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Penguins: Just Like Us; Grizzlies: Not So Much

posted by: Scott Tobias
July 28, 2005 - 10:09pm

So I finally caught up with March Of The Penguins, the latest documentary

phenomenon, last weekend and I can see why people love it: The footage of these

Emperor Penguins, surviving against long odds in the meteorological extremes of

Antarctica, is pretty extraordinary. I don’t know how they wrangled those

cameramen to freeze their asses off at 50 below (to say nothing of the high winds),

but I doubt they were a Union crew. Remarkable, too, is the story of their long,

perilous mating ritual: Waddling 90 adorable miles in the bitter cold to the breeding

grounds, going months without food, protecting the egg from the elements, shielding

their fragile young from scavengers, etc. Yet Morgan Freeman’s prodding

voiceover narration, perhaps in an effort to connect with little kids and their

parents, keeps coughing up terms like “love” and “family”

to make these penguins seem just like The Cleavers or something. While it’s

natural for us to want to anthropomorphize the animal kingdom—who with pets

isn’t guilty of assigning them colorful personalities?—documentaries

have a responsibility to view nature with a cooler, more rational eye for their

true capabilities. Propagating the species seems to me an instinct that all animals

share (or else risk extinction, no?), but a concept like “love” seems

far too abstract for these cute little buggers, who abandon both their mates and

their young when the mating cycle is over. Deadbeats!


Penguins

Perhaps my tolerance for March Of The Penguins would have been greater

had I not just seen Werner Herzog’s excellent new documentary Grizzly

Man, which is due for limited release in mid-August. Its hero is Timothy

Treadwell, a daredevil who lived among grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness for

weeks at a time and eventually paid for his naivety when a ravenous bear devoured

him and his girlfriend. Through the hours of video footage that Treadwell shot

on these expeditions, Herzog reveals a man who anthropomorphized these animals

to dangerous degree; alienated from the human world, he wanted to become one of

these bears, and he developed what he believed to be a genuine kinship with them.

What makes the documentary especially fascinating is how much Herzog’s view

of nature—already made clear in the great Burden Of Dreams, about

the making of Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle—serves as a counterpoint

to Treadwell’s. He believes that nature (humans included) is unified its

capacity for savagery and violence, not their opposites. In the bears’ eyes,

Herzog sees not hatred or love, but an indifference that cruelly belies the passion

Treadwell had for these animals. Now what would Morgan Freeman have to say about

that?

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