Cute Killers

Living in the city, you forget about animals. They're mostly pretty small, a few bugs, rats, the occasional raccoon, and a few secretive coyotes. The sight of a skunk ambling along in the bushes outside my window is an occasion for delight and surprise. In the city humans dominate, but in the country the odds are a bit more even.

When I return to my family's farm in the Kootenays, the bustling, teeming world of living things, garter snakes, leopard frogs, humming birds, prairie dogs, muskrats, chipmunks, elk, coyotes and bears, is always a surprise. You are surrounded from the moment the dawn chorus breaks until three the next morning when a lone coyote warbles unholy notes that echo across the pasture. One morning, just after breakfast, my sister gestured urgently. "Come here and look at this," she said. We walked outside into the freshness of the day, and she pointed at something on the path beside the house. Not more than a couple of feet from my mother's bedroom window was the biggest bear shit I've ever seen. "That's right beside the house!" I said. We looked at each other, our faces twins of each other, big-eyed and spooked.

Suddenly every tree and bush seemed a logical hiding place for a giant bear, not afraid of humans and intent on eating and shitting us out in one terrible moment of carnage. The Saskatoons with their snapped off limbs, the peaches trees given the same treatment, the mounds of scat the same size as piles of horse manure -- suddenly the signs of an active and busy animal were everywhere. My brain immediately began to spin a story about a giant bear besieging a remote farm house, along the lines of Jaws, a huge but largely unseen force that sets upon a clutch of puny humans clustered inside. It almost spun itself inside my head, the scenes spilling out one after the other, as I lay awake at two in the morning, training my ears to catch every little whisper of sound. It's easy to be inspired when the sun disappears and the great big dark begins to slip and slide like thick syrup down the sides of mountains, pooling into hollows as deep as water. The sounds that wake you up in the middle of the night could be anything, but your brain twists and turns, making every little noise outside the window a heavy panting presence, teeth and claws and cunning, simply biding its time, waiting for sleep to claim you.

I tell my mother my great idea for a horror epic in the mould of '70s exploitation fare (Prophecy or Grizzly). She rolls her eyes and scoffs, "You've lived with bears around your entire life. Did you ever get eaten?" Well, no, but that's not the point. This isn't a real bear, it's the bear that lives in your brain, the scariest and most deadly variety there is. When is a bear not a bear? When it's a movie instead.

Flights of terror

Two of the all-time greatest creature features, Jaws and The Birds, are screening this weekend at the Pacific Cinémathèque.

If the singular massive shark of Jaws made an ideal vessel for humans fear, so too the many flying avian missiles in The Birds make for an equally satisfying deployment of human ego versus animal id. For those of you, all three or so, who haven't seen The Birds, the new 35mm print on display at the Cinémathèque is something to be relished. Since I already chewed a hunk out of Jaws a couple of weeks back, I'll have just a peck at The Birds.

Although they feature villainous animals, neither film really has much to do with actual creatures, like most films made by humans, they're primarily about what is going on in the people population. Whether they're stand-ins for God's punishment, a cosmic slap-down for human arrogance and hubris, or Freudian subtext run amok, the animals themselves are just a means to an end. In the case of Hitchcock's film, the story of Melanie Daniels and Mitch Brenner, and Mitch's mother and ex-girlfriend, eats up the bulk of the narrative. The sexual subtext alone could sink a freighter. The masses of critics and cultural theorists who have flocked to the film outnumber The Birds themselves, and really there isn't that much to say that hasn't already been said. Everyone has had a whack at it, from Camille Paglia who states, "The Birds charts a return of the repressed, a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed,” to Slavoj Žižek zipping around in a motorboat, yammering on about wanting to fuck Mitch in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. But for all the Oedipal imbroglios, maternal super-egos, and raw incestuous energy, to paraphrase only a few of the theories, the film's central mystery remains just that. Why do the birds attack?

The film offers no answers. There is no reason for the birds to attack and kill humans, they simply do. Upon re-watching the film, it isn't actually the attacks that terrify and unnerve as much as the moments before anything happens, the silent landing of the crows on the jungle gym, the rustle of the starlings massing outside the house. It is the thing that isn't seen, whether that’s an imaginary bear lurking just outside your window or a massive great white shark just below the surface of the water, that is the most terrifying and ultimately the most fascinating.

'Chaos, hostility and murder'

Even in the realm of documentary the unseen is always better than the seen. Werner Herzog's decision to not include the actual audio of Timothy Treadwell being eaten alive in Grizzly Man was a moral and correct choice, as the director himself stated he wasn't making a snuff film. But it also has the odd effect of heightening the six minutes of audio footage into the stuff of nightmares. Immediately your brain spins scene after horrific scene of rending and tearing and eating.

Grizzly Man provides an interesting counterpoint to fictional animal attack films like Jaws or The Birds, in that the essential question that drives the plot forward is, in fact, answered. For Herzog, it is eat or be eaten. In the final coda of the film, the director talks about being given access to Timothy Treadwell's last videotape in which he may have filmed the bear that killed and ate him and his girlfriend. Herzog states that in the face of this killer bear, "I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy, I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature... this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food."

Herzog's characterization of the natural world as "chaos, hostility and murder" makes an almost perfect blank screen upon which we humans can project any form of narrative we like. Sentiment or horror, they're both part of the same story-telling impulse. But the quest to make sense of the animal world is always more about us than them. The terrible tale of Timothy Treadwell is a case in point. Leaving aside the apparent mental illness of the man, here was a human so driven to impose human ideas of love and emotion on animals that he literally was eaten for his efforts. The footage shot by Treadwell himself returns again and again to the sentimental view of the natural world in which there is harmony and meaning. But in reality, appetite often trumps all. A mother bear who devours her young to stave off starvation, probably does not feel a sense of yawning horror, akin to Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son". Or maybe she does. Who knows?

Pet notions

The human need to make sense and sentiment of all things turns thousands of years of instinct into love -- from the wild things outside in the woods to the dogs in our laps. Cynical, perhaps, but then again, the word "cynic" is derived from the Latin root for doglike. We make films to make sense of the world. But the most frightening films reveal that there is no ultimately no sense to be found. There is no why, no reason at all, no meaning behind car accidents, brain tumours, or bear attacks. It just happens. But before we fall inextricably into existentialist malaise, when the fantasy and reality do collide it often makes you oddly feel better. 

One late afternoon, my son Louis and I straggled up from the beach, talking about ordinary stuff like Justin Bieber and hairstyles. I looked up to the distant house to see my mother waving her arms and yelling at us to stop. "There's a bear on the road, stay there, I'm coming to get you in the car." Just for a moment, I thought, "Here it is, the thing you only thought might happen, actually happening." But then my mother roared down the driveway, and we jumped in. Of the bear itself, there was no sign.

After our near encounter, I went downstairs to get something for dinner, and found a frog no bigger than a penny sitting on top of the freezer. I took him outside, cupped in the palm of my hand, and set him loose in the garden. Looking at this tiny creature, just a glimpse of the curious equanimity present in his eye was enough to make me breath again. Whether it was real or imagined doesn't actually matter.