary. One of the queer and possibly poetic things about your other key protagonist, the ‘psychonaut’ John C. Lilly, is that he not only sought to commune with dolphins mentally, but he also thought that in doing so he would unlock the deepest recesses of our own minds in suit. That is to say, his research was colored with a kind of philosophical ‘frontierism’ that might have projected the Kantian ideal of ‘daring to know’ against a fantastic backdrop shaded by images of space travel and other totally speculative alternate realities. In the film, these ‘twin’ sentiments can be found in the case of Daniel P. Dukes, a sort of loner, stoner, gamer who Tilikum dismembers and eats; so I wonder: what do you think is the mirror play between these two characters and the sort of worldviews each of them fosters?

JPH: Tilikum never ate anyone, strictly speaking, though I guess it’s fair to say he roughed Dukes up quite a bit. The thing is that with most animals there is a certain overlapping between aggression and affection. Sometimes I cat-sit for a friend, her cats disassemble small things and stuffed toys in the most affectionate way. Dukes, I believe, probably thought he could befriend Tilikum – hug him perhaps – and Tilikum affectionately tore him to pieces. But I don’t know enough about Dukes to tell if he was a victim of Disney’s adorable, talking animal world or if he had other, maybe more mystical, motives. All I know is that he stayed for about a month at the Hare Krishna Temple in central Miami before he went to Orlando. The temple is just around the corner from the building where Lilly based his former dolphin lab – I wonder whether Dukes might have known this or even read Lilly… To answer your question, yes, I believe the film deals with the frontier imaginary in many ways: mind-expansion, inter-species communication, contact with aliens, deep-sea exploration, but perhaps the strongest example is the least outspoken, the erotic frontier, this bizarre paraphilia that both Lily and Dukes seem to experience, and which Gregory Bateson captured perfectly when he suggested that dolphins could be trained as psychotherapists - because they have no material culture, Bateson believed they would be better-tuned to the subtleties of spiritual life, not to mention that they always seem to smile, knowingly. The funny thing is that the dolphin became a symbol of sexual liberation for the hippie movement exactly at the same time that the US navy was training dolphins to neutralize enemy ships, in a way the dolphin came to signify the opposite of what its function (as a bio-weapon) was meant to be, and at the crux of the matter you will always find Lilly: the man who trained the navy dolphins is the same man who fictionalized the dolphin as an icon of kinship and harmony.

Credits

Written and Directed by Jan Peter Hammer