Underlying this extraordinary bond was scientific idealism gone awry. ![]() And it’s such an extraordinary thought that Janis is probably the only person who’s done this in the whole world.” “That’s the same as all the chimpanzees on the island – they all got on as one family. “They got on as beings, and that’s clear,” the film’s director, Alex Parkinson, told the Guardian. She stayed on the island, with her family of eventually 10 rehabilitated chimpanzees and without other humans, for over six years. Carter extended her trip by a couple of weeks, then a couple of months, then moved to an uninhabited island in the Gambia River with Lucy and two other chimps unable to survive in the wild without help. She never went back Lucy, extremely depressed by the upheaval and disappearance of her human parents, unable to forage and unwilling to ditch her human diet for leaves, needed her friend. ![]() Carter accompanied the Temerlins to the Gambia on what was supposed to be a three-week trip to help Lucy adjust to her new home. In 1977, the Temerlins decided Lucy, despite only having ever known humans, should live as a free chimpanzee in an African nature preserve. The 79-minute film breezes from Carter’s weird college job to a story of tragically misguided idealism and, ultimately, a portrait of a singular friendship – a testament to loyalty and the fuzziness of boundaries between our closest animal cousins and ourselves. This foundational moment of intimacy anchors Lucy the Human Chimp, a deceptively moving, sensitive first-person account of an intense, unusual inter-species bond. It was “a very special moment for me,” she recalls in the film, “and has nothing to do with theories of psychology or language or anything. ![]() When Lucy asked for grooming in return, Carter reached her fingers through the chain-link cage. In a tense moment recreated in the film, Carter dropped the touch boundary. One day, Lucy motioned to Carter that she wanted to groom her. “She was formidable,” Carter recalls in an expansive, disarming interview that forms the backbone of Lucy the Human Chimp, a new HBO Max documentary on the primate used as an idealistic science experiment and the caretaker who stood with her to extraordinary ends.Ī “very precise” signer with a 120-word vocabulary in American sign language, Lucy was “very arrogant, very condescending” about Carter’s inability to understand her. The chimp, raised as the Temerlins’ “daughter” as a part of a foolhardy, 60s zeitgeist experiment on the limits of nature versus nurture, immediately challenged Carter’s ability to hold the boundary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |