The Celluloid Specimen

Front matter

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Moving Image Research into Animal Life

Part One. A Science Of Sympathy: The Films Of Robert Mearns Yerkes

1. Stimulating Intelligence: IQ Exams and the Cinema 23 2. “Getting a Feeling for the Animal”: Ape Affects Onscreen 37 3. Primate Figures: Social Darwinism, Anthropology, and Ingagi 51 Conclusion to Part One. Expressive Labor 65

Part Two. Model Animals: Neal E. Miller’s Motivation And Reward In Learning

4. Rodent Simulations: Stimulus-Response, Laboratory Rats, and a Southern Lynch Mob 75 5. Distributed Suffering: Animal Experiments, Speculative Modeling,

and Their Effects 94 6. From Lab to Classroom: Animal Testing and Educational Film ul

Conclusion to Part Two. Scientific Folklore in “A Sea of Potential Facts” 128 vi CONTENTS

Part Three. Posthuman Control: B. F. Skinner And The Onscreen Pigeon

7. Project Pigeon: Rendering the War Animal through Optical Technology

8. A Trip through the Senses: The Media Theory of Radical Behaviorism

9. Utopian Behavior: The Televisual Figure of a Pigeon That Hailed the Future

Conclusion to Part Three. The Pigeon as a Figure for Our Times Conclusion: Sensing Our Place in History Notes

Selected Bibliography Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank many people who provided me with the support that made this book possible. The Celluloid Specimen began as a dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many thanks are owed to my cohort in the Film & Digital Media Department there—Christina Corfield, Elaine Gan, Fabiola Hannah, Kiki Loveday, and Rebecca Ora—whose critical insights and feedback helped me to refine, complicate, and elevate my understanding of film studies. I am also grateful to the excellent faculty whose classes I took in what was then a relatively new program: Irene Gustafson, Jonathan Kahana, Peter Limbrick, Irene Lusztig, and Yiman Wang nurtured my early interest in nontheatrical film and animal studies. Special thanks to my dissertation committee—Karen Barad, Martin Berger, Oliver Gaycken, and Jennifer Horne—who shepherded the dissertation to completion through their generous feedback and guidance. Above all, I am thankful to my adviser, Shelley Stamp. Her work-ethic, insight, rigor, and scholarship are endlessly inspiring. I am proud to know her as a mentor and friend.

Many people have aided in transforming the dissertation into this book. Scott Curtis deserves particular mention for his constant advocacy and support. Dominic Pettman, Sam Ishii-Gonzales, James Leo Cahill, Jennifer Peterson, Sophia Gräfe, Alex Johnston, Elaine Gan, Jaimie Baron, Abram Stern, Marc Francis, Donovan Shaefer, Greg Seigworth, James K. Stanescu, Antoine Traisnel, Selmin Kara, and Patricia Alvarez have all been essential interlocutors. My excellent student assistant, Danny Tayara, helped with additional research for chapter 1 and with procuring the rights to publish many of the book’s images. Tanya Goldman, Peter Labuza, Katherine Johnson, and Martin Johnson all generously workshopped chapter 5. Haidee Wasson and Caetlin Benson-Allott provided in-depth feedback viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for chapter 7. Crucially, Leo Goldsmith and Laliv Melamed each read and gave constructive edits on nearly the entire book—including multiple revisions of some sections. I shudder to think where this project would be without you both.

Special thanks to my editor at UC Press, Raina Polivka, for patiently and generously guiding me through the many steps of publishing this book. You are an amazing editor and friend. Thank you to Madison Wetzell for all your help managing the many complex copyright issues particular to this project.

Thank you to my family, who have always had my back. To my grandparents, Bud and Ruth Schultz, the authors of It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (1989), The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America (2001), and We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present (2008), you have modeled rigorous, politically engaged, critical thinking for me from the moment I was born. Thank you to my parents, Marilyn Figueroa and Susan Schultz, for believing in me, even during times when I had trouble believing in myself. And thank you to my lifelong friends Evan Casper-Futterman, Ben and Graham Gottlieb, Ben Jacoff, Jesse Krulwich and Alex Wyles for all the late-night laughter, strolls through the city, and earnest talks.

Most important, no one did more to see this book to fruition than my wife Caitlin Manchester. Caitlin’s brilliant insights into the work, her meticulous edits, and her insistence on accessible, detailed, and grounded writing shaped more than anyone how I approach being a scholar. Caitlin, you are my best friend, my partner in all things, my fellow traveler. I love you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Finally, thank you Cora Ray Schultz-Figueroa and Eliza Jane Schultz-Figueroa. You are both new to this world but are already making it a better place.

Introduction

The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life

Looking through the index cards at the archives of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, one will find traces of Mona, a chimpanzee who died on September 24, 1942.' Like many laboratory animals, Mona continued to produce scientific evidence as a specimen saved within the laboratory’s collections long after her death. Her body currently exists as item cards in the lab’s filing system: her cadaver, head with brain, placentas and umbilical cords from two births, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries each have different entries. But alongside these anatomical remains, Mona is also present in four cards representing films that document her interactions with her children and her performance during intelligence tests. Within this filing system, and that of many other animal labs across the globe, film reels have been itemized with body parts, experimental observations, lab notes, published findings, and other ephemera, each existing alongside the other as scientific documents of animal life to be preserved and stored for future use.

How should we approach these traces of Mona in the scientific archive? What do they tell us about the history of animal research, the role of animals in society, and their representation on film? Such films certainly stand as a visual record of how science was practiced, as well as providing a testament to the lives of animals like Mona that were dramatically transformed in the name of scientific discovery and progress. To conceptualize these overlapping dynamics, I have taken to calling animal research films celluloid specimens. This term evokes the central dynamics that define films like those at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, the term specimen was used to refer to “a part or portion of some substance or organism, etc., serving as an example of the thing in question for purposes of investigation or scientific study.” In specifying a severed “part or portion,’ the word points to the violence of Mona’ dissection, as well as the act of selection that brackets what is being studied. Specimens are defined by their role as evidence for specific scientific projects, which dictate what is saved and what is not. Like the films of Mona, specimens are items to be categorized, stored, and compared within a filing system and therefore integrated into an epistemic network. As actual corporeal portions of an animal, specimens are also signs of that animal’s life, indexes of its ontological existence at some point in the past. And finally, specimens are preservations—usually maintained via formaldehyde—and thus continue to hold meaning long after both the death of the original animals and the completion of the scientific projects that made them. Whether relying on celluloid or formaldehyde, specimens are the end result of chemical processes that transform living, breathing beings into objects of scientific study. In coupling celluloid with specimen, I mean to refer to how all of these dynamics are present not only in preserved sections of animals’ bodies but also in the scientific research films depicting animal experiments.

Celluloid specimens are artifacts from the history of scientific experiments with animals. But they are also films, part of a larger media history and context. The animal researchers studied in this book were important interlocutors with filmmakers working in educational filmmaking, ethnographic filmmaking, and sponsored filmmaking, and the methods and theories used to make their celluloid specimens were created in dialogue with these central forms of nontheatrical cinema. Additionally, celluloid specimens were often created as experiments into what film could capture through the image of an animal—proposing variously that films of animals could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of environment on an organism. In this capacity, creators of celluloid specimens often proposed their own theories of media and their relationship to living organisms, theories that intersected with and influenced major media studies figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky. But perhaps more important, the scientists filming celluloid specimens often created new types of aesthetic and technological approaches to representing animals onscreen. These techniques exist alongside more well-known approaches from narrative and wildlife filmmaking. Studying these films therefore reintroduces a major strain of animal representation that has been largely left out of the discussion.

By focusing on the production, distribution, and reception of celluloid specimens, this book contributes to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to the scientific uses of film.’ The Celluloid Specimen expands this field into the animal laboratory, a thriving area of cinematic production where thousands of animal research films were created as laboratory notes, teaching aids, moving illustrations, and archival records. As such, this book also contributes to philosophical and ethical debates about the use of animals in society, as well as scholarly considerations of the aesthetics of animal representations in the moving image.* As the first book to focus exclusively on the aesthetic techniques and ethical stakes of animal representation in American laboratory filmmaking, The Celluloid Specimen extends conversations within critical animal studies into new, unsurveyed terrain. I will show that different analytical techniques and approaches are needed for us to understand the political significance of the onscreen animals in scientific films. It is my hope that this book will provide such conceptual tools to a broad community of scholars interested in the representation of animals on film.

Like many so-called useful films, celluloid specimens are interstitial objects that are usually thought of as passive recordings of scientific research with little to no intrinsic interest in and of themselves. Hundreds, if not thousands, of celluloid specimens have been left to languish unseen in the vaults of labs, universities, and archives. But when examined in their own right, animal laboratory films are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that have played crucial roles in the history of science and cinema, as well as in broader social histories. In many research labs, the moving image has been used as an essential tool for transforming complex, often unpredictable, living things into specimens that can be studied in an orderly fashion. Animal researchers have produced novel ways of representing living animals onscreen in the pursuit of research agendas, presenting them in ways that differ significantly from other cinematic portrayals of nonhuman life, such as nature documentaries, animated features, or other forms of animal narratives. Despite the centrality of animal testing for many scientific disciplines and the abundance of films produced on this subject, film scholars have not yet written the history of this cinematic form. Yet it persists as a hidden material record of experiments with nonhuman life that reaches back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The films of Mona at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center are good examples of the multifaceted dynamics at play in celluloid specimens. Taken at face value—especially for nonscientific audiences—these films attest to the violence and imprisonment forced on Mona, the ways in which she was restricted in her movement, and how her body was disassembled in the name of science. From this perspective, film was an extension of her violence and capture. And perhaps even beyond simple violence, they also document elements of cruelty, the ways in which Mona and other research animals were often physically or psychologically tortured by their keepers in the name of science. Moments of jarring animal suffering are nearly ubiquitous in the history of celluloid specimens, and I will necessarily return to them throughout this book.

But if these films served solely as accounts of nonhuman pain performed in the name of science, there would be very little reason to examine them. Indeed, there is a long and violent history of animal cruelty in the name of scientific discovery and innovation. But what makes such films important objects of study is their startling effectiveness as tools for shaping scientific discourse and social governance— a function that affects humans and animals alike. These films served as central components within scientific research programs whose findings influenced the shape of major facets of twentieth-century American society.’ If we continue looking beyond solely the violence and cruelty contained in these cinematic images, we can focus on their content and purpose. In the case of Mona, she was filmed as part of Robert Yerkes’s primatology research. Yerkes, a known eugenicist, produced images of chimpanzee maternal behavior and intelligence as part of his larger political project, where they served as pieces of evidence that were meant to justify particular policies in the scientific management of race, species, gender, and genetics. In his various leadership roles within powerful American scientific and governmental institutions—president of the American Psychological Association, chairman of the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits during World War I, “Expert Eugenic Agent” for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, chairman of the Committee on Inheritance of Mental Traits at the Eugenics Records Office, and chairman of the United States National Research Council’s Committee for Research in Problems of Sex— Yerkes contributed to some of the most important political debates of his time. As we will see in the chapters dedicated to him, his rise to positions of power was predicated on his psychological experiments with animals like Mona, and the decisions he made in these positions were directly influenced by the theories of species that he developed while studying Mona and her kindred. Recognizing this role for Yerkes’s research is to also recognize that the films of Mona are not only scientific recordings but also political texts.

Thus, to fully address the complexity of celluloid specimens, it is important to recognize that they are simultaneously important pieces of scientific findings and of political rhetoric. Yet they are not entirely defined by their status as “texts.” Looking at the Yerkes films, we also see traces of Mona herself—a primate who is estimated to have been born in 1913 in Sierra Leone and subsequently lived with Cuban socialite Madam Rosalia Abreu in her primate colony in Havana before being donated to the Yerkes lab.’ Mona gave birth to six children in the Yerkes laboratory—Cuba, the twins Tom and Helene, Mon, Ami, and Mu. She died from a bacterial infection at the age of twenty-nine. Celluloid specimens like those at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center contain traces of long-gone life-forms and speak to experiences of confinement and invasive testing. The analysis of animal research films can thus play a recuperative role, one that refuses to allow Mona and her kind to recede quietly into obscurity.

Finally, we might also ask what Mona's images mean for us today. How do the theories, policies, and institutions built on findings extracted from Mona’s body and behavior continue to operate in the twenty-first century? In what ways does Mona’ life still resonate outside the walls of the laboratory that studied her and the archive that preserves her? Understanding that celluloid specimens have at times played important roles in crafting social policy and creating institutional tools of governance and control, there are good reasons to think that animal research films will continue to be a prevalent force defining our politics going forward.

BEHAVIORIST CELLULOID SPECIMENS: A CINEMA OF OBSERVATION AND CONTROL

This book specifically analyzes the celluloid specimens created by behaviorists working in the early to mid-twentieth century. It tells the story of how the moving image was adopted by comparative psychologists working in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s as a tool to record psychological states, how the medium was then shifted into a means of modeling human behavior with animal subjects during the mid- 1930s and 1940s, and finally how it was stripped of its evidentiary status by later “radical behaviorists” who simply saw it as another form of visual stimuli. Each shift is presented through the analysis of a central character: Robert Yerkes stands in for the early period; Neal E. Miller exemplifies the use of film as a form of modeling; and B. F. Skinner represents the later radical behaviorists. These figures were all at the center of their respective movements in comparative psychology. Yerkes’s work represents psychology’s early attempts to establish itself as a social science with its own empirical practices; Miller was a central member of a movement based out of Yale that was responsible for reviving the behaviorist brand after its decline in the 1920s; and Skinner, one of the most renowned scientists of all time, brought his own version of behaviorism into the public discourse at an unprecedented scale. Skinner’s eventual decline in popularity during the late 1970s and 1980s—even as many of his ideas were being adopted and implemented in institutional settings like the classroom, the prison, and the asylum—signaled the eventual fate of behaviorism itself, whose concepts would continue to be practically applied even as they are rarely discussed.

I have chosen to focus on this particular field—as opposed to other forms of animal research—because of behaviorists’ aspirations for shaping policy and governance as well as their essential reliance on using nonhuman animals as research subjects. Together, these dynamics make behaviorism a perfect case study for understanding how scientific films of animals have functioned as political texts, allowing us to draw clear connections between filming an animal experiment and shaping social policies. The scientists I study here made such connections themselves. Yerkes described his primate films as evidence of the validity of his eugenicist platforms; Neal E. Miller, alongside his colleagues, created rat films in order to model human behavior in a variety of cultural and institutional settings, such as classrooms, factories, and even lynch mobs; and B. F. Skinner described film as a means of exerting behavioral control over humans and animals on a society-wide scale.

One of the most influential movements in psychology, behaviorism is largely a child of the twentieth century, emerging out of many of the same concerns over empirical observation that led to the creation of film itself.” The discipline’s origin is usually attributed to a 1913 speech by the psychologist John B. Watson, which was subsequently published as the article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views

It?! Watson asserts that psychology should be an experimental science based on verifiable observations. He argues that rather than attempting to describe the internal thoughts, feelings, and desires of their subjects, behaviorists should study and test how those subjects acted in different controlled settings. This approach contrasted sharply with the symbolic analyses and theoretical frameworks used by other contemporaneous forms of psychology, such as Freudian psychoanalysis or gestalt theory. Drawing from Darwin's theory of evolution, which placed humans within a “continuity of species” that included animals, and building on the earlier work of animal experimentalists like C. Lloyd Morgan, Herbert Spencer Jennings, and William James, Watson developed his argument at a moment when the common lineage of humans and nonhumans was a well-accepted fact in scientific communities.’ Within this context, his article champions animal experiments as a means of revealing “a unitary scheme of animal response, [which] recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.’ He reasoned that if human behavior is an extension of animal behavior, experiments with managing animals and their social interactions could lead to similar procedures for human management. This managerial component was essential for how Watson conceived of the field, writing that it was a brand of psychology for “the educator, the physician, the jurist, and the business man,’ a management tool for use in each of the various arms of society.”

Behaviorism went through periods of rapid ascension and decline. After an initial burst of interest and controversy over Watson's work, behaviorism did not truly take off until the 1930s. From then until the 1950s, behaviorism became extremely popular with students of psychology, largely becoming the lingua franca of the discipline. It was then largely superseded by developments in cognitive science and neuropsychology. Despite falling in and out of favor throughout the twentieth century, Watson’s approach ultimately did succeed in revolutionizing the field, eventually leading to major developments in human engineering, urban planning, and artificial intelligence, among other disciplines. Indeed, historian of psychology John Mills goes so far as to claim that behaviorism and American psychology generally have become indistinguishable, despite how the movement has fallen out of fashion. When looking at the practice of psychology at the turn of the twenty-first century, Mills saw traces of behaviorism everywhere, from the use of animals to test concepts, to the attempts to predict and manage behavior based on past observations, to the implementation of psychological theories in industrial and commercial spheres. In many ways, these aspects of behaviorism’s ongoing influence have heightened exponentially, as increasing computational capacity has been dedicated to the pursuit of behavioral control.

At each step of behaviorism’s development, one finds the dual presence of animals and cinema, which operated as fundamental tools for achieving the field’s far-reaching sociopolitical goals. Early behaviorists were fascinated by the medium and often drew connections between their laboratory experiments and the experience of watching a film. The latter half of Watson's career, which was dedicated to the study of human sexual behavior, was itself inspired by his work studying the effects of anti-VD films on soldiers during World War I." In one early publication, Watson presaged his own cruelty toward animals and children by equating scenes of violence in a film to the stimulating effects he observed when administering electric shocks to humans and animals in the lab. He also heartbreakingly describes how the promise of watching a film was the only way to stop an eight-year-old child from crying after receiving such a shock in his lab.'° Watson later rearticulated these themes when he created his own film, Studies upon the Behavior of the Human Infant: Experimental Investigation of Babies (1923). This film claims to depict how a young child, named “little Albert,” was conditioned to fear rabbits.” Generating lasting controversy, it first shows Watson introducing a variety of animals to the infant Albert, who observes them with neutral interest.’ The film then cuts to months later, after the child has been supposedly conditioned. Albert is now terrified to touch the rabbits or even any furry rabbit-like object.

This film establishes many of the characteristics that will define behaviorist films going forward: shot from a single, stable camera angle, the frame is used to delimit what portions of the laboratory setting are visible to the audience. This tight control over the parameters of the onscreen experiment is also exerted through the film’s constant cutting (the standard shot is six seconds long), which renders invisible the actual conditioning of the child. Finally, the presence of the filmmaker/scientist, who is played by Watson himself, has access to all the spaces prohibited to the viewer. Walking in and out of frame to introduce and remove the animals that frighten the child, erasing many of the traces of his own interventions through the editing of the film, Watson’s onscreen character deploys and withholds the evidentiary power of the moving image at will. Like Mélies’s magician in the theatrical trick films of early cinema, Watson's scientist/filmmaker colluded with the form of the medium itself to display impressive feats of control and power over the children and animals onscreen. In this initial work of behaviorist filmmaking, it is already clear how much cinema has to offer the field in terms of controlling filmed subjects and eliciting them to perform for the camera lens. The film also establishes a direct link between this act of filming and enacting physical or psychological violence, a pattern that, unfortunately, continued. Studies upon the Behavior of the Human Infant thus creates a particular gaze—a gaze that refuses sympathy with its human and animal subjects and exerts control over these subjects as part of the act of looking—which will be repeated in many films to come. In other ways, though, Watson’s film is an outlier in the history of behaviorist filmmaking, particularly in its use of animals as stimuli rather than as subjects of an experiment. Watson's willingness to publicly display his damaging experiments on human children was quickly considered an ethical travesty. Later scientific films were instead made with a vast menagerie of other animals—rats, pigeons, primates, cats, dogs, monkeys, and more—in order to study, monitor, and control a sprawling set of behaviors from mating to working, giving birth to developing an

VIDEO 1. Clip from Studies upon the Behavior of the Human Infant: Experimental Investigation of Babies (John B. Watson, 1923). DOE: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.145.1 addiction, learning a new skill to participating in mob violence. In each instance, different species were chosen for the behaviors they could perform, as well as their more intangible social and symbolic statuses. The three scientific filmmakers around which this book is organized— Yerkes, Miller, and Skinner—selected their different test animals based on their capacity to illustrate the scientist's research. On the one hand, Yerkes was interested in what he called “ideation,” the processes of the intellect, and thus chose to work with high-functioning primates. Miller, on the other hand, was concerned with the ways that different cultures create their own personality types; thus, he chose rats because of their ability to stand in as a standardized form of life that could be repeatedly tested in different conditions. For his part, Skinner found that pigeons were both amenable to being conditioned in the lab and served as powerful rhetorical devices—since viewers were frequently shocked to see what these supposedly stupid birds could be trained to do.

Each section of this book therefore focuses on a specific scientist (Yerkes, Miller, Skinner) and a specific set of experimental animal subjects (primates, rats, pigeons). But each section also features a distinct affective relationship to power that was embodied in the research being conducted. I categorize these relationships under the headings of “sympathy, “modeling,” and “control” Although only the first of these groupings is recognizably emotional in its content, all three required complex arrangements of scientists, technologies, and animals that demanded particular affective postures and responses from each. “Modeling” and “control” may sound clinically objective, yet producing such perspectives requires deep conceptual and technological interventions into the sensing bodies of both animals and scientists. As Claude Bernard—one of the founding figures of animal experimentation and vivisection—infamously wrote, the experimenter “no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve.” Here, even the pursuit of an abstract idea is clearly rendered as an embodied experience of sensing organisms who adopt and reject particular affective relationships with one another.” Scientific objectivity, modeling, and control are all specific brands of emotional labor, just as much as scientific uses of sympathy.

It is my contention in this book that moving images were central in the creation of all three of these affective relationships. In each instance, film was used for its capacity to perform different scientific functions. The first section of the book is dedicated to the primatologist Robert Yerkes’s use of film as a means of creating a sympathetic rapport between scientific audiences and his animal subjects. In this section, I study Yerkes’s use of mediated sympathy in three different settings—his planning and implementation of intelligence exams during World War I, his use of film as a means of transforming scientific discourse, and the position of his films within the wider popular culture of primate cinema—each of which is the topic of its own chapter. In each site, we will see how film was used to facilitate emotional projections and sympathy across differences as a means of supposedly accessing hidden truths about the minds of others. This emotional experience was at the heart of Yerkes’s scientific work, and he often produced accounts of such experiences as the finished outcome of his research. Moreover, sympathy was essential for how Yerkes articulated his belief in eugenics, which he envisioned as an enlightened form of progress through the management of race and species. Yerkes argued that social hierarchies should be built and maintained through a sensitive deployment of understanding for how different groups of people and animals experienced the world. His sympathy therefore came with an implicit threat: to better know the other was a way to better contain and confine them. Film’s use in this process was equally troubling, modeling the subject position of the eugenicist managers who could see into the very minds and hearts of those they control.

The second section of the book is dedicated to the experimental rat films made throughout the mid-twentieth century—focusing primarily on Neal E. Miller’s Motivation and Reward in Learning (1948), which emerged out of a prevalent critique of Yerkes and his fellow eugenicists. Rather than picture difference as a property inherent to an organism that could be revealed through film, Miller and his colleagues proposed that difference was the end result of an ongoing relationship between organisms and their environment, a development that their films set out to capture. Here, film was considered a type of model, one that was primarily abstract in nature. In the three chapters constituting this section, we observe how this modeling was produced through the creation of Motivation and Reward in Learning, in the broader genre of the lab-rat film, and in the screening of these films in classroom settings. I argue that animal modeling was a particular form of affective labor, one that involved what Donna Haraway describes as “shared suffering” from both the scientists and their lab animals. I expand this idea to show the ways in which shared suffering was not limited to the events of the lab but often extended to the sites where laboratory findings were used to govern or where films of the lab were screened. I conclude that, as a form of abstraction, onscreen animal modeling of human behavior takes on an essentially different set of registers and political stakes from Yerkes’s approach. Miller and his peers sought to explain a wide array of disparate social actors and actions with their filmed rodent models, from the racial violence of lynch mobs to the workings of class in American society, from child socialization to the effects of overpopulation in urban centers. In these instances, the trifecta of rat, film, and model became a tool for simplifying and controlling massively complex social issues through manipulations of and interactions with nonhuman animals.