Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

5"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.'"

Blissfully unaware of such clichéd sentiments, S. and I sat in silence through the credits, as we always do (they are part of the film, after all).  But afterwards I turned to her and smiled, “Well...they sure didn't show any gay ones.”  She rejoined, "And if they did, are you so sure we would have noticed?"  We agreed on having just witnessed, if nothing else, some extraordinary homosocial bonding.  Which is to say, of the sort of which only animals (or humans only in extremis extremis) may be truly capable of handling.  This latter point, actually, remained mostly unsettled.  And S. is currently thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, so we cannot ask her.

Today of course, in the timeless fashion (if not totalitarian blog-genre) of ridiculing the various utterly predictable, imaginational failures of wingnuttery, served up as distraction by the cynical powers that be, an astute commenter at Crooked Timber alerts us––lest there be any doubt, of course––to female penguin prostitution.

However, like many of you I find the industry of “culture”––culture as prescription––of both liberals and conservatives, appallingly contrived and dull, and hardly grounds for anything like a war.  There is ample reason they are called the "tired culture wars," of course.  Not least of all, this phrase itself arrives in the ring already belly-up, and ceding essential ground to those who, quite simply, do not deserve the dignity.  Persisting in reasoned and rigorous debate meanwhile, on grounds already fundamentally forfeited...well, there are of course jokes about those who so engage, let alone "argue" in such company; jokes with origins long preceeding Zizek or Deleuze.  Suffice to say there was never any winner in a pissing match with a skunk.

What (neo)conservatives culture warrior constituents, cynically egged on, are defending is not culture, but a fixed and rigid template; theirs is a trench-digging tendency in the face of the slightest wind, such as that generated by the earth's humble rotations, one might imagine (though I am no scientist).  It is a tendency that, most unfortunately, continues to rub off on far too many liberals, who remain on the one hand crazed militarists and on the other hopelessly complacent, PC-contented cultural drones.   

Naturally, however, what is worth fighting for is the retention of the very futurity and openness of this word, "culture" itself, allowing it to be something more or less than a normative act of Nature, something more or less than a prescribable, programmable certainty or forumula, but rather still responsive to new definition and direction, and responsive in advance to that which remains as yet unforeseeable.  This may sound like an impossible demand, and in a certain sense it is; but there you have it.  The reason to get out of bed, perhaps, for those who don't believe in stretching the performative limits of the old politics of capitalization.  There may in truth be nothing merely natural about this.

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There are certainly problems with this film, even the American version.  One can only expect there will be problems, when the chosen narrator's voice is by now something of an institution in itself, probably best known for a certain pan-cliché epic of a sentimental prison movie. In this the cinematic age of death-throes of formulae, marked by such jubilatory excess of reference, the very presence of sincerity, the more unabashedly seeming-quaint the better (within cliche after cliche scenario) may appear as nothing less than deeply courageous.  Our penguin epic is, sadly, not entirely immune from pandering to such contemporary standards.

"The despair is overwhelming," the narrator tells us, as the distraught mother penguin compulsively nudges the frozen corpse of her once-baby, and like so we are treated to the expected flashbacks, a series of infinitely cute snapshots, and we are made to experience again and again that hopelessly picturesque and romantic cliché of "mourning:"  in all it's glory and for one last time, an entire life flashed before her eyes.  (The image-repetoire, of course, does no such thing.  On the contrary, at the loss of the loved object the image-repetoire is rendered strangely distant and dryly foreign–one is suddenly as if estranged from one's own memory.  It is a leaden feeling, hauntingly passive and inert, an infinite falling-short and anti-climax, that marks our true reckoning with death.)  The sentimental slideshow betrays an obvious effort and anxiety (or perhaps simply box-office calculation) on the part of teh director behind the lens who has become, for this moment, a sort of ideologue instead of  documentarist, in trying to feel (or make us feel) something profound.  One wonders if such efforts remain tantamount to a sort of necrophilia, or the refusal of the work of mourning. 

Penguins, needless to say, do not so suffer.  Or at least not in the same manner as we might...And yet, if neither strictly the penguins nor our own, is there yet a different suffering permitted by the gaze of this lens--that which may be said to be unique in some sense to documentaries, perhaps--a gaze eventually confronted with itself, or rather with a space always ‘outside’ itself?  If so, it is this other gazing that saves the documentary from itself. Were I pressed to make (yet another) vague and foggy claim it might be this: by confronting our entrenched romantic pathos so unexpectedly and directly, but especially in the moments when time is allowed to sink, and permeate between the cracks of trivializing, humanizing commentary, this film ex-poses us to a sense of being neither purely animal nor human, but rather some-thing ‘outside.’

"They must go on living, though the loss is overpowering," we are told.  Meanwhile there they are, sneezing and pecking and preening themselves; in short, just being penguins.  The manner of the patient waddlewalk, pajamastrut, at once out of place and benignly dignified, easily defies the noble human narratives of To March!  Sacrifice! and War!  Such patience is for them the most natural––difficult, no doubt, but instinctual and casual––unquestioningly enduring thing in all the world.  Without the sense of mission that can only come from a language conscious of itself (albeit often pretending otherwise), they remain, innocent to the language that ceaselessly fixes and orients our gaze...just penguins.  As a certain Frenchman might have said, objects do not look back at them in the form of differancing words.  Their concept of time (hellish perhaps?) is to us unfathomable.   

Yet I only want to consider one thing here:  their suits. 

The penguins' suits present us with a paradox.  On the one hand, we see the decadence of an endless cocktail party:  tight-fitting, crisp and clean, black and white, their fat bellies pressed up against each other in highly organized chaos, it is a scene of excessive sociality.  On the other hand, the penguins wear their suits not at all like aristocrats or even butlers (though they often appear to us as but the dopey, unintending parody of the latter), but rather as working class grunts.  In a land of monumental time and harsh winds, where time itself seems frozen; these survival suits are made for one thing primarily:  to protect.

Yet close-up shots reveal brown stains and molting feathers (they molt in patches).  These are incredibly noisy and smelly creatures.  Over the course of several 70-mile trecks, often sliding on their bellies much of the way, these swimming birds are a dry-cleaners nightmare.   They make no bones about holding their elaborate parties in a pit of mud.   When sharing the burden of protecting an egg, they are forever spontaneously looking between their legs.

Perhaps the hilarious and unaccustomed awkwardness of the swimming-bird-out-of-water lends much to the penguin paradox.  To appropriate another's words, the penguin's body is at once "fully at home in effort, bodies which are used to extended sweeping movement."  And yet meanwhile the massed-produced suit is "clothing idealising the sedentary, the descrete, the effortless."  The very shape and coloring of the penguin's body, to our eyes so aristocratic (as John Berger says, the lines of the suit are "tailored, cut to follow the idealised shape of a more or less stationary body and then to hang from it" and as opposed to the traditional peasant clothes, which "respected the specific character of the bodies they were clothing...in general loose, and only tight in places where they were gathered to allow for freer movement...") present no shortage of cognitive dissonance for humans.  The very bloated and ridiculous shape of the penguin's body, and especially in a suit, and combined with their at once dopey-looking and astoundingly graceful agility...well, perhaps it encourages in us a more subtle "cultural conservatism" after all. 

In fact it is difficult not to see a redemption of the coctail party, an appeasement of bourgeois guilt, or a fantasy petty-bourgeois identification (a casual projective, as opposed to introjective imagining), in this film.  That is undoubtedly what accounts for its popular "success."  Look, they are natural.  Cocktail parties are natural.  Oh, in only we could party like so.  Simultaneously:  Look, they are absurd, sliding on their bellies in the mud, and in those beautiful tuxedos!  Proof that we humans are infinitely more refined.  Cocktail parties in such wilderness, ha!  It's like a movie ready-made for the clever postcard industry.  And yet we also envy them their strangely-suited freedom, do we not?  There is a sense almost of a stronger species, more courageous and at ease, deserving someday to inherit the earth.  And it isn't us.

It is a wonderful documentary (especially without the original French soundtrack), if only one can appreciate such paradox without simply patting oneself on the back for noticing (or what amounts to the same thing maybe, for glibly diagnosing them); that is without becoming merely cyncial in the flood of such frankly irressistible, projective currents or losing one's sense of wonder at such epic-seeming creatures, whose concept of experience remains finally so foreign and estranged from anything like an epic.  The joke remains on "us."

Let's give the final words to Berger:

Yet nobody forced peasants to buy suits, and the three on there way to the dance are clearly proud of them.  They wear them with a kind of panache.  This is exactly why the suit might become a classic and easily taught example of class hegemony. Villagers–and, in a different way, city workers–were persuaded to choose suits.  By pictures.  By the new mass media.  By salesmen.  By example.  By the sight of new kinds of travellers.  And also by political developments of accomodation and state central organisation.  For example:  in 1900, on the occasion of the great Universal Exhibition, all the mayors of France were, for the first time ever, invited to a banquet in Paris.  Most of them were the peasant mayors of village communes.  Nearly 30,000 came!  And, naturally, for the occasion the vast majority wore suits. The working class–but peasants were simpler and more naïve about it than workers–came to accept as their own certain standards of the class that ruled over them–in this case standards of chich and sartorial worthiness.  At the same time their very acceptance of these standards, their very comforming to these norms which had nothing to do with either their own inheritance or their daily experience, condemned them, within the system of those standards, to being always, and recognisably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive.  That indeed is to succumb to a cultural hegemony. Perhaps one can nevertheless propose that when the three arrived and had drunk a beer or two, and had eyed the girls (whose clothes had not yet changed so drastically), they hung up their jackets, took off their ties, and danced, maybe wearing their hats, until the morning and the next day's work.  (Berger, "The Suit and the Photograph," About Looking, 1979)