Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978, Barbet Schroeder) (Patreon)

50/100

Let me confess my bias at once: I do not believe that any non-human primate has acquired anything remotely like language. It's a subject I've read about extensively, and the arguments against, to my mind, are significantly stronger than is the affirmative case; apes are good at learning that performing certain actions can score them treats, but so are any number of other animals. A kind of intelligence, yes. Linguistic prowess, uh-uh. So it was fascinating, on one level, to finally see Koko "in action," so to speak, even though all that did was confirm what others have long argued (based in part on this very footage, for all I know). There's no doubt whatsoever that Penny Patterson—who still heads the Gorilla Foundation, almost half a century later—sincerely believed that Koko could use many ASL signs (slightly modified; she calls it Gorilla Sign Language) and understand many more, and her relentless optimism makes you want to see what she sees. Yet this film observes them for well over an hour, in long stretches of real time, and at no point does Koko ever seem interested in signing except as an immediate means of getting something that she wants. You might argue that language invariably starts out as purely acquisitive, but it really doesn't; human babies babble incessantly just to work out how sounds are formed, like twiddling dials on some mysterious device with which no instructions were included, and human toddlers fucking never shut up, that's a big part of the reason why I don't have kids. Apes, on the other hand, just don't speak spontaneously, no matter how relentlessly we drill them. Nor should we expect them to, since their brains never evolved the insanely complex language circuitry that ours did. It's like bats trying to teach us to navigate via sonar. Get back to us in a few hundred million years and see how we're coming along. 

Anyway, Schroeder's film is pretty much all-in on Koko as a harbinger of intra-hominid communication, which obviously hasn't progressed beyond that point. (See also Project Nim, a doc with which I have entirely different issues.) So if you think its thesis is bullshit, as I do, there ain't much else going on, apart from the inherent appeal of watching one of our nearest relatives up close. Patterson seems very sweet, but after a while I just wanted her to leave poor Koko alone, stop prodding and correcting and insisting like a kindergarten martinet. Schroeder does include one dissenting voice: a zoo director who suggests that we should let a gorilla be a damn gorilla, even in captivity. I agreed with him.