logo
The Penguin Lessons is just the latest film that teaches us how animals rescue men from loneliness

The Penguin Lessons is just the latest film that teaches us how animals rescue men from loneliness

The Guardian08-04-2025

The penguin at the centre of The Penguin Lessons, a new movie by Peter Cattaneo, is nothing if not hard-working. The film, adapted from the 2015 memoir by Tom Michell, uses the political turmoil of Argentina in 1976 as a backdrop for the personal transformation of an English teacher at a boys' school. Michell (Steve Coogan) is an idle curmudgeon when he rescues an oil-drenched Magellan penguin from a beach in Uruguay in an attempt to impress an attractive woman. She leaves, but he is stuck with the bird, whom he duly names Juan Salvador, and who thaws him out sufficiently to bond with students and colleagues, process past trauma and rekindle a political idealism.
Naturally, there are hurdles for Juan Salvador to clear before the interspecies friendship spreads its wings. Michell tries a range of methods to ditch his new buddy, only for him to waddle back so determinedly that Michell reluctantly transports the penguin across the Argentine border and installs him on the terrace at the college. A perception shift on the charms of his new roommate is aided by an influx of visitors of all ages. Staff and students alike delight in feeding him sprats and – more significantly – in quieter moments are drawn to unburden themselves.
In his memoir, Michell mused on the magnetism of a silent yet sentient audience. 'As with any good pastor or patrician, Juan Salvador was such a good listener, patiently absorbing everything that was said to him, from observations about the weather to secrets of the heart. He never once interrupted. He looked people straight in the eye and always paid such close attention to what was said that his guests were inclined to talk to him on equal terms.'
The film is the latest in a remarkably long-legged subgenre: man in or approaching middle age experiences powerful emotional awakening thanks to an animal whom they initially kept at leash's length. Unconventional riffs on the subgenre plunge us into the relationship once it has already hit its stride, but for those that start with teething troubles, their secret is stealth psychological power. While it is tempting to focus on the surface charms of, say, Channing Tatum as Jackson confronting the cost of his military service with the help of a hound in 2022's Dog, or the ominous setup of Nicolas Cage as Robin retiring to the woods with a virtuoso truffle porker in Pig (2021), these films may reveal more about how men are taught to handle themselves than meets the eye.
'For some males, the world doesn't feel really safe to connect to,' says Dr Chris Blazina, psychologist and co-author of a 2019 study, Do Men Underreport and Mask Their Emotional Attachment to Animal Companions? The Influence of Precarious Masculinity on Men's Bonds with Their Dogs. Blazina believes many men find their attachment to their dog to be more secure than their closest human relationships, particularly in middle-age and beyond.
He throws into relief how vital a relationship like this can be by saying that a lack of social connection has been found to be as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 'We need connection not just to survive growing up but throughout our lives to flourish as whole human beings,' he says, advancing the theory that a loving relationship with a pet can be a lifeline to men otherwise inclined towards emotional detachment. 'They can turn to animal companions as a friend or family member, and it helps. It's not the complete package, but it sustains some men in a way where they don't give up on connecting.' Men are susceptible to a close attachment with an animal, thinks Blazina, because it is a relationship that can blossom in private, while in public they can underplay its importance.
Back in movieland, Tom, Jackson and Robin find that in the non-judgmental space provided by their pets of choice, suppressed feelings surface and they end up more fully inhabiting their emotions. This leads them to connect more authentically and deeply with the people around them. As Blazina says: 'We're hardwired to connect. Sometimes, as human beings, we do such a good job of putting up barriers that say we don't need that. And with dogs, it can be a little cleaner.'
The relationship between men and dogs has a special status in cinema and the wider culture, whether powering the entire John Wick franchise (2014-), exposing the true colours of humans in The Call of the Wild (1997) or showing a devotion that not even death can halt as in the tear-jerker Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009). It is not always the case that a canine outlives his master: indeed, their demise is so often weaponised to help a repressed hero confront grief that the website, Does the dog die?, was created to help sensitive viewers navigate the cinematic landscape. As Rudyard Kipling put it in his 1909 poem, The Power of the Dog, 'Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware / Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.'
Dogs tend to turn up in soulful dramas or family films. Primates, on the other hand, are infantilised as naughty children, as in Monkey Trouble (1994) and (to verge into TV) Friends (1994-2004), or have their humanoid features exploited to position them as a menace to civilisation, such as in King Kong (1933) or Planet of the Apes (1968) and their many spin-offs and reboots.
Creature-features, like the above, may introduce the beasts as brutes but eventually come round to the idea that man is a greater menace and animals have overlooked depths. This chimes with a reflection expressed by Michell towards the end of his memoir. Having spent much time meeting people on his travels around South America, he realises: 'I would never have opened my heart to them, as I had to Juan Salvador, and the same was true of all those who encountered him. How was it that a penguin brought such comfort and tranquility to the people whose lives he touched? Why did they go to his terrace and bare their souls to him as though they had known him for a lifetime, treating him like a real friend who could be relied upon in adversity?'
While the mysteries of life-changing attachments to animals cannot be boiled down in one article, there is an infectious quality to this subgenre of cinema. Watching Coogan slowly stripping back his character's protective plumage to expose a sincere and vulnerable man, creates emotional space for the viewer to feel as Michell does. It may occupy the opposite role to Juan Salvador (talking rather than listening) but, nonetheless, cinema can provide a safe, sounding board for our buried emotions.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne
Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne

Glasgow Times

time3 hours ago

  • Glasgow Times

Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne

The opening contest of the 2025 fixture is one of the highlights of the week, with the John and Thady Gosden-trained Lead Artist set to clash again with Newbury second Dancing Gemini, third-placed Rosallion and the fourth Notable Speech. Both Notable Speech and Rosallion were Classic winners last year, taking the English and Irish 2000 Guineas respectively, and while John Gosden expects the pair to improve for their seasonal bows, he is backing Lead Artist to again make his presence felt. He said: 'Rosallion and Notable Speech are both going to come on for that Lockinge run and it is as good a Queen Anne as I have seen in a long time. Now those two have a race under their belt, it's quite a humdinger to start the meeting with. 'Lead Artist has matured a lot mentally, which some of us do as we get older, and I like his enthusiasm as you can put him anywhere in a race, even though handy is where we would all like to be.' Lead Artist has not run since that neck defeat of Roger Teal's Dancing Gemini, but enjoyed a racecourse gallop at Newmarket on Wednesday morning under owner Juddmonte's new retained rider Colin Keane. Oisin Murphy was in the saddle for last month's Lockinge and Gosden felt it was a worthwhile exercise for Keane to get a feel for his mount ahead of the Group One. He added: 'It's been a long time since the Lockinge so it's great to come here and of course there has been not much rain, so we have been pretty much stuck on the all-weather all spring. 'Colin hasn't ridden him before and maybe hasn't seen him before, so it was good he could come here and get a feel for him. 'He does hold his condition really well and he's a well-covered, powerful horse. But that comes from the sire line and they do hold their condition incredibly well. 'We've been pleased with him and he's had a nice blow here which should set him up nicely for next Tuesday.' The Gosden team has a powerful second string in Sardinian Warrior, who was just denied in the Prix d'Ispahan last time out while last year's second Docklands, the supplemented Carl Spackler, Lake Forest, Diego Velazquez, Quddwah and Cairo are also in the mix

Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne
Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne

Rhyl Journal

time3 hours ago

  • Rhyl Journal

Colin Keane familiarises himself with Lead Artist ahead of Queen Anne

The opening contest of the 2025 fixture is one of the highlights of the week, with the John and Thady Gosden-trained Lead Artist set to clash again with Newbury second Dancing Gemini, third-placed Rosallion and the fourth Notable Speech. Both Notable Speech and Rosallion were Classic winners last year, taking the English and Irish 2000 Guineas respectively, and while John Gosden expects the pair to improve for their seasonal bows, he is backing Lead Artist to again make his presence felt. He said: 'Rosallion and Notable Speech are both going to come on for that Lockinge run and it is as good a Queen Anne as I have seen in a long time. Now those two have a race under their belt, it's quite a humdinger to start the meeting with. 'Lead Artist has matured a lot mentally, which some of us do as we get older, and I like his enthusiasm as you can put him anywhere in a race, even though handy is where we would all like to be.' Lead Artist has not run since that neck defeat of Roger Teal's Dancing Gemini, but enjoyed a racecourse gallop at Newmarket on Wednesday morning under owner Juddmonte's new retained rider Colin Keane. Oisin Murphy was in the saddle for last month's Lockinge and Gosden felt it was a worthwhile exercise for Keane to get a feel for his mount ahead of the Group One. He added: 'It's been a long time since the Lockinge so it's great to come here and of course there has been not much rain, so we have been pretty much stuck on the all-weather all spring. 'Colin hasn't ridden him before and maybe hasn't seen him before, so it was good he could come here and get a feel for him. 'He does hold his condition really well and he's a well-covered, powerful horse. But that comes from the sire line and they do hold their condition incredibly well. 'We've been pleased with him and he's had a nice blow here which should set him up nicely for next Tuesday.' The Gosden team has a powerful second string in Sardinian Warrior, who was just denied in the Prix d'Ispahan last time out while last year's second Docklands, the supplemented Carl Spackler, Lake Forest, Diego Velazquez, Quddwah and Cairo are also in the mix

English literature's last stand
English literature's last stand

New Statesman​

time5 hours ago

  • New Statesman​

English literature's last stand

Illustration by Michelle Mildenberg English literature – so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of 18 – was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at Oxford and asked why I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase that I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that 'literature shows us what it is or might be to be human'. I believed it. In books, I felt with Tennyson that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine. Poems – especially by Hopkins, Eliot and Auden – worked on me like spells. I had contrived to download a recording of Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' on to my primitive mobile phone, and at school would stand in the playground with the device pressed to my ear, enraptured by the tinny incantation, convinced I was responding to a higher call. Literature, if one were to reduce it to anything so tawdry as a formula, was history multiplied by philosophy multiplied by life. I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off). English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was 'a glory of the universe' or 'the spring which unlocks the hidden life'. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had 'life-enhancing powers', and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain 'any capacity for a humane existence'. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these 'soaring affirmations'. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students 'transferable skills', that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC. But for all the Gradgrindian propaganda embattled modern departments are obliged to turn out, it remains the case that it is only because people have felt extravagantly about books that English is taught at universities at all. The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini's happy phrase) 'beauty and the footnote'. Students of English do not expect to emerge from their degrees able to speak a foreign language (save perhaps a smattering of Anglo-Saxon) or code or say anything useful about the differences between arthropods and crustaceans. According to the purest conception of the subject, Collini points out, 'the ur-exam question should be something like 'Isn't this beautiful?''. Though surely, 'the way to get high marks would not simply be to answer, 'Yes, it is.'' This has been the source of English's insecurity as an academic discipline, but also its self-confidence as the purest and most noble of the humanities. I was a late product of this passionate tradition. My English-teacher father brought me up to regard Eng lit as a secular religion. Our god was Shakespeare, whose birthday we celebrated annually with a homemade cake. Like Catholic peasants, our house was strewn with tasteless devotional items: Shakespeare mugs, Shakespeare socks, Shakespeare tea towels. We quoted Shakespeare, and his attendant lesser deities Wordsworth, Tennyson and Milton, like scripture and in the summer holidays we made solemn pilgrimages to their shrines: Dove Cottage, the Globe Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. My father particularly impressed me with the information that a friend of his had once repelled a home invader by descending the staircase in the dark carrying a single lighted candle and intoning a sulphurous passage from Book One of Paradise Lost. Such – the moral of the story ran – was the power of blank verse. If the atmosphere of militant bardolatry in which I was raised was anachronistic in the early 2000s, it seems as archaic as Assyria now. English is in precipitous decline. Still one of the most popular A-levels when I left school in 2011, it no longer even makes the top ten, having been displaced by various Stem subjects and those vulgar parvenus, sociology and psychology. Another university English department shuts down practically every year. My friends who pursued academic careers in English – no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists – feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning only to find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off. Partly the problem is tuition fees, but most importantly, literature is becoming culturally marginal. The screen is replacing the book. Studies show dramatic and unprecedented drops in literacy and reading, especially among teenagers. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust found time spent reading books 'at a historic low'. In this environment, the study of literature is far from an obvious use of three crucial years of young adulthood. And if the slew of viral journalistic reports from universities – 'The end of the English major', 'The elite college students who can't read books' – are to be believed, even students who choose to study English are unable to actually force themselves through novels. 'Most of our students are functionally illiterate' runs a characteristic de profundis wail. A gloomy young Oxbridge academic I spoke to recently described 'a collapse of literacy' among his students. [See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now] The first enemies of English worried not that reading novels was too hard for students, but that it was much too easy. When English arrived in universities (at Oxford in 1894 and Cambridge in 1914) conservative dons objected that the subject wouldn't provide students with 'the mental training' inculcated by mathematics or classics. Others feared that English was an invitation to students to be 'specious and superficial': why did you need educating in how to read poems? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The literary gentlemen who were first summoned from the chaos and clan warfare of Grub Street to establish English amid the Groves of Academe were not always reassuring models of scholarly subtlety and rigour. Cambridge's first professor of English, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was in the habit of addressing his audiences of mostly female undergraduates as 'Gentlemen'! George Saintsbury, the king of fin-de-siècle belles-lettres – with his wine cellar, 'extreme Toryism', prodigious forest of a beard and apparently omniscient command of his country's literary heritage – was making £190,000 a year in modern money from literary journalism before he was made a don (his earnings much enhanced by his genial willingness to write 'as many as five reviews' of the same volume). His own innumerable books (The History of Elizabethan Literature, A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature, The History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, an 800-page Short History of English Literature) combined panoptic ambition with 'a large number of errors' and sold in the tens of thousands. Saintsbury's career was only an unusually florid symptom of a society in which English literature was culturally central to a degree not easy to grasp today and which throws a stark light on the subject's present crisis of marginality. English was born as an academic subject in a world in which journals and magazines 'carried an endless stream of critical essays celebrating or reconsidering the achievement of major and minor poets alike'. For many people 'a deep intimacy with English poetry was a living presence, not simply a social affectation or a relic of a half-remembered education'. When the littérateur-turned-don John Bailey gave public lectures ('Can We Tell Good Books from Bad?', 'Shelley') he addressed 'crowded' halls of hundreds of people ('many standing') and met with 'wild success'; when he lunched with the former prime minister Arthur Balfour in 1914, the two men chatted about 'Dryden, Pope, Browning, etc'. As Collini writes, the enthusiasm of men like Bailey meant Eng lit was able to draw on 'deep wells of cultural validation'. The apogee of the subject's prestige arrived in the 'two decades after 1945'. By this point, English had acquired the dignity and purpose of a modern, professional discipline. The lingering uncertainty about what the subject was actually for left a convenient space that could be filled with ambitious claims. To IA Richards, the father of practical criticism, the study of literature was a laboratory science (the amputated text tweezered and probed beneath the critic's microscope); to Leavis, English was a kind of nonconformist religion. The prevailing tone of high moral seriousness – 'a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilisation itself', as Terry Eagleton once summarised the Leavisite view of literary studies – charged English with a charisma that no other academic discipline has ever matched, either before or since. The nearest analogue for English's status 'as the central subject' in the giddy decades of its prime is probably the position enjoyed by classics in the 19th century. Where Latin and Greek had been vessels for the themes of imperial destiny and Western cultural superiority so closely cherished by the Victorian elite, Eng lit's meridian coincided with the zenith of postwar liberalism. In his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, released at the very chiming of this high noon, Lionel Trilling argued that by dramatising the world's moral complexity and encouraging readers to inhabit other consciousnesses, literature could help form the tolerant, independent-minded, 'morally mature' citizens necessary for a successful liberal democracy. English was a bulwark against those twin threats to human intellectual freedom most feared by the establishment intellectuals of the Fifties: the totalitarian ideologies of the Eastern Bloc and the stupefying and ominously expanding empire of mass culture. It was liberal commitment to the autonomy of the human mind, not mere reactionary loathing of modernity, that animated Leavis's famous animadversions against the new forms of electronic entertainment which – the thought seems more prophetic now than ever before – demanded 'surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals'. The students who streamed through the redbrick portals and concrete geometries of, respectively, Manchester and York in the Sixties for lectures on 'the English Augustans' were no doubt responding to the high, clear call of art but also to the shriller trumpetings of social status. Academic critics were celebrities and, for a while, the culture bowed to them. 'It is no exaggeration to say,' writes one historian quoted by Collini, 'that in the late Forties and early Fifties, for the hippest of the young (even among those who were beginning to be beat) the best thing in the world to be was TS Eliot or Edmund Wilson. Literary criticism was the philosophers' stone.' In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch 'a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden'. Literature's prestige has declined precipitously since then. To many students in the 21st century, English seems not a liberal discipline but a positively anti-democratic one, with its cultural hierarchies, decaying canons and excessive reverence for the scribblings of dead white males. If sympathy with Jane Eyre once implied an expanded sphere of moral concern capable of enhancing a person's feeling for all humanity, it now signifies attachment to the culture of an oppressive elite. The rise of electronic distraction has only tended to increase English's political vulnerability. Not only is English more remote than it has ever been from the cultural mainstream but the fewer people actually read Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the more their exalted place in the canon seems like the conspiracy of an establishment minority rather than something that is obvious to all intelligent people. 'In time,' Collini writes, 'it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one's own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.' I agree but with one qualification: 'May become possible?' To anybody under 40 it is clear that time is already upon us. Whether this heralds catastrophe – the fate of literature being coterminous with the fate of civilisation – remains to be seen. But when those of us raised in the faith survey the darkness of the modern world, the thought is a hard one to avoid. Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain Stefan Collini Oxford University Press, 656pp, £35 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: The People's Republic of iPhone] Related

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store