Leo and the Bear-Beaver

A Movie Review of The Revenant

"Leo DeCaprio got raped by a bear," I read on the internet, so I was eager to see a bit of interspecies porn. I love visiting the Grand Tetons, which literally translates as big boobs, so I figured The Revenant was about nature paying back all those fur trappers who fucked nature plus their horses, knotholes, and prairie-dog holes. They even named ladies' private parts after the peaceful dam-builder that they trapped to near extinction. A nature-revenge porn movie!

The movie starts well enough, setting the mood with lots of fog and uncertainty, reminding me of the laundry Tim Robbins enters in Shawshank Redemption just before getting gang-banged by a group of prisoners called the Sisters. A little foreplay conflict, with a bit of blood and killing, set the stage for the bear's grand entrance. I figured Leo was about to get it up the butt as a metaphor for nature paying back the screwing it had received by European-Americans. But no! Instead, in wander a couple of cubs.

Cubs? This powerful metaphor escaped me at the time—the moral righteousness of the strong protecting the innocent, even to the point of death. Still, do the kids have to watch Dad forcefully expel the intruder? And where was the story heading? Surely not a rape in front of the kids!

As the huge grizzly appeared on the screen, I gasped. It was a female. And we all know a female with two little ones has no interest in sex. What was Leo thinking? The subtitles nearly showed the bear's thoughts: "You're going to have to stick me with something harder and bigger than that puny earthworm." And then she mauled the shit out of him.

Unfortunately for the nature-revenge metaphor we've been building, Leo did indeed stick the bear with something other than his manhood—a knife that was in reality too small to kill her, but she agreeably played dead, as this was a Hollywood movie, and I hope she was paid well in salmon or trout. The metaphor that actually works is something like this: We've done our best to screw over nature to the point where she is nearly dead, and in turn we may be to the point of nature killing us in return. Is dying due to new diseases, hurricanes and flooding, droughts and starvation, warfare over diminishing resources and religious conflicts, really so much better than getting raped by a bear?