March of the Penguins, also known as La Marche de l’Empereur, is a nature documentary that has been a surprise hit all round the world. Who knew that people would take to a story about the travails of the Antarctic emperor penguin?
Their travails are indeed extreme. The “march” in the title is often more like a slide, because they frequently flop over on to their tummies and slide along the snow instead of walking, which is obviously not their strong suit. And that “march” should in fact be plural, “marches”, because there are several — back and forth, back and forth …
First the penguins leave the sea and toddle more than 100km to the inland region that will be their rookery. Then, having mated, with the appropriate dances and so on, they lay their eggs. The male penguin takes over the business of keeping the egg warm while the female penguins trudge off again to the sea to feed; then they return, and the males go off on another 100km trek to feed in turn, having spent three or four months looking after the eggs, without any food, and in freezing blizzard weather. This happens during mid-winter in the Antarctic, and it’s not as though summer was warm.
To film such a tale of extraordinary effort and endurance was a major task for director Luc Jacquet and his crew, who went through nearly as much pain as the penguins themselves. They stayed in the Antarctic for 13 months, following and filming the full cycle of the penguins’ breeding life. Jacquet et al must thus have been very happy when March of the Penguins turned into a big hit (it has grossed $77million in the United States alone, on an original budget of about $8million). It was taken up by the Christian right, who saw in the penguins’ dedication to the duty of procreation a family-values message. They didn’t note, though, that every year the penguins change mates, which doesn’t exactly spell lifelong monogamy.
Not that one doesn’t get pulled into the penguins’ drama as the movie progresses. This is in part because Jacquet has given the film a lot of voice-over. In the French version with English subtitles, which we are apparently seeing in South Africa, there are three different voices to talk us through it: Penguin Dad, Penguin Mom and, finally, Penguin Baby. The voice-over is rather poetic, often very dramatic, and mostly terribly cute.
This is called anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures, or even the weather. March of the Penguins is a thoroughgoing exercise in anthropomorphism, with the voice-over going as the penguins’ interior monologues. It works to fill we humans in on the details and to engage our sympathies, but overall it’s actually just too much earnest poetry and internal angst. After an hour or so it begins to feel incredibly intrusive, and you want the voice-over artistes to shut up and let you watch the suffering penguins, against that beautifully filmed icy waste, in peace.
The anthropomorphism is ladled on so thickly that one’s emotional response begins to turn on itself. At first you’re suckered into thinking the penguins are amazingly human; then you start to see how bizarrely penguin-like we humans are. The tagline of the movie’s poster is “In the harshest place on earth, love finds a way”, and “love” is a keynote of the narration. But it’s not about “love”, is it? It’s about a blind drive to procreate, whatever the cost. Is that a good thing? Are we to feel sorry for the penguins or to admire them?
Or is there a more general lesson to be learnt? Certainly, I left March of the Penguins ruminating on the huge amount of stupid actions humans undertake, the nonsensical things we believe and desperately cling to, and the immense pain we’re willing to go through for not very clear reasons. And, unlike the penguins, we have the gift of reason.
I’m aghast at what the emperor penguins go through to breed but, without the human voice-over to tweak my feelings, I doubt I’d feel any admiration for them. Perhaps it was all that endless ice and snow, but March of the Penguins left me rather cold.