In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a famous question about consciousness : “What Is It Like to Be a Bat ?”
Nagel chose the bat because, as a fellow mammal, we readily accept that it possesses consciousness, in the sense that it is like something to be a bat. A bat has subjective experience.
But he also chose the bat because it is so weird and alien to us—humans can’t echolocate, for example, or fly—that even if we knew every scientific fact about bat biology, we’d still lack access to what it actually feels like to be one. As Nagel put it, we can rely only on our own experience to provide “the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.”
Every documentary begins with an impossible ambition : to understand what it is like to be someone—or something—other than yourself. Telling the truth about the experience of any other being is never easy. You never really know if you are getting it right. But at least with human subjects, you can ask them, “What is it like to be you ?” You can ask them, “Did I get that right ?”
There’s a reason so many people at Q&As will ask a documentarian, “What did [subject of film] think about the film ?” They’re looking, in a way, for a fact-check on the whole enterprise of the filmmaker having tried to represent what it is like to be the subject.
With an animal protagonist, the mystery is even more irresolvable. There are no interviews, and no explanations. Just the best available scientific understanding, close observations of behavior, and ultimately, your own imagination.
This is the challenge Penny Lane from the Susbtack newsletter found herself facing when an owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and immediately became the most captivating protagonist she have ever encountered in real life. This owl, who had lived in captivity his whole life, was now suddenly free. He had begun writing his own story. Her job became to try, however imperfectly, to tell it.
What is it like to be an owl ? The question announced itself to anyone who saw him on the sidewalk near the Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue.
But we weren’t just asking it about owls in general—we were asking it about Flaco. An individual, with his own personal history, his own individual temperament, and his own subjective experience. That’s the invitation at the heart of Wild Inside : to get to know one extraordinary individual, on an extraordinary quest… who just happens to be an owl.
That said, the first step in avoiding the mistake of anthropomorphism is remembering Flaco is, in fact, not a human but an owl. One must try to understand the owl’s world : his umwelt. This wonderfully German word refers to the distinct perceptual reality of a species, deriving from their unique biological abilities.
And so, Penny asked embarrassingly basic questions of esteemed scientists over many months as she learned about owl biology. She was delighted to learn that owls, with their forward-facing eyes fixed inside their sockets and their long-range vision, probably see the world not so differently from a birder with binoculars glued to the face. This parallel vision became a visual motif throughout Wild Inside… especially because it so often seemed Flaco was watching us as much as we were watching him.
