One With the Tiger. Steven Church
instructed Villalobos who, to everyone’s surprise, was still alive, to roll toward them.
David was bitten and clawed and dragged around by his foot, and he suffered numerous bite wounds; but Bashuta did not break his neck and did not kill him. For whatever reason, the tiger displayed an unexpected and unpredictable level of restraint and patience—behavior that looks, in retrospect, a lot like mercy.
Or perhaps, as one zoo employee told me, “He was just lucky that tiger wasn’t hungry.”
In the second-day news stories, Villalobos was described by his attorney Corey Sokoler as “very intelligent” and “very caring,” and reports surfaced that David had told the responding New York City Police officer, Detective Matthew McCrossen, that as the tiger mauled him, he’d stroked Bashuta’s face, petting the beast like a common house cat.
David believed he’d forged a bond with the tiger, and that he’d crossed over and developed a connection that was hard to describe. Perhaps David imagined himself someone who lived between the civilized world and wild nature. Perhaps he believed he’d succeeded in bridging the divide between human and animal, that he had crossed over to their side, if only for a second.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a little jealous. Maybe that’s why I traced his trip to the zoo. Maybe I just couldn’t get his story out of my head. Ever since I read the first reports of David’s leap, I’d been somewhat obsessed, losing myself down rabbit holes of research into similar stories.
David was arrested and charged with felony trespassing. His parents blamed Adderall for his behavior; and perhaps his mind had gone a bit wild and unruly, a bit savage, but David told officials that his leap wasn’t caused by drugs and wasn’t a suicide attempt. He wasn’t depressed or delusional. He wasn’t even really trespassing.
He was going home.
David told anyone who would listen, “I was testing my natural fear. You would not understand. It is a spiritual thing, I wanted to be at one with the tiger.”
WHEN DAVID VILLALOBOS JUMPED from Bengali Express Monorail into Bashuta’s cage, he also leaped straight into my consciousness. Something about his story cracked open a well of curiosity that bordered on obsession. I followed all the initial news reports and the follow-up stories about the incident. I couldn’t get enough. I wanted all the information, all the facts and fluctuations, anything I could read about it. I wanted to get inside the story somehow. I’d heard of people leaping into cages with apex predators. But most of the time they don’t survive to tell a story. David survived only to be vilified and mocked, publicly indicted as deranged and suicidal. But this story wasn’t his story, or the whole story. Aside from his statements to the responding officers and his boastful claim, landing “like a cat,” I could find few words from David himself. But his leap seemed to speak to me in ways that were hard to understand.
It seemed too easy to write him off as crazy. Even retelling the story of his leap here seems ridiculous, even comical or absurd, like a tale I trot out at parties to get gasps or laughs. Who does such a thing?
As is often the case, such questions become vessels for my own explorations. I wanted to understand the thinking of such savage and unruly minds. I wanted to get close to the subjectivity of people who push the boundaries between human and animal, who come close to crossing over; and I wanted to understand what drives someone like David Villalobos to make the leap, to thrust oneself into an encounter with an apex predator.
What did he mean by calling it a “spiritual thing”?
I wanted to understand what ecstasy exists, what promise of spiritual connection imbues such encounters and how it can seduce someone into risking his life. But I guess I’m also trying to understand my own interest and compulsion to come close to this experience, my lifelong desire to inhabit these tales of survival in the face of animal savagery, as well as the larger pop culture embrace of these stories. Why do such stories persist, and why do we persist in loving them?
PERHAPS SOME OF MY odd obsession started (or was rekindled) in the Fall of 2007, when I was contacted by a former student, an instructor in the Mass Communications and Journalism Department at the university where I teach. He presented me with an odd request.
He asked if I’d be willing to play-act the role of a bear attack victim for his beginning reporting class. He explained that there would be a mock press conference where his students would ask me questions. He explained that I just had to pretend that I’d survived a bear attack.
That was all.
“Just a little role-playing, a little acting,” he promised.
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF my kindergarten non-speaking role as a munchkin in the sixth-grade production of the The Wizard of Oz, I’d never done any acting; and I knew next to nothing about pretending to be someone else. But I said yes anyway and began preparing for my role. I was told the students would be asking me questions for a “second-day,” or follow-up story, and that I should be prepared to answer them from the perspective of the survivor. It dawned on me, vaguely at first, that I would be expected to offer a convincing facsimile of a bear attack victim. It dawned on me, quite clearly and quickly, that I was in way over my head and had a lot of work to do.
The Oscar award–winning star of the 2015 film The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for his dedication to the craft of pretending to be someone else. He works extremely hard to become another person. As a “method actor,” DiCaprio tries to immerse himself as much as possible in the subjective reality of his characters. For The Revenant, this meant that DiCaprio did everything he could to become the single father, hunter, trapper, guide, and bear-attack survivor, Hugh Glass, embodying the character in a way that many have called “masterful.” It was a performance that required a lot of physical sacrifice. And a lot of grunting, festering wounds, and visible suffering. He not only camped out in subzero temperatures and had to repeatedly dive into an ice-cold river wearing a bearskin coat, he also ate raw bison liver and—according to some (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