Daily Blague

As a treat for her commitment to Team Vacation, I took Kathleen to the movies late yesterday afternoon. I do not, as a rule, go to the movies, partly because I don't like the theatres, partly because showtimes are sporadic, and partly because home video has freed me of the need to sit still for a long period of time. The quasi-religious experience of sitting in a dark room with a crowd of strangers has never had the slightest appeal for me. In addition, movies lack the ingredient that makes concerts and plays so quickening: their subtle interactivity. Any Broadway actor will tell you that the audience is different every night. The same is not, perhaps, true of concert audiences, but there the hum of a pleased audience is the almost audible salute to realized greatness.

But Kathleen wanted to see March of the Penguins, so we went. Now, I was not keen to see a documentary about animals in Antartica, even if its real title was La Marche de l'empereur, but that's what made taking Kathleen to this show a treat. It would not have been a treat to take her to see De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, which I'd really like to see again even before it comes out on DVD. For there to be a treat, I had to have some resistance. But after a week with filing boxes and old letters, I really didn't care what the movie was going to be about, I just needed an escape.

March of the Penguins documents the reproductive cycle of the Emperor penguin. As you have probably heard by now, these birds, flightless in the air but not in water, retreat seventy-odd miles from the waterfront, their only source of food, every winter, to mate and then to incubate and nourish their chicks. It is perhaps the most inconvenient procedure in the world of vertebrates, involving endless trekking, shivering, and, eventually, regurgitating.

The photography is astonishing. It is close and clear, sharp but calm. But the narrative is arresting. Yes: "But." It's no surprise that Disney has co-produced this extraordinarily anthropomorphizing film. The penguins are not made to talk, but that is about the only dishonesty of which March of the Penguins is not guilty. Don't get me wrong - I was completely wrapped up in the harrowing ordeal to which penguins have adapted. But I was led every step of the way by human calculation. The expert score, the authoritative but easily-grasped narration (by Morgan Freeman), the editing - all of these first-rate devices made a tidy eighty-minute package of a process that takes several months of lousy weather and diminished daylight. They missed not the slightest opportunity of making penguins appear to behave as human beings do. There would be nothing wrong with that if it were not for the human propensity to read human feelings into human-like behavior. What the penguins do every winter is remarkable to us only because our developed consciousness renders us incapable of fully imagining what the penguins go through, of how they endure months of extreme discomfort and uncertainty. In fact, the penguins do not go through anything; they just plod from minute to minute, and soon forget almost everything. What makes us different from other forms of life is our extraordinary memory. We can remember a roller-coaster ride taken decades ago. Mastering history enables us to "remember" things that happened long before we were born. We are distinguished from one another by our unique memories, and it is not too much to say that we are really nothing but our memories. (That is the tragedy of degenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's.) Without our memories, we might be penguins. But we would not know it.

So movies such as March of the Penguins are unavoidably false. They purport to "introduce" the viewer to bizarre and arduous ways of life that are bizarre and arduous only because that's what they'd be if human beings tried to imitate them. To be faithful to the natural world, one must honor its absolute, repetitive tedium. And one can never be completely faithful, because one can never honor "nature's" obliviousness. When we look at the penguins and see the drama of their winter schedule, we see something that, for them, simply isn't there.

Having said all of this, I'm not sure that I would give March of the Penguins a bad review. It's a sensationally effective movie.