Certain species of hawk moths, such as the death’s head hawk moth, have achieved a level of fame in the movies. Many film lovers will know them as the calling card of Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs.” Dark, twitchy moths with markings that look like skulls they’re pretty creep-tastic bugs. Turns out, they’re also kind of beautiful. They are as Nocturnes poetically shows us a complicated and fragile kind of moth, just one among many kinds in the world: Mothness. Nocturnes takes us closer to these moths than ever before on film. The images are arresting, but what researcher Mansi Mungee finds is way scarier than any bug Bill could come up with. These moths are climate change alarm bells.
Mungee and her assistant Bicki Marphew are cataloguing hawk moths in a region of India’s Eastern Himalayas called Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary, where Mungee has set up shop for several years (Bicki is Bugun Indigenous). They set up screens with buckets below; all night long, thousands upon thousands of different moths flutter onto the screen every few minutes or seconds until their wings give out and then they fall into the bucket below; when morning comes around again there will be hundreds dead (or dying) moths in each bucket. We see this process over and over again it never gets less astonishing. There are so many kinds! So many shapes! So many sizes! So many colors! What strange and marvelous sights these things are. But for Mungee et al., it’s specifically about hawkmoths right now.
Manshi Mungee observes one such moth that arrived at night on one such screen. They photograph them meticulously; they pay attention to these ones first because they are “hawk” moths, and Mungee has been studying the relationship between their size and altitude above sea level for several years. Every time she moves up or down the mountain, she measures more. Every few hundred meters there is another set of traps to be opened, boxes to be filled with dry ice (at lower altitudes) or light (at higher ones), camera lenses to be focused, moths to be photographed before they are measured and released. One night at the highest site reveals a surprise: an elephant one of two that have recently entered the sanctuary lumbering through an open meadow on a ridge.
These two things awe and alarm are inextricable from each other now. It’s not just that this is a lot of moths Bicki says over dinner one night that he thinks it’s strange how many moths there are this year; he doesn’t remember seeing so many in previous years; but it could also just mean that there were no screens here before last year, which would mean there was no one here looking for moths until then either; but Mansi agrees with him anyway because she is inclined toward alarm. They put their screens out in May, when the dry season begins in these parts of India, but already something seems off: It is still raining every day. This never used to happen.
Nocturnes poetically captures the monotony of research as Mungee and Marphew watch their screens each night. Moths appear on her screen like apparitions. And it captures what is thrilling about discovery as you look at them looking at all these different kinds of moths. There are so many kinds! So many shapes! Why does this one look like bird shit? So many sizes! So many colors! What strange and marvelous sights these things are! People think moth means brown-winged thing flapping around porchlight, but there are more kinds of moths than butterflies. They’re actually quite fetching. They have distinct markings and patterns that rival hummingbirds in their appeal.
Nocturnes puts you right inside these things’ world. Their wings never stop flapping on the screen. The hum of wings is always there sometimes a skin-crawlingly gross soundtrack; sometimes a refreshingly soothing one.
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