Fac ut Vivas

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

—- From The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott (quoted in Groundhog day)

… watched two movies before dawn. March of the Penguins, and Groundhog day. Good movies, especially the first. It’s amazing what amount of fuss the Penguin movie has gotten itself into when people started expounding and extrapolating from what is initially a documentary about the penguins in the cold wastelands of antartica. They went so far as to challenge evolution on grounds that something so "intelligent" and "complex" couldn’t have been a byproduct of natural selection (or any related random process). Ultraconservatives have extolled the movie’s portrayal of the Emperor Penguins’ social structure and thus furthered their agenda by lambasting non-traditional family setups in humans. What was a movie about penguins became an anthromorphic exposition. Unfortunately, though the penguins were monogamous, they remain as such for only a year and by the next  cycle of mating season, they pair with another.

Like the director has said (maybe countless times), why can’t we let penguins be penguins and humans be humans, and for that matter, let the movie be just as it is: without any agenda or cultural bias, but a product of his intention to let people know what the march of the penguins was like on the darkest places in this earth.