For Wordless Documentaries

AJ and I went to see March of the Penguins last night, and although the photography is completely stunning and I recommend it, I also want to gripe about documentary filmmaking, which advanced early on in film history and then regressed horribly and has remained frozen in a state of utter condescension to viewers, for the most part, ever since.

I realize it's a National Geographic film and everything, and that people really love when filmmakers do the sort of Mickey-Mousing we see and hear in March of the Penguins. I've sat through Mickey-Mousing in its worst forms, in GeoKids and other kids' nature documentaries, where animals are milked for their full comic potential at every turn, helped along by the music in case you don't get the joke, ba-dum-bum, wha wha wha whaaaaaaa, splat. (I could talk more generally about National Geographic and the dumbing of America, with special attention given to the print magazine National Geographic for Kids, which is full of advertiser-driven editorial drivel—what does Scooby-Doo have to do with geography, for example?—but that's another topic).

MOP opens so promisingly, with a very long shot of what looks like hooded figures engaged in wallking meditation on a flat white landscape. Succcessive shots bring us closer and closer to the creatures. We know them right away as penguins, of course, but see their movements freshly because they've been made strange for us. We are allowed to really see them.

But get them in their rookery, starting their mating ritual, and we're back in the land of cliché. They are looking for "true love," Morgan Freeman's wonderful, sonorous voice informs us in the intrusive, unnecessary narration; their courtship is made human. The score in a movie about penguins should work actively to discourage us from making the usual associations. Two penguins walking across the ice in concert are doing more than waddling amusingly. It's so sad, seeing images of such grandeur reduced to human triviality.

Ideally, there should have been no music at all. Or a score that didn't feel obligated to act as a narrative element. But I think I'm going to go with no music at all: everything you need to hear in this film is in the sound of the wind and the voices of the penguins. In fact, the voices of the mother, father and baby penguins are so important that the film should have made us pay perfect attention to them without distracting us.

As for the narration, it doesn't tell us anything, really, that we can't get by just watching the film. If someone needs to know exactly how many miles the penguins travel, they can look it up in a book. We can see that it's very very far. The photography shows us that the weather is extremely cold, the day increasingly short, the conditions perilous. We can see that a leopard seal just nabbed a penguin, that the southern lights are flashing, that this little seal is learning to walk by standing on her mother's feet—just like people do! Why did filmmakers stop trusting their own medium, or is this the work of some nefarious personality at National Geographic?



Read writer Ken Foster's comments on March of the Penguins

Now We Are Six

Yes indeed, it's hot hot hot, as Eloise would say. I've been reading Eloise books for a couple of weeks. We hosted a big community party the other night, and my daughter greeted every guest:

"I am Eloise.
I am six."

The six part is true; I gave her the book for her 6th birthday two weeks ago. She wears her Eloise costume nearly every day—a black skirt, white shirt, suspenders, sometimes a bow on her head. She says "absolutely" a lot these days. She points at our cat and says "That's my dog Weenie. He looks like a cat." I'd really like to take her to the Plaza to see the portrait of Eloise, but the place is closed for renovations because everything must change.

Eloise is a good six-year-old role model. "What would Eloise do?" I ask my daughter when her feelings are hurt. "Would Eloise let that bother her?"

This house is like an innocence machine. My family inhabits a fierce state of innocence. It's not a time machine; I don't believe that "more innocent time" stuff. There have always been dastardly and brutal doings of one sort or another. Eloise is, after all, a postwar literary figure, yet look at her life, sheltered in that grand hotel. What a luxury, to pretend everyone's just fine, fine, fine.

To shelter or not to shelter?

We definitely can wait on family dinner conversation about gas chambers, landmines, people being shot for moving too quickly away from a police officer, and 9-11 conspiracies. From here it all feels hopelessly complicated, infectiously enraging, potentially engulfing. Definitely disabling.

Here's the thing of it: I have to be able to brush my children's teeth without having a nervous breakdown.

Here's what I like:

Family-friendly protest marches.
Nonprofits that write letters to politicians for me to sign.
Raising children to be creative, innovate, resist.
Knowing the world's craziness cawn't go on. It cawn't cawn't cawn't!

Here's what I don't like:

Nukes.
Mainstream news.
Deceiptful, criminal, greedy leaders.

To all intents and purposes:

I am red eft.
I am six.

There were birds

It's an unbearable fact that at any given moment, some people are running and screaming and others are on vacation.

As it happens I fell in the second category the last two weeks, but for part of it my heart was with the screamers of the world.

A return from the rocky rolling foothills of the Adirondacks to the emailbox means back to the Supreme Court, the emissions of SUVs, pesticide residues and farm children, speakers to hear, workshops to attend. Somehow, everyone on Earth must manage the assault and battery that now passes for news. Always has, I suppose, but there are more of us now, more misery, unprecedented levels of misery. The misery meter is busted.

On vacation, I heard it in tiny dribbles through NPR. I picked up a paper a couple of times.

But there was no computer, no television, no cell phone. We scarcely use the second two even at home. We call our tv a "video monitor," because that's what we use it for. The phone at the lake actually has a metal ringer! And only friends and family call there.

There were birds. Phoebes, the occasional "haunting cry of the loon," a whip-poor-will that began its whooping on the early side, at 9:30 pm. Roman candles firing off somewhere on the lake, nearly every night, doggedly mimicking missiles though it seems the world needs the facsimile less and less.

There was a baby song sparrow fallen from her nest. I put her in a feeder that was hanging empty from a beech tree, the kind made of cedar with a tray at the bottom. Her parents found her and began feeding her. She fell out. I put her in a box on a chair at the base of the tree. They found her. She stayed that way all night and all day, through pouring rain, under an umbrella I'd rigged to the chair, snuggling into a corner of the box, her eyes shut. I checked on her with a flashlight. I poured the water out of the bottom of the box and made sure it sloped so she wouldn't drown.

Once, when I was in college, I "rescued" a baby robin and kept her in a box in a greenhouse, where she rapidly dehydrated and starved. Humans make bad bird parents, so this time I checked and checked again for the parents, and they were always there, darting from beech to hemlock to maple and back, from beech to hemlock to back of camp, where moths congregate nightly on the kitchen window, to hemlock to beech, moth in mouth.

The rain stopped.

In the longest exchange I sustained with my Dad during these two weeks, I got fixed up with a hack saw and the plexiglass from the feeder, and altered it to make a little wall to keep her in the feeder so she could be in something more like a nest. Dad added a wedge of wood on the other side. He likes a project.

The parents continued feeding the sparrow but for a time I wasn't sure they were so I fed her cherry flesh from a tweezers. I touched her breast with my thumb and her back with my forefinger and she opened her mouth and let out a little cry and I could feel her manic heartbeat. Whenever I approached, the parents flew to the branches of the beech and cried at me to get away and I said It's OK, and Are you feeding her? and Take good care of this one. She was all quill and down, the size of a golf ball. That is to say she was a fledgling.

And at the end of one warm sunny day, her third day out of the nest, she was gone. I looked to see if she had wobbled down among the rocks and lilies that grow along the lake shore. I asked the cat if he had eaten her. I circled the beech tree and touched its smooth grey bark, where my brother wrote Scott B so long ago with a pocket knife that the letters have expanded into themselves nearly unreadable. So the bird was gone, perhaps dead.

The song sparrows flitted among nearby branches, yammering, and I wondered what they knew, if they saw what happened, who did it, or were they mourning their baby, or celebrating her first flight, or were they ignorantly asking where'd she go? Where'd she go?

I wonder.

Well, that's one of the things I did on my summer vacation.