(perhaps apocryphal) reports—he even slept inside a dead horse.
DiCaprio himself has said many times that he and the entire cast regularly risked hypothermia while filming in temperatures as cold as –40 degrees Fahrenheit. Hands became numb. Equipment froze up and stopped working. DiCaprio did not, however, subject himself to an actual bear attack—even if their film shoots in the Canadian Rockies were occasionally threatened by the presence of wild bears—but you get the sense, watching the film, that were Leo called upon to answer questions from a class of journalism students about what it was like to be attacked by a bear, he could answer them honestly and exhaustively. He could tell them exactly what it felt like, and you would believe every word he said.
For my acting gig as an attack victim, the students’ mission was to uncover new details or new angles to my story, to find new meaning in events that had already been reported on; and my job was to both convince them that I’d actually been savaged by a grizzly bear, but also to confuse or derail them. But it now occurs to me that their assignment, their true mission, was perhaps my own as well.
My somewhat obsessive reading of attack stories, my imagining the horror and savagery, my desire to understand why David Villalobos would leap into a tiger cage, or why anyone would put oneself in close proximity to an apex predator, is, I suppose, driven in large part by my desire to discover new meaning beneath the surface details of these attack stories, to try and get inside the subjectivity of the experience. I wanted to “method act” my way closer to understanding.
The now-infamous bear attack sequence in The Revenant takes about five minutes of screen time. It begins slowly as DiCaprio’s character Glass sets off alone in the forest, scouting a trail for the hunting party he’s guiding. It’s early morning, just after dawn, and the light is perfect. Trees tower overhead, swaying silver and black against a gray-blue sky. The sound here goes ambient and, at first, all you hear are twittering birds, the staccato knocking of woodpecker, and the white noise of wind blowing through the treetops. Glass’s boots crunch through the brush.
He hears something, maybe. You’re not sure at first what it could be. The group was being tracked and hunted by a Pawnee chief searching for his kidnapped daughter, and they were on the run. Perhaps they’ve been found.
Glass pulls his hood down and stuffs a wad of chewing tobacco in his lip. There’s something out there. But you can’t see anything. All you hear is Glass’s breathing.
Or is that something else breathing?
You hear this deeper and more guttural sound, a huffing breath that doesn’t seem human. It sounds bigger, more animal, and it pulses beneath the images on screen like a rumbling bass line that builds and builds. You realize subconsciously that you’re listening to the bear. Your first fear is conditioned by this sound, by the bear’s amplified breath. And it is a deep fear, one that you feel in your own chest. There is no music, no soundtrack, just the bear breathing.
Two mewling bear cubs appear onscreen, scrambling through the dense undergrowth. Glass raises his rifle; and just as he turns around to look for the mother bear, we see her, over his right shoulder. She rises up on her hind legs, bellows an angry cry, and looks straight at Glass, who stands between her and her cubs. She drops to the ground and charges fast in a mad growling rush. Glass doesn’t even have time to turn around before he is slammed into a tree. The massive bear, weighing at least 400 pounds, rolls over Glass like a quivering wave of brown fur and teeth and claws; and the noise, the huffing and growling, the screaming, washes over you, pins you to your chair, and then recedes, leaving pools of silence where you know more danger is lurking.
At one point in the midst of the attack, the bear, standing on DiCaprio’s body, leans in close to his face, almost nuzzling him and sniffing at his neck. Two or three times the bear pauses for these moments of odd intimacy that look a lot to you like mercy mixed with curiosity; and the second time, she actually uses her head to roll DiCaprio over on his back before licking at his bloodied face in an almost tender way.
The camera gets so close to one of these moments that the bear’s hot breath fogs up the lens, a somewhat risky choice in the scene because it sort of breaks the spell by reminding you that this attack isn’t “real,” that it is being performed and filmed, probably computer generated; but it is also a craft choice that immerses you in the scene such that you feel the bear’s breath on your face. You feel your own vision fog. You become a sentient camera lens. And you can’t deny that you feel something for this bear—an intense level of emotion for this CGI creation—that seems inappropriate.
The bear is just trying to protect her children. At one point, she even pauses the attack to check on the cubs and make sure they’re safe before resuming her mauling of Glass. I know the feeling. She’s just doing what any parent would do. But she does it with such power, such strength and rage, and such commitment to savagery, part of me has to admire her. Part of me wants to be her.
She thrashes DiCaprio around as if he is a toy, ripping at his flesh, and pounding on his back with her paws, stomping him into the dirt. The two of them embrace again and again in this repeated act of consumption, and it seems impossible that either of them will survive to see their children.
When she’s been shot and mortally wounded, the bear charges, reluctantly, almost out of obligation, and DiCaprio plunges his long knife into the bear’s side, shoving the blade up into her heart or some other vital organ. Blood pours from her wounds, the two of them tumble down an embankment, and you feel a mixture of relief and sadness. It’s over now. Or it’s just beginning. And you feel your breath caught up in the top of your throat; you have to remind yourself to let it out. You have to convince yourself that it’s safe to breathe again.
The whole attack doesn’t last long, but it feels like forever. And I realized that, as I watched it in the theater, I’d pitched forward in my seat, my hands gripping the hand-rests like they were the safety bar on a roller coaster; and I made little noises, as if I was witnessing the attack live. When it was over, I turned to my friend and mouthed the words, “Holy shit.”
It sounds crazy to say this, but not only did I want to watch the attack again and again (and I have since), but part of me wanted to experience it firsthand. The cinematography and sound editing, the acting and special effects, all made it feel so real, so immediate and visceral, I wanted to jump into the scene. I wanted to feel the bear’s hot breath on my neck. I wanted to smell the deep woodsy stink of the bear’s coarse fur and its hot blood spilling over me. I wanted that kind of intense ecstatic experience—which is not necessarily to say that I wanted to die or even be mortally wounded. I wasn’t remotely suicidal. I just wanted to be close to the terror, to feel the energy of those precious moments. My friend just wanted the scene to end. At one point, she turned away from the screen, toward me, and I could offer her no solace. I couldn’t break my focus.
I realize that these do not sound like the thoughts of a rational person. These should not be the thoughts of an overweight writer, a classroom volunteer, a professor and member of professional organizations who has bad knees and wears sweatpants a good part of every day. These are not thoughts I even entirely understand. But I have them and I cannot deny their existence; at least part of what I’m doing here is trying to normalize these thoughts and complicate the stories we tell about this kind of thinking and this urge to witness.
Sure, the attack scene in The Revenant is gruesome, savage, and terrifying—the sort of film scene that might make some people afraid to go into the woods in the same way that Jaws made people afraid of the ocean. In many ways the star of this particular scene is the bear, while DiCaprio gets the rest of the movie to shine. The scene is also strangely intimate. Personal, even. Seductive, mythical, and spiritual in its implications.
It’s so visceral, so immediate and intense that it almost feels surreal.
