Animal Kingdom

Today, in a virtually unprecedented turn of events, at least in my adult life, I saw two movies in actual theaters. Coincidentally, both movies were about animal behavior. The first movie, Earth, I saw with a friend and her children, and Lily. It was beautiful: beautifully filmed, awe-inspiring in all of the intended ways, and respectful of those of us who want to be down with the cycle of life but can't stop eating bacon and get angry when other people step on ants. In other words, the obligatory animal deaths were handled delicately but honestly, and so thoughtfully in a few cases that I heard Lily say as a scene featuring a wolf pouncing on a caribou faded into black, "Oh, good. He only got his tail." Sorry, Lily. But you can wait until you have your own email account to learn the truth. 

I was worried about the polar bears; it's impossible to discuss global warming without picturing a starving polar bear, at least for me. Sure enough, the dignified father polar bear does not survive; I will see him again when I fall asleep tonight. And as soon as I saw the polar bear family, and realized that animal deaths would be filmed in a real and honest way, I was a little worried about the children, all three perceptive, sensitive and inquisitive, in different ways. I love how children surprise us, again and again, over and over, defy our expectations, refuse to play into our preconceptions, insist on continuing to grow, in spite of how many times we insist on strapping them to the couch and forcing them to watch cartoons. 

Kidding. About the strapping part, anyway. But as I tried not to think about the certain fate of Mr. Bear, all three children kept whispering wise, insightful comments about the unprecedented images they were seeing on the screen. There were no tears or shrieking when an elephant was attacked by a pride of lions in the middle of the night because they understood--were able to process in spite of their empathy for the elephant--that the lions were starving. How can four and five-year-olds make sense of this, allow this empathy to exist for predator and prey? They did. 

The second movie, which I saw at night, after the children were asleep, was about the preschool application process in New York. Its portrayal of animal nature was far less appealing, although awe-inspiring in its own way. The less said about it, the better. But as we walked home, my friend and I remembered what Lily had noted, after the umpteenth scene in the movie Earth in which a mother animal sacrificed food, water, shelter, safety and life itself for her child. I think it was after the narrator, which the junior Star Wars fans among us may not have known was Darth Vader himself, explained that the polar bear cubs had survived the winter by nursing (exclusively, for all those wondering if polar bears have access to formula or the statistics on IQ points or allergy rates), while the mother polar bear had lost half her body weight and was emaciated. "It seems like there's always enough for the babies," she said, "But the mothers never get enough of anything." Hmmm. 

I feel proud to be a member of a subset of the animal kingdom that bands together to protect its young against a threat of death, whose individual members know instinctively that what matters most is to love our children more than life itself, no matter what. With this in mind I will try to be less judgmental of the mammals in the other movie, generously hoping that what motivates them is the same.