Penguins: Just Like Us; Grizzlies: Not So Much

By Scott Tobias  |  July 29, 2005 | 4:09am
Film Features Film

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?

 
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