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As crafty, elusive and voracious, perhaps, as the Norway rat itself, Theo Anthony‘s new documentary Rat Film is a movie about the titular vermin and a good deal more. How could it not be, when the fact of rats has always been so intimately entwined with human history—or, in particular here, Baltimore history. For Anthony, rats are Baltimore’s hidden id, and their history is a semi-secret diary of the city’s injustices and institutionalized venality.
Rats themselves are never less than fascinating. They are smart, aggressive, evolutionarily indomitable, and muscled like small panthers. Yet they are so universally loathed that our culture has a million ways to kill them, maim them, abuse them in laboratories, and feed them to other animals. We would applaud their mass destruction, if such a thing were possible. It isn’t, in large part because they thrive in our refuse and contrails. Without us, rats are nothing. They are our primal double, our omnivorous shadow.
Anthony sees the ironic poetry in the rat’s human connection, and goes wild on it. The film, his first, is a free-form essay, roping in all manner of ways of looking at rats in order to backlight their relationship to our own failings. In much of the film, the rats’ prominent place in our ecosystem is a symptom of endemic racism and socioeconomic injustice. The film limns the history of Baltimore’s rat population and how official segregation laws and unofficial racist policies have, in certain neighborhoods, overlapped with the rise of the rat.
Racism equals segregation equals poverty equals rats—it’s not a new insight, but Anthony makes it explicit and resonant. He quotes from official documents that reveal almost as little regard for Baltimore’s black inhabitants as they do for the rodents. He also cuts to other perspectives: a VR game that captures a rat’s point of view; a gaggle of amateur rat hunters, using air guns and baseball bats and fishing rods; several devoted rat pet-owners; and a philosophical city exterminator who notes that rats are found “where people have nothing, no dreams, no aspirations, just surviving.” Just like rats, of course.
Racism equals segregation equals poverty equals rats—it’s not a new insight, but Anthony makes it explicit and resonant.
These parallels are sharpest in the mini-story of a local barn co-opted by a Johns Hopkins researcher, who set up a mini-kingdom of rats with unlimited food and unlimited reproductive opportunities, just to see what would transpire. He ended up creating something he labeled the “behavioral sink,” which occurred when the rats, quite naturally, reached an overcrowded state of psychotic chaos, neglecting their young, starving themselves, killing and eating each other impulsively, in a strangely human collapse of sociability and equitability.
But Rat Film resists coming to any conclusions, beyond the simple fact of the rodents’ role as a marker of racial unbalance in urban America. Anthony is clearly a devotee of the great French New Wave film-essayist Chris Marker, and his movie shares the late master’s penchant for free-associative detours and lyrical asides.
Some of the film’s most arresting sequences have nothing to do with rats, and everything to do with our attempts to grasp modern urban reality. It plays with Google Maps’ street view, and the much-sampled fact that as it tries to smudge out identifying human faces, the imagery also smudges out windows, sections of brick wall, and random arrangements of light and shadow. Another running string in the film explores simulations used to recreate murder scenes, from a museum of tiny dollhouse-sized dioramas to police-training faux-apartments (filled with dummies or posing actors), virtual reality, maps, and so on. No rats, just the frozen reenactments of human savagery, using various eras’ best technology.
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The cool oddness of Anthony’s movie finds an explanation in the very end, as the murmuring narration makes clear it’s speaking from a not-so-distant future, when we will all be happily awaiting the demolition, and rebirth, of the city. We hear this as we witness a small snake working its jaws around an oblivious fetal rat.
Documentaries often have only their subjects to brag about, their didactic intent unbothered by deeper thought. Anthony’s film is another thing altogether.
As prevalent as they are today, documentaries often have only their subjects to brag about, their didactic intent unbothered by deeper thought. Anthony’s film is another brand of thing altogether, a weird and idiosyncratic tour through neighborhoods, actual and metaphoric, we thought we knew well.
Rat Film opens in theaters September 15.
Michael Atkinson is a writer, poet and film critic. His latest book is the novel Hemingway Cutthroat.