Remarkably Bright Creatures
Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures features Marcellus, a Giant Pacific octopus who narrates the story like a sarcastic, observant, emotionally aware witness to human mess. He is intelligent. He is funny. He is a character. He is someone. And because he is someone, people may finish the film thinking differently about “seafood”.
But why did it take a Netflix drama?
Octopuses do not become sentient when Alfred Molina gives them a voice. They do not become intelligent when a screenwriter gives them jokes. They do not become individuals when humans finally find them charming enough to care about.
They already are.
Real octopuses are extraordinary animals. They solve problems. They explore. They remember. They escape. They play. They learn. They respond to the world around them in ways we are still arrogant enough to treat as surprising.
Scientists recognise that octopuses are sentient and capable of experiencing pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement.
That should be the end of the conversation. Instead, humans looked at an animal who can feel, learn, investigate and make choices, and decided to turn them into food. Because that is what human supremacy does. It takes someone’s life, flattens them into a product, changes their name to “seafood”, and acts as if the moral problem has disappeared. It has not disappeared. It has been battered, grilled, boiled, served, sold and normalised.
Marcellus is CGI. A real octopus was not dragged into captivity and made to perform for human entertainment. But the bigger contradiction remains.
People will watch a fictional octopus speak, think and feel, then leave the sofa and still defend eating real octopuses who do all of those things without a script. They will call Marcellus “remarkably bright” and call his real-world counterparts “seafood”. They will cry over one imagined octopus while paying for actual octopuses to be killed.
And there is a push to farm them. Mexico has introduced a bill to ban octopus farming after high mortality and cannibalism were documented at a farm. Experts have said there is no ethical or sustainable way to farm cephalopods. Of course there isn’t. You cannot ethically farm someone whose entire being is built around exploration, problem-solving and control over their own body. You cannot sustainably industrialise the confinement and killing of sentient individuals. You can only make exploitation more efficient.
If Remarkably Bright Creatures makes people rethink eating octopuses, good. But the truth was never hidden. Octopuses were always remarkable.
Humans were just too invested in eating them to care.