March of The Penguins - Political and Social Interpretations

Political and Social Interpretations

The film attracted some political and social commentary in which the penguins were viewed anthropomorphically as having similarities with, and even lessons for, human society. Michael Medved praised the film for promoting conservative family values by showing the value of stable parenthood. Medved's comments provoked responses by others, including Andrew Sullivan, who pointed out that the penguins are not in fact monogamous for more than one year, in reality practicing serial monogamy. Matt Walker of New Scientist pointed out that many emperor penguin "adoptions" of chicks are in fact kidnappings, as well as behaviours observed in other penguin species, such as ill treatment of weak chicks, prostitution, and ostracism of rare albino penguins. "For instance, while it is true that emperor penguins often adopt each other's chicks, they do not always do so in a way the moralisers would approve of." Sullivan and Walker both conclude that trying to use animal behavior as an example for human behavior is a mistake.

The director, Luc Jacquet, has condemned such comparisons between penguins and humans. Asked by the San Diego Union Tribune to comment on the film's use as "a metaphor for family values – the devotion to a mate, devotion to offspring, monogamy, self-denial", Jaquet responded: "I condemn this position. I find it intellectually dishonest to impose this viewpoint on something that's part of nature. It's amusing, but if you take the monogamy argument, from one season to the next, the divorce rate, if you will, is between 80 to 90 percent... the monogamy only lasts for the duration of one reproductive cycle. You have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans."

Some of the controversy over this may be media driven. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, reported in the magazine's blog that the BBC "have been harassing me for days over March of the Penguins ... about what, I'm not sure. I think to see if I would say on air that penguins are God's instruments to pull America back from the hell-fire, or something like that. As politely as I could I told her, 'Lady, they're just birds.'"

Another controversy involves those who feel that the Emperor Penguin's behavior can be viewed as an indication of intelligent design, and those who consider it to be an example of evolution by natural selection in action. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, is quoted as saying, "Supporters of intelligent design think that if they see something they don't understand, it must be God; they fail to recognise that they themselves are part of evolution. It appeals to ignorance, which is why there is a lot of it in American politics at the moment." Author Susan Jacoby claims in her 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason (page 26), that the distributors of the movie deliberately avoided using the word "evolution" in order to avoid backlash from the American religious right, and writes, "As it happens, the emperor penguin is literally a textbook example, cited in college-level biology courses, of evolution by means of natural selection and random mutation. ... The financial wisdom of avoiding any mention of evolution was borne out at the box office ..."