IDRIS ELBA SHARES a strange but compelling kinship with cats, more so the wild kind. The English actor lent appropriate suavity to the voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. As Macavity in Tom Hooper’s musical litter-box Cats, he shimmied nude in a monstrously mutated form, his face glued onto a furry cat bod. All the fury and frustration over that faux-paw appears to have been channeled into the right hook he deploys against a rogue lion in his new movie Beast.
Across the three aforementioned movies, Elba’s attempts to embrace, reconcile, and overcome a beast in fact reflect the eternal struggle between man and the wild. What binds the two, separates them and keeps them straddling the fine line between co-existence and conflict — has long intrigued storytellers, regardless of the medium of their telling. But what gives cinema its potency is the medium allows for a persuasive expression of the beauty and brutality of the wild without the need for words.
There is a simplicity to the nature-run-amok movie and all its microgenres. By showing nature at its most unforgiving, it invites us to rethink our place in the ecosystem. What man must survive may be elemental, like tornadoes, volcanoes, or tsunamis. Or it may be a creature, mutated, giant-sized, alien or native to Earth. Be it Robert Shaw going full Ahab to capture a sneaky shark in Jaws or Liam Neeson battling a pack of hungry wolves in The Grey, by pitting man against an apex predator, these movies evoke the most primal thrills, built around the mechanisms that drive natural selection. Even if Beast isn’t a roaring triumph on the same level as Jaws, it still stokes our atavistic fears of hunter becoming the hunted and being devoured by a creature higher up in the food chain. With a lion virtually playing a serial killer in the movie, director Baltasar Kormákur taps into the idea of nature as an unstoppable force, reminding us that we are at its mercy, not the other way around.
Animals have served as subjects of visual art since its very birth. Cave paintings from the Stone Age trace a meaningful bond between man and beast. Over the centuries however the imbalance in power has grown more and more. Industrialisation has reduced all things nature to mere economic resources. Animals have been marginalised, from co-habitants to captives. John Berger, in his essay “Why Look at Animals?,” described how they have disappeared to a point where they now exist only as symbols. “What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought,” he wrote, “the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
To be sure, man vs wild movies are as much about the nature of man as they are about man’s inescapable conflict with the wild. Jaws is not just about a great white shark, but also about human folly. You have got a mayor insistent on keeping the beaches open because he is more concerned about his town’s economy than people’s lives. Given summer tourism makes up a substantial portion of the town’s revenue, he covers up the truth despite experts’ warnings. The last bit must sound familiar as our own politicians refuse to heed the warnings of climate change experts. In The Grey, Neeson and the other survivors of a plane crash somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness are hemmed in by a pack of wolves. As the survivors grapple with everything from masculinity to death to God, they come to realise men can be their own worst enemy.
The external conflict in the man vs wild movies exists for the protagonist to resolve an internal one. In Beast, Elba is wildlife biologist Dr Nate Samuels, a recent widower plagued with regret over not being there for his two teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) as their mother suffered from — and eventually succumbed to — cancer. When he takes his daughters to a South African game reserve, the trip is meant to heal their relationship and shorten the distance between father and kids. The rampaging lion they run into gives Nate the opportunity to do exactly that.
If the CG-rendered king of the jungle has a misanthropic streak, it’s because poachers killed his pride. Nate and his two teenage daughters are simply caught on the wrong side of its vengeful mayhem. The beast of the title is thus not as clear-cut as it may seem, as Elba too put it in an interview. “For me, it was really important that the lion isn’t the bad guy even though the film is called Beast,” he said. “The lion is a beast. Grief is a beast. Pain is a beast. Survival is a beast. These are themes that, when you look deeper into this picture, isn’t just about a lion chasing a man. It’s about a man chasing his life. It’s about daughters chasing their father. It’s about a family chasing the ghost of their mother.”
The beasts are often rendered larger-than-life to reflect the magnitude of our cultural anxieties. The radioactive lizard of Godzilla and the giant man-eating ants of Them! were born in the ‘50s as a response to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Some movies imagine pre-historic beasts having grown to larger proportions in closed ecosystems untouched by man. The croc in Lake Placid and the shark in The Meg are both examples of nature continuing to operate outside of our agency. The crocs in Crawl and the sharks in Sharknado, on the other hand, embody the threat of our impending ecological collapse, even if one movie is at least 1,000 times sillier than the other.
Before sharks birthed their own B-movie fest, all it took was one great white (and two notes) to change the course of movie history. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws remains the gold standard for the man vs wild thriller. Everyone thought twice before going to the beach, swimming in the ocean or even dipping their toes in it. Some still do, afraid of whatever lurks beneath the surface. And afraid, we should be.
The real wild is far removed from the Disney version, where animals are anthropomorphised into cuddly critters. Those who pretend the wild is a place where humans can live like neighbours next door to the animals, could meet a grisly end. Werner Herzog served a reality check in this regard with the 2005 doc, Grizzly Man. Through the tragic tale of American bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, the German director exposed the folly of romanticising the wild. Treadwell was a man so obsessed with bears he spent 13 years summer camping with them. Only the obsession ended up devouring him and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard whole. All the footage Treadwell shot is reframed by Herzog to show how nature can be cruel as well as humbling. Treadwell assigned personalities to the bears, and gave them infantilising nicknames like “The Grinch” and “Miss Chocolate.” At one point, he even suggests, “They’re not that different from us, really.” Herzog argues otherwise.
“What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears Treadwell filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy,” he says, as he looks at footage of a bear gazing right into the camera. “I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a saviour.”
What Herzog tells us, and what all the man vs the wild showdowns demonstrate, is that man doesn’t hold dominion over the wild, instead continues to remain at its whim.
You can stream Jaws on Amazon Prime Video and BookMyShow Stream; The Grey on Lionsgate Play; The Meg and Crawl on Amazon Prime Video; Grizzly Man on YouTube.
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