San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Nim Chimpsky—not a human, but raised as one.
Documentaries are better than they’ve ever been, mostly because they’re inexpensive to produce and everyone has a point to make. But British director James Marsh seems more interested in telling a good story than advocating for a particular position. He won an Oscar doing exactly that with Man on Wire, the film about Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, and now he’s returned to the ’70s with Project Nim, a fascinating documentary about a monkey raised like a person and the people who are supposed to love him.
In 1973, Columbia University’s Herbert Terrace decided to see what sort of language would develop in a baby chimp who’d been raised as a human. Soon, a 2-week-old newborn was living in a New York brownstone with one of Terrace’s grad students / former lovers, as well as her husband and their combined seven children. They named him Nim Chimpsky (a play on Noam Chomsky, probably the world’s most famous linguist), and, as a baby, he was breastfed by his human mother, taught sign language and generally raised as a member of the family. But there was no scientific model put into place, no methodology being dictated, and conflict soon arose between the professor and his student, resulting in Nim’s move to an estate owned by the university, where he was supervised and taught by a number of grad students, and occasionally Terrace himself.
This marked the second enormous transition in Nim’s life, the first being when he was snatched away from his birth mother. And while he bonded with people everywhere he went, sadly, it wasn’t to be the last big disruption. The film covers more than two decades of Nim’s life, and at almost every step of the way, he’s parted from the people he loves and who, more often than not, love him back. Marsh obtained an extraordinary amount of footage of Nim throughout the years, and almost every big player in Nim’s life, including Terrace and a number of Nim’s surrogate mothers, sits down for an interview almost 30 years after the fact. Some of them are tragic, like the scientist who needed test specimens and who eventually became a chimp advocate, and some of them are hysterical, like Bob Ingersoll, the Deadhead who became Nim’s closest pal for years.
No one, including Terrace, can say that Nim was done right by the humans in his life. In fact, throughout the interviews, many of Marsh’s subjects are moved to tears as they remember not just their relationship with Nim, but how their own actions contributed to his situation.
The thing is, Marsh doesn’t really have an axe to grind, although a number of his interview subjects most certainly do. Sure, Terrace and some other scientists come across as bad guys, but Marsh gives them an opportunity to respond to the charges their former students and the media level against them (Terrace doesn’t always acquit himself).Marsh isn’t telling you that raising chimps as humans is bad; nor is he saying that we have a responsibility to act ethically in our dealings with our animal buddies. He doesn’t need to. By simply telling the story of Nim, who isn’t capable of telling it himself, everything comes out through the narrative. There are occasional reenactments that are unnecessary, but these are ultimately forgivable.
When all is said and done, though, it’s worth asking whether it was wrong to raise Nim as a human. That’s certainly debatable, but what certainly was wrong was how his human companions frequently abdicated their responsibilities in the name of science, or because of their own personal issues.
Project Nim is often inspiring, but it’s also frequently upsetting, because you get to know Nim during the course of the film. And this is one monkey who got a raw deal from the very people who were supposed to be looking out for him.
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