“My Octopus Teacher” defied convention

> I really found the way Craig injected himself into the story to be a distraction and wish this had been more like Sir David Attenborough documentary

Can you already see this 94 years old guy jumping into the water to build a personal relationship with an octopus? ;) I think the whole point of the movie was not capturing the life of the octopus, but showing the relationship between human and octopus. This would not be possible with the way Attenborough documents things (i.e. as a narrator).

The movie is not a nature documentary, it is a love story. He starts out making a nature documentary, but this is merely the context of his relationship with the octopus.

Yeah agree, loved the movie but his story did not land for me at all. The octopus gets her arm ripped off and he somehow internalized that as himself being torn apart... He was dying working a regular job and needed to make this moonshot octopus documentary... for his son.

It all comes off as this sort of quasi humble but very self-aggrandizing story told by a man with one facial expression. Sort of like a wealthy white lady talking about her ayahuasca retreat or something.

Yeah, that was a really cool scene. It felt like a dog chasing squirrels or a cat batting a string.

I don’t know. It’s a bunch of different octopuses for starters, so the whole premise is pretty flawed. It’s definitely not the same octopus.

If you interact with them in the wild, at least I have, they are pretty easy to catch at daytime, and then they’re very curious and interact a lot, smelling your hair and touching everything (your scuba gear) after a moment of trying to jet.

In some habitats they are not elusive at all, easy to find in very obvious preferred hiding places.

While I understand your sentiment, I think the primary objective of the filmmaker is to make a good film. Sometimes that means doing something to simply get an emotional response out of it. If it’s effective in giving people a deeper appreciation of the animal and that ecosystem, then I'd argue it was a good choice and not at all misguided as you're portraying it.

Any documentary with added music already has spin. I don't see how making it a bit more contrived will make much of a difference.

You're correct that they are not social, but they appear social when it suits them:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2017/sep/1...

I heard a theory that a large reason humans have complex brains is that we need them to do fine motor control with our hands and throw things accurately.

Similarly, a octopus probably needs a big brain to control all the muscles in its arms

“evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it.”

― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

> So it's a bit of a mystery how they evolved so high intelligence without having to outsmart other individuals of their own species constantly.

It's not like they don't have myriad other creatures to outsmart in their daily lives.

> But the puzzle still remains why their intelligence is similar at all to the one that evolved through forced social interactions.

Is it? Every time I see 'octopus' and 'intelligence' in the same sentence it's someone saying how weird and alien they are. Possibly they have some similarities when it comes to theory of mind because they're modeling generic other intelligences, but everything else about their minds seems totally alien unless presented with a large ladle of anthropomorphization poured over it.

Growing up in a rural area I witnessed a “stovepipe castration” of a cat, and heard that rubber bands were commonly used for castrating other farm animals (sheep, cows, goats). I don’t remember seeing it, though.

I wonder how many non-South Africans get this :)

Yea because humans aren't animals. Our behaviors haven't been dominated by our genes for quite some time.

I share your sentiment in the regard that it highlights an obvious difference between how we think about humans and animals. I think you probably know why applying darwinisim to human society is "extremely controversial".

On a side note, what constitutes "good genes" nowadays?

The ability to exploit finite natural resources (including human health and lives) in a maximally efficient way? Accumulating as much money as possible?

Would you prefer to reduce human population to a wealthy, healthy remainder and purge all people who cannot sustain themselves?

What does sustaining yourself mean in terms of "benefit to society"?

Is making money by burning fossil fuel - or facilitating and developing systems that (unnecessarily) burn more fossil fuel - a contribution to a "better human gene pool"?

Can sustaining yourself make life worse for others?

Would you approve eugenics, if yes, to what degree?

These are ethical questions as old as humanity.

Overcoming naive social darwinism is arguably one of the reasons that todays "civilized" society can even exist.

I appreciate your comment as a start for a discussion, but I also dislike the implications that I read into it.

People who earn obscene amounts of money and deplete natural resources hardly contribute to an improvement of the human gene pool.

And to me it seems that most people with physical or psychological handicaps that deem them "unfit" already are poor, die young and often don't procreate.

I would look for sources of this in a conflict of interests. Most humans don't care about the fate of other species, as competition for resources is relatively rare. An exception is where animals can be turned into a resource to extract, with overgrown chickens as an example.

Whereas humans compete with other humans, and it's in one's interest to manipulate others to be less of competition, but more subservient instead. Even if the human who advocates for it doesn't benefit from it, their descendants will.

With conflicting interests at play, rational neutrality is hard to achieve.

Genetic Load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_load

We take this on because we can leverage technology to improve lives.

We take this on because it might be one of the things that makes us human.

Humans are supposedly born with inalienable rights - life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our societies in the West are built upon this shared foundation of rights. To deprive any adults of the ability to procreate would be considered barbaric, as they want to pursue the creation of "life" with their liberty, and to support their own happiness.

Meanwhile, nature is just raw competition, we're used to talking about genetic evolution in natural populations. Natural creatures aren't deemed to have any right to their own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, or at least not by most humans outside environmentalists.

Humans have technology like medical care and a lack of natural predators that substantially mitigates any impact gene pool deficiencies might cause, whereas wild animals do not. So there's no real danger that the human population will collapse without eugenics. That isn't true of the wild. This changes the ethical calculus quite a bit.

Also frowned upon when done to humans, but accepted by most humans in regard to animals: slavery, raising for food, taxidermy, hunting for sport, neutering and keeping as pets, etc.

Some people don't think this treatment is appropriate for non-human animals either.

Personally I eat other animals, but I'm against both eugenics and cannibalism.

The history of 'scientific' human eugenics is absolutely full of controversies and links to controversial things like involuntary sterilization campaigns, genocides, etc.

Oddly, people tend to get touchy when someone starts trying to provide justifications that decide who will live well, poorly, or not at all.

It's a lot harder to play god of men than of wild animals.

What makes for “strong” genes in humans? Accepting the axioms of that discussion is a quick way to arrive at eugenics.

The quote takes a position of non-interference with the process with naturally occurring selection pressures on animals.

When the discussion involves humans and eugenics, it's the complete opposite and revolves around substituting a human chosen selection criteria with all the possible inclusion of criteria with very limited knowledge of the long term impacts, a minimal knowledge of short term impacts, and often biases driven by hubris and racism assessing the benefits vs the unknowns. That's why it's controversial.

> It's interesting that we can talk about this in such an objective and rational way when it involves non-human animal species, but when it involves humans this statement suddenly becomes extremely controversial.

Because historically people mistook skin color and phrenology and other nonsense for "good genes" and caused grave injustices. The attitudes aren't even fully eliminated and so eugenics is rightly viewed with suspicion.

"Breeding" is also the crudest of methods to produce "good" humans because we value relationships and individuals much more than we do cattle or show dogs. Medicine is the proper science to treat disease in humans.

It might be useful to learn that the narrator was depressed and documenting the octopus helped him heal.

Huh? He only has one kid- a son, who appears in a lot of the movie diving with him. I'm no expert on the filmmaker's life, but I've not heard that he 'turned his back' on his wife. In fact, you can read her feelings about his relationship with the octopus here:

https://stories.seachangeproject.com/my-octopus-teacher-and-...

She ends by saying that she dives almost every day with the filmmaker.

I almost stopped watching it during the first few minutes for the same reason, you just have to get past that first bit and get to the first underwater shots.

It's an incredible film, definitely my favorite nature film.

The world must look a very gray place to you.

Is our curiosity about the world not one of the fundamental features of humanity?

The fact that a man is able to rediscover his fervor for life in something as lowly as an octopus seems to me to be nothing short of beautiful.

The film is antithetical to our fractured modern society of ease, reason, disregard for our lowlier neighbors on this planet, and mindless consumption.

Its frustrating to me that its expectedly relegated to the doc category while a vapid, shallow commentary on modern life such as Nomadland is nominated for best picture.

I was expecting some kind of mention of this guy's apparent privilege.

As I recall, not even a single line in one of the talking-head section even as simple as "I've been incredibly lucky to be at a place in my life where I have the resources to make this film." I found this lack to be particularly off-putting when the general message (of this otherwise good documentary) is more-or-less "You can strengthen your soul by connecting with nature".

> A privileged white dude complains about how he feels disconnected from his family

I thought he was suffering from burnout. Regardless, it's possible to be rich and sad at the same time. You don't have to have empathy for the guy if you don't want to, but if we're turning suffering into a competition, there will always be someone with bigger problems than you.

> It literally tries to run away and he stalks it, it's creepy.

Scientists observe animals that try to run away all the time. And it did approach him on multiple occasions as well.

I found it to be a fascinating case study in the life of an octopus in it's natural environment. These long form animal documentaries are a lot more interesting to me than "Earth" or the like where it's a rapid fire, quick form snapshot into multiple animal species.

> It literally tries to run away and he stalks it, it's creepy.

shrug other people who dive in that bay would stalk it, catch it, kill it and later that day; cook and serve it with some nice white wine to their family. Is that less creepy?

That was my thought process exactly for the first half of the film. Really pissed me off that he had this "woe is me my life is so empty" while having this dream job and living in paradise. Like, WTF dude? See a therapist. What softened me was the storytelling: it's a feelgood formula and I'm a sucker for that. I believe one could have easily re-narrated this film to make the octopus terrified, we have no real way to know. Sorry you're getting downvoted, but I agree with you. Some people just want to see a happy narrative, even if it has a dark side. But definitely bursting at the seams with privilege and questionably misleading ethics.