Fisherman´s tale

 

My second attempt at a review of a recent Loch Ness docu.

“Monster: The Mystery of Loch Ness” is a three-part documentary about the hype surrounding the Loch Ness monster. At this stage, essentially everyone in the world has heard of the Scottish lake and its mysterious denizen. The so-called “surgeon´s photo”, supposedly showing Nessie peeking out of the dark waters of the loch, is one of the most iconic photographs ever taken.

It´s also, ahem, a hoax. Indeed, it seems most smoking gun evidence for the monster´s existence is the result of, shall we say, strongly motivated reasoning. The Rines “flipper photo” (published in Nature magazine of all places) is perhaps the most egregious. One of the few real pieces of evidence that *something* might be down there comes from an expedition led by a super-skeptic who very self-consciously tried to debunk Nessie. The guy even looks like Charles Darwin! Maybe some one (or some thing) really is messing with our minds here…

What makes “Monster” fascinating is its Nessie-like sneak peek into the subculture surrounding the elusive creature, a bewildering maze of eccentric British lords, crazy American inventors, rookie teenagers and hippies. Not to mention thousands of tourists visiting Loch Ness every year in the hope of getting their own little glimpse of the mystery. Several of the interviewees admit that their entire lives revolved around the Loch Ness monster…until they suddenly realized that perhaps there was nothing to it. A rough landing?

Despite being three parts long, “Monster” says next to nothing about the situation before 1933, the quasi-official starting point of the saga. Legends about strange creatures in Scottish (and Irish) lakes are centuries-old, but it´s only in modern times that the monster of folklore becomes a “hidden plesiosaur” or something to that effect, obviously inspired by the horror picture industry and dinosaur craze. Traditionally, the monster of Loch Ness was imagined to be a demonic horse! Each time-period has its own boogies…

It will be interesting to see if and how this modern folklore, or is it fakelore, will evolve in the future. One ironic side-effect of skeptical documentaries like this one is (of course) that they perpetuate the legend it tries to debunk by making it known to a new generation of TV coach potatoes. My guess is that cryptozoology will become more forthrightly supernaturalist in the future (maybe it has already). Climate change will make this transition downright inevitable. If not even dramatically altered living conditions can flush out a flesh-and-blood monster, the logical conclusion is that it either doesn´t exist at all…or can hide in the spirit-world.

But what did “Darwin” (Adrian Shine) find during his debunking operation? I don´t think anyone really knows, but analysis of DNA samples from the water show that a lot of eels live in the loch. Some eels can indeed become quite large, and also have very long life-spans. So maybe there is something in the accursed lake, after all: the world´s largest fisherman´s tale!