the archive of iconic, can’t-forget movie scenes. Even though I know it’s not true, I want to believe that this attack actually happened and that I honestly witnessed it; and at least part of this is because I believe the scene speaks to a very real and very human compulsion toward animal savagery. It speaks to the urge that many of us feel to have—or at least to witness—such ecstatic experiences. It’s that urge, however taboo, to leap into an encounter with a force beyond our control, perhaps even beyond our comprehension.
It is perhaps not surprising, in response to this scene and the onscreen connection shared between DiCaprio and the bear, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and comedian Kevin Hart rapped about it at the MTV Movie Awards. Surrounded by backup dancers in bear costumes, the cohosts rhymed about other 2016 movies, but returning each time to the chorus, “You’ll always remember where you were . . . when LEO GOT FUCKED BY A BEAR!”
It’s funny. Other minor celebrities stand up to join the fun, reciting their own memory of where they were when LEO GOT FUCKED BY A BEAR, and everyone laughs. It’s quite a show. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. But here’s the thing: I believe the intimacy of this scene scares the average person more than the violence or gore, more than the undeniable terror of being attacked by a bear. They make weirdly homophobic jokes and perform this ridiculous rap with the backup dancers because, if they’re being honest, The Rock and Kevin Hart and all the others also want to be “fucked” by a bear.
Okay, so what they secretly want—what many of us want—is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself. It’s kind of like being fucked existentially, emotionally, and intellectually, perhaps also physically. It’s not a death drive, no Thanatos, or suicide ideation, but it is perhaps a drive to be destroyed or disassembled and then remade again. It’s a desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.
I think this is part of what David Villalobos wanted—or part of what I want to take from his story—and I think this destruction and rebuilding of the self is also at the heart of the audience’s experience of the bear attack scene in The Revenant. To be clear, I’m not arguing that Hugh Glass felt pleasure as he was being brutally mauled by a grizzly bear; but I am suggesting that this is what we, as audience members, feel when we watch the attack—pleasure mixed with pain and repulsion. This ecstatic jouissance is what tingles through our bodies as we pause, rewind, and replay the scene over and over again. This jouissance is what frightened the writers of the rap into calling it “fucking,” because there is something vaguely pornographic or at least voyeuristic about it; and you feel a little dirty for watching.
The bear, though behaving monstrously, does not necessarily come across as a monster, not in the same way that the shark did in Jaws or that some horror movie killer might scare us. She is just a bear being a bear, a mother protecting her cubs. She becomes both beast and phenomenon, both animal and annihilation. She is the hunted, not the hunter in this story; and the hunters are all white men, most of them weak, vile, or repulsive in some way. She is, in fact, one of the few female characters in the whole film. This bear is not a villain; that role is reserved for Tom Hardy’s character, Fitzgerald. This bear didn’t want or deserve this violence. This mother bear—this sublime and massive maternal creature—relied on savagery as protection. When your children are threatened, you do what you have to do. You don’t start the fight, but you finish it. You fuck up some asshole who gets between you and your kids.
At the end of the scene, the sow lies there dead, her thick brown mass sprawled out on top of DiCaprio’s mangled body, and her cubs are now left without a mother and a protector. You can hear them calling for her as the other men show up to pull the bear off of Glass. Their cries echo in the forest. The men pull her great mass off of Glass and she rolls over and flops onto her back, her head tilted down toward the camera. I can’t help but feel sorry for the bear. I don’t want her to die, but I know she has to for the sake of the movie. I know that it makes a better story if the monster dies and the hero survives. It makes the story a tragedy. But part of me wants the typical horror movie trope where she rises from the dead, lets out a monstrous roar, and savagely mauls three or four other men before finally dying at Glass’s hand.
A WEEK OR SO before I was expected to play the role of an attack victim, the teacher sent me a copy of the original AP wire story that the students had read. He also sent me some follow-up details. I sat down and read through my script, trying to imagine what it must have been like, what this man must have seen and heard, my brain already working over the details and reaching for the unique subjectivity of the experience. I started doing some research and pretty quickly lost myself in story after story of bear attacks in the United States. I wrote pages of notes and obsessed over my character and all of his possibilities. I realized at one point that I was dreaming almost nightly of bear attacks.
I emailed the teacher and confessed my nervousness at “acting” for the first time, particularly at the challenge of embodying the subjective experience of an attack victim. I was worried over the weight of responsibility. But he did his best to reassure and prepare me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This will be fun.”
BEING STEPHEN
The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.
—VICTOR HUGO
MISSOULA, MONT. (AP) — One hiker is dead and another hospitalized after a bear attack in a remote backcountry area of Glacier National Park.
National Park Service Rangers on Sunday night found Stephen Haas, 37, of Yakima, Wash., huddled in a cave and barely conscious, suffering from multiple injuries brought on by an attack by a grizzly. Haas’s hiking partner, Janey Craighead, 50, of Moses Lake, Wash., was found dead in a brushy area several hundred feet from the cave.
Haas was in serious but stable condition Monday at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, according to a hospital spokesman.
The attack occurred near Florence Falls in the Logan Pass area of the park, south of the Going-to-the-Sun Road.
Rick Acosta, a Glacier National Park spokesman, said that Haas and Craighead were on a three-day backpacking trip when a large grizzly attacked them early Sunday morning while they were asleep in their tent. Haas escaped the tent, but Craighead was trapped inside.
Haas threw rocks and sticks in an attempt to scare off the grizzly, which then pounced on him, according to Acosta. Haas received a concussion, a punctured lung, a sprained wrist, several broken ribs and numerous cuts and bruises in the attack, the Glacier National Park spokesman explained.
No additional details were immediately available. 1
I knew I’d be asked questions about the attack, and I understood that the reporters would be looking for updates or clarifications, angles that weren’t in the original story.
The instructor had made it clear that, as Stephen Haas, I didn’t have
