An Unimaginable Life
Last night we watched a Netflix show called My Octopus Teacher. Kim had heard about it from two separate animal-friendly friends and wanted to watch it. We share the same problem the rest of the world struggles with these days. It’s less that there is nothing good to watch on TV, but rather that we all rely so much more on TV to entertain us and the array of choices is seemingly so endless that it can seem impossible to choose something on any given night. So, when Kim declared that she wanted to watch this strange-sounding show, I figured that I could survive an updated aquatic version of Wild Kingdom for one evening. The common element of all animal movies is that they must be narrated if anyone is going to follow the plot. Some animal functions can be guessed, but narration is pretty much needed to understand what an octopus is up to. The narrator in this case is not Marlin Perkins sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, but a South African photojournalist and filmmaker, Craig Foster. He is also both the human co-star of the movie and the photographer who took most of the underwater footage.
Tonight, based on a blog recommendation from my friend Steve, we tuned into Netflix to watch Sir David Attenborough narrate Our Planet. The problem with the proliferation of programming content these days is that it seems to not be lost on producers that by naming their shows similarly to popular or successful programs, people are likely to stumble their way into their shows and their viewership stats accordingly benefit. Have you ever noticed that when you use the search function on Netflix (or Prime or DirectTV or whatever), the served up selections on the right side of the screen need to be examined carefully before clicking through to them because they sound similar or, in some cases, identical to the item you are looking to watch, but they are not. I have personally watched more shows that I hadn’t intended, wondering why my friend or some article would recommend this drivel. When I searched Our Planet on Netflix I could have chosen one of a dozen shows with the same or approximately the same name. Since they all showed nice pictures of animals, I was even further confused about what to click through to. I know if I click on it I can probably drill down to more information, but that presumes that I have noted enough details about the recommendation to sort out the right show from what I can recollect of the narrator, exact topic, director, producer of specific subject matter, in this case in the natural world.
It so happens that I picked a show called Our Planet: Behind the Scenes. Once the film started to roll I was reassured that this was indeed the David Attenborough version of Our Planet, even if it was sort of an outtakes version. Sort of David Attenborough’s Funniest Home Videos I imagine. But the tape was rolling and the colors were pretty (good cinematography) and we immediately went to shark-infested waters off of Sumatra, then to a shack in Siberia where the scientist/photojournalist peered out into the dark night to see hundreds of thousands of walruses pressing up against the shack from all sides. Next we were in the muck of the jungle inland on Sumatra in search of a tool-using Orangutang while the team in Siberia split up with one sitting in tiny-house Spartan blinds for six-day stretches hoping to glimpse an extremely rare Siberian tiger while the rest of the team went to watch landlocked polar bears fishing in the rivers…only to find that the waters were too high, so they ate the crazy walruses that flung themselves off the Siberian cliffs thinking that the water was just below when it was really all sharp and lethal jagged rocks. Nuts on many levels. This was a fascinating look behind the scenes of the life of a nature photojournalist.
This is where the My Octopus Teacher and Our Planet shows found common ground. Yes, they were both narrated, but we all know that’s inevitable. The real commonality is the theme that these people live an unimaginable life and record the even more unimaginable lives of these crazy animals. The only lesson I took from all of this was what Craig Foster, the South African diver/photographer/storyteller said about his female octopus friend; it’s all about living fast and dying young. He and all these crazy naturalists say that they believe that there is something precious to humans in wild places and wild animals. They all feel it is somehow liberating to commune with nature. It also all helps remind them about how vulnerable lives, all lives, on this planet are. I suppose they would all cop to falling in love with the wildness. They want to be a part of these places in the wild, not just a visitor or observer, a real part of it all.
Craig Foster spent a year free-diving (no scuba gear) down 20-30 feet into a kelp forrest in the rocky and frigid waters off Cape Town. He is no spring chicken and has a teenage son, but he had burned out and did this to gather his wits. I don’t think of nature photographers “burning out” the way Treasury Bill traders or air-traffic controllers might, but there you have it. His way of de-stressing was to strike up a relationship with a female octopus and chronicling 80% of her natural life in the wild (octopi live for about a year apparently). We see her as predator to fish, mollusks, crabs and lobsters. We see her as prey to Zebra Sharks. We see her disguising herself with kelp and with shells and doing a great chameleon-cum-shape-shifter imitation. We see her snuggle up to Craig like a puppy without a skeleton. This is a wild show that makes one wonder why a fifty-something guy would dive in frigid water every day for a year to live the unimaginable life of an octopus. But it is fascinating.
Meanwhile, back on Our Planet, spending time in Siberia with 100,000 beached walruses knocking on your door and trying to fly off cliffs and then siting in a wooden box for a week at a time in hopes that a Tiger will walk by and not notice there is a box of Human Crackers sitting there in the wild, all seems pretty unimaginable as well. Doing night dives with thousands of sharks having regular feeding frenzies, even with chain-mail wet-suits seems pretty unimaginable. But the winner might well be either the cameraman stuck in waist-high mud in the jungle trying to hump his camera in to get a shot of an orange monkey eating ants with a stick, or the Russian walrus scientist (Yes, that is apparently a zoological specialty) who finds that a six-foot-long stick is enough to keep hungry polar bears at bay. These are all unimaginable lives to me and I told Kim that I am just glad there are people in the world who want to do these things so we can sit at home during our COVID quarantines and enjoy the wild world of nature.