Tag Archives: March of the Penguins

They killed Bambi, and now Mumble too

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Bambi meets GodzillaGenerations of American children have grown up witnessing Bambi orphaned by evil mother-killing hunters. In my theater seat, I was sure that deer stalking, as it’s called in England, would evolve the way of Neanderthals. The Happy Feet generation might have held the same hope for the survival of Emperor Penguins, but our George Bush Caligula has just given them a thumbs down.

In spite of the fact that the Academy Award for best documentary went to the March of the Penguins, which told of the heart-breaking travails of the Emperor Penguins, whose natural challenge is to face the most bitter climate on Earth.

Now Climate Change is pulling the ice from under their egg-nestling feet. Environmentalist groups want the Emperor Penguins declared an endangered species, to give clout to efforts to fight the causes of global warming, but the industrialists and fossil fuel companies are having none of it.

Remember the Rockhopper Penguin in Happy Feet, slowly strangling in his plastic six-pack necklace? He too was denied protection from the peril of melting ice and over-fishing.

I can’t visit a penguin exhibit at the zoo without thinking of Mumble, the Happy Feet star, gone crazy from confinement, at last breaking into the soft shuffle which enabled him to communicate with man, to pique man’s interest into his human-like behavior, and lure civilized man’s sympathy for Mumble’s kind, and their helplessness in the face of the human’s destructive fisheries.

At the Omaha Zoo, the scene on the ice with all the aimless penguins was so identical, I was certain the transformative scene had been filmed there, until I reminded myself that Happy Feet was a computer animation.

I was uncomfortable with the Stepin Fetchit quality of Happy Feet’s master-pleasing tap dance. It may have helped humanize black people in the eyes of racists, but it didn’t change white condescension.

Of course, neither penguins or polar bears can do a thing to slow the melting of their habitat. Their fate is in our hands. That was the message of Happy Feet, a message you might not have conceived could have gone over anyone’s head, even George Bush.

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature

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Product placementTalk about subverting mother nature. In the guise of an environmental message –stop overfishing for the sake of tap-dancing penguins– Happy Feet screws up everything. Forget ecosystems, it wants you to unlearn social systems. This movie builds upon our awareness of the selfless Emperor Penguins from last year’s Oscar-winning documentary and marches it straight off a cliff of ice. Calfs it right into the warming ocean.

Happy Feet is a Footloose attack on the seemingly dogmatic tradition of penguins to value an individual’s vocal heart song as opposed to tap dance. Although, such a presumed rigidity might not be unexpected from a society of birds which spends two thirds of the year balancing eggs on the tops of feet. Emperor penguins have no limbs with which to retrieve an egg should it fall by accident unto the ice. One of the heartbreaks of March of the Penguins was to learn that an egg succumbs to exposure within seconds of rolling upon the ice.

For the children perhaps, Happy Feet soft pedals the harsh brutality of Mother Nature. Getting past that, the movie befuddles us with what it means to work individually toward a mutual goal. Collectivity is portrayed here as mind numbing, spirit killing conformity, as opposed to biological imperative, genetic behavior.

But let’s address a real pop misconception. It’s not herd mentality. It’s herd. There’s nothing wrong with humanizing the animals, but don’t let’s pretend to learn something from them, the fiction of us.

There’s a preacher penguin in the movie whose head towers over the rest, the archetype of the sinister puritanical demagogue. This character keeps every penguin in line by shaming those who might stray. Do you recall ever seeing a penguin taller than the others? It’s one of the charms of penguins that they are all the same. Penguin behavior appears curiously random to us, yet at the same time it’s as mechanized as dominos. There is a deeper leadership somehow, and I think it’s what humans are seeking for ourselves.

Happy Feet is the message you get when there is no God but Coca Cola. When product placement rules, not even secular education is served.

The Lion King highlighted the Disney monarchist reordering of nature. It’s lovely to think of the lion as the King of Beasts, but it’s certainly very silly. No animal rules another except for interpersonally. Looking at man’s natural order, isn’t it rather silly to think that one idle fat man should lord over others who labor?

Ant armies are not led by ant generals. Queens may be the backbones of insect colonies, but they are not social architects. Penguins and ants may have something to teach us about how human beings can someday achieve balance with nature. It might have something to do with conformity and a sense of collective purpose. We know already it doesn’t come from Marx or Jesus, it’s something farther inside.

I’ll bet you right now such an inner compass will be more like a penguin’s heart song and less like a tap-dancing, individualist, obey your thirst, just do it, gotta be me, fool.

Not only Darwin’s nightmare

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Darwins NightmareWhen he introduced the screening of his documentary at UCCS on Wednesday, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper told us that for the five years he had worked on the project, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE had been his nightmare. Sauper predicted that in two hours, after we’d seen it, the story would become our nightmare.
 
The film was billed as a tale of fish, men and guns. The American release poster features only fish heads. It was about all three, and about just one as well.

I have no qualms about spoiling the story for you because this film is not available in the U.S. The copy we saw did not even have English subtitles. They’re having difficulty finding distribution because Darwin’s Nightmare is worse than an unhappy story, it portends ill for us all.

That it was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary, losing to The March of the Penguins, has meant that Darwin’s Nightmare will enjoy some success. Sauper is happy that he did not win the top award because the higher visibility would mean he could no longer make such an incidiary film.

He could certainly not have made this one. Sauper had to smuggle himself unto cargo planes, into foreboding factories, slums, houses of prostitution and some places for which no description is suitably odious, to tell a story that no one wanted told.

The fish tale begins with the Nile Perch, introduced by scientists into lake Victoria many years back. Like so many other foreign species introduced by man into otherwise balanced ecosystems, the Nile Perch has proved itself a voracious predator and today all the biodiversity of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, is gone. No more other fish, no more anything else. Now the water is no longer getting aerated, so the perch are dying. And without prey, the perch are feeding on their own young. The lake could soon end up a sink hole.

Sauper’s film is a parable. Top preditors can out-eat their supply, even devour their own. Is this film about fish and men?

There’s more to the fish tale. Once Lake Victoria was filling with oversized perch, factories grew on the banks to process the fish fillets and ship them to Europe. The fish became too expensive for the locals to eat. Now the fishermen themselves can only afford to eat fish heads.

All the perch fillets are sold to Europe, in return for guns to fuel the incessant warfare in the Congo. Ordinary westerners can wonder: where do war torn regions get their endless supplies of guns? Westerners who are gun manufacturers know where they come from, and precisely how many have been shipped and where. This was the deadly secret that Sauper uncovered: the same planes used to bring in UN relief supplies brought guns as well. The fish denied to the local malnurished population are being sold to buy guns.

There’s more of course. The kids are sniffing glue, a byproduct of the packaging process. Widows become prostitutes. People lives are foreshortened by working among the decaying fish skeletons being rendered for subhuman consumption, and of course, the entire population is being decimated by AIDS. We forget about that one. And the church is still preaching against the use of condoms.

We learn that when a fisherman finds himself too weak to work, he must hasten to the village of his birth so that he may be buried there. The price of transportation, once he is dead, goes way up.

We learn that when a fisherman dies, his wife has little choice but to become a prostitute. Unleashing the HIV cycle again.

We see a fish factory supervisor who has a fake stuffed fish on a plaque. Flick a switch on the back and his tail moves to a recording of “Don’t worry be happy.”

We learn what feeding time looks like among street children. Someone rustles up a pot, someone rustles up some gruel, they cook it and the moment someone’s guard is down, everyone reaches into the pot with both hands. Those caught without a handful are left to chase and beat those that who aren’t able to gobble their catch with sufficient haste.

Hauper explained in his notes that this tale of the developed world cannibalizing on the undeveloped world could be told anywhere. If it wasn’t fish in Africa, it is bananas in Central America, it is tea or coffee or sugar anywhere. It’s a tale of indegenous peoples not being allowed even a subsistence on their own bountiful lands. It’s a tale of Europeans or Americans who require the resources of the poor to sustain their unseemly standards of living.

I don’t know if bananas would tell the tale of a obscenely large unatural predator that’s feeding on everything and will eventually asphyxiate itself.