Penguins: Just Like Us; Grizzlies: Not So Much

by Scott Tobias
July 29th, 2005
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!

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?