Have you heard Planet Earth II? The sound effects are absolutely maddening. The dramatic music is bad enough, but they saturated the soundtrack with all sorts of business invented by sound designers and foley artists. Why do they do this? Nature is often quite silent, except for the wind, to our rather limited ears.
Faking it like this in post-production is another reason I don’t really like these photographically-gorgeous productions. This stuff is nature porn, by which I mean visually-intensive, heavily edited, artificially constructed, and yes, basically reactionary. They reproduce the archaic ideological perspective of “nature red in tooth and claw.” It’s the old sex and violence thing. Actually, being so veddy British, they cut away from most of the actual sex, but the inevitable chase scenes and male fighting sequences are fawned on.
If you observe animals, you will notice they actually have a hell of a lot of down-time, cleaning, resting, watching. The predator-prey ratio is usually so large that most “prey animals” are never prey. They do a lot more than just run away from the lionesses. But that’s all “boring” to the frenzy machine of attention that is the point of television, having to compete for viewers against the internet, not to mention computer games and movies (often much the same thing these days). The slo-mo aesthetic PEII uses makes it look like a contemporary movie, too. And the narration keeps using words like “peculiar” and “odd,” characterizations that say more about us than the animals. Doesn’t that kind of terminology serve to distance viewers further?
Of course some animals eat other animals. (Look at us: we devour the planet.) But there are also synergies, cooperation, symbiosis (mutualism, commensalism). These don’t get nearly enough attention. They are the most important things people need to know about ecosystems, about planet earth, our only one.
The last episode includes amazing footage of Peregrines in New York. I remember hearing about the crew’s visit some years ago, when they filmed the Brooklyn House of Detention scrape (none of that seems to have been used) among other places. The ratio of footage shot to footage used must be astronomical. All this editing and fine-tuning and tricksy sound effects gives viewers a spectacle above all else. Even with the strong conservation message, this is an utterly unrepresentative view of the natural world.
The overarching message here, besides the corporate capitalist competitive one, is that you’re unlikely to see such things yourself in several lifetimes, so why should you even leave the house?
Backyard and Beyond 
Leave a comment