Planet in Focus 2019: The Last Male on Earth
In March 2018, Sudan, the last male Northern White Rhino in the world, died at the age of 42. Sudan’s death made front pages around the world and was touted as another tragic loss in the battle for conservation in Africa and abroad. But in the years before his death, Sudan was more than a symbol of ecological decline. He was also a tourist attraction at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Central Kenya, attracting thousands of tourists each year who visited the camp to pay Sudan their respects in person. The Last Male on Earth focuses on this morbid fascination with Sudan and investigates the ways that conservation and economic interests are intertwined, while also questioning the more gentle impulses behind conservation in the first place. Thus, it’s a dryly humorous and quietly critical documentary, more of a moral investigation than a rigorous chronicle of factual events.
Dutch filmmaker Floor van der Meulen and her team follow Sudan on the conservancy for roughly the final three years of his life. A counter appears on screen and ticks down the days until his death at frequent intervals. This makes it clear that Sudan’s death is not the focus of the film, but its operating principle: it’s inevitable and not so much the focus of a mournful lament, but instead the fact that makes all the other investigations in the film possible. Van der Meulen doesn’t even focus much on Sudan himself in the film, because as his trainer likes to comment at the end of each tourist session introducing him to travellers, he cannot speak for himself. Instead, she focuses on the trainer, the PR and management team at Ol Pejeta, the rangers who protect him, the researchers who want to breed rhinos using his genetic material, and even the tourists who come to visit him.
Van der Meulen takes an ironically-detached approach, both in terms of thematic and formal focus. For instance, the colour grading flattens the colour palette and the framing places everyone in the centre of the screen in medium-wide, offering plenty of head room and other negative space in the frame. The frame depersonalizes people and approaches them all in the same manner. Van der Meulen then asks people questions about their actions and often bluntly questions the very basis of their assumptions, such as when she asks scientists why they work to clone Sudan in the lab. When they simply say that he’s from a beautiful species that deserves to live, she again asks why, and they act befuddled before she cuts away.
This approach underlines her skepticism and the film’s quietly-critical way of investigating conservation. It’s clear that the people love Sudan and care for animals like him, but when van der Meulen interrogates their impulses for working to save him and his kind, their pat answers and vagaries about protecting the natural world prove unsatisfying. In actual fact, it seems the main impulses are economic, as the conservancy’s work to sustain Sudan creates hundreds of jobs and fuels the local community. The PR director and manager both admit this during their interviews with van der Meulen, even if they don’t seem to realize the implications of their own words.
But it’s clear that van der Meulen believes the economics behind conservation are almost impossible to remove from the larger impulses. Why else would she spend so much time focusing on the workers instead of the animals? In the film’s funniest scenes, she shows the training of the many rangers working on the conservancy. She shoots them bumbling through training drills and spends a lot of time with their white trainer who discusses the much-needed “militarization of conservation.” These words are another inadvertent admission by the conservation workers, because militarization speaks not only to the need to protect against violence against the animals, but the industrial scaling of a work-force. Poachers and rangers operate in an economy that requires the presence of both to operate (as powerfully demonstrated in last year’s Planet in Focus standout, When Lambs Become Lions), and the only real outcome of the dance back and forth between killing and protecting these animals is the money made doing so.
All of this comes to a head in the moments when van der Meulen follows tourists coming to visit Sudan. She lets the tourists discuss their interactions with Sudan, their placing of hands on his chest and scratching behind his ears. Listening to them describe the profound effect of interacting with him is moving, but even more startling is the admission at the end, when the most vocal tourist comments that Sudan would probably voice his hatred of their presence if he could, since the tourists come from a society that failed Sudan, and now come to engage with his death as spectators. A few shots after Sudan’s funeral service elaborate on this point even more as we see people pose in front of his gravestone, broad smiles and excitement at the novelty of their photo’s potential on social media exposing the lie that they were primarily motivated by concern for him in the first place.
The Last Male on Earth shows that so many conservation efforts are simply feeding off of the spectacle of environmental collapse and prop up an economy that maintains the status quo long enough for everyone involved to profit off of it. If you’re coming to this film hoping to learn about Sudan in exhaustive detail and be emboldened by efforts to continue the Northern White Rhino species, look elsewhere. Despite the rhinoceros’s presence at the film’s centre, The Last Male on Earth is more interested in the humans surrounding him, and its conclusions about them are not gracious. But as a subtle investigation of how economic concerns dominate animal conservation, and about the ways that humans are fascinated by, and profit off of, the spectacle of death, it’s a rewarding viewing and one that challenges some earnest assumptions that may be more pernicious than we realize.
7 out of 10
The Last Male on Earth (2019, The Netherlands/Belgium/Germany)
Directed by Floor van der Meulen; written by Floor van der Meulen and Renko Douze.