Animals in danger in movies

I was watching a movie tonight, Tell No One, of the psychological thriller variety. There was a dog in the movie and I found myself very, very concerned with the fate of this dog though, as it turned out, it played a minor role and no harm came to it. But there was good reason to believe this dog was in danger, and this seized on my mind. At the same time I found myself thinking how odd my anxiety was. My concern could be dismissed as me being a bleeding heart welfarist, or whatever the going denigration is, except that my response was in the context of a genre that above all else aims to elicit tension and concern apropos the human characters. A pretty large number of people were killed and/or abused in this movie; there was good reason for me to be concerned for any and all of the characters, and indeed I was worried about them; but it was the dog that I really hoped didn't get it. Amidst a concerted effort to make my brain worry about people, I found a dog to think about.

I can't quite put my finger on why this happens, but at the least I can say that (for me) dogs puncture some vital veil between image and reality (or whatever we call this world we live in). The humans in movies I always see also as actors--if we are particularly convinced in a given role that they are not 'acting,' we praise them as good actors! And when appropriate I have the same feeling towards well trained and physically skilled animals. But when the dog's role is just to run alongside a human protagonist and sit on the sidewalk, I don't see him as an actor. Though there is certainly some level of pre-discipline required, just as we must be constrained by language to express ourselves, I see this as not "performing" in the same sense. I might lie sometimes, and express powerful emotions at others, but neither of these capacities makes me an actor. Those are par for the course, and when a nonhuman is acting par for the course I do not see it as an image but as a being in a part of the same world from which I watch. The set on which the animal acts is continuous with the earth on which, watching, I sit, whereas the earth on which the actors and directors etc narrative takes place is not even contiguous with this world. It is a world to itself entire.

I see two sides to this. One, we see the animal as a link between image and self, and a vital one at that in a world increasingly populated by glowing screens, by images of elsewhere brought here. Two, we see this general phenomenon as evidence of a certain techne of viewing that has historical precursors. Strangely enough, I am thinking of Racine; of his contrived plots that correspond with brutal exactitude to the quasi-Aristotelian unities demanded in his day. His plays were praised, in the degree to which they measured up to said unities, as rational and natural, though from another measure they are the most absurd and unnatural things conceivable. But, as Auerbach points out, the yardstick of nature is not in this case in the world at large but already within the theater. That is, if we assume the action on stage is real, how could a play staged in two or three hours possibly be taking much (more than 24 hours) longer than that? This whole apparatus only makes sense if we understand that the audience sees what is on stage as a separate but whole world, rather than an emanation from our world and reducible to it. I have no evidence that my experience of nonhuman animals in movies is widely shared, but if it is I would venture that we also share, in part, this neo-classical divorce from the image as a world that we can watch without sharing its laws. But again, the animal is the limit and signal of this phenomenology. Perhaps even the lever prying us apart.