“It wasn’t the chimp I had problems with,” she says, “it was the humans.” Laura-Ann Petitto, the most important and involved of Nim’s teachers and caregivers, left the project after Terrace abruptly broke off an affair with her (Petitto was eighteen when she began working on the project). Pretty much unanimously disliked by every other voice in the documentary, it doesn’t take much to paint his character as irresponsible, opportunistic, incompetent, cruel, cowardly, disloyal, pitifully vain, and given to using his authority to have sex with his students-at one point to the detriment, almost certainly, of the project. The film certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. The film left me wondering whether Terrace gave thought to how negatively he would come out looking when he consented to filmed interviews if so, then his gameness is, I suppose, commendable. Herb Terrace quickly emerges as the arch villain of Marsh’s narrative. The LaFarges were wealthy, eccentric hippies-W.E.R., a pony-tailed and put-upon poet, and Stephanie, a former student and lover of Terrace’s-with a Brady-Bunch-sized family who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Not a single member of the household was fluent, or even competent, in sign language. Days after his birth, Terrace scooped up the infant Nim, flew him to New York, and had him placed, like a foster child, in the home of the LaFarges, asking the family to instruct the chimp in American Sign Language. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist (who still teaches and conducts research at Columbia) and the grand architect of the project, planned to raise a chimpanzee in a human home, with no other contact with other chimpanzees, and begin instructing him in sign language from infancy.
But Washoe was already several years old when the Gardners’ research began.
There had been several previous failed language experiments with apes that attempted to teach them spoken language, and, correctly reasoning that nonhuman apes physiologically cannot produce the same range of vocal sounds as humans, University of Nevada psychologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner had the idea to attempt imparting sign language to a chimpanzee, which they began to do with the female chimp Washoe in 1967. The project was at the time the most ambitious experiment in ape language to date.
#Movie about animal testing smoking chimpanzee full#
Nim’s name was one of the smaller indignities, and only the first, that he was to suffer in a life full of suffering, and that is primarily what Marsh’s touching, disquieting film is about.īased on Elizabeth Hess’s very excellent 2008 book on the subject, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, Project Nim chronicles the titular chimpanzee’s relatively short and chaotic life, beginning with his birth in Norman, Oklahoma in 1973. That’s why we give silly names to our cats and serious ones (Frank Zappa notwithstanding) to our children. Someone who respects another being as a thinking and feeling consciousness with a complex inner life does not give him a whimsical joke for a name. But the punny frivolousness of the name Herb Terrace gave Nim Chimpsky is perhaps an indication of how seriously he took into account the emotional life of his subject: that is, not at all. Chomsky is never directly mentioned in Academy Award-winning director James Marsh’s documentary film Project Nim, since it focuses on, well, the human interests of Nim’s story more than on the science of it. The name is of course a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist and most-cited academic author alive, who in the middle of the twentieth century was allowed to set the arbitrary goalposts determining what language “is” and “is not.” Herb Terrace’s experiment was one of several sign language experiments with apes throughout the sixties and seventies that sought to test Chomsky’s assertion that language is a uniquely human capacity. Herbert Terrace bestowed on the subject of his doomed ape language experiment: Nim Chimpsky. THERE’S SOMETHING a little too clever, a little too cute, about the name that Dr. Hale: Nim Chimpsky’s Story Benjamin Hale ▪ August 17, 2011
0 kommentar(er)
