Penguins: Political pawns?

After a wave of commentary on the salubrious family values depicted in last month's "March of the Penguins," it was just a matter of time until the inevitable "But-on-the-other-hand" debunking article came out. It did, about three weeks ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer, although it only arrived in the Oregonian today--owing to the difficulty of following those rutted wagon trails over the Rockies, no doubt.

The stars of March of the Penguins seem to endure the worst of all worlds: almost nonexistent sex lives that nonetheless lead them to parenthood, total self-sacrifice, and endless suffering.

Conservatives are loving it.

"It demonstrated qualities of sacrifice and devotion and the importance of child rearing and bringing the next generation into the world," says Michael Medved, who hosts a conservative radio talk show in Seattle. He said this was the first movie many of his listeners had seen since The Passion of the Christ.

Other conservatives such as National Review editor Rich Lowry have publicly extolled the film and set up the penguins as paragons of family values.

Yet several biologists confirmed what I suspected 15 minutes into it. March of the Penguins is a fairy tale.

In case you haven't seen this second-highest-grossing documentary of all time - a French-made National Geographic production, narrated in its American version by Morgan Freeman - I'll summarize. Scores of emperor penguins leap from the sea and march for miles to some frigid inland wasteland where the temperature drops to 80 below zero. They pick mates, nuzzle, and lay eggs. The dads dutifully incubate the eggs for weeks, fasting and suffering through blizzards, the moms suffer as they search for food, the parents both suffer and sacrifice as they feed their hatchlings, and some mother penguins lose their young and wail and cry. They live for nothing but their children. It's called a love story.

But it's not minus 80 out there. It's minus 40 at the worst, says Gerald Kooyman, a penguin expert from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "Why would they exaggerate that?" asks Kooyman, who has made more than a dozen trips to Antarctica.

Kooyman said these cold-adapted penguins probably aren't suffering, despite what viewers are told. From beginning to end the scriptwriters project human feelings onto the penguins. It's not exactly scientific, but then the film probably couldn't have achieved its blockbuster status without going light on the science and heavy on the melodrama.

Viewers are told a pair of young penguins who fumble and lose their egg have suffered an intolerable loss. But how do we know their squeaks aren't just penguin for something like "Oops. Oh well. Hey, let's get something to eat."

And that tearful scene when a "mother" is shown wailing over her frozen chick? Kooyman suspects it was staged.

Read cautiously; by the end of the article you could end up knowing way more about the fluid mechanics of penguin sex than you ever wanted to.

The reporter's point--that there was some serious anthropomorphosizing going on in that film--seems hard to argue, but since I went to see "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" yesterday, it's perhaps understandable that I'm having a little trouble seeing where the problem is. Honestly, I'm surprised and even a little alarmed it took a responsible member of the press 15 minutes to realize she was being spun. On the other hand, maybe she got caught up in the magnificent cinematography; it'd be a perfectly valid excuse.

(And on the subject of spinning the documentary: Since Berke Breathed's "Opus" strip isn't available online, I'm just going to have to assume you saw its tip of the hat to "March of the Penguins" last Sunday.)

The article calls "March" the second highest grossing documentary ever--would the first, ironically, be that bane of the Medveds and Lowrys, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"?