Smuggling a Penguin as a Metaphor for Resistance

In 1976, at the start of the military junta in Argentina, an Englishman rescued a penguin from an oil slick in Uruguay.

The Penguin Lessons is a movie (first, it was a book) based on the true story of an Englishman, Tom Michell, who rescues a penguin from an oil slick on a beach in Uruguay in 1976. At the behest of a would-be paramour, Michell brings the oil-covered bird back to his hotel to wash the black viscous stuff off the languishing creature. What ensues is a comedy of fumbles that culminates in the inadvertent smuggling and subsequent hiding of the penguin.

Michell is a new English teacher at an exclusive boarding school in Buenos Aires at the start of La Guerra Sucía, which saw the abduction and disappearance (Los Desaparecidos) of at least 30,000 people from 1976 to 1983. I reference this period in another post I published in March, “What Does the Beginning of a Dictatorship Feel Like?,” about the military junta in Brazil.

An unlikely figure in the stuffy school, the penguin, eventually named Juan Salvador, becomes a fixture in Michell’s classroom and the unofficial school mascot. The movie is sentimental and wears its moral lessons on its sleeves (I’m interested to see how the book handles these themes). Still, Michell’s care of the penguin sketches the physiognomy of trepidatious resistance.

While in town picking up fish for the penguin, Michell stumbles onto the kidnapping of a young woman who works as a cleaner at the boarding school. A few men from the junta spill out of a car and grab her in broad daylight. Michell, who has befriended the girl and her grandmother, is only a few paces away from the scene and does nothing. He freezes, even averting his eyes when one of her kidnappers looks in his direction.

Many, including the character in the movie, consider this cowardice. Perhaps it is, but I wonder what resistance in the face of superior force should look like. In real life, Michell was a young man in his twenties during his time as a teacher in Argentina, but in the movie he’s a wispy late-middle-aged man. The men are younger, meaner, and outnumber him three to one. If he intervenes, the best-case scenario is that they’d ignore him. The worst-case scenario? He ends up in the car next to the young woman on their way to a black site to be beaten and tortured.

Does certain failure divest an act of resistance of its utility or meaning? Is it better to live to fight another day? Or does that simply rationalize cherry-picking convenient moments to resist? Maybe there is no such thing as certain failure. What if Michell would’ve spoken up? What if that would’ve emboldened other onlookers to speak up? What if that would’ve rallied a crowd against the three men? Maybe that would’ve been enough to thwart them, at least in that instance. Maybe it would’ve been enough to inspire the townspeople to band together in future clashes with agents of the junta. Maybe not.

This moment, at least for me, contextualizes the smuggling of the penguin within the theme of the story—the movie, mind you, not the book or the real account. When Michell first encounters the penguin ensnared by the oil slick, he justifies not helping the poor animal to the woman he is trying to woo. He explains that the penguin is likely doomed already, but she insists. After they clean the penguin, Michell leaves the bird in the hotel room, but the hotel forces him to take the penguin. Michell throws the animal into the ocean, but the penguin, separated from its colony, keeps waddling back to Michell. Every time he tries to get rid of the animal, including when he’s questioned at customs between Uruguay and Argentina, circumstances conspire to keep the bird with him.

Michell keeps finding reasons not to help the penguin. The bird is doomed. Keeping a penguin is not legal. Customs will confiscate the penguin. The school will banish the penguin. The bird will be better off in a zoo. One can’t properly care for or feed a penguin. As unlikely and impractical as saving Juan Salvador was, it worked. Rescuing Juan Salvador wasn’t just an act of charity, because he returned the favor by bringing light into Michell’s life and into the school’s classrooms and corridors during a dark time for both Mitchell and the school.

I suspect it played out quite differently in real life, as the series of events seem unrealistic, even a smidge fantastical, but I see the movie, and specifically the rescue of Juan Salvador, as a parable for resisting tyranny. However unlikely a victory may appear, however silly the act may seem, resistance is worth it, not just for its intrinsic merit but because its success cannot be measured in advance.

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