The New York Times reported that conservative Christians have flocked to a movie that is for the birds. Or more accurately, about the birds. The film in question is “March of the Penguins,” a documentary about the difficult life and mating procedures of the brightly colored emperor penguins.
To political conservatives and religious groups, the mating ritual and rearing process of these birds is nothing short of a miraculous allegory about the universality of family values, the value of monogamy, the perversity of gay marriage and the wisdom of intelligent design.
In the film, we see these birds trek 70 miles on their small and wobbly penguin feet over the treacherous ice and snow of the Antarctic to court, mate, lay their eggs and rear their young.
Once at the breeding grounds, each bird finds its true soul mate. They bill and croon and stay together until the happy day when the female births a single egg. In a complicated and danger-fraught dance, she transfers the egg from under her feathers to the male’s feet. If the egg drops or is exposed to the frigid air for even seconds, it will crack, and the unborn penguin will freeze to death.
The story of parental devotion continues as the males steadfastly balance the eggs on top of their cramped feet for months while the females return the 70 miles to the ocean to feed. During that time, the males endure perpetual darkness, temperatures of minus 60 degrees, accompanied by ferocious, howling ice storms. The males huddle together without food or drink, guarding the precariously balanced eggs. As the weather warms up, the chicks hatch, but they have no food except for one bit of regurgitated sludge the males have somehow managed to salvage in their emptied stomachs. When the females return, they find their soul mates, take over the chick-rearing while the males return to the ocean to eat. And then the males return one final time to rear the chicks some more.
What a story of fidelity, devotion, steadfastness, all choreographed perfectly by the hand of a creator! That is what the e-mails and blogs report over the born-again cyberwaves. A writer in the conservative Post Chronicle gushes “see and enjoy the life of a family of penguins and how they practice monogamy, true family life, and the nurturing of their children.”
Film critic and conservative talk radio host Michael Medved wrote: “`March of the Penguins’ [is] the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing. This is the first movie [conservatives] have enjoyed since `The Passion of the Christ.’ This is `The Passion of the Penguins.'”
Andrew Coffin, writing for World Magazine, a Christian publication, marveled: “That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat–and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design. It’s sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it’s also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film.”
Postfilm family discussion might be necessary, but it would help for families to get the facts right. Being a fly on the wall in discussions about intelligent design and penguins would be fascinating for anyone interested in science and the way facts are used in society. We might see dad and mom explaining that the way the penguins mate and rear children was so complicated and specific it had to be a result of an intelligent creator.
On the other hand, when I went to see the film, I left thinking: How could there be a god that would subject the poor penguin to such horrendously difficult reproductive technology? Couldn’t an intelligently designing God have provided at least a pouch for the penguin to keep the egg in instead of having to shuffle along with an egg on his feet for a couple of months?
As for monogamy, the idea that birds are faithful is lovely. But what kind of monogamy are we talking about? The penguins mate and stay together for all of a few months. After that, it’s a new mate next year.
As for family values, we see that some of the females who have lost their eggs because of incompetent husbands or sloppy footwork have no compunction about coveting and trying to steal their neighbor’s eggs, definitely violating the Mosaic code, but not the harsher laws of nature. Then again, these loving families have a strange denouement. The mothers and fathers abandon their chick to return to the sea when the chicks seem knee-high to a grasshopper, never to see them again.
And when it comes to gay marriage, I just don’t see what this film has to say about that. If you can tell the straight penguins from the gay ones, you have better gaydar than I do. The family values crowd has seized on the supposed straightness of penguins because of bad memories of the well-publicized news story about two gay penguins in the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn and two more at Central Park Zoo. If you did the math, it would show that in New York, 1 out of 25 penguins is gay. So when you see the film, look again and see if you can spot the odd couples.
What all this tells us is that if you pin your hopes of finding family values in nature, you’ll end up with a wilderness of possibilities. Nature is larger than many smaller minds. And if you happen to balance “March of the Penguins” with Werner Herzog’s documentary “Grizzly Man,” in which Timothy Treadwell lives with grizzly bears and is ultimately eaten by them, you may have to agree with the filmmaker’s assessment that there is not harmony in nature but “chaos, hostility and murder.”
