Project Nim

By Nicholas Davies

Whenever a recent documentary film comes up as a topic of conversation,
‘Project Nim’ (2011) – directed by James Marsh, who won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his ‘Man on Wire’ (2008) – still tops my list.

The film is based on Elizabeth Hess’s book ‘Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human’, and tells the fascinating, raucous, scandalous, at times hilarious, and ultimately tragic story of a chimpanzee named Nim.

Not long after his birth in 1973, Nim was taken from his mother (the film’s re-enactment of this intense moment powerfully bonds the viewer with the chimp; it also foreshadows the emotional abuse to come), and was taken to a university linguistics lab, where he was made the subject of an admittedly exciting but, finally, flawed experiment. If a baby chimp were raised as though he were human, would he be able to develop language skills?

Over time, with tutoring, Nim did indeed develop the ability to use sign language to communicate, with more or less complexity depending on whom you ask. Through interviews with the chimp’s various caregivers – all of whom develop complex relationships with him – over the course of his life, we learn that he had complicated emotions and some pretty sharp smarts. Nim became very close friends with humans and other chimps; he could be playful, friendly, forgiving, petulant, angry, violent and manipulative. Perhaps most significantly, we learn that his feelings were hurt when his trust was betrayed.

Now, baby chimps are adorable. Grown male chimps are aggressive, powerful –and can be dangerous. After an extremely violent incident – Nim, in a rage, mauled one of his caregivers – the language experiment is shut down. The chimp, no longer wanted, no longer ‘useful’, is abandoned by those who have been looking after him and shipped off to a primate ‘shelter’. Here he eventually makes new friends; then, in what is one of several emotional spikes in the film, narrowly avoids being sold to a medical research lab – a fate his fellow primates do not escape. Nim lived out the rest of his days, lonely and depressed, on a sort of farm for rescued animals.

Broadly, the film presents the case that, however exciting and however well-intentioned it may have been, the linguistic research undertaken on Nim was bad science – not very well thought through, poorly documented and, finally, inconclusive. Far worse, it took advantage of a trusting creature and subjected him to emotional abuse from which he never fully recovered.

‘I strongly believe that we made a commitment to him and we failed. We did a huge disservice to that soul. And shame on us,’ says Joyce Butler, one of Nim’s teachers. Perhaps what ‘Project Nim’ shows us most clearly is that we humans can be just as petulant, aggressive and manipulative as chimpanzees – and a whole lot less forgiving. We are the primate with the greater power, and we are often thoughtless, selfish and, at times, stupid and downright cruel.