Bear ecologies and settler ecologies: Jack Love, ‘Bear Ecologies in Alejandro González Iñárritu’sFilm Adaptation of The Revenant’, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 23, 2, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Bear ecologies and settler ecologies: Jack Love, ‘Bear Ecologies in Alejandro González Iñárritu’sFilm Adaptation of The Revenant’, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 23, 2, 2024

06Jan25

Excerpt: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film The Revenant (2015) follows the character of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) through the beautiful and harsh South Dakota wilderness in the 1820s. Based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel as well as historical events, and co-written with Mark L. Smith, this film portrays the characteristic nineteenth century Western narrative in which European settlers struggle to live within the North American landscape. Glass acts as a sort of American figure common in literary works set on the North American frontier. However, this protagonist’s actions are distinct from the other fictional American frontiersmen of other literary works and films. The famous bear-mauling scene in The Revenant – in which Glass is viciously attacked by a mother grizzly – signals to this distinction in his character. Not only does it signify Glass’s need for physical healing, but it enables him to understand the damages of European-American colonialism to the environment around him. But the mother grizzly bear is not merely a symbolic representation of nature’s resistance to colonialism. The animal is also an agential figure who chooses to attack Hugh Glass in the narrative. Through the bear’s choice to take up a defensive posture, it also becomes a victim of colonialism. In The Revenant, the mother grizzly acts as a force that punishes Hugh Glass’s complicity in American expansion. Rather than continue to hyper-focus on his struggle to survive, the bear scene is the catalytic moment through which the narrative structure of The Revenant becomes more attentive to the ecology of the South Dakota landscape. After Glass and his fellow pelt traders escape an Arikara attack that occurs at the beginning of the narrative, the party finds themselves in a dense forest deep in indigenous territories yet to be exploited by colonization. Glass, being the archetypal frontier guide, scouts the area surrounding the remaining traders to secure a safe path back to Fort Kiowa before the pursuing Arikara catch up to the traders. As he wanders through the forest, he encounters a group of bear cubs and, before he can even react, a mother bear viciously attacks him. She drags Glass across the forest floor, shredding the flesh on his torso and back in the process. For a moment, his chances of survival look slim as he desperately fights back against the overpowering strength of the bear. After a while, he locates and loads his rifle while crawling around the forest floor in agony. Finally, after finding his rifle, he shoots the bear multiple times, eventually killing the powerful animal as it bears down on top of him. This violent sequence is uncomfortable for most viewers, and Glass should not have survived this encounter. Yet, his rifle – which, in other adaptations of this story, he prizes above human life itself – extends him a lifeline. He has cheated death with a weapon of destruction most associated with colonialism. Further, the mother grizzly’s tragic death defies the ecological hierarchy, configuring Glass and his rifle as invasive species that damage both human and more-than-human beings native to the South Dakota landscape. His miraculous survival and recovery, which takes the remainder of the film, leads him to a mild realization surrounding the horrors of westward expansion. What is striking about this bear encounter is the similarity to events and themes in William Faulkner’s story “The Bear” in Go Down, Moses. In fact, Iñárritu himself has claimed that Faulkner is one of his main storytelling inspirations (“Alejandro”). In this story, Faulkner addresses the mythic qualities of nature, and the ways in which humanity violates its relationship with it. The story follows Isaac McCaslin and his “ritualistic encounter[s] with Old Ben,” the bear that the McCaslin men and friends hunt every year on their plot of land in the American South (Lewis 104). According to many in the hunting party, Old Ben is “the head bear” of the woods (Faulkner 190). According to John Lyndenberg, Old Ben serves as “the preternatural animal that symbolizes for them their relation to Nature and thus to life” (65). The men’s hunt becomes a ritual where all feel compelled to challenge and revere Old Ben, their mythic god of the wilderness. Similarly, the bear Hugh Glass encounters in the South Dakota forest appears out of the wilderness as an almost mythic representation of the natural world. In Faulkner’s bear story, Melvin Backman argues the relationship that Isaac McCaslin has to Old Ben is tribe-like in that the bear embodies the role of “chief of the wilderness” (597). In the text, McCaslin undergoes a series of trials of initiation into the ways of the wilderness, and he “would have to win acceptance from the chief” (Backman 597). The only way to accomplish this feat is by rejecting symbols of civilization and thus “surrender himself completely to the wilderness” (Backman 597). For example, Isaac McCaslin sheds tools of “civilization” like his compass and instead navigates his way through the forests based upon his instinct and know-how alone. During his wilderness trials, McCaslin feels as though Old Ben is constantly observing him among the brush and trees of the dense forest (Faulkner 199). At one point, he even sights the bear: “it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him” (Faulkner 200). In the end, Isaac McCaslin’s viewpoint drastically shifts, and he rejects the institutions of his father by refusing to inherit the land the McCaslin family “owns.” As an old man, he refuses to repudiate the land that he is supposed to inherit from his family. He says, “[The land] was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father’s and Uncle Buddy’s to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather’s to bequeath” (Faulkner 245-246). After witnessing Old Ben in the woods, he realizes that taking ownership over land is an act of violation that is harmful to everyone involved. This revelation occurs after Old Ben is brutally killed by the hunters in a manner McCaslin finds utterly repulsive. He is disillusioned as he watches Old Ben suffer grave violence for the sport of it. In both narratives, the bear’s death signifies a moment in which the powerful animal imparts its own ecological wisdom onto its human counterpart. In Faulkner’s story, Isaac McCaslin is bestowed with this symbolic gift. In The Revenant film, Hugh Glass is given this knowledge despite also acting as the mother grizzly’s murderer. Thus, in both narratives, the bear is only important insofar as it serves as the bestower of ecological wisdom. The bear is only important in its tragic death. When both texts are read in ways that centralize the American male protagonist (or marginalize animal life to mere symbols), they fit within the long literary tradition that focuses on the civilization-wilderness dichotomy. McCaslin and Glass are both repulsed by what they perceive as civilization and instead turn to the frontier or wilderness as a place of vitality. Indeed, this move away from the modern or civilized world has long been perceived as a driving influence on white American cultural identity. As Henry Nash Smith claimed back in 1950, cultural thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner “maintained that the West…was the most important among American sections, and that the novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European heritage in shaping American society” (3-4). William Cronon, of course, says that this idea is just the trouble with the wilderness. He argues that the notion of the frontier, that place Frederick Jackson Turner deems as so essential to American identity, is completely constructed (Cronon 14). More bluntly, Arthur Redding claims, “The myth of the frontier is simply a hoax” (321). Nonetheless, Annette Kolodny shows us that this wilderness-civilization dichotomy in colonial letters and literature is a primary metaphor for white American male experience even into the twentieth century, hoax or not (138). If we maintain our focus on the white male characters in The Revenant movie or even “The Bear,” then both grizzlies serve as symbols that enable McCaslin and Glass to see through the veil of so-called civilization. Additionally, these readings place value on the environment insofar as it aids human characters in regenerating or redefining their own identity. The environment, the nonhuman life within it, and even the indigenous peoples who long claim the frontier as their home only matter in their relation to our white protagonists. Approaching The Revenant, “The Bear,” and other frontier literatures from this perspective is still important. By doing so, we can analyze how the frontier myth persists into the present day or, conversely, how artists attempt to subvert or deconstruct this dichotomy that separates the wild from civilization. Yet, we miss out on so much else these texts might have to offer when we remain focused on characters like Hugh Glass. The nonhuman animals and the environment in which The Revenant is set deserve far more critical attention. Therefore, I argue that it is not enough simply to look at the bear in The Revenant as a mere catalyst for Hugh Glass’s transformation. Though Mario Ortiz-Robles convincingly claims that all literary animals serve human purposes, we still must look at the bear itself, and how it claims its own agency as a political figure even if it loses its life due to American expansion (2). The bear is more than a symbol or metaphor to be interpreted by critics and audience members. Yes, the mother bear can function in these ways, but it is also a living being within the narrative itself. Of course, to hearken back to Ortiz-Robles, all literary animals serve anthropocentric goals in any narrative, and the bear in The Revenant is no different (2). Hence, we must look at the nonhuman animal simultaneously as a being in relation to Glass and as a being in its own separate sphere of existence, insofar as we can. The bear certainly serves as a metaphor of change or punishment for Glass, but it is also “a material organism with its own agency” (Lönngren 43). To examine the bear in its own right, we must first revisit the mauling scene depicted in Iñárritu’s and Smith’s adaptation. Glass wanders about the underbrush of a lush forest alone when he suddenly encounters small bear cubs. The trapper lifts his rifle to his shoulder, aiming it towards the animals in front of him. As he does this, the silhouetted figure of a much larger bear appears behind him. Before he can rotate his rifle towards this shadow, a mother grizzly swiftly paws Glass to the forest floor. The mother defends her cubs from an invasive predator, choosing to appear out of the underbrush where she was formerly hidden. The bear’s very appearance at first seems to fit within the common American western frontier trope where the living beings in the frontier – both indigenous people and animals – exist simply to stifle the white man’s progress. Writing on the film adaptation of The Revenant, Jack Rutherford claims that the violence of the bear and the Arikara attack at the beginning of the film moralizes Glass’s quest for the settler-colonial advance inherent to the western genre (72). In other words, the bear attack is just another obstacle to the frontiersman. It centers the white protagonist while marginalizing indigenous people and the western frontier itself as a place of violence. While the bear certainly intrudes within the narrative simply to inflict violence, it is a defensive move. She is provoked by Glass’s very placement in the forest. It is actually Glass who intrudes upon the grizzly bears, and he is also responsible for the real or at least more disturbing form of violence in this sequence. Much like other frontier hero narratives, “the bear represents aspects of the wilderness that are incompatible with Euro-American civilization” (Rutherford 72). As such, it must die. In the case of The Revenant, however, the very act of defeating the bear in combat is based upon reliance on a colonial machine: the rifle. Glass’s choice to use the weapon in such a way does not embody the “heroic” often associated with the legendary frontier hero. On the contrary, it sheds light on the truth of this kind of narrative much in the same way Old Ben’s death in “The Bear” undermines the sacred hunting story the McCaslin family appropriates. In both, the sheer destructive violence of the weapon reveals its exploitive nature. As Jack Rutherford and other critics accurately suggest, The Revenant still centers the white male frontiersman at the expense of the indigenous humans and animals in the South Dakota environment. Hugh Glass, or Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, still receives the greatest amount of screen time. Nonetheless, the bear mauling scene is pivotal as it adds dimensions to the oft-neglected reality of this figure and western narrative more broadly. Most western narratives depict the human-nonhuman/animal struggle as something almost herculean. Take, for instance, the legend of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Both men were said to have killed bears in their lifetime while wandering the frontier. Indeed, a common legend of Crockett claims he dispatched his first bear at the age of three (see Cannon). To be a legend of the frontier, wrestling and defeating the apex North American land mammal seems to be a necessary rite of passage. The ingenious western hero must outwit the powerful animal in a struggle for supremacy over the landscape. Charles Waugh calls the ritualistic bear killings we see in American fiction “as a moment that defines some part of the national character” (25). Waugh suggests that the bear killing plot is a rhizomatic, nonlinear narrative trope that continually arises in American literature from early colonial days to the twenty-first century (25). He proves his point by looking at a few bear-killing texts, including Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, T.B. Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. According to Waugh, these texts “establish a tradition with real-life analogues and consequences that, in turn, point to important and problematic characteristics in American culture,” which is also the case in the movie (25). Glass’s ingenuity when facing his bear derives solely from his ability to discharge a rifle. Without it, he is doomed to death by mauling. No skill or physical feature can protect him from the might of the mother grizzly he fights. Glass is an intruder in her environment even if he knows it better than the average Anglo-American fur trapper. In the novel, Michael Punke also emphasizes the importance the Anstadt rifle to Glass’s survival (24-25). It is his lifeline, and it must be used strategically to defeat the mother grizzly. So, rather than firing the weapon from a long distance, Glass lures the mother near his injured body before firing the rifle into the animal. This bait-and-switch move ultimately saves his life, but it is a cruel and almost exploitative action. In fact, his choice of combat is representative of North American settler colonialism generally, and the mother bear dies with a singular motive: to protect her own cubs from harm. Hence, the ritualistic bear killing we see in the movie and the novel, to follow Waugh’s critical trajectory, points to the value of the rifle in American culture.

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