The story of Nim the chimpanzee is an uncomfortable one. Photo / Supplied
The new film by the director of the electrifying Man on Wire (about the Frenchman who walked a tightrope between the barely completed Twin Towers) is another jaw-dropper, but for different reasons: it's a troubling and troubled meditation on the ethics of science and the apparently limitless human capacity for
self-absorption.
The "Nim" of the title is a chimpanzee, born in Oklahoma and raised in New York in the 1970s as the subject of a decade-long experiment at Columbia University to teach him signing and test whether he was capable of learning what we might regard as a language. (Oddly, the film does not mention that Nim's full name, Nim Chimpsky was a crack at Noam Chomsky who, long before he became an activist intellectual, was a distinguished linguist who argued that language acquisition was innate - and unique - to humans).
What the experiment proved and failed to prove - and what the nature of language is - are all traversed at length elsewhere. What interests Marsh, and makes for a film as riveting as any high-wire walk, is the behaviour not of the chimp but of the humans around him.
Using a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews, the film compiles a sad story: Nim is adopted into the seven-strong family of a graduate student Stephanie LaFarge, who plainly wanted him treated just like one of the kids. She breastfed him ("it was the 70s," her daughter, Jenny Lee, explains) and tells us, with no apparent awareness of how creepily ambiguous it sounds, that "my appetite and drive to have an intimate relationship with an animal was unstoppable".
What quickly emerges is that Nim's human captors (no other word seems apt), are nine parts neurotic to one part scientist: the experimental methodology is unclear; the record-keeping, where it exists at all, is flawed; individuals work with and stop working with Nim almost randomly and for entirely questionable motives; at one point an adult male human appears actually to be romantically jealous of the chimp.
