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For Alexandrowicz, Levy’s thought process illustrates another defense mechanism, which has to do with the way we watch fiction and the way we watch nonfiction. The difference between the two can be surprisingly hard to parse, but Alexandrowicz thinks of it as the difference between two forms of consciousness. There’s the “nonfiction consciousness,” which he defines as “the knowledge or belief that what we are looking at has a direct relation to reality, to the real world.” It’s the state of mind in which we watch documentaries; it’s why we get angry when we find out that something in a documentary is faked but not disclosed — say, the voice of a human, using an AI.

In contrast, when we watch with our “fiction consciousness,” we expect a level of mediation. “Someone wanted to portray reality, and then they created a production and they cast people to be in that situation,” he says. That mediation gives us a layer of remove. Someone who gets killed onscreen in a film, we assume, didn’t really die. A crying person is acting. It’s emotionally easier to bear.

Because we have these two consciousnesses at our disposal, Alexandrowicz hypothesizes that another defense mechanism develops when we “fictionalize” the nonfiction, by finding a way to insert a layer between ourselves and the image. In other words, we try to find a way to cast the nonfiction as fiction. “If [Levy] could see the same image, but experience it in a more fiction-consciousness way, that would take away some of the weight of images threatening her,” Alexandrowicz suggested.

In a way, I think that’s what many people found themselves doing on January 6. Media coverage and politicians’ speeches seemed more devoted to bending the insurrection into the form of a Hollywood blockbuster than grappling with the deep rot it unveiled. A similar response seems to pop up whenever a huge, traumatic event is unfolding. Thinking of the news as another episode of TV or an action thriller, however unconsciously, helps us believe that we fully understand what we are watching. Rarely is that the case.

Is there any way forward?

Becoming more critical of images and videos thanks to our collective status as both viewers and creators, and our understanding of the way videos and images can manipulate the truth, has contributed to an overall sense among contemporary audiences that what we see cannot be trusted and requires further interrogation. On balance, Alexandrowicz agrees, that’s good.

However, if that baseline of increased suspicion makes it harder for any of us to maintain a “nonfiction consciousness” — to believe that images can teach us true things about the world — what happens to documentary? To the news? To activists who make videos? If the trend toward skepticism and mistrust continues — or even worsens, with the mounting certainty of high-quality deepfakes just over the horizon — what happens next?

After watching The Viewing Booth, I wondered whether, had I been my 15-year-old self during the Capitol insurrection, I would have been convinced at all by the images I was seeing that something was wrong. I thought about people who saw videos of George Floyd, or of an angry mob forcibly entering the halls of Congress, and were able to deploy defense mechanisms that strengthened their existing views. I wondered when I’ve done it myself.

There is no simple solution, no good way to easily navigate inherent disbelief.

One thing The Viewing Booth made me think about, however, is the difference between objectivity and reflexivity, and how all of us could stand to more frequently reflect on the act of viewing. (Interestingly, the Hebrew title of the film is Mirror.) “I think the only thing I come out of the film with, something that allows me to move forward, is this idea that everything is so polarized, but maybe one thing that could still be unpolarized is reflecting on how the process of subjectivity works,” Alexandrowicz said.

Looking for, confronting, and scrutinizing the reasons we interpret a video or image a particular way can help us come to terms with the whys of it — and combat the tendency to believe that we are “objective” viewers. You probably unconsciously know that your own beliefs factor into how much you trust the image in front of you. But directly acknowledging as much can have a powerful effect. “What it taught me is that when I’m thinking of how to maybe try to convince people of things — not that [Levy] was convinced in the film, but there was a process there — is that maybe a question mark is more effective than an exclamation mark,” Alexandrowicz explained.

For him, that lesson will affect the way he approaches his future work, and how he thinks about media literacy: “Usually, we refer to media literacy as educating people on how to better read media and understand it. But I think what this film suggests is that there is another part of media literacy, and that is understanding ourselves as viewers.”

For me, it shifts how I view myself. I suspect that I sometimes assume I am more of an “objective” viewer than a subjective one because I’m critical of what I watch, as a good 21st century viewer with a camera in my pocket. But does that actually make me more objective? Or am I falling into the same trap I would have when I was 15, by separating myself from what upsets me and finding ways to sidestep what bothers me? How would I know?

That awareness gives me a new set of questions to interrogate myself with. When am I using my critical eye as a way to reinforce my own biases, or to avoid being threatened by the weight of what I am seeing? Can I reflect on those responses, rather than attributing them only to the footage I’ve just watched?

It’s hard work, but work worth doing. There is no going back. We are all living in our own little viewing booths — and if we want to know the world as it is, and even love it, and maybe change it, we’ve got to make sure we are looking at it straight on.

The Viewing Booth is playing in limited theaters and is available to digitally rent for a limited time through the Museum of the Moving Image’s virtual cinema platform.

Critically, Prop 12, passed by California voters via ballot measure in 2018, closes some of the remaining gaps in these laws.

It explicitly requires “cage-free” conditions for hens, and also expands how many hens are covered: About two-thirds of all eggs are sold as “shell eggs,” the kind you buy in a carton at the grocery store; the rest are sold as “liquid eggs” for restaurants, cafeterias, and food manufacturers. California’s older animal welfare law only covered shell eggs, but Prop 12 extends the cage-free ban to cover hens produced for liquid eggs as well.

The law should have an even bigger relative impact on the pork industry, which has been more stubborn in eliminating confinement systems.

There are 125 million pigs raised for food in the US each year, a little over six million of them are sows used for breeding, and just one million of those sows are raised for the California marketplace. But for those one million sows, the difference between life in a gestation and crate and life outside of one will be stark. The crates are barely larger than the sows’ bodies — so small that the animals can’t turn around for the duration of their numerous four-month pregnancies.

MediaNews Group via Getty Images / Harold Hoch
Sows in gestation crates at a pig breeding farm.

The crates take a physical toll — sows can develop sores as well as foot and leg injuries from having to lay on concrete all day, and the immobility reduces their bone strength. The crates take a mental toll, too. Pigs are highly social, curious animals who, in natural settings, are usually quite active. But in intensive confinement systems, they might bite the bars of their crates or repeatedly move their head side to side — signs of distress, boredom, and frustration.

To date, 10 states have banned gestation crates, and around 55 food companies have pledged to eliminate them from their supply chain. But compared to the progress for hens, the results have been mixed.

Some companies, like Chipotle and Whole Foods, have made good on their promises to ban gestation crates from their supply chain. But most have not, according to a report by World Animal Protection, a UK-based international animal welfare organization. And most states that have banned gestation crates don’t raise a lot of pigs to begin with.

Some major pork producers have begun to phase out gestation crates in their supply chain, moving sows to “group housing” pens. These industry shifts have brought the share of crate-free sows from just 10 percent in 2011 to about 28 percent, but with a big catch — most pork producers that use group housing pens still use gestation crates for the 30 to 40 days between the time they finish weaning their piglets and when they’re reimpregnated, what some call “early stage confinement.” This is another critical animal welfare gap that Prop 12 will close.

Prop 12’s space requirements are also stricter than any other law, giving sows 24 square feet apiece, well over the industry’s typical crate-free space allotment of 16 to 18 square feet. This means most pork producers probably aren’t prepared to supply California with compliant pork come January, leading some industry analysts to predict bacon shortages in the New Year.

A looming bacon shortage in California?

In the North American Meat Institute lawsuit against California filed in 2019, employees from the country’s biggest pork companies declared under penalty of perjury that their companies likely wouldn’t be able to meet California’s demand for pork under the new strictures.

A spokesperson for Smithfield, which raises about 15 percent of all US sows, said in a declaration in the lawsuit, “There will be an inadequate supply of Proposition 12-compliant hogs to meet existing demand for fresh whole pork meat in California.” The spokesperson added, “It is no exaggeration to state that the expense and complications of complying with Proposition 12 may cause Smithfield to conclude it is no longer viable to do business in California.” Similar comments were made by representatives from Hormel, JBS, Tyson Foods, and Clemens Food Group in the lawsuit.

Over a year later, according to industry insiders, not much had changed. In March 2021, Christine McCracken, executive director of the animal protein division at agribusiness financial services company Rabobank, published a report in which she predicted a Prop 12 pork shortage. Per the report, California eats about 15 percent of the nation’s pork, but only 4 percent of sows were raised in housing compliant with Prop 12. The National Pork Producers Council says less than 1 percent of US pork meet’s Prop 12 standards.

In a webinar for pork producers about Prop 12 compliance recorded in April 2021, McCracken put it bluntly: “We’re looking at a shortage. If implemented as set, we’re not going to have enough pork to meet the needs of California. The pork that is compliant is clearly going to be priced at a premium.”

McCracken declined to be interviewed for this story, but she’s probably right about a looming shortage. What she didn’t say in that presentation is that this entire scenario was avoidable.

By the time Prop 12 goes into effect, the pork industry will have had more than three years to change housing systems for about a million of its 125 million pigs. Instead, it will have spent much of its time and resources unsuccessfully suing California.

Meanwhile, egg producers — including the largest one in the US, which raises about 12 percent of the nation’s hens — have been rapidly converting cage operations to cage-free.

Compliance will be a lot of work, both the initial project of converting operations, and continually providing compliance documentation. But as the egg producers have shown, compliance is squarely in the realm of the doable.

And these pork producers are some of the largest, most lucrative food businesses to ever exist, some of which enjoyed enormous windfalls in 2020 as consumers panic-bought meat and other groceries. (And some of the meat companies that are warning that letting pigs turn around will result in pricier pork are the same ones accused of conspiring since 2009 to limit pork supply to inflate its price.)

Despite the public warnings of a coming shortage, some in the industry have been working behind the scenes to comply. Hyatt Frobose of Jyga Technologies, a company that produces feeding equipment for pork production and is helping pork companies reconfigure barns to be crate- free, told me via email that he’s “worked with most of the larger meat packer groups to at least draw up plans for Prop 12 compliance and many of them have moved some of their production in the direction of Prop 12 compliance.”

After the Humane Society of the United States filed a shareholder proposal calling on Hormel to disclose that it’d have trouble complying with Prop 12 — a major financial risk — the company had an about face. Hormel now says it will comply with Prop 12, but it’s actually a relatively small operation, tied for 36th place in US pork production. Clemens Foods Group, ranked 11th, told Civil Eats last year that it’s converting some of its operations.

Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods, smaller producers owned by poultry giant Perdue Farms, will both comply. Niman’s standards have always been higher than Prop 12’s, while Coleman has been working with some of its contract farmers to meet Prop 12 requirements. Chris Oliviero, general manager of Niman Ranch, told me that combined, the two companies own about 38,500 sows, which would put Perdue Farms at #26.

Oliviero thinks that ultimately, the bigger producers will fall in line with the law, even if they’re still trying to overturn it. “There still seems to be this belief by some if they push back hard enough that it won’t happen,” he told me. “But I think at a certain point when we reach a place where it’s going to proceed, the energy, time and money will be focused on making it happen as opposed to fighting it.”

One can see how the law’s formal implementation could play out. California pork prices will probably rise in January, with some in the meat industry claiming animal advocates campaigned for and passed a law that’s just too difficult and too expensive to comply with (reminder that voters overwhelmingly supported the measure). The same thing happened in early 2015 when the predecessor to Prop 12 went into effect for eggs. But the egg industry adapted and egg prices stabilized.

More than anything, the fight over Prop 12 shows just how awful farm animal welfare standards are in the US — simply allowing less than 1 percent of US pigs to be able to turn around has become a multi-lawsuit fight waged for years. Such treatment of a dog or cat would be criminal, yet it’s just how business gets done in the pork industry.

The extreme confinement of farmed animals on a mass scale began in post-World War II America, making meat cheaper and more accessible than ever before in human history. But in recent decades, consumers have increasingly come to understand that the cheap meat we expect comes with a steep cost to animals. Prop 12 is a major part of the effort to confront this cost, and marks a step forward in the expansion of our moral circle.

Warnock’s political career — and democracy in Georgia — could hinge on the most dangerous provision of the state’s new voter suppression law.

Late last month, Georgia Republicans began a process that could end with them seizing control of election administration in Fulton County — a Democratic stronghold that encompasses most of Atlanta.

Under Georgia’s new election law, SB 202, the GOP-controlled state elections board may remove a county’s top election officials and replace them with a temporary superintendent (although this process will likely take months as the board has to jump through a few procedural hoops first). Once such a superintendent is in place, they can disqualify voters, move polling places, and even potentially refuse to certify election results.

Voter suppression laws are nothing new, even in the post-Jim Crow era. And Georgia’s SB 202, is hardly the first effort by Republican state lawmakers to skew elections by making it harder for Democratic constituencies to cast a ballot.

But prior efforts to restrict the franchise frequently placed unnecessary hurdles in the way of voters, such as by requiring them to show certain forms of ID or by limiting where and when voters can cast their ballot. These sorts of laws are troubling, but they can be overcome by determined voters.

SB 202, by contrast, is part of a new generation of election laws that target the nuts and bolts of election administration, potentially allowing voters to be disenfranchised even if they follow the rules.

Because state voter suppression laws targeting the counting of ballots and certifications of elections are relatively new, Democrats did not come into 2021 with a legislative proposal to address these laws. Democratic leaders’ primary voting rights bill, the For the People Act, includes a grab bag of provisions intended to neutralize state laws making it harder to vote. But the For the People Act’s drafters did not anticipate something like SB 202’s provisions allowing the Republican Party to take control of election administration in Democratic counties.

Which brings us to the Preventing Election Subversion Act of 2021, a bill introduced by Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) that seeks to fill that gap.

It doesn’t prevent Georgia’s elections board from removing a local election official, but it does impose some procedural safeguards intended to prevent local officials from being removed for partisan reasons. Among other things, it allows such officials to sue for reinstatement in federal court.

Additionally, the bill would make it a felony to harass or intimidate election workers in order to interfere with their official duties. GOP lawmakers in some states, including Texas, are pushing legislation making it harder for election workers to remove partisan observers who disrupt an election. Warnock’s bill would subject the worst-behaved election observers to criminal charges.

Realistically, Warnock’s bill has a long way to go before it becomes law. Warnock is reportedly in negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to include safeguards against “election subversion” in a package of voting rights reforms that enjoys Manchin’s blessing. As the most conservative Democratic senator in an evenly divided Senate, Manchin is key to advancing any meaningful voting rights legislation.

And, even if Manchin signs on to the Preventing Election Subversion Act, that support is unlikely to amount to much unless Democratic senators unanimously agree to eliminate the GOP’s power to filibuster voting rights bills. Plus, there’s always a risk that an increasingly conservative judiciary will refuse to enforce new voting rights legislation.

But, at the very least, this bill is a sign that Democrats understand that the GOP recently escalated its tactics in the voting rights war, and that Democrats — and democracy — need an adequate countermeasure.

What exactly could the Preventing Election Subversion Act do in Georgia?

SB 202 presents a devilish problem for federal policymakers.

On its face, SB 202 creates a process that can be used to remove local elections officials who violate the law, or who demonstrate “nonfeasance, malfeasance, or gross negligence in the administration of the elections.” Few people would argue that election officials who repeatedly break the law, or who prove incapable of doing their jobs well, should remain in office. It’s entirely reasonable for a state to create nonpartisan process to remove officials who are bad at their jobs.

The problem with SB 202, however, is that it de facto creates a partisan process to remove local elections officials. The bill ensures that Republicans will control four of the five seats on the state elections board for as long as the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature. (As they have since 2005.) And it removes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who rebuffed former President Donald Trump’s attempts to toss out Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia’s 2020 election, as chair of the state board.

The Preventing Election Subversion Act includes several provisions that would diminish the GOP’s ability to take over local election administration in Georgia — and in other states that enact SB 202-style laws. One of its central provisions states that statewide officials may only remove a local elections official “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Of course, SB 202, at least on its face, also gives similar protections to local elections officials. But SB 202 allows the GOP-controlled State Elections Board to determine if an official committed malfeasance. Warnock’s bill would allow a local elections official targeted by SB 202 to sue in federal court for reinstatement.

Thus, the ultimate determination of whether a local official performed their job so poorly that removal is warranted would be made by federal judges who, at least in theory, are less likely to be motivated by partisanship than a state board dominated by Republicans.

Warnock’s bill also includes provisions to ensure that such a federal lawsuit is vigorously litigated by a well-financed team of lawyers. Among other things, it provides that a local election administrator who is wrongfully relieved of duty, may receive “reasonable attorney’s fees” if they file a successful lawsuit.

Additionally, when a state begins proceedings to remove a local official, it must inform the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division that it has done so, and the Justice Department may also challenge the state’s effort to remove such an official in federal court.

The Preventing Election Subversion Act only works if federal judges are committed to the rule of law

The basic theory underlying the Preventing Election Subversion Act is that federal courts can be trusted to stop partisan efforts to seize control of local election administration. But it’s far from clear that this theory is correct.

The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has generally been hostile towards voting rights statutes. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act — the primary federal safeguard against racist voter suppression — based on an entirely novel reading of the Constitution that is at odds with the Constitution’s text. Similarly, in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the Court imposed new limits on the Voting Rights Act that have no basis in that law’s text.

Congress, in other words, could pass a law that effectively neutralizes the most virulent provisions of SB 202, but there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will follow that law.

Another danger is that, should the Preventing Election Subversion Act become law, individual federal judges may apply that law in bad faith.

Imagine, for example, that Georgia Republicans uncover a few instances where Fulton County’s election board made suboptimal management calls — the sort of minor errors that are inevitable in any operation tasked with counting hundreds of thousands of ballots. Because Warnock’s bill allows local officials to be removed for “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” a partisan federal judge might claim that these minor missteps justify removal.

And then there’s the risk that the Supreme Court — perhaps by engaging in the same sort of textually challenged legal interpretation that it performed in Shelby County and Brnovich — could strike down a federal law governing who may administer elections.

As a general rule, federal courts are reluctant to hear lawsuits challenging how a state allocates power among its “political subdivisions.” Though there are some exceptions to this general rule, typically, if Georgia decided to take over Atlanta’s police force, or its schools, or some other government agency that is typically led by local Atlanta officials, federal courts would not intervene.

The Supreme Court has also held that the federal government may not “commandeer” state officials and demand that they perform their jobs in certain ways. A conservative Supreme Court could potentially extend this doctrine to prevent the federal government from shaping who will administer elections in Fulton County.

But the Constitution also gives Congress an unusually broad power to regulate congressional elections. Although the Constitution permits states to determine “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” it also permits Congress to “at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.”

Thus, as the Supreme Court held in Smiley v. Holm (1932), federal law may “provide a complete code for congressional elections,” regulating such granular matters as “notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election returns.”

A Supreme Court that believes it is bound by the text of the Constitution, in other words, should uphold Congress’s ability to prevent Georgia Republicans from taking over the administration of congressional elections in Fulton County. But, of course, America is ruled by the same Supreme Court that gave us Shelby County and Brnovich, so there is no guarantee Warnock’s bill would be upheld.

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