In (some) Theatres: Project Nim

Since this is my first post on the site, I figured I should try and fit in.

The folks behind the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, which won the Oscar that year and still sits unwatched in the wasteland that is my Netflix instant queue, are back with another documentary focusing on an abnormally talented primate.

No, I didn't hear about this next to an image of monkey genitalia

Project Nim details the life of a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who was passed around through various research programs in the 1970s, initiated by Herbert Terrace. Nim was taken from his mother and fostered into a human family at the age of two weeks, where he was treated quite like a human and taught American Sign Language. His name was a rather unfortunate pun towards Noam Chomsky, who asserted that language should not be considered an animal "behavior," but one that solely exists in higher functioning brains. Chomsky also claimed that the grammar that is present in language is something which is "hard-wired" into the human brain; it is heritable and inherent.

Nim the chimp was adopted into these circumstances, and was taught to sign with varying success. However, their hypothesis that this chimp could form a sentence in a syntax similar to humans was far from supported.

More after the jump:


As documentaries are wont to do, this film strays your feel-good, Koko the gorilla Youtube video style, far beyond the dreaded negative data (There's also a cuter sign-language chimp story with Washoe). Nim became very aggressive as he grew older, and attacks some of the female graduate students and assistants in charge of his care. After these incidents, Nim was attempted to be reintroduced back into a chimp population.

The film assuredly iterates the consequences of anthropomorphizing animals, a fallacy of which every person attempting to study animal behavior must be cognizant. Terrace also should have considered the long-term care of his chimp subject after the study has concluded, an issue that would never be allowed to occurred under today's very stringent primate animal care policies.

(Quick aside: The movie is based on a book by Elizabeth Hess, who's only other book is also on animal welfare and adorably titled Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter. Who's anthropomorphizing now, Lizzie?)

These mistakes are absolutely something that should, be, uh.. documented, by these documentary filmmakers.

But I really hope this movie doesn't take an overly anti-animal research approach. Chomsky's "generative grammar" theories were first formulated in the late 1950s. The assertion that human-like grammar was unique to human primates was a testable hypothesis.

It's easy to look back and say "Oh, well of course chimps can't learn human grammar!" However, if grammar is indeed a heritable and inherent component of human cognition as Chomsky suggested, a chimpanzee's lack thereof would indicate to science that this trait had evolved in humans since the two species shared a common ancestor. Comparative approaches are excellent ways to examine how language evolved.

Dr. Terrace still has an active lab, and has found some really interesting stuff with his new model organism, the rhesus monkey.

I consider myself a staunch supporter of (humane and meaningful) animal research, so I marched to my local multiplex and demanded "Admit one to that monkey movie, my good man!"

I was appalled at what I saw.

Not only do the monkeys SPEAK in colloquial, grammatical English, but so do bears, lions, and gorillas. Herbert Terrace, who's name was inexplicably changed to Griffin Keyes, even takes one of the talking gorillas to a local fine dining establishment. I expected less dramatic liberties to be taken by Academy Award winning filmmakers.

So yeah.. it's not playing in Lexington yet. When it is, I'll sneak in to see it after buying a ticket to Transformers 3 and update you all. And I haven't read the book. Hopefully my reservations aren't warranted. Have any of you all seen it? Holler at me via comments.

UPDATE: It's only playing in 4 theaters and it brought in 25,820 scones this weekend. In other news, this film accepts baked goods as legal tender.