Kevin Smith *EXCLUSIVE*

Eating a chicken's soul

KS: The way we see a bear or a shark, do you think that’s the way chickens look at human beings? That there’s a communicado that goes in the chicken world where they’re like, “If a human’s coming at you, pick up a bike, make yourself look big.”

SM: Well they don’t have any arms really. I think that’s why chickens run, if you walk in chickens don’t like—

KS: So they’ve got the fight or flight response, they’ve got the flight aspect.

SM: It’s like, “There’s something large coming in here, we’ve got to move.” Or if you bring food they’re still timid, some birds will come and eat out of your hand. I mean they still have senses to sense the difference between us coming in there and say a coyote or something.

KS: Right.

SM: But to a chicken we’re just a big huge thing.

KS: What’s the difference between a human and a coyote to a chicken? Both of us are coming to eat him, the coyote sooner rather than later.

SM: Well if you have a chicken coop, you’re just coming in to get eggs, you’re not slaughtering them in front of everybody.

KS: But isn’t there a part of them that’s like, “Protect the young! They’re taking our babies!”

SM: I don’t think chickens—

KS: You don’t think chickens have emotions?

SM: The chicken brain is not the most developed.

KS: I gotta imagine the chicken has to have emotions, the chicken has to feel like—

SM: Or you want to think?

KS: I really do! Part of me wants to and a part of me doesn’t want to, because I eat a lot of chicken. But part of me wants to believe that the chicken is sitting on a bunch of eggs and then some asshole comes in and is stealing them—

SM: Like naming them?

KS: Totally! This will be Herbert, this will be George, this would be Francis.

SM: Most people who eat chicken tend to not think that they have emotions, usually it’s people who don’t eat meat who have the impression that—

KS: A chicken has a soul.

SM: Yeah. The media is just that they’re dumb fucking things pecking around, shooting out eggs.

KS: Yeah, I’m a happy medium where I’ve got to believe that there’s more going on in a chicken.

SM: You want to eat their soul!

KS: “Here it comes, it’s the fat soul sucker! Hide the babies! Oh, he’s back! He took Bertha!” Yeah, I don’t want to necessarily eat their souls, but I have a hard time thinking the chicken is just sitting there, “Gooup! Bweurr!”

SM: That’s hard to imagine!

KS: Christ man, you’ve got to think like it’s a living being, it has a brain, a higher function. If we were a jellyfish-eating world, I’d be fine. A jellyfish does not have a brain or a spine. I still don’t understand how a jellyfish works. I was at the aquarium with the kid and I read something like, “The jellyfish has no brain, no heart, no spine.” I’m like, “The jellyfish is like me!” But I have those things, but in theory I’m spineless and heartless and brainless. But this thing literally has — how does that fucking thing exist? It’s a freak of nature, just this thing that lives and eats other things but it doesn’t have a brain, it doesn’t have a heart and it doesn’t have a spine. What the fuck makes a jellyfish work?

SM: It’s an arrangement of cells. Look at bacteria. Bacteria is a living thing, but they don’t have spines and brains.

KS: No brain whatsoever?

SM: If a jellyfish doesn’t have a brain, I’m going to vote for bacteria not having a brain.

KS: Yeah, a jellyfish is weird. So I could see a jellyfish just be “Brrruep!” just floating in the ocean, “Beurrp! Brrrp brre” — Even that’s giving it too much, ’cause there’s an inflection in “Brrreup Be Brreup Be.”

SM: It’d be robotic. It’d be “Brrrrrrb Brrrrb.”

KS: No man, they don’t even make noises. But a chicken, there’s got to be like, when you leave and the chickens are alone there must be like, “Hey, what’s up? How are you?” “We’re still alive, we’re still doing it, they haven’t eaten us yet. Let’s work on our escape plan like Chicken Run, like the dream, the Aardman animation.”

SM: I’d say that it’s proof positive that they don’t fucking do that.

KS: Why?

SM: Well, I mean I’ve never heard of them doing that. In the age of the Internet we should do the research, and maybe someone can write in with their stories of chickens fucking doing elaborate escape plans.

KS: I’m not even looking for that. I’m looking for, has anyone ever buried a mic in a chicken coop? Not let them know, like built a chicken coop with a microphone in it, hidden, throughout the place, a bunch of mics and then brought the chickens in there and be like, “We’re just going to eat your eggs and that’s it and then maybe we’ll eat you sometime or whatever.” Just treat them like normal chickens — don’t let them know that the jig is up — and then walk away and then see if the chickens say anything when the door closes.

SM: In English?

KS: Wait a good minute. Whatever, any language. Even if they spoke Chinese I think it would be wicked if they were suddenly like [whispering] “They’re gone. [‘Chinese’] Tonking Tonking.” Yeah, I’d take that. But still you’d get somebody translate it to find out what chickens say to one another. And the conversations they would have, like just, “Look at my dick. Look at my chicken dick.” Whatever, I don’t need them formulating fucking math equations but if I could relate to a chicken a little more—

SM: Would you eat them then?

KS: No! I would stop eating them. I’d be like, “Holy shit, these things talk, they know English, they’ve just been waiting all this time to pull the whole Planet of the Apes.”

SM: But if we found out that chickens were just like, “Hey Fred, how you doing?”

KS: “Hey Fred, look at my dick. Watch me jerk off.” I imagine a dirty chicken…

SM: Dirty chickens! If that did happen then I don’t think you would want that because you would have nothing to eat!

KS: No, I would eat box cereal.

SM: You’d eat box cereal?

KS: I would live off fucking Kellogg’s.

SM: What if you found out, if we mic’d the grain…

KS: And they spoke?

SM: Yeah.

KS: Then I’d have to re-evaluate.

SM: You know what is funny about corn is that they think that most sugar based cereals are heavily corn based.

KS: Yeah, that’s when they grind them up. I’ll eat corn when you grind it up. But it’s that texture. If you grind it and dry it up, yeah I’ll eat cornmeal. I’ll eat that raw. Just give me a fistful of cornmeal and I’ll eat it. Like a chicken would, that’s why I relate to the chicken very much.

SM: And what you’re hoping is that you could be left in the coop and be like, “Let me see your dick!”

KS: Totally! I would like to go incognito into a chicken coop and rattle large chickens—

SM: You’re a chicken fetishist!

KS: Look, let’s not be ridiculous. You don’t even need to be in a big chicken outfit. Let’s say they built into the coop a place where I could put just my head, my body’s outside the coop resting comfortably, my head is sitting on a nest. And you know like we know some special effects dudes, they decorate my head, they do me up so I look like a chicken.

SM: But your face is like the belly.

KS: Yes, but I’m wearing white contact lenses so it just blends in with the feathers and shit like that. So I’m totally undercover, I’m not dressed like a giant chicken where they might be like, “Come on dude, try a bit harder.” But I do blend. Then they fucking start talking, and talking about showing their dicks.

SM: It’s like, “Look at the new guy.”

KS: Totally, yeah.

SM: “Show us your dick!” And you’re like, “They didn’t put a dick on me!”

KS: “Why didn’t they think of that?” How long would I sit in that coop listening to the conversation? Like I think the first time a chicken said something I’d be like, “Aha!” And they’d be like, “Oh shit!”

SM: “The jig’s up.”

KS: “Caught.”

SM: See, I would imagine that if chickens could talk, in a world where chickens could talk, they’re smart enough.

KS: And we’re not talking about “Bwarp!” We’re talking about—

SM: “Look at my dick.”

KS: “Devil’s tied up the Series 2-2.” Like they’re interested in the shit we are.

SM: I think that if they had the power to do that, one of them would have been like, “Stop fucking eating us.” Like in the world that chickens could talk and they loved their babies and all the rest of that stuff then why wouldn’t it occur to them to be like, “Look, look, stop eating our children!”

KS: How do you know they haven’t? How do you know that some chicken hasn’t said that on a farm to Farmer John and Farmer John was just like, “Oh my god, if the word gets out that chickens are almost human-like, I got no work.”

SM: I’d say Farmer John’s first reaction would be like—

KS: “Satan is in this chicken!”

SM: He could be scared of demon-possession, or, he’d try to make a buck off of that, I’m sure he’d make more fucking money off his talking chickens then out of his fucking eggs.

KS: Yeah but let’s say he’s got the talking chicken and he’s like, “I’m going to take the talking chicken out into the world.” And the chicken is around the microphone, “Finally I have a forum, a platform, to address the world!” Like, “Look, we all talk, all of us chickens talk. I’m not the only one. Farmer John can’t get rich off me because all the chickens talk.” Farmer John is fucked. If he had thought ahead he’d be like, “If I let people know that chickens talk, if I spill the beans, my livelihood is killed.”

SM: Well, the chicken would lie. The chicken would be like, “I’m the only one that talks.”

KS: Until he gets in front of a microphone?

SM: Yeah.

KS: Wow! That is presupposing a world in which not only can the chicken speak, but it’s devious!

SM: The chicken would be. It’s sitting around the coop all day.

KS: That’s true.

SM: I’m going to bet on the chicken. I’m going to bet on the super brain chicken that’s smart enough to know that the revolution’s going to start, but that if he fucks it all up… He’d be better off being the celebrity chicken fighting for his cause than just going out there and being, “Hey man, we all fucking talk, Farmer John. We’re all fucking talking — mostly about our dicks.”

KS: “But still, so do you.” In a world where the chickens reveal themselves to be—

SM: Highly intelligent.

KS: Higher brain function animals, how long before we stop eating chicken the world over? Because it’s not like immediate, it’s not like Happy Feet, like, “Oh shit, that penguin is dancing, let’s stop fishing the ocean.”

SM: I’d say that the immediate reaction is that a lot of people would stop, and a lot of people would just start killing them out of fear.

KS: Because if it can speak, then it can plan. If it can plan, then we’re next!