In college, I took a psychology course with a professor I'll call Frank. He was not a typical academic, but wore an undersized sports jacket that barely concealed his massive biceps, had thinning hair held together by gel and the exploits of a barber, and wore a number of necklaces that I would describe as several too many. I do not know where Frank was originally from, but I know in my heart it was New Jersey.
This is an article about Cocaine Bear, but I have to start with Frank, because Frank was a psychologist who fed cocaine to pigeons. That was his whole gig. And in an abstract sense, that's OK! There are probably serious researchers all over the country who feed cocaine to pigeons for good scientific reasons. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 people on the street and told them, "One of these guys is feeding cocaine to pigeons," 10 times out of 10 they would vote for Frank.
One day, when we were both late for class, I had the opportunity to ask Frank how he got into his "field of research" To which he shrugged his shoulders, grinned wolfishly, and said, "Because they let me." I do not know how it came about that Universal Pictures greenlit Cocaine Bear, but the film unmistakably has Frank's energy, because they let me.Of course, there's really only one reason to see Cocaine Bear, and that's because you want to see what happens when a bear takes cocaine. And in a nation populated by con artists and frauds, it's refreshing to have someone sell you exactly what you were promised. The plot of the film, based on a true incident, is quite simple. Drug smugglers drop cocaine from a plane. A bear finds the cocaine. In search of more cocaine, the bear turns the mountain red. There are a few other minor plot threads, mostly about a couple of kids eating a spoonful of cocaine and getting lost, and a nice drug dealer mourning his dead wife (who died of cancer, not a bear), but that's basically the important stuff.
But the most compelling thing about this lowbrow blockbuster is not the titular bear rampaging through the Georgia wilderness. The most interesting thing about this film is its offbeat environmentalism. Elizabeth Banks, the director of Cocaine Bear, has insisted that her seemingly unserious film is about humanity's hubristic desire to dominate its environment. "When you mess with nature, nature messes with you," she summarizes. This ecological angle may surprise viewers who came to theaters with the promise of a black bear stuffed with nose candy and letting loose.
If Cocaine Bear does indeed violate our expectations of environmentalism, it's because American consumers are accustomed to a discourse of the environment that is marked by piety and a dash of sadness. The tone of most "green" messages is celebratory, accompanied by a light soundtrack and stern warnings. Above all, environmental content- whether it's a feature film or a World Wildlife Fund commercial- is always didactic. They want us to learn something and, through that education, to be inspired to act. Almost all environmental discourse in America is based on the old Enlightenment idea that knowledge is power: If we simply know more about humanity's impact on the environment, we will change our behavior and attitudes.
The sad truth is that this assumption is dubious. Research shows that more information about environmental issues does not always lead to changes in people's habits or behavior. Moreover, some scholars argue that the somber mood that often prevails in mainstream environmental communications may even be counterproductive, stoking fears rather than encouraging action. As a professor who teaches environmental films, I have experienced firsthand the mixed effect that serious films about issues like climate change or species extinction can have on students.
Disaster movies like "Snowpiercer" or "Children of Men" may be brilliant cinema and contain sophisticated statements about environmental problems, but they do not inspire the kind of attitudes necessary to combat the very ecological crises they address. In my classrooms, there are usually bright environmental science students who want to save the world, and yet watching films and documentaries about environmental disasters often seems to dampen their enthusiasm for activism. "What's the point of trying?" one student asked me in office hours after seeing the bleak apocalyptic film The Road. "Things are going down the drain anyway." Reactions like these often leave me torn between my responsibility as a professor- to help young people grapple with hard truths about our threatened planet- and the sense that environmental art often seems to do more harm than good, generating despair rather than resolve.
Nicole Seymour, an environmentalist and English professor at California State College, has recognized this kind of environmental despair in herself and her own students, and asked a provocative question: If pious messages do not effect change, what if environmentalism "works" better when it becomes more irreverent? More crude and less self-righteous? More silly than somber? More based on giggles than guilt? Seymour calls this cheeky attitude "bad environmentalism," which she defines as "environmentalism with the 'wrong' attitude-without reverence or seriousness-while having a sense of humor about itself" An attitude Cocaine Bear is steeped in.
The film's desire to elude any feigned enlightenment is conveyed from the outset. Before we get our first glimpse of the bear on booger sugar, the film opens with an epigraph that provides very official-sounding information about what to do in the event of a bear attack. However, once the film is done with these helpful survival tips, the epigraph closes with the source saying that it is nothing more than Wikipedia. The gag was deadly at my screening, mostly because the joke was on us. (The movie is called Cocaine Bear. Were we expecting a scientific report?) From the beginning, the film confesses that it has no moral beyond the obvious, nothing to teach its viewers that they could not learn from a quick goo