Boxing Kangaroos
Yesterday I saw something on TV that made me rethink nature documentaries. It was a David Attenborough episode on kangaroos in Australia. More specifically, it was about how male kangaroos fight one another for dominance and mating rights. What I wasn't expecting was how viscerally violent these matches are. The kangaroos are built to punch and flail. Muscled and motivated, they pull no punches, literally and otherwise, in dispatching with their opponent. As with any such documentary, the episode was replete with a moody ambient soundtrack and effects which heightened the tension implicit in the fights. There were various shots which closed in on the faces of kangaroo onlookers. The whole thing was narrativized and given the framing of an event: a pleasant, unassuming pastoral setting, and suddenly, like in some depiction of a duel in the wild west, two kangaroos face off against one another and everyone else runs away and watches from a distance. The kangaroos themselves don't