Why Is There A Depressed Penguin On Everyone's Feed?
And the irony of its strangely motivational one-way trek
You would have to have a very healthy screentime if you have not yet seen the clip of a depressed penguin going viral on social media.
In the video, a lone penguin breaks away from its group, and instead of heading back to its colony, heads straight to the mountains in the interior of the colony, roughly 70kms away. With no food and means of sustenance in the interior of the frozen continent, the trek is a suicide mission for the bird, yet it persists.
The clip is from legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, where the filmmaker travels to the Antarctic to explore the vast landscapes of the subcontinent and the people who risk their lives to study it.
Towards the end of the documentary, Herzog, looking at the penguin colonies on the island, asks penguin scientist Dr David Ainley if social creatures like them can go “insane”. Ainley answers, “I've never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They do get disoriented… They end up in places they shouldn't be, a long way from the ocean.” As film closes, we see an example of these penguins, who, Ainley explains, would make a dash for the mountains even if you returned them to the colony.
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Is It Depressed? Or Adventurous?
Last year, it was a deep-sea anglerfish swimming up to the surface of the water. This year, it's a disoriented penguin walking away from the colony towards certain death at the mountains. Social media really loves its moments of existential crisis.
Except this time, there's a good chance that said crisis is actually misinterpreted. In the documentary, Herzog and the doctor explain that the penguin is on a suicide mission. But the edit that inspired the trend (video below) cut the clip midway, stopping right after Herzog asks why the penguin would even think of going to the mountains. Gradually, with no context, the “nihilistic penguin” became the internet's favourite motivation video.
A single penguin against unbeatable odds, but still, it persists in its mad conquest. I'm sure you'll find the Nike tagline getting cemented on it in the next few days.
And now we're left with two groups on the internet debating on comment sections about whether you should look up to the penguin or not. Unlike the bunch who finds this journey motivational, this group argues that this meme is a classic example of people lacking basic media literacy. The penguin is clearly going to the mountains to die, and people, in their bid for the next trending video, are giving a whole new meaning to the clip.
Except, in this case, both sides are actually right.
The Penguin... And The People Of Werner Herzog
This might be a good time to scroll up a little, back to where I mentioned that Encounters at the End of the World is about the people risking their lives to study Antarctica. Yeah, the penguin documentary wasn't about penguins at all.
Werner Herzog does this pretty often, actually. In Grizzly Man, his topic is Timothy Treadwell, an activist who spent his entire life around the conservation of grizzly bears, and who would ultimately lose his life to an attack by the animals he was protecting. The Fire Within has a full seven-minute-long clip of a volcanic eruption without any narration, but it's actually a requiem to two volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who documented volcanic eruptions around the world right up till an unexpected eruption in Hawaii claimed their lives. See the common thread here?
The people Werner Herzog captures are the same as what the penguin seems to be: eccentric individuals who are passionate about things that ultimately lead to their demise. People who, ideally, shouldn't be doing the things that they do, but do it either way, even if it means going against their sense of self-preservation. In many of his documentaries, he even mentions it right away that his intention is to celebrate the grit of these characters.
That being said, the penguin is in the video might not have the passion to explore the mountain or the desire to break free at all. Penguins actually leave their colony when they are depressed, and Herzog ending the movie with the bird's impending death was actually a gloomy commentary on isolation and hopelessness in the harsh deserts of ice.
Yet, the emptiness of the image was filled with a meaning most of the internet did not even know had been sitting there the whole time, in the characters of the movie most had not even watched.
After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.