Call of the wild

Mother Nature unleashes the beasts in the films of '05.

By Susan Gerhard

Do Penguins pay taxes? They must. The star species of this year's highest-profile wilderness documentary seems particularly suited to bureaucracy: They've adapted to queuing up in long lines, and they suffer deprivation well. When called to march, they fall in, no questions asked. And when winter throws a blizzard their way, do they get in their Humvees and head to the hills? No, they huddle en masse, for the greater good, nearly starving themselves to death while waiting for their wives to come back with provisions. I'm not quite sure they were intelligently designed, but they've certainly been carefully marketed: They do it all for the sake of the children. Interested parties may, at this very moment, be accelerating the extinction of the bald eagle in hopes that the national symbol can become a pair of mated penguins.

You needn't have gagged on the bones of Disney's Chicken Little this year to note what strides humans made in their quest to project their own quirky species traits onto the unsuspecting others of the wild kingdom. Bats, dinosaurs, and silverback gorillas all carried Hollywood's key themes in 2005. I love long suffering, the staple ingredient of melodrama, so I'd be proud to hoist the penguin flag. But what is more typically asked of beasts on celluloid is that they step off the page of Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter" to break us from what Stegner termed "our technological termite life." (And what's wrong with termite life, the true naturalist, or Microcosmos or Hellstrom Chronicle fan might ask?) Animals often arrive on screen as Rousseau's noble savages, reminders of a freedom stolen by the still unsigned social contract. Unlike March of the Penguins, which was truly innovative in its perhaps reactionary message, most animal movies remind one of liberties lost or unexplored. Surely, there's no better time to fantasize about animal life than the present, given advances in nature photography and retrenchments in the nature available to be photographed.

There's certainly no better setting in which to view the natural world as a fantasy than New York City, where human civilization has been running amok for centuries. To view NYC as part of nature, as Steven Spielberg did when immersing it in water in 2001's A.I., is itself to spell out apocalypse for an audience. This season, the return of the repressed takes the form of the 25-foot gorilla who brings true love and loyalty (see also: penguins) back to a city that's lost its heart to the Great Depression. The poor are prostituting themselves on streets and stages, waiting for their close-ups. The rich are traversing the red carpet to cynically laugh at the return of nature's brute force, which they arrogantly believe they can contain. Like he was 70 years before, King Kong is misunderstood in NYC.

But what was monstrous in the '30s – the Great Ape – is nearly gone now, and therefore must be sentimentalized before being numbed out by military assault. Despite the post-9/11 pornography – planes circling tall buildings, which I guess audiences will now never tire of – the last third of the film is great romantic melodrama between the sexiest pseudo-silverback gorilla yet seen on the big screen and his would-be lover (who calls to mind less a Faye Wray than a Diane Fossey or Jane Goodall). Nature's beast has returned with full libido and a message of love, never mind that the second third of the film is a tedious parade of computer-generated insects and swamp leeches that look too much like uncircumcised penises, which will leave many with the impression that the few remaining stands of rainforest should truly and finally be stamped out.

We share much less DNA with the other species challenging New York in blockbuster style this year. But bats are the perfect complement to Gotham. Like New Yorker Travis Bickle, they live in crowded conditions yet symbolize antisocial behavior. Theirs is a New York where forces of nature have only temporarily been buried. Bruce Wayne, for one, knows how to harness their anarchist spirit for extralegal justice, which has become a popular theme in Wild West America. As odious as another use of the terror-threat-as-entertainment is, Batman Begins matches a moody force of nature with NYC in a way no other member of the Batman franchise has. It's not so much Batman, certainly not Robin (mysteriously absent in the year of Brokeback), but a colony of carefully marshaled (and American Humane-monitored) bats who save the day.

It's of course easy to see nature's wild beasts as fantasy in fiction films. In documentaries on similarly untamed animals, we tend to follow where the director leads. Lemmings, for instance, aren't actually suicidal animals – their mad group-leap off a cliff in Disney's 1958 "documentary" White Wilderness was cruelly, carefully, staged. Werner Herzog, for one, would like to replace what you think you know about nature from cable destinations like Animal Planet – friendly snakes and the like – with his own set of projections onto the wild.

In Grizzly Man, a warm documentary on Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly memoirist and nature videographer who was himself eaten by a grizzly in 2001, Herzog hits a cold note when it comes to nature. "I believe the common denominator of the world is not harmony," he narrates, "but chaos, hostility, and murder." And yes, you have heard that before from the director, who has the jungle (not "rainforest") experience to back it up, and you will likely hear it again. Where Treadwell sees friendship in the eyes of grizzlies and foxes of Alaska's outback, Herzog sees only "cold indifference." The bears, he reminds us, eat their own to further their chances at what he terms "fornication." Sure, Grizzly Man shows nature as a Rorschach test, but the beauty in the project is how Herzog takes the opportunity not so much to render a final verdict on undisturbed nature, but to examine the human nature of people who decide to live and die there. He notes Treadwell unexpectedly headed back to the wilderness in the most dangerous season of all only after encountering an unyielding bureaucrat in an airport, post-9/11. Who wouldn't rather face down a grizzly?

The most fascinating films to treat animal behavior this year could generally be listed under the heading "Beast, Man As." The murderous late-season grizzly's got nothing on humans when it comes to brutality. In Michael Haneke's Hidden, the beastly actions – a childhood crime and a national one, France's massacre of Algerians in 1961 – are initially left offscreen, but they terrorize the mind of the film's protagonist via surveillance footage that intends to cut through to his conscience. In David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, the beast brilliantly reunites with its previously "civilized" host to become a fully human animal – and killer protagonist – again. But it's Sam Mendes's Jarhead that allows us to watch and wonder at the formation of the human beast. The military mission, as spelled out in the film, is to decivilize human beings, which, the film and book argue, is the appeal of joining: It's not the camaraderie, it's the brutality. When two of these newly minted human "animals" can't climax with a kill in Gulf War I, they wither. Of course, the more philosophical Herzog drew the apocalyptic Lessons of Darkness from the oil fires of the first Gulf War: Chaos, hostility and murder won. Here, as Jamie Fox's Sergeant Sykes savors the pleasures of being rained on by petroleum, we watch just how chaos, hostility, and murder persist. As the penguins have taught us, animals can find ways to take pleasure in pain.

Susan Gerhard's top 10 of 2005

1. Hidden (Caché) (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy)

2. Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, USA)

3. Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/France/Iraq)

4. The World (Jia Zhang-ke, China/Japan/France)

5. Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, Japan)

6. Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, France/Germany/Netherlands/Israel)

7. Jarhead (Sam Mendes, USA)

8. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

9. Crash (Paul Haggis, USA)

10. Rize (David LaChapelle, USA)