McConaugheMay Day 22: Deep in the Heart: A Texas Wildlife Story

I was blessed to have a pal join me for today's McConaugheMay. It is a lonely battle I wage this month, and to know that I have my friends and loved ones behind me, supporting me in this often pointless struggle makes it all the more worth it. Today I watched Deep in the Heart: A Texas Wildlife Story, the kind of documentary that you'd watch in an elementary school science class on a day that the teacher is hungover, or simply has a love of film that they so rarely get to share with their students.

Some truly lovely footage in here of the various fauna that makes Texas their home and a nice reminder that Texas is so much more vibrant and green than it so often gets credit for. This documentary is not particularly well-paced, but nature documentaries rarely are. They exist to show scenes from nature that the average person simply doesn’t have the ability to see regularly. Like friends showing you vacation photos, you simply have to imagine yourself there, take the visual stimuli and combine it with your imagination to create a narrative on your own.

And this documentary, directed by documentarian Ben Masters, does feature some stunning imagery—a colony of bats flittering out of the cave in a hurricane of flapping wings and screeching bodies takes on an otherworldly tinge. It covers all of Texas, from the green forests to the start deserts of Big Bend, to the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean life that resides within. Texas is massive, and the ecosystems it holds within it are even more so.

Nature documentaries are an interesting art form, really. In order to really work, they need to invent narratives and invite a human, empathetic connection which fundamentally requires villains. The goals of animals in the wild is often to eat, sleep, and mate in relative safety, which don’t lend themselves to short vignettes, especially when the filmmakers can’t (or simply don’t) follow one particular animal throughout. Thus, danger needs to be introduced in the form of predators. In this film, it's birds, snakes, and reptiles attacking cute mammals, but the circle of life requires violent action. The snake is no more a villain than the baby bat is a hero; we just find more to connect with in the latter.

We build connections through the screen, find moments of humanity where there may not be any, apply our own life experiences to alien creatures beyond our ken. What are we really looking at when we see these things? What are we searching for? What meaning can be drawn from this activity?

Matthew McConaughey narrates this movie.