My Mercury unwittingly exposes the boundless arrogance and hypocrisy of Homo treehugginus (‘tree-hugging freak,’ in lay terms). This documentary revolves around Yves Chesselet, a damn dirty hippy whose job is to chase seals off Mercury Island (a 750 meter-long, 270 meter-wide rock on Namibia’s Diamond Coast).
We’re told that “guano harvesters,” “climate change and overfishing” had driven gannets, penguins, and cormorants “to the brink of extinction” in the early 1990s; consequently, “these seabirds only breed on remote islands” like Mercury.
Meanwhile, “the dominant Cape fur seals have thrived, usurping the seabirds’ habitat and disrupting the region’s ecological balance.” That’s where Yves comes in. The seals are resilient as fuck, though, and Yves, overwhelmed by his Sisyphean labor, gets to a point where he “had to kill the [seal] pups.”
Yves, mind you, is supposed to be a flawed yet sympathetic hero. The film, written and co-directed by his sister, is not exactly a hagiography (for that, Yves would have to not be in it), but it does expect us to admire his bravery for overcoming his PTSD or whatever (“Who wants to, every single morning of your life, kill every single pup that was born overnight?” he asks. Well, you did) and returning to Mercury and continuing his work (presumably without butchering God’s creatures that time). I for one thought that Yves was a sanctimonious prick all along, even before the geno-seal-dal stuff.
Don’t get me wrong; I feel for the seabirds. However, penguins are not the seals’ problem any more than penguin-seal relations are man’s problem. The evil that men do, that’s man’s problem; shouldn’t we be going after guano harvesters and unscrupulous fishermen? How is climate change the seals’ fault?
Yves’s quest is predicated on two questions; “Should we just allow nature to take its course?” and “Should we merely observe the outcomes of our folly, or is it our responsibility to step in?”
Nature’s course in this case would be the seals overrunning the penguins, which wouldn’t be entirely ‘natural’ in that it was human activity that caused penguins and seals to clash.
Now, we should definitely “step in” and clean up our own messes; what we can’t do is fuck penguins over and then ‘fix’ it by screwing seals over; two wrongs don’t make a right. You have to think of a solution that is fair for both species.
The movie is clearly biased, though, and slanders the seals by assigning them human motives that they are incapable of. Man “usurps” and “disrupts;” animals don’t. It’s like the fable about the scorpion and the frog, only literally; the seals on Mercury Island simply follow their nature.
My Mercury stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that the only alien thing on the island is Yves himself — that’s the hypocrisy. The arrogance lies in the childish belief that not only can we save the planet, but that we can hurt it. “How dare we put our planet through the risks we do?” whines Yves.
Earth to Yves: you can think of the planet as Fairuza Balk in The Craft, because as far as it is concerned, you don’t even exist. It’s like George Carlin said; “The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas,” and it “will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ‘cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system.”
Anyway, closing intertitles tell us that Yve’s “work has contributed to critical scientific research about the seabirds of South Atlantic.” This afterthought is what My Mercury should have been about, but the filmmakers put it off until there was no time to elaborate on it.
Who knows? This phantom research might have been interesting enough to make for a more compelling viewing (as it is, Yves’s “work” boils down to “chasing the bastards off” — the environmentalist version of the ‘you kids get off my lawn’ crazy old coot), and/or important enough to atone for Yves’s crimes against nature.
Unless, of course, it’s bullshit (like when Yves’s sister calls him “enigmatic,” but the only enigma is why she would call him that in the first place; then again, maybe Yves is the long-lost third member of the Enigmatic Assholes), and they left it until the end precisely so that they wouldn’t have to elaborate on it. Either way, it’s too little, too late; despite all their efforts, it’s evident that the emperor has no clothes.
All things considered, My Mercury is the stuff of a horror film — one in which the seals fight back and tear this self-righteous motherfucker to pieces.
Leave a comment