Endless Thread - The Great Lemming Lie

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Telling a story is hard. Filming nature is even harder. That may be why, in the 1940s, Walt Disney productions leaned on movie magic to develop its True-Life Adventures nature documentary series. It built sets, shipped in animals from distant locales, and even made up facts. One lie looms larger than them all. It's haunted the film genre for generations with a question: From classics narrated by Sir David Attenborough to today's fast-paced animal content on YouTube, is what we're seeing real or fake? Prompted by a Reddit post, Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell go down the rabbit hole — lemming hole? — of deception in nature documentaries. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The co-hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Our managing producer is Samata Joshi.

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Dean Russell. Ben Brock Johnson.

Have you ever played the video game Lemmings? Not unlike Amory. I think my answer to like any question that begins, have you played the video game is almost always no. I'm surrounded by a new. Surrounded by Noobes Uh, yeah But I came to play

So let's play All right, let's play You got it up on your screen You sent me a link Yeah To what looks like A website from 1999 Yep

And it says click to start Yeah I'm looking at a screen That's very pink Uh huh It looks like we're in a cave Yeah We're underground

And then under Or from some like weird contraption, these little... Trapped door. Yeah. Yeah. What I assume are lemmings, but they actually look like umpalumpas, are just like walking back and forth. And they all basically go in the same direction. So they all basically follow each other. Ooh. Can you hear that? Yeah. Boop, boop. I just passed the first level, Dean. Catch up. I think I just lost. They all

just stopped moving. But you get the idea, right? Like, lemmings basically, you can basically control the lemmings. You can, like, explode them, kill them. You can have them dig. You can, like, do all these different things with the lemmings. And the goal is they all basically walk in the same direction and do the same thing unless you control them and tell them to do otherwise.

That is the one thing that has struck me. And mostly that's because I know what this episode is about, which is to say, yes, when you control one lemming, or at least the leader seems to control all or most of the lemmings. Everyone follows the leader, right? Exactly. There's one and only one fact I know or at least thought I knew about lemmings before we did this story before a post I saw on Reddit broke my brain. and I'm going to guess that I'm not alone in that, the one fact being if a lemming jumps off a cliff, all the other lemmings will also jump off the cliff.

In other words, lemmings follow the leader. They all do the same thing, even to the point of mass suicide. Tragedy. There are two definitions of the word lemming. One is a, quote, small, short-tailed, thick-set rodent related to the voles found in the Arctic tundra. The other definition is,

based on the supposed behavior of said Thickset Rodent, a person who unthinkingly joins a mass movement, especially a headlong rush to destruction. Just throw in shade at the lemmings. It's hard to overstate just how much that second definition has influenced my outlook on life. You may have heard the phrase, don't be a lemming. Don't be a lemming. You must not be a lemming. Don't be their lemming. Which is to say, don't be a lemming. Don't be like everyone else. Don't submit to group think. Don't be a lemming. I live my life by this code. I have always. What you may not have heard is that this phrase is based on a lie. A lie told more than 70 years ago in a nature documentary.

They reached the final precipice. This is the last chance to turn back. The lemmings lie, while seemingly small, would go far beyond changing. how the public viewed this Arctic rodent. Because as we looked into this, as we threw ourselves headlong off a cliff into an ocean of lemming information, we discovered that this one little lie would shape a whole genre of film too,

nature documentaries. And in doing so, in shaping the nature doc from the genre's origins to the nature content you see online today, this tiny lemming lie would also change the way many of us think about ourselves and nature as a whole. I'm Sir Dean Russell, your presenter. I'm Ben Thickset Rodent Johnson. Oh, God.

And you're listening to Endless Threat. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's Cliffside NPR. Today's episode, the great lemming lie. All right. So Ben, tell me how did you come across this factoid that apparently broke your brain? I think it was on like an Ask Reddit thread basically about, yeah, it was like the question was like, what is the worst documentary you've ever seen or what's like just a terrible documentary? And of course I'm going to take a close look at that.

Yeah. And that's, you know, that's where I discovered. this fact, which was really shocking to me. And so you roped me in to try to understand where and how this lemming lie originated. When I say lemmings, what do you think of? Oh, boy. Not mass suicide. I will say that.

Alenda Chang is a big fan of nature docs. I'm actually pretty partial to. French nature documentaries. Oh, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, exactly. One of my favorites is this, it's called microcosmos, and it's about insects. And, you know, so you have these kind of hilarious scenes, like an operatic love scene between snails. There's like a slow pan up over the moss with like some of their secretions kind of like draped over in the moss.

It's very, yeah. Wow. And they even, you know, the like couples kiss where you do the like 360 rotating, they even do that. As a professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara, Alenda has seen many nature documentaries from over the years, including the lemmings doc. I actually show this to my students when I teach nature documentary and we watch some of those scenes of these lemmings that were purportedly, according to the film, kind of committing mass suicide, you know, by flinging themselves. off these cliffs into the sea. This documentary is, to some, infamous. It's called White Wilderness.

The Arctic has forever been a legendary land. And even today, there exist here living legend. White Wilderness was part of a series from the 1940s and 50s. True Life Adventures. The series was genre-defining in the world of film. And it was created by none other than, Walt Disney. How big of a deal

is Walt Disney Productions when it comes to the genre that we know today as nature documentaries? I think it's huge. Each film in Disney's true life adventure series showcased different biomes with supposedly

true wilderness and real science. White wilderness covered the animals of the Arctic. The lemming scene is lengthy and it comes in the middle of the film. In it, you hear the voice of Winston Hibler describing the lives of these gerbilish rodents.

It's not given to man to understand all of nature's mysteries. But as nearly as he can surmise, it would appear that the lemmings consider this body of water just another lake. As you're watching, you see several close-ups showing frantic furballs running pell-mell over rock and snow and near a body of water. They're apparently in the mid-since. of some kind of migration.

The cuts are quick and jumbled. The lemmings jostle and zag. And then for reasons unexplained, one reaches a cliff and jumps. The rest follow suit. Yet over they go. Casting themselves bodily out into space. With the camera placed just over the edge of the cliff,

you see dozens of fuzzy bodies dropping from the sky. It is wild and horrifying. According to the narrator, the lemmings fall into a freezing Arctic ocean. And instead of making for sure, they swim out to sea, to die on purpose. And soon the Arctic Sea is dotted with tiny bobbing bodies. It is brutal to watch. But here is the thing. This nature documentary from Walt Disney, please don't sue us, Disney,

which launched a thousand more, this incredibly influential piece of film was pushing the truth off of a cliff to its death. This was fabricated. You know, it was like some river in Alberta, and they were forcibly pushing these lemmings. They weren't even the right species of lemmings. You heard that right.

These lemmings, who were supposedly throwing themselves willingly to their demise were actually being thrown by Disney employees. When I learned this fact, my head exploded. I was so, I was just like incredulous.

I was like, wait, this one crucial piece of animal behavior that is like, if you asked me what facts I know, like what just random facts I know about animals, this would be one of the first that would come to my mind. This has made me

think about human behavior. Maybe like tens of thousands of times in my life I have thought about this, maybe more. It's all completely fake. Like how many times have you heard the phrase, well, if your friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? You know, like from anti-peer pressure rhetoric to a cautionary tale about following the group. Lemings has had a huge influence on my life. Dean, am I crazy to be made crazy by this? Uh, yes. But you're not wrong. Okay. For many years, the lemmings lie went unquestioned, at least by the public.

Then it solidified into truth. And then... Bill, you worked on a film called White Wilderness, Disney Film. Do you recall a scene involving lemmings in that? Yes. This is from a 1982 investigative documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. titled Cruel Camera. In it, the CBC's Bob McEwen and a team of reporters

tracked down a Disney cameraman, Bill Carrick. What did you hear about the last music? Can you recreate the scene for us? Do you remember? I know it was taken. It was a recreated thing done in Canmore in Alberta. You say recreated down? Well, they built a set.

It looked like the Arctic. And I'm a nice painted sky for a background. Canmore, Alberta is about 1,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle. There are no lemmings there. Disney allegedly paid Inuit children 25 cents apiece to catch lemmings up north, and then the rodents were shipped to the set. The scene showed dozens, hundreds of lemmings. The same lemmings over and over again.

Falling into a body of water, purportedly the Arctic Ocean. That was the Bow River. The Arctic Sea. That was the Bow River. The Bo River, he says, which flows through Calgary, not even close to the sea. The CBC reporter also spoke with Roy Disney, Walt's nephew, who was working with the company's Nature Dock Branch at the time. Roy was less than concerned. We've lost a few lemmings. Okay. The lemmings probably would have gotten lost anyway.

That did get brought on by what could conceivably be defined as an act of cruelty. This could have been something that petered out, but white wilderness wasn't just any documentary. It was a Disney documentary. And to understand the significance of that, Alenda says you have to understand the origins of nature docs and what made Disney different. To me, the origins of the genre might even go back to like the late 19th century, early 20th century, the sort of expedition films of people like. kind of Teddy Roosevelt-esque, you know, privileged people who sort of traveled the world and took record of their expeditions and then brought it back. Before Disney, nature documentaries were very human-centric.

Producing something about wildlife was too daunting. Film equipment was heavy in temperamental. The wilderness was even more temperamental. No one had the time or resources to, you know, march into the mountains of Mongolia. set up shop with, I don't know, 20 reels of film and wait for a rogue snow leopard. Frankly, that seemed like a dream. But Disney makes dreams come true. Creatures about which man knows so little, they seem a blend of myth and mystery.

The genius behind Disney's idea was not in venturing out into the wild. It was bringing the wild to Disney. Producers built full sets, shipped in animals, arranged blocking and lighting, and scripted narratives kind of based on reality. But it does definitely set a precedent in terms of, I think, subsuming scientific accuracy to narrative. And here begins the legacy of the lemming lie. Science versus narrative. It is a tension that ever since Disney has plagued a genre most people know as the purest, the realest kind of documentary.

Telling a story is not easy. Capturing nature on film is even harder. What Disney did set the stage for the future was make nature work for it, which is perfectly Disney, a company known for its anthropomorphic cartoons and no pants on a duck. And it's good at manufactured theme parks pumping music through artificial rocks and trees. And that's really where I think the commercial success of the genres is proven, or at least tested, and where nature documentary really comes into its own as something that is about nature in itself as sort of separated. Nature as separated.

To put that another way, the modern nature documentary was born from Disney, which brought an unnatural expectation to the genre. In truth, lemmings don't kill themselves. The idea is based on something called mass dispersal. lemming populations fluctuate based on predators, food, climate, what have you, under ideal conditions in a single year their populations swell. When they've exhausted their food supply, they disperse, look for new lands sometimes in the same direction. Mass drowning happens sometimes in the Scandinavian mountains when a different species of lemming than in Canada will build up along a body of water. They'll become so dense that they'll inevitably try to swim across.

As one zoologist said, if they get wet to the skin, they're essentially dead. Freezing to death because overcrowding has inadvertently nudged you into the water is not the same as mass cliffside suicide. So why did Disney make it up? One reason is that it's a better narrative. Another reason may have more to do with politics. In some ways, this, it almost had to be because of the context of the Cold War, you know, the sort of fear of... Whoa. Are you saying this is like communist?

Are you telling us that this movie is anti-communist propaganda that the one fact that we know about Lemmings is basically just anti-communist propaganda? Wow. I really, I really do think there's a, if you watch those scenes, you see that the, there's this latent fear of sort of mass behavior. I found this really surprising. Maybe it shouldn't be. At the time the documentary came out, the Cold War was really kicking off. The after effects of World War II had morphed into the United States and the USSR's intense staring contest. The late 1950s were about the United States planning massive retaliation with nuclear weapons, should anything happen.

Fear of the Soviets, including everything they represented by communism, was perhaps higher than it had ever been. But to put those ideas into a nature documentary about lemmings, damn. In creating the modern nature doc, Disney created an expectation. Audiences expected a story, often morally coded, about life in the wild. And, as the industry would show again and again, producing such a story would sometimes come at a cost. to the animals, and to reality. The Lemming Legacy continues from Attenborough to YouTube in a minute.

At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous. curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. The last of Disney's True Life Adventures Nature Documentary series came out in 1960. By then, plenty of other people had taken the genre and made it their own.

Most famously, It looked enormous, and from its size and markings, I was quite sure that it was a python. If you know NatureDocs, you know Sir David Attenborough. You may even hear his voice in your dreams, narrating your life. Or maybe that's just me. The abundance of Dean's mustache acts as a filter for the deluge of coffee he must consume. To stay productive and active.

Attenborough came onto the scene in 1954 as the presenter for the BBC's Zoo Quarrow. This was not the austere, removed planet Earth-type dock that Attenborough would later be known for. This was much sportier? It's important to grab his tail as soon as you grab his head. Otherwise, he'll wrap his great coils around you and give you a very nasty squeeze. Zoo Quest was a literal zoo quest. Attenborough would drop into these remote locations with a team from the London Zoo and capture animals for the zoo's collection.

the accepted practice at the time. If we're talking about the legacy of the lemmings, this may be part of it. The way in which cruelty is common in filmmaking, even documentary. ZooQuest wasn't anomalous. Even Jacques Cousteau would later regret the things he did in his films. Scientists body surfing frightened sea turtles or popping puffer fish or bombing coral reefs. Cruelty, however, is not an essential ingredient. in nature docs, narrative is.

And that can sometimes require a bit of movie magic. That has raised a consistent question throughout the history of this genre. Is what I'm seeing real or fake? If you watch carefully, even contemporary things, you can sometimes catch what, what, like, industry people would call continuity errors, right? Like, oh, the Coke can just went from her left side to her right side. Except in this case, you might notice. like, oh, well, the angle of the shadows have changed, right? Or, you know, this leopard has eight spots in this one, and now it has six, what's happening, right?

Because Endless Thread is a show about the internet, we thought we would take that question, real or fake, to the things that we see online where nature content abounds. And on YouTube, the king of the modern nature documentary is... Brave Wilderness. Brave Wilderness, which sounds pretty close to white wilderness, is a YouTube channel that started in 2014, almost exactly 10 years ago. Today, it has 21 million subscribers. It's a whale. It's not shaky phone footage nature talk, but sleek TV quality content. I'm going to submerge into a pool filled with alligators and swim alongside them. If Planet Earth is the offspring of Disney's

true-life adventures with its like distant shots and serene narrator, Brave Wilderness falls more into the genetic line of ZooQuest, the adventurer-type doc, just updated. In the entertainment industry, they say you've got your 15 minutes of fame in the digital world. It is 15 seconds, if not less. Meet Coyote Peterson, the handsome bearded host of Brave Wilderness. His on-camera vibe, think Steve Irwin meets Stevo, maybe a little more on the stevo end. I am not a wildlife biologist. I did not go to school to learn anything at all about animals. My knowledge is completely self-taught, and it comes from trial and error. By trial and error, he means trial and terror.

His biggest claim to fame? What in your mind was like the first big hit of the show? Without question, it's when I started. doing intentional bites and stings. You maybe have seen these videos. Coyote Peterson drops a tarantula hawk or a bullet ant onto his arm to show you just how much it hurts. When we reached out to Coyote Peterson to ask if he would come talk about fakery in nature

documentaries, I got to admit, I didn't think that he would say yes. But, you know, according to Coyote, this is something he thinks about a lot. Maybe because it's something his viewers are thinking about. People are like, is he really getting stung or is he faking it? Is it necessary to roll around on the ground and punch the dirt and be in that much pain? Or is he overplaying it? Nothing we do on Brave Wilderness is fake in any way whatsoever. To give you a sense of the kind of carping coyote gets,

here are a few of quite a few Reddit threads. I think the Coyote Peterson Sting videos are fake. Some of the Coyote Peterson videos are definitely fake. Coyote Peterson overreacts to Stings. It's true. Perhaps one of my favorite examples of a coyote truther is this guy, Danny Burke. Another YouTuber. His bio reads, investigative journalist. What do you think of Coyote Peterson? Oh, he lied.

Yeah, he lied. Someone ought to investigate Danny Burke's bio because he might be more Hunter Thompson than Bob Woodward. That was gnarly. His method of smoking out the truth is to light himself on fire. When he saw a video of coyote reacting to a single bullet ant sting, Burke apparently thought, why don't I try that? But with 200 bullet ants. I got stung by 200 bullet ants, and I'm not crying.

I mean, I'm hurting for sure. It's a 10 out of 10 pain. But I'm not coyote. Peterson crying. He got stung once. No screams. No body flailing. Burke is almost zen.

Does that prove that coyote is faking it? Now, could I be a super tough guy and just sit there and take it? Yes, absolutely I could. I actually have an insanely high pain tolerance. But we realized very early on that half of the entertainment was me exemplifying the pain by rolling around on the ground. It just gives you good visuals to go along with what it is that your body is experiencing. It's almost a performance art in that regard.

This is interesting to me, though, because what you're saying is that there is an aspect of performance to it. Absolutely. There has to be because what I think makes myself on camera likable for so many audience members is the fact that I'm just kind of a normal guy. I have a high pain tolerance, but I'm not macho. To understand Coyote's perspective on this, it may help to understand his background because he came into this world, as he said, not through animal studies. He came from screenwriting and filmmaking. I always wanted to be a director for, films and stuff like that. But when the opportunity came about to start telling stories about wild places and wild animals, it just really made a whole lot of sense and clicked.

And as such, Coyote sees Brave Wilderness as the social media-ready answer to the white wilderness tradition. Certainly, there's still people that have the appetite for a 60-minute, slow David Attenborough narrated piece of content like planet Earth. But I think what we've managed to do in a unique way is create content that feels very fast-paced and very palatable for a younger generation. And even an older generation that doesn't want to be overly inundated with a bunch of science and facts that they're not going to remember. That is not to say the science isn't important, he told us.

It just has a time and a place, maybe a journal paper, or a year. university lecture. Because people's attention spans are not getting longer. If anything, they're getting shorter. So it's how do you tell that story even faster than we did five, six, seven years ago. There is something very Walt Disney in here, too. Balancing science with butts in seats with ticket sales or clicks, make of that what you may. I'm curious what you think the biggest lie that nature documentaries have ever told is? Well, I think we're talking about animal wildlife filmmaking specifically prior. The biggest falsity that's told is that all of these animals are naturally in this same

spot at the same time. And again, that's looking back on history to older Disney films. A lot of those animals were likely brought in for specific shots or for specific scenarios. And that is something that we never do. Coyote is right about this. Throughout nature documentary history, Those rare animals that the camera crew or host just, like, happen upon, it's very possible that animal was brought from somewhere else.

Not always as egregiously as buying lemmings from indigenous kids and shipping them a thousand miles to the south. But those scenes where the host catches the frog, often that frog was caught by somebody else and filmed again later. Or as Alenda mentioned earlier, there's also the classic case of swapping one animal for another or something. speeding up time. If you watch closely, maybe the wild dog spots

change, maybe the shadows shift, and almost all of those cool sounds, yep, they did it in post. As David Attenborough once said in the 1980s, quote, there is precious little that is natural

in any film. You distort speed, you distort light levels, you distort distribution so that the places seem to be teeming with life. What the filmmaker is trying to do is to convey a particular experience. The viewer has to trust in the good faith of the filmmaker. Good editing, good music, good timing. All of those things are a skill set that don't necessarily take away from the honesty of what it is that we're actually doing. The insects are

real. The arachnids are real. The reptiles, the mammals, all of them are real. All of the catches are real. All of the actual impact moments that happen between myself and one of these animals are real. And I think in the way that we show that to the audience, they recognize it at this point. By the way, we asked film professor Alenda Chang what she thought of brave wilderness as the quintessential YouTube nature doc. She hasn't seen a lot of it, but... Alenda was pretty into certain aspects of brave wilderness. To her, it's quite different from Disney's white wilderness. So in some ways, these YouTube ones, where the host is very much present, is actually,

to me, like a good step or a step in the right direction of acknowledging, hey, we're here. That is to say, Alenda feels like brave wilderness isn't continuing the biggest lie of all in nature docs, that nature is somehow separate from human life, that lemmings live in the secluded north, that filmmakers and we as a species do not affect the creatures who inhabit at the earth. Sometimes that effect is positive. Often it's negative. Always it's there.

And that raises one last thought about the legacy of the lemming lie and the future of nature documentaries. An idea that Alenda admits is not especially popular, even with her students. At some point, maybe we don't go film them.

Right? I do think there is that sort of question. of how many times do we need to fly a film crew to Papa New Guinea to film this, you know, particular bird species, right? Coyote Peterson has thoughts on this too. I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 10 years, we are no longer physically interacting with animals, period.

But you'll have me in a room using augmented reality to interact with animals that are not even real. And you're sitting in your own family room watching it in Applevision Pro, and I'll have to go out there and catch anything. All I need to do is present it to you and have you believe it's as real as it can possibly be, and that will suffice. Alenda, will you give us a fact about lemmings that we can go forward with from here

that is a different one so that we can break the cycle? Oh my gosh, I didn't do my lemming research. I don't know. Let's just say they made for life. We'll just make that up. They're probably not even. They're probably like polygamous. Lemmings are indeed polygamous.

quite so. And maybe one thing to take away from this is to remember what the lemming represents here. Its legacy. Nature documentaries as a whole are not fake, not even close, but they do shape our sense of nature. And our sense of nature shapes our sense of ourselves, because we're part of nature too. At least until we're all strapped into our Apple Vision pros watching totally artificial content about animals that don't really exist. So in the gray scale of documenting the world around us, we have to try to be as

self-aware as we can about being part of the story. Otherwise, we'll forget that there's probably a guy just off camera potentially sending an animal to a watery grave. And the next time someone says if your friend told you to jump off a cliff, would you? Ask them,

why do you hate communism so much? Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was co-hosted and produced by me, Dean Russell. And me, Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Emery Sievertson, Samitajoshi, Grace Tatter, and Paul Vikis. Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and 100 bullet ants. If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell,

you can hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org.