Читать книгу One With the Tiger - Steven Church - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI have a huge and savage conscience that won’t let me get away with things.
—OCTAVIA BUTLER
On Sept. 21, 2012, twenty-five-year-old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a $5 ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. The ride, built in 1977, promises on the Zoo’s website to take the visitor “above mud wallows, pastures, forests, and riverbanks to the heart of Wild Asia.” After leaving the station, David would’ve first crossed the mud wallows of the Bronx River, a shallow and polluted urban waterway, before making his way quickly into said heart of Wild Asia.
In September 2014 when I purchased my own ticket to ride, the conductor and tour guide, Devin, a twentysomething guy in khaki pants and a retail haircut, told us that the Bronx River was home to a pair of beavers, the first wild beavers spotted in the river in over a hundred years. One of them, Devin told us, was named “Jose.”
“His partner, the other beaver,” he said, “voted on by the public, is named ‘Justine Beaver.’”
Everyone laughed at Devin’s joke and stared down, searching for the beavers below, hoping to catch site of the local native celebrities. The monorail’s cars are built so that you only sit on one side, facing the left of the track instead of toward the front of the train; and though they have roofs with translucent skylights, the viewing areas open to the elements, bordered only by a short railing of metal tubes. It can make for a great show as you skirt the perimeter in what feels like a moving couch or section of sports bleachers; but on this day, we saw no celebrity beavers.
Devin drove the train, talked into a microphone, and played some prerecorded narratives about the animals and the zoo’s conservation efforts. The track circles the perimeter of the “Wild Asia” exhibits, and it feels like you’re waiting for a show of some kind. On his own ride, David Villalobos positioned himself in the last car, far from the conductor, and he listened patiently along with the rest of the visitors, waiting for his chance.
The exhibits in Wild Asia mostly consist of various species of deer and cattle, all of which look only slightly different in size and shape from the deer and cattle that we all know. If he had been looking for them, David might have seen spotted deer and Taiwanese Formosan deer and one called a “hog deer.” There are also wild horses, massive buffalo-esque cattle, hairless jungle pigs, and rock-climbing goats. But the king of the mountain—so to speak—and the animal most of us were waiting to see, was the Siberian tiger.
The day Villalobos visited in 2012, a 400-pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta was “on exhibit.” The tigers are the only apex predators in Wild Asia, and their habitat is separated in part from the monorail and the traffic on the nearby Bronx Expressway by a tall wood-pike fence that looks like something out of the movie King Kong. This is one of two tiger habitats in the zoo, the other being a place called Tiger Mountain, where you view the cats not from above but instead through thick panels of glass.
As the monorail tram left behind Cali the rhinoceros and curved past the fence, the open side of the tiger paddock slowly would’ve revealed itself, almost like a curtain parting, and a grand green stage, set for drama, open for the existential business of witness. The tramcars ran right along the top of the chain-link boundary fence, sixteen feet up in the air, and David would’ve been able to look directly down into the grassy hillside habitat.
On the day I visited, the weather was perfect—sunny and about eighty degrees with a slight breeze—and the paddock looked like some kind of idyllic picnic spot or forested campsite. The air was cool and seemed like it had been freshly washed. Three tigers live in Wild Asia, but because they are solitary and fiercely territorial, only one of them is on exhibit at any given time. Devin told me that one of the tigers likes to lay up against the fence, just beneath where the tram passes and is, thus, hard to see without leaning out over the edge of the car.
For my visit, a Siberian tiger named Yuri lounged on the hillside in the sun, raising his head to consider us as we passed. It took me a while to spot him at first, but I followed where Devin pointed. Strangely, it was easier to see the tiger if you didn’t look directly at him. Yuri was enormous and regal, a striped king reclined on a blanket of green; not hiding, he was still somehow camouflaged against the background, his stripes creating a veil of color and shade.
Three young boys traveling in the same car with me drummed their feet against the fiberglass benches out of either boredom or excitement as their nannies and grannies squealed and pointed at Yuri.
Though Yuri seemed to be napping like a common house cat, he was also menacing in a way that’s hard to articulate. Even from a significant distance he seemed dangerous. Something about his body—the size of his paws and his head, in particular—broadcast power and violence. Yuri was fun to look at, and it sent a little tingle up my spine to see him there in his habitat. But I was fine with seeing him from afar. As an object in a cage. Contained and controlled. I didn’t need to be much closer.
The tiger habitat is shaped like a shorter, fatter football, and the backside of it, at the top of the hill, shares a chain-link fence boundary with exotic cattle and deer habitats—which I imagine must be, for the tigers, like staring outside your prison bars to see not just freedom but also a buffet of all the food you could possibly eat; and our train appeared regularly like a line of sushi boats floating just out of reach.
David Villalobos didn’t care about the Formosan deer or the hog deer or the wild horses with their short, bristly manes. He positioned himself in the very last car, and he waited for the guide to take them past the jungle pig and Cali the rhino and the wood-pike fence, until the car crept along the top of the tiger enclosure. He’d planned this. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had to have taken the ride a few times, gauging the distance, timing the tour and the movement of the tram. I imagine the zoo employees had come to know him, to recognize his face in line. Maybe they’d started to wonder why he came so often.
David knew what was about to happen: the guide slowed the cars, trying to spot Bashuta in the brush, and pointing her out to the other visitors. David waited for his cue, for the opportunity. As his car pulled up alongside the paddock, Villalobos suddenly stood up. He climbed up on the edge of the car, reaching up and bracing himself against the roof with his palms. He balanced briefly on the railing, rolling on the balls of his feet to get his balance right. Then he leaped, clearing four strands of barbed wire sixteen feet down into the tiger’s cage.
David landed on all fours, “like a cat,” he would later brag, then crumpled and rolled to the side.
People on the train gasped, pointed, and screamed.
Imagine the terror of witnesses. Think of how that moment must have shimmered and buzzed, electric with fear. I’ve tried to imagine David’s leap, perhaps as a way to get closer to understanding it. I’d come to New York to try and retrace his steps. I’d come to the zoo to find David.
“He jumped!” someone called ahead to the tram conductor. “Stop the train! That man. He jumped down there! Into the cage!”
Was this part of the tour? Is this real? Is it some kind of show? Already the question rises, as if released from the earth upon impact, like a cloud of dust: Why would he do that? And that question would linger, still floating in the air two years later when I visited.
David looked up at them and saw their mouths stretched into dramatic “O’s,” their arms and fingers extended, pointing, the other hand covering the eyes of a child or waving frantically, telling him to run, to get away—like people do when they’re watching a horror movie and the actors are doing things you know are going to get them killed; and perhaps David smiled and waved back at the people above, his witnesses and his audience. Or perhaps he was so focused on his mission that he didn’t even acknowledge the spectators and their commotion, and he simply gathered himself to stand and face the tiger.
BASHUTA, WHO DESPITE HER fairly domestic existence in Wild Asia still possessed all the instincts of an apex predator, made her way quickly over to David. I see him there, in the long slow seconds of those first moments in the cage, turning and smiling, his thick shock of black hair standing out against the green background, his eyebrows arching into eternity. There is no sound to these images. Bashuta’s huge paws pad silently on the grass, covering the ground between them in seconds. And if we pause the scene, you will notice that David is a handsome young man. Tall and slender, with those thick black eyebrows and high cheekbones—he could be a model, he could be your boyfriend or classmate, maybe just the guy you see every day on the subway into the city and you think to yourself that he looks familiar or famous or otherwise interesting. But in those ecstatic moments in the tiger’s cage, the sun dapples his face and he holds his arms out to the animal, as if to embrace Bashuta and, for a second, the scene is beautiful. Time slows down, filtered through the thick lens of memory. Each witness to David’s leap must, inevitably, have his own story, his own burden of that day.
In the moment, only one thing is true: David wanted to touch the tiger. And he would touch her. She would touch him. She would touch him deeply. She would ravage his foot; puncture a lung, and more. Tigers typically kill their prey by biting the neck, snapping the bones and puncturing vital arteries before dragging the body off to a secluded spot where they can feed. David spent close to ten minutes alone with Bashuta. Ten long minutes in the cage. And he did indeed suffer several broken bones, at least a few of which may have been the result of his leap from the tram and his apparently less-than-catlike landing.
It must have taken a while for word of David’s leap to spread in waves through the tramcar, up to the driver, and eventually to zoo officials. The tram operator, probably a kid just like Devin, who most certainly radioed ahead to tell them what had happened, would’ve had no choice but to leave Villalobos there and make his way past the goats and hog deer, past Wayne the Red Panda, the Pygmy Deer, and quickly back to the station. He had a responsibility to the other visitors. He had to get them out of there. The zoo certainly didn’t want a tram full of visitors to witness a man being eaten by a tiger; and that’s exactly what everyone expected to happen. David didn’t stand a chance. He was dead meat as soon as he landed in that cage.
Zookeepers sprinted into action to try and rescue David, following a response protocol that they’d practiced but were rarely called upon to perform. They had to act fast and fearlessly. Rushing to the scene, one zookeeper blasted a fire extinguisher into the cage (an oddly common method of intervention in such situations), frightening Bashuta away, as another zookeeper instructed Villalobos who, to everyone’s surprise, was still alive, to roll toward them.
David was bitten and clawed and dragged around by his foot, and he suffered numerous bite wounds; but Bashuta did not break his neck and did not kill him. For whatever reason, the tiger displayed an unexpected and unpredictable level of restraint and patience—behavior that looks, in retrospect, a lot like mercy.
Or perhaps, as one zoo employee told me, “He was just lucky that tiger wasn’t hungry.”
In the second-day news stories, Villalobos was described by his attorney Corey Sokoler as “very intelligent” and “very caring,” and reports surfaced that David had told the responding New York City Police officer, Detective Matthew McCrossen, that as the tiger mauled him, he’d stroked Bashuta’s face, petting the beast like a common house cat.
David believed he’d forged a bond with the tiger, and that he’d crossed over and developed a connection that was hard to describe. Perhaps David imagined himself someone who lived between the civilized world and wild nature. Perhaps he believed he’d succeeded in bridging the divide between human and animal, that he had crossed over to their side, if only for a second.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was a little jealous. Maybe that’s why I traced his trip to the zoo. Maybe I just couldn’t get his story out of my head. Ever since I read the first reports of David’s leap, I’d been somewhat obsessed, losing myself down rabbit holes of research into similar stories.
David was arrested and charged with felony trespassing. His parents blamed Adderall for his behavior; and perhaps his mind had gone a bit wild and unruly, a bit savage, but David told officials that his leap wasn’t caused by drugs and wasn’t a suicide attempt. He wasn’t depressed or delusional. He wasn’t even really trespassing.
He was going home.
David told anyone who would listen, “I was testing my natural fear. You would not understand. It is a spiritual thing, I wanted to be at one with the tiger.”
WHEN DAVID VILLALOBOS JUMPED from Bengali Express Monorail into Bashuta’s cage, he also leaped straight into my consciousness. Something about his story cracked open a well of curiosity that bordered on obsession. I followed all the initial news reports and the follow-up stories about the incident. I couldn’t get enough. I wanted all the information, all the facts and fluctuations, anything I could read about it. I wanted to get inside the story somehow. I’d heard of people leaping into cages with apex predators. But most of the time they don’t survive to tell a story. David survived only to be vilified and mocked, publicly indicted as deranged and suicidal. But this story wasn’t his story, or the whole story. Aside from his statements to the responding officers and his boastful claim, landing “like a cat,” I could find few words from David himself. But his leap seemed to speak to me in ways that were hard to understand.
It seemed too easy to write him off as crazy. Even retelling the story of his leap here seems ridiculous, even comical or absurd, like a tale I trot out at parties to get gasps or laughs. Who does such a thing?
As is often the case, such questions become vessels for my own explorations. I wanted to understand the thinking of such savage and unruly minds. I wanted to get close to the subjectivity of people who push the boundaries between human and animal, who come close to crossing over; and I wanted to understand what drives someone like David Villalobos to make the leap, to thrust oneself into an encounter with an apex predator.
What did he mean by calling it a “spiritual thing”?
I wanted to understand what ecstasy exists, what promise of spiritual connection imbues such encounters and how it can seduce someone into risking his life. But I guess I’m also trying to understand my own interest and compulsion to come close to this experience, my lifelong desire to inhabit these tales of survival in the face of animal savagery, as well as the larger pop culture embrace of these stories. Why do such stories persist, and why do we persist in loving them?
PERHAPS SOME OF MY odd obsession started (or was rekindled) in the Fall of 2007, when I was contacted by a former student, an instructor in the Mass Communications and Journalism Department at the university where I teach. He presented me with an odd request.
He asked if I’d be willing to play-act the role of a bear attack victim for his beginning reporting class. He explained that there would be a mock press conference where his students would ask me questions. He explained that I just had to pretend that I’d survived a bear attack.
That was all.
“Just a little role-playing, a little acting,” he promised.
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF my kindergarten non-speaking role as a munchkin in the sixth-grade production of the The Wizard of Oz, I’d never done any acting; and I knew next to nothing about pretending to be someone else. But I said yes anyway and began preparing for my role. I was told the students would be asking me questions for a “second-day,” or follow-up story, and that I should be prepared to answer them from the perspective of the survivor. It dawned on me, vaguely at first, that I would be expected to offer a convincing facsimile of a bear attack victim. It dawned on me, quite clearly and quickly, that I was in way over my head and had a lot of work to do.
The Oscar award–winning star of the 2015 film The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for his dedication to the craft of pretending to be someone else. He works extremely hard to become another person. As a “method actor,” DiCaprio tries to immerse himself as much as possible in the subjective reality of his characters. For The Revenant, this meant that DiCaprio did everything he could to become the single father, hunter, trapper, guide, and bear-attack survivor, Hugh Glass, embodying the character in a way that many have called “masterful.” It was a performance that required a lot of physical sacrifice. And a lot of grunting, festering wounds, and visible suffering. He not only camped out in subzero temperatures and had to repeatedly dive into an ice-cold river wearing a bearskin coat, he also ate raw bison liver and—according to some (perhaps apocryphal) reports—he even slept inside a dead horse.
DiCaprio himself has said many times that he and the entire cast regularly risked hypothermia while filming in temperatures as cold as –40 degrees Fahrenheit. Hands became numb. Equipment froze up and stopped working. DiCaprio did not, however, subject himself to an actual bear attack—even if their film shoots in the Canadian Rockies were occasionally threatened by the presence of wild bears—but you get the sense, watching the film, that were Leo called upon to answer questions from a class of journalism students about what it was like to be attacked by a bear, he could answer them honestly and exhaustively. He could tell them exactly what it felt like, and you would believe every word he said.
For my acting gig as an attack victim, the students’ mission was to uncover new details or new angles to my story, to find new meaning in events that had already been reported on; and my job was to both convince them that I’d actually been savaged by a grizzly bear, but also to confuse or derail them. But it now occurs to me that their assignment, their true mission, was perhaps my own as well.
My somewhat obsessive reading of attack stories, my imagining the horror and savagery, my desire to understand why David Villalobos would leap into a tiger cage, or why anyone would put oneself in close proximity to an apex predator, is, I suppose, driven in large part by my desire to discover new meaning beneath the surface details of these attack stories, to try and get inside the subjectivity of the experience. I wanted to “method act” my way closer to understanding.
The now-infamous bear attack sequence in The Revenant takes about five minutes of screen time. It begins slowly as DiCaprio’s character Glass sets off alone in the forest, scouting a trail for the hunting party he’s guiding. It’s early morning, just after dawn, and the light is perfect. Trees tower overhead, swaying silver and black against a gray-blue sky. The sound here goes ambient and, at first, all you hear are twittering birds, the staccato knocking of woodpecker, and the white noise of wind blowing through the treetops. Glass’s boots crunch through the brush.
He hears something, maybe. You’re not sure at first what it could be. The group was being tracked and hunted by a Pawnee chief searching for his kidnapped daughter, and they were on the run. Perhaps they’ve been found.
Glass pulls his hood down and stuffs a wad of chewing tobacco in his lip. There’s something out there. But you can’t see anything. All you hear is Glass’s breathing.
Or is that something else breathing?
You hear this deeper and more guttural sound, a huffing breath that doesn’t seem human. It sounds bigger, more animal, and it pulses beneath the images on screen like a rumbling bass line that builds and builds. You realize subconsciously that you’re listening to the bear. Your first fear is conditioned by this sound, by the bear’s amplified breath. And it is a deep fear, one that you feel in your own chest. There is no music, no soundtrack, just the bear breathing.
Two mewling bear cubs appear onscreen, scrambling through the dense undergrowth. Glass raises his rifle; and just as he turns around to look for the mother bear, we see her, over his right shoulder. She rises up on her hind legs, bellows an angry cry, and looks straight at Glass, who stands between her and her cubs. She drops to the ground and charges fast in a mad growling rush. Glass doesn’t even have time to turn around before he is slammed into a tree. The massive bear, weighing at least 400 pounds, rolls over Glass like a quivering wave of brown fur and teeth and claws; and the noise, the huffing and growling, the screaming, washes over you, pins you to your chair, and then recedes, leaving pools of silence where you know more danger is lurking.
At one point in the midst of the attack, the bear, standing on DiCaprio’s body, leans in close to his face, almost nuzzling him and sniffing at his neck. Two or three times the bear pauses for these moments of odd intimacy that look a lot to you like mercy mixed with curiosity; and the second time, she actually uses her head to roll DiCaprio over on his back before licking at his bloodied face in an almost tender way.
The camera gets so close to one of these moments that the bear’s hot breath fogs up the lens, a somewhat risky choice in the scene because it sort of breaks the spell by reminding you that this attack isn’t “real,” that it is being performed and filmed, probably computer generated; but it is also a craft choice that immerses you in the scene such that you feel the bear’s breath on your face. You feel your own vision fog. You become a sentient camera lens. And you can’t deny that you feel something for this bear—an intense level of emotion for this CGI creation—that seems inappropriate.
The bear is just trying to protect her children. At one point, she even pauses the attack to check on the cubs and make sure they’re safe before resuming her mauling of Glass. I know the feeling. She’s just doing what any parent would do. But she does it with such power, such strength and rage, and such commitment to savagery, part of me has to admire her. Part of me wants to be her.
She thrashes DiCaprio around as if he is a toy, ripping at his flesh, and pounding on his back with her paws, stomping him into the dirt. The two of them embrace again and again in this repeated act of consumption, and it seems impossible that either of them will survive to see their children.
When she’s been shot and mortally wounded, the bear charges, reluctantly, almost out of obligation, and DiCaprio plunges his long knife into the bear’s side, shoving the blade up into her heart or some other vital organ. Blood pours from her wounds, the two of them tumble down an embankment, and you feel a mixture of relief and sadness. It’s over now. Or it’s just beginning. And you feel your breath caught up in the top of your throat; you have to remind yourself to let it out. You have to convince yourself that it’s safe to breathe again.
The whole attack doesn’t last long, but it feels like forever. And I realized that, as I watched it in the theater, I’d pitched forward in my seat, my hands gripping the hand-rests like they were the safety bar on a roller coaster; and I made little noises, as if I was witnessing the attack live. When it was over, I turned to my friend and mouthed the words, “Holy shit.”
It sounds crazy to say this, but not only did I want to watch the attack again and again (and I have since), but part of me wanted to experience it firsthand. The cinematography and sound editing, the acting and special effects, all made it feel so real, so immediate and visceral, I wanted to jump into the scene. I wanted to feel the bear’s hot breath on my neck. I wanted to smell the deep woodsy stink of the bear’s coarse fur and its hot blood spilling over me. I wanted that kind of intense ecstatic experience—which is not necessarily to say that I wanted to die or even be mortally wounded. I wasn’t remotely suicidal. I just wanted to be close to the terror, to feel the energy of those precious moments. My friend just wanted the scene to end. At one point, she turned away from the screen, toward me, and I could offer her no solace. I couldn’t break my focus.
I realize that these do not sound like the thoughts of a rational person. These should not be the thoughts of an overweight writer, a classroom volunteer, a professor and member of professional organizations who has bad knees and wears sweatpants a good part of every day. These are not thoughts I even entirely understand. But I have them and I cannot deny their existence; at least part of what I’m doing here is trying to normalize these thoughts and complicate the stories we tell about this kind of thinking and this urge to witness.
Sure, the attack scene in The Revenant is gruesome, savage, and terrifying—the sort of film scene that might make some people afraid to go into the woods in the same way that Jaws made people afraid of the ocean. In many ways the star of this particular scene is the bear, while DiCaprio gets the rest of the movie to shine. The scene is also strangely intimate. Personal, even. Seductive, mythical, and spiritual in its implications.
It’s so visceral, so immediate and intense that it almost feels surreal. It is an impossibly artful creation of a bear attack that I will remember forever, catalogued into the archive of iconic, can’t-forget movie scenes. Even though I know it’s not true, I want to believe that this attack actually happened and that I honestly witnessed it; and at least part of this is because I believe the scene speaks to a very real and very human compulsion toward animal savagery. It speaks to the urge that many of us feel to have—or at least to witness—such ecstatic experiences. It’s that urge, however taboo, to leap into an encounter with a force beyond our control, perhaps even beyond our comprehension.
It is perhaps not surprising, in response to this scene and the onscreen connection shared between DiCaprio and the bear, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and comedian Kevin Hart rapped about it at the MTV Movie Awards. Surrounded by backup dancers in bear costumes, the cohosts rhymed about other 2016 movies, but returning each time to the chorus, “You’ll always remember where you were . . . when LEO GOT FUCKED BY A BEAR!”
It’s funny. Other minor celebrities stand up to join the fun, reciting their own memory of where they were when LEO GOT FUCKED BY A BEAR, and everyone laughs. It’s quite a show. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. But here’s the thing: I believe the intimacy of this scene scares the average person more than the violence or gore, more than the undeniable terror of being attacked by a bear. They make weirdly homophobic jokes and perform this ridiculous rap with the backup dancers because, if they’re being honest, The Rock and Kevin Hart and all the others also want to be “fucked” by a bear.
Okay, so what they secretly want—what many of us want—is perhaps less like being violently raped by an apex predator and more akin to the French concept of jouissance, which implies a kind of ecstatic experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain that shatters the self and, thus, provides an opportunity to reassemble oneself. It’s kind of like being fucked existentially, emotionally, and intellectually, perhaps also physically. It’s not a death drive, no Thanatos, or suicide ideation, but it is perhaps a drive to be destroyed or disassembled and then remade again. It’s a desire to be fucked to death and to be reborn.
I think this is part of what David Villalobos wanted—or part of what I want to take from his story—and I think this destruction and rebuilding of the self is also at the heart of the audience’s experience of the bear attack scene in The Revenant. To be clear, I’m not arguing that Hugh Glass felt pleasure as he was being brutally mauled by a grizzly bear; but I 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.”
