Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is audio-visually saturated. Anyone streaming it can see the beautiful visuals. I had the good fortune to watch it in an old theater. In that massive space, you heard hushed whispers come from behind you, while the near-drowning scene felt thick and heavy, as water sloshed, slid, and crashed all around. The focus on its visually-stunning panoramas in nearly all reviews is highly deserved, since the film conveys its story through atmosphere. The devil is in the details, even in the most sweeping scenes, there are costumed extras, vintage cars, and small signage that set the scene.
But, for me, a certain set of details that I will never forget are the dead animals that permeate the scene of winter celebration and libations, when the family vacations in a hacienda. When the main family originally arrives, two servants gaze at a wall full of taxidermy heads of dogs—the pets the property owners once owned. According to an interview with production designer Eugenio Caballero, these were reconstructions of what once really occupied that wall in Cuarón’s childhood:
“So obviously, having the taxidermied dogs on the wall, it’s completely wrong. It came from reality, but also, it enhanced the idea that sometimes the wealthiest classes in Mexico really like to show off. One thing they have normally is taxidermy pieces, which is quite odd, to live with the corpse of an animal [laughs].”
Later on, in that same vacation, kills from various hunts decorate the walls. Trophy taxidermy, the more common and acceptable taxidermic practice, gets no lines of dialogue. While taxidermies of pets are “odd” and “completely wrong" the other taxidermies are not. Together, both work to suggest wealth and leisure—the leisure to hunt, the leisure to take care of pets, the wealth to have these creatures stuffed—yet they suggest different excesses.
After a semester working on taxidermy objects and thinking about art historical methods to write about them, this scene shocked me because it gave attention to the strangeness of these animals-turned-objects, these stationary animals that deny the vivacity and randomness that precisely characterizes our typical interactions with animals. On the wall, dogs lose their wet nose, their puppy eyes, their licking tongues. We are disturbed by this inability to forget a pet, to let the dead lie, and yet the trophy creatures from hunts appear amidst their drinking glasses (as above) with no explicit attention from the servants.
The magic of this scene is that it estranges this whole practice. The designers and Cuarón decided to start with pet taxidermy—a class of stuffing that is the stuff of sensationalized headlines still—and let that strangeness wash over the other images and animals displayed. If pets are too far, isn’t hunting? Is it similar to the ecological destruction of the land-grabbing owners? Who owns this land and who owns animals? In a film about class divides that shows traces of environmental concerns, what does Cuarón say about our relationships to animals with these taxidermy objects?
Image still from Roma.