The Glamorous "Life" on the Discovery Channel

There was a Fergie song a few years back called "Glamorous" in which she spells the word glamorous and the refers to it as "the flossy". Perhaps this is her Gramma's friend Flossy, a hip elderly lady who wears bangles and bedazzled pants suits? Alas, no; flossy means "flashy, showy", as the Urban Dictionary will tell anyone who asks.

So Fergie tells us that her life appears flossy, but that she still eats at Taco Bell. She's a regular person with a seemingly glamorous job.

I watched two hours of the "Life" series on the Discovery Channel last night, and it made life in the wild seem extremely flossy. It was one stunning beauty shot after another of reptiles with Stretch Armstrong tongues, a female ostrich running (unsuccessfully) for her life, tiny frogs hurtling down cliffs, and fish, basilisks and Western Grebes dancing on water (not together, though they'd make a great inter-species dance company; probably get a lot of grants with that angle).

Anyone who's ever gone camping or walked within two hundred feet of a standing body of water swarming with mosquitoes can tell you that life is not flossy. "Life" is, but life isn't. It smells. It's dirty. It eats at Taco Bell. Anywhere there have been people -- and if you are there and if camera crews are there, then there have been other people there -- there are people-remnants, plastic wrappers or bits of toilet paper or initials inked on rocks or rock cairns or (and especially) footprints. To take pictures of the wild, you might have to frame out your Aunt Flossy (she booked the Alaska trip with you, of course; she collects pictures of wildlife and flirts with the young guides).

"Life" makes everything clean and precise. It's fascinating and informative and I very much enjoyed it, but it's also a Glamour Shots version of these creatures. They're wearing too much lipstick and posing with tilted heads in front of a pastel background, which is to say that the lighting is always very bright, the shots are very sharp, and the narrative is very clear. Nothing is chaotic or frightening or dull or matter-of-fact. Animals running for their lives look picturesque. You cannot feel the terror and the bursts of cortisone and smell the dust and sense the hot breath. The animals are presented in extreme closeups and in slow-mo. Slow-mo makes everyone look cool. It's the cheapest shortcut to glamour; it makes Steve Buscemi look like Steve McQueen. The whole thing is like the Wild West as interpreted by Sergio Leone: beautiful, visually and aurally precise and striking, and utterly untrue to life.

Amidst all the Oprah-narrated HD beauty, the most striking bits of the show are the few minutes at the end of the program when you see the crew on site shooting these incredible images. This is one scene: a cluster of cameramen perched for weeks next to a dusty, muddy waterhole where a poisoned water buffalo is mercilessly harassed by a pack of taunting Komodo Dragons. The cameramen stalk both the buffalo and the dragons; they stand and move the camera when the dragons run off. They watch the water buffalo get bitten by a Komodo Dragon, and they know what the buffalo does not; that he's been fatally poisoned and will linger for weeks. They settle down next to the Komodo dragons to watch him weaken and die.