I know that I am way behind the trend on this yet I always find that I end up watching television shows long after they have finished. Perhaps I am just allowing the cream of television to rise and perhaps I am just lazy. Regardless, friends have begun touting this amazing documentary and I have finally gotten into it. Clearly it is brilliant. Yet I am not entirely sure what the real focus of the documentary is.
There have been several occasions during the show when I have flinched at the use of over anthropomorphic allusions. There are some overt comparisons between some of the animals and humans and the tone of the episodes frequently changes to set up an idea of 'good animal' and 'bad animal'. Are the arctic wolves the evil foil to the good musk oxen? I think not, yet the damning music and chase scenes imply otherwise.
The show is obviously attempting to create a human connection to these animals without diminishing their idiosyncratic, animalistic nature. It seems that one of the only ways out of this conundrum is an appeal to balance. While this appeal is not made too directly, the episodes seem to imply that nature is balanced and that the death of an animal helps the life of another. As other television shows like All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace have demonstrated however, this sense of balance is a human conception based on systems and network theories.
Planet Earth is magnificent. Yet it is quite obviously more about the rhetoric humanity uses to describe the environment.
-The English Student
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