Lemmings Don't Jump: The Disney Documentary Problem

To call someone a lemming is to accuse them of a very particular failing: the mindless following of a crowd over the edge of a cliff, all the way to a pointless death, because everyone else is doing it. The word carries an entire fable in a single syllable. It is one of the most efficient insults in the language, and it rests on a belief that almost everyone holds and almost no one has examined, which is that lemmings, the small Arctic rodents, periodically gather in their thousands and fling themselves into the sea in a deliberate act of mass suicide. They do not. They have never done so. And the reason so many people are certain they do can be traced, with unusual precision, to a single film released in 1958.

That film is White Wilderness, a Walt Disney nature documentary in the studio’s celebrated True-Life Adventures series. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In one sequence, sonorously narrated, a mass of lemmings is shown migrating across the tundra, gathering at the edge of a cliff, and then plunging over it into the water below, where the camera lingers on the drowning animals. The narration frames it as an ancient compulsion, a suicidal migration hardwired into the species. Millions saw it. For a great many of them it settled the matter forever. The trouble is that the sequence was staged from beginning to end, and understanding exactly how it was staged is the key to the whole myth.

The kernel of real biology

Before the fakery, there is a real animal and a real phenomenon, and conceding the truth of it is what makes the rest of the story legible. Lemmings are genuinely strange creatures, and their populations do something dramatic enough to have puzzled naturalists for centuries. In good conditions they breed with astonishing speed, and their numbers swing through boom-and-bust cycles, roughly every three to four years in many populations, that can see a local density explode and then crash almost to nothing. During a peak year the landscape can seem to seethe with them.

When a population booms, food and space run short, and lemmings disperse. They leave the crowded ground and strike out across the terrain in search of somewhere less packed, and because they are driven and numerous, they will attempt to cross obstacles that stand in their way, including rivers and lakes. Lemmings can swim, and they will enter water to reach what looks like open ground on the far side. Sometimes they misjudge. A body of water too wide, a current too strong, a shore too far, and animals drown, occasionally in large numbers. To an observer on the bank, a crowd of small rodents pouring into a lake and failing to reach the other side could look, from a distance and with the wrong assumptions, like a deliberate plunge to death.

So there is a genuine substrate: real population crashes, real mass dispersal, real drownings during river crossings. What there is not, anywhere in the scientific record, is suicide. The animals are trying to survive and spread, and some of them die in the attempt, which is a very different thing from a species evolving an instinct to destroy itself. Evolution does not build a drive toward self-annihilation, because any lineage that acquired one would remove itself from the future. The population crashes are now understood mainly through the pressures of predators, food supply and weather, the ordinary mathematics of boom and bust.

The point where the film departs from the truth

Here is where White Wilderness leaves the record behind, and the details were established beyond doubt by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary in 1982 called Cruel Camera, which investigated how wildlife films were made and interviewed people involved in the Disney production. The findings are damning and specific.

The lemming sequence was shot in landlocked Alberta, near Calgary, on the banks of the Bow River, far from the Arctic and far from the sea, a place with no lemming population and no ocean for hundreds of miles. The filmmakers did not have wild lemmings to film, so they bought them. Animals were purchased from Inuit children in the Churchill area of Manitoba, hundreds of miles away, and transported to the location. To create the impression of a vast migrating horde from a modest number of animals, the crew placed the lemmings on a large snow-covered turntable and filmed it revolving, so that the same few dozen creatures appeared, through editing, to be an endless streaming multitude.

Then came the plunge. There was no cliff over the sea and no suicidal instinct to capture, so the animals were driven off a river bluff, herded and in some accounts pushed over the edge by the crew, to fall into the Bow River, which the film presents as the ocean. What the audience took for a natural mass suicide was a staged event: imported animals, a rotating platform to fake the numbers, and a forced fall into a river dressed as a sea. The Oscar-winning documentary had manufactured the very behaviour it claimed to be documenting.

The myth that predated the film

It would be tidy to say Disney invented the whole idea, but the truth is subtler and more interesting, because the film amplified a belief that was already old. The notion that something was deeply peculiar, even self-destructive, about lemming populations had circulated among European naturalists for a very long time. In the sixteenth century the geographer Zieglerus and others recorded the folk belief that lemmings fell from the sky during storms, an attempt to explain how the animals could appear so suddenly and in such numbers on ground that had been bare. Later naturalists, grappling with the same mystery of the vanishing populations, reached for various dramatic explanations, and the idea of a lemming migration ending in mass death in the sea had taken some hold well before any camera existed.

What Disney did was take a vague and disputed piece of folklore and give it the one thing it had always lacked: apparently incontrovertible photographic proof, wrapped in the authority of a prestige documentary and stamped with an Academy Award. Before 1958 the suicidal lemming was a curious old story that a well-read person might have half-believed. After 1958 it was something people had seen with their own eyes, on a cinema screen, in a film that presented itself as science. The forgery did not create the belief so much as it promoted it from rumour to established fact, and it is that promotion, more than the original folklore, that fixed the myth in the modern mind and in the modern language.

A habit older and wider than one film

The lemming sequence was not an isolated lapse by a single crew, and seeing it in context makes the deeper problem clear. The staging of wildlife was, for much of the twentieth century, a quiet convention of the genre rather than a scandal. Animals that would not perform on cue were coaxed, confined, or provoked into the required behaviour; predators and prey were sometimes filmed in enclosures and cut together to imply a hunt that never occurred; captive creatures stood in for wild ones. The 1982 investigation that exposed the lemmings, the CBC’s Cruel Camera, was surveying an entire industry practice, and the lemming plunge was simply its most notorious single example.

The habit did not end with the black-and-white era. As recently as 2011 the BBC’s acclaimed series Frozen Planet showed a polar bear mother nursing newborn cubs in a snug den, footage widely assumed to have been captured in the freezing Arctic wild. It had in fact been filmed in an artificial den in a Dutch animal park, a technical necessity, since no camera could have survived beside a real wild bear at that moment, but one the programme did not make plain to viewers until the practice was reported. The disclosure caused a minor storm precisely because audiences hold nature documentaries to a standard of literal truth they extend to almost nothing else on television.

That reaction is the revealing thing. We accept, without complaint, that a drama is acted and a news bulletin is edited, yet we expect the nature film to be a transparent window onto the real, and we feel genuinely betrayed to learn otherwise. The expectation is understandable; the whole appeal of the form is the promise that we are seeing the world as it is, in places we will never go. But that same promise is what makes the form such an effective vector for a false belief. When a staged moment slips through, it arrives with the full authority of the genre behind it, and it lodges as fact in a way a labelled fiction never could. The suicidal lemming is the price of a form we trust too completely to interrogate.

Why the false version sticks

There are good reasons the suicidal lemming refuses to die even now that the fakery is documented, and they say something about why we hold the myths we do. The image is simply too useful. The lemming has become an irreplaceable metaphor for herd behaviour, for the human tendency to follow a crowd off a metaphorical cliff, and a metaphor that vivid and that convenient develops its own momentum quite apart from any facts about the animal. Every time the word is used as an insult, the myth is rehearsed and reinforced, and the more the metaphor circulates the more real the underlying belief comes to feel. The animal has been conscripted into a story about people, and the story about people keeps the story about the animal alive.

There is also the sheer authority of the source. A myth endorsed by a trusted documentary is peculiarly hard to dislodge, because the belief arrived wearing the credentials of fact. This is a recurring pattern in how false ideas about the natural world take hold and refuse to leave, the same shape found in the durable conviction that a bull is enraged by the colour red, when bulls are red-green colourblind and are reacting to the movement of the cape, and it echoes the way a Disney film also fixed the false idea of lemmings on a cliff in the popular imagination. In each case a satisfying picture, once installed, resists the duller truth that would replace it.

What the story is really about

Strip the staging away and consider what remains, because the residue is a lesson about trust rather than about rodents. A generation absorbed a falsehood about the natural world through nothing worse than their reasonable faith in a form, the documentary, that is supposed to show them reality. The betrayal in the lemming footage is a small one, no lives were harmed but the animals’, yet it exposes a large vulnerability: we grant the moving image, especially the image that calls itself a document, an authority we grant almost nothing else. When that authority is abused, even in the service of a better story, the false impression it leaves can outlast the correction by decades.

The people who believe lemmings leap to their deaths are not foolish. They watched a respected film that told them so, in the confident voice of science, and they trusted it, which is exactly what such a film asks its audience to do. The uncomfortable insight underneath the myth is how much of what we take for granted about the world we have never checked, having instead accepted it on the authority of a screen. The lemming, that supposed emblem of the crowd that follows without looking, turns out to be a rather sharp mirror. We looked at the film, and we followed.