The Penguin Lessons

 Looking for films to watch recently, the algorithms rightly guessed that we would enjoy The Penguin Lessons a 2024 film starring Steve Coogan and based on the 2015 memoir by Tom Michell. 

And enjoy it we did. One one level, it calls to mind all of those films about teachers who are out of their depth with a challenging class but somehow win over their reluctant learners; think Dead Poets Society or Goodbye Mr. Chips. The protagonist's reluctant adoption of a penguin and his bumbling attempts at romance add levity to the story. 

The historical context, however, gradually introduces sobering elements to the story. The teacher in question arrives at a British school in Argentina just as it the country entered a period of brutal dictatorship. I had read quite a lot about this and other authoritarian regimes quite a lot in graduate school, when I completed a doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies. 

My mind has been very much on those studies over the past two years, as my own country experiences many of the practices and optics of the "Banana Republic" regimes we had been studying. Then, as now, I could not understand how governments could attack their own populations and still maintain enough pupular support to remain in power.

I still do not understand fully, of course, but I do notice that denial is an important means by which individuals cope with autocracy and an important element on which the autocrats rely.

This is eventually countered, of course, by the willingness of citizens to confront the regimes, often at great personal risk. In 1977 Argentina (and in Argentina to this day), that resistance was led by Madres de Plaza de Mayo. These were mainly middle-aged and older women whose adult children had been kidnapped by the regime, and who eventually helped to bring about the end of the dictatorship. 

I do not think that the makers of this film could have anticipated that by including those protests from half a century ago, they would be bringing to mind today's protests in the United States. The 2025 and 2026 #NoKings rallies are broader demographically, but are often dismissed by regime supporters as being too old to be taken seriously.