One With the Tiger. Steven Church
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 to be an easy interview, and that I could try to derail their questions or be evasive. It was their job to ask the right kinds of questions, to steer my comments into something they could use. He told me that in a previous year the man who’d played my role had gone to the lengths of wrapping his head in gauze and bandaging an arm in order to look the part. This guy was the Leo DiCaprio of class visits.
I made no real effort at looking the part. I wore a baseball cap pulled down low over my eyes, and I carried a cup of coffee. Though I’d never really had an intimate or violent encounter with a bear, a costume seemed less important than being able to capture the emotional and intellectual reality of what it’s like to survive a bear attack. I thought I should first call upon some of the things I knew about grizzly bears and Glacier National Park.
I also wrote out an entire life story for Stephen Haas . . . because that seemed necessary. And because I tend to over-prepare for anything like this, or because I’m more “method actor” than I care to admit. It’s true that I felt as if I needed to get close to the subjectivity of Stephen Haas’s experience, even if only through my imagination. I needed to become Stephen Haas.
I figured that it would help my story that—in real life—I had actually stopped in Glacier for a couple of nights on my way to Alaska in 1995 with my girlfriend (the girlfriend who would later become my wife and the mother of my children, and the woman I would eventually have to divorce after almost two decades of marriage and partnership). I thought my knowledge of the place would add some authenticity to my performance.
At Glacier National Park we’d stayed in a campground that had recently been invaded by a large grizzly. Signs had warned us to be vigilant about keeping food, or anything with an odor, outside our tent. It rained on us for two days and we day-hiked in a downpour, scared the whole time we might run into a wet and grumpy bear. We slept in the truck because it was easier than trying to set up a tent in the rain. We never saw any bears or signs of bears, but the traces of their presence seemed to float around everywhere like mist, like something you take into your lungs and it fills you up. And I figured I could use this kind of feeling in my performance. I could talk about the fear and the exhilaration tingling in my extremities, the way every sound seemed amplified.
FOR MY ROLE, I tried to imagine what Stephen Haas must have felt and thought at the time, tried to create him as a character in my mind. I wanted to tap into the subjectivity of the experience, which meant that I spent a lot of time reading reports of bear attacks, the wash of them sweeping over me until I could spit out facts and figures like Rain Man.
I also had my own questions for Stephen. I wondered how he’d managed to escape the tent when Janey didn’t, and how he found the cave nearby. I wondered about the nature of their relationship. Janey was older and had a grown daughter. How did they know each other? Had they been camping