Blockbusters and Birdwalks

REVENGE OF NATURE, a conversation – Episode 6: “The Edge”

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0:00 | 23:45

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa wonder if bears prefer eating old or young white dudes. Bon appétit, Bart!

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Referenced media:

  • “The Silence of the Lambs” (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
  • “First Blood” (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)
  • “Glengarry Glen Ross” (James Foley, 1992)
  • “Once Were Warriors” (Lee Tamahori, 1994)
  • “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” (Tobe Hooper, 1986)
  • “Road House” (Rowdy Herrington, 1989)
  • “The Game” (David Fincher, 1997)
  • “LA Confidential” (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
  • “The Ice Storm” (Ang Lee, 1997)
  • “U Turn” (Oliver Stone, 1997)
  • “Boogie Nights” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
  • “The Sweet Hereafter” (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
  • “The Devil’s Advocate” (Taylor Hackford, 1997)
  • “Prometheus Rising” (Robert Anton Wilson, 1983)

 

Audio quotation:

Welcome And Nature As A Threat

SPEAKER_05

Welcome to the Blockbusters and Birdwalks podcast. I am the curator, Garrett Chaffankirai. Today we have a conversation with a friend, Ed Rosa.

SPEAKER_01

That's me. Hi. My filmmaking partner and I have a YouTube channel, Toothless Richard Productions, where you can see a number of our short films.

SPEAKER_05

Nature can kill us. Nature is bigger than us, but nature is also a playground where very skillful storytellers can describe wonderful things. People as meat is high on mine for me, and I like those stories.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely.

Why The Edge Once Hit Hard

SPEAKER_05

In the fall of 1997, I knew that I was going to be married in the fall of 1998. And I was living with my parents to save a buck because they were giving me a sweetheart deal on rent. And that meant that I socialized a lot with my folks, having meals out, but especially going to movies on a Saturday night. And I carted us off to go see The Edge, which I thoroughly enjoyed and thought, Cracker Jack, this is great. What a bear. Bark the bear. Bark the bear, right. And he he had a good career until he died, I think, from cancer. Yeah. So when we hatched this, Revenge of Nature Thing, I thought, I gotta see that again, because man, I enjoyed it. It it doesn't measure up. It's not as good as that event. In fact, I found myself kind of laughing at it rather than being moved.

SPEAKER_01

I was like, oh, I forgot how good this thing is.

SPEAKER_05

The Edge is the story of a billionaire who goes off on a photo shoot with his much younger wife, who is a model played by El McPherson. This lead man, Charles Morse, that's Anthony Hopkins, he of the great vivid blue eyes, who is fresh off of his Oscar having won for Silence of the Lambs. The photographer is played by Alec Baldwin. He's Bob Green. And Charles gradually comes to realize that Bob and his old lady Mickey, that's El McPherson, they're sleeping around with one another. They're hangers on with them to make this photo sheet possible, somewhere deep in Alaska. And they get this hare-brained idea to go find this man they see photographed on a wall, who's this great Indian hunter who hunts bears. If we could find this guy, it will legitimize the whole shoe. So they hop on their prop plane, they get up into the air, they fly many, many miles away. I mean, that's a pretty silly conceit. It's dumb. Yeah. But the catch is as they're flying to this faraway place to find this faraway hunter of bears, they run into a flock of birds that crash land the plane, killing the pilot, and that leaves our boy Charles, this rival Bob, and then one of Bob's gopher Stephen, played by Harold Perineux.

SPEAKER_01

Perrineau.

SPEAKER_05

Perinew Perineau. He's the black guy hanging out with white dudes, and there's a bear on him. So we know who's gonna die first, and it's him.

SPEAKER_01

He has a line that he where he acknowledges it, like where he says, like, brothers don't survive this kind of stuff or something.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah. And he doesn't, and he won't. And he can't, and I suppose in the logic of genre filmmaking, he shouldn't. So it eventually becomes a monoe monoe bear. And the clutch thing is that Charles has one of those Hoover brains. He can suck up any body of knowledge. And when Steven dies and bleeds out, it teaches the bear, Bart, that he wants man blood. So Bart is hunting them all the way along until eventually they create a deadfall trap to kill the bear they do, and they still have to find their way back to civilization. And that's when finally Bob and Charles confront each other, and Charles says, I know you're sleeping with my wife. And Bob's like, Yep, and I got a gun here, so let me kill you. Right. And uh, well, it doesn't quite work out that way. Charles comes out on top, he reveals privately to his wife, I know you're cheating on me, and his life is renewed because the Alaskan bush is a wonderful place.

SPEAKER_01

Turns out all that theoretical knowledge actually works in applications. It does.

SPEAKER_05

You you read enough and you can keep enough in your head and you're willing to experiment because desperation will drive you. You can be all right, which means Gary can go outside and camp.

Mamet, Direction, And What Got Lost

SPEAKER_05

David Mammoth is our writer, and we can't overlook the fact of David Mammoth's contribution both to stagecraft and to movies, first as a screenwriter for hire in the like late 70s, early 80s, and eventually as a filmmaker in his own right. I've read some of his nonfiction, I find some of it completely enchanting. Before, let's say he turned 50-55. He's become a little more arch, a little bit more disagreeable to my sensitivities, which means I'm just a pinko California lefty. So, what can I do about myself except try to not fall over the dandelions in my yard? Right. Yeah, this movie is filled with all of this really, really good stuff about men in nature, what makes a man. And I know that's what was getting me excited when I was 24. Seeing this at that early age when it was first released, preparing for my own marriage, my own future, my own dalliances with the movie industry and whatever I was going to turn into. Another detail which really is present, especially now, is that Jerry Goldsmith did the score.

SPEAKER_01

Who's amazing?

SPEAKER_05

When's John Rambo gonna show up? Because it's just first blood. Everything about it, this is just like that.

SPEAKER_01

Alec Baldwin, according to the internet, complained after the release of this movie that the director, Lee Tamahori, had done a disservice to David Mammoth's script by eliminating chunks of it and dumbing some of it down and leaning into more action than what Mammoth was doing. I actually I actually asked uh Google AI to tell me what the key differences were between Mammoth's original script and the finished product. One of the differences it said in the original script, which is based on a book he wrote, I think, the uh the bear wasn't like a literal like monster trying to eat them. The bear like was more sort of, you know, metaphorical in a way.

SPEAKER_05

It wasn't important that we have Bart show up.

SPEAKER_01

Right, exactly. Right. It wasn't about, you know, anybody necessarily being eaten by the bear, it was more like, you know, the the impending, you know, possibility of being eaten kind of thing, right? By no means have I seen everything that David Mammoth has worked on. But I do know that the first time I was aware of encountering him was at my uh very early in my path down the road to cinema that less people watch, was seeing Glenn Gary Glenn Ross. Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_02

You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them. You can't close the leads you're giving. You can't close shit. You are shit. Hit the bricks pile and feed it because you are going out. The leads a week. The leads a week. Fucking leads a week. You a week. I've been in this business 15 years. What's your name? Fuck you. That's my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 VMw. That's my name.

SPEAKER_01

As a kid in high school, I was just floored by this dialogue. Right. Whoa, David Mammoth. Okay, well, I'm gonna remember that.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah. When we watch Alec Baldwin tee off with Anthony Hopkins, I'm glad to learn that Gemini is telling you there was a separate thing that's original. I didn't know that. I just thought because the other I I I'm forgetting. I'm burying a big important lead here. I was really fixated on Australian and New Zealand-based filmmakers and and films in the early 90s. Nice. And among the people that I'd learned about was Lee Tamahori, who had directed uh the translation of Once Were Warriors. Oh, which I think.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, I think I was gonna have Tamahori, I guess. That's like a Maori name.

SPEAKER_05

I think he's half Maori. I forget which part of his family that lineage comes from. I thought Once Were Warriors was one of the very best movies of the early 1990s. And so a few years later, when I saw Tamahori attached to this project, Mammoth Goldsmith. Baldwin? Oh, whoa. Oh, I oh, and L. McPherson's a thousand feet tall, and she's in it too. What's this all about?

SPEAKER_01

And then uh um uh Kathleen Wilhoit from Roadhouse Master 2, yeah, Roadhouse.

SPEAKER_05

Exactly. This is all gonna just pay a hell of a dividend. So then you sit down and you start.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, LQ Jenos, don't forget him. Right, right. He actually used to like drink and shoot and hang out with Peck and Paw.

Wealth, Legacy, And Proving Yourself

SPEAKER_05

Charles, he's a bookish dude who spends his life indoors, and he longs to be challenged in a way to prove what his mettle is. If that doesn't prove definitive of middle age for really everybody, I don't know what the middle age crisis is.

SPEAKER_01

No, I I have been I have found myself uh the one of the one of the current sources of depression is my lack of any kind of real legacy in any way at anything.

SPEAKER_05

That's a good parallel because what you learn from this character is he is a billionaire, capital B. Now, billionaires now feel commonplace because they're talked about a lot. And in fact, that's what our president is, a billionaire. And his and his influence is largely pushed by other billionaires. But we didn't talk about billionaires a lot in the late 90s because there weren't as many of them. So, billionaire, capital B, most of us would say you've you've made it. You figure that's your legacy. What we learned from Charles is that's unimportant. There's no reference made to his family. He's got this much younger woman and he's ridiculed for it. Like, how can you, this mid-50s guy, have landed this mid-20s woman? Right, right. It seems silly what's going on here. And you can see how uncomfortable he is with everything about him. The trappings of his wealth bring him no pleasure, and he has no deep footing among people. Whatever he's done to amass this wealth, however it was accomplished, is never discussed. It's just an established fact of who he is. And the bottom line that we learn from the whole movie is Charles's reliance on himself, in his own knowledge and the application of same in nature, is what finally fills him with something that looks like joy and pleasure. It happens that that's outsmarting a bear. It happens that's outsmarting his wife's lover. It happens that that's him understanding the signals that are around him and that this beautiful place, which as I say is Alberta, Canada, not Alaska. It's an extraordinary thing to view and look at and examine. And the thing is, we often consider stuff in American capitalist advancement, like, well, you got enough dollars, you could just buy this mountain range. So his accomplishment and ability to buy things doesn't please him. His ability to go do something and survive it does. I'm now the age of this character. I wasn't when I saw it. And there's uh there's a great scene when we have our surviving pair, Charles and Bob, and Bob is crippling under the pressure of this bear is gonna eat us. And Charles is like, no, we're gonna, we're gonna fight.

SPEAKER_04

You wanna die out here, huh? Well, then die. I tell you what, I'm not gonna die. I'm not gonna die. Say it, I'm gonna kill the bear. Say it. I'm gonna kill the bear. Say it. Say I'm gonna kill the bear.

SPEAKER_03

Say it.

SPEAKER_02

I'm gonna kill the bear.

SPEAKER_03

Say it again. I'm gonna kill the bear. Say it again! I'm gonna kill the bear! God, what one man can do, another can do. What one man can do, another can do. What one man can do, another can do. What one man can do, another can do! Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

God damn right. Today.

SPEAKER_05

I'm gonna kill the motherfucker. The way that I have written scenes in unpublished work, I'm I'm writing everything to fit certain beats that I'm really excited about. Right. Where there is a set piece that I just know everything can spin around. This there's gonna be this wonderful bit of dialogue. I I know it's strung along like like pearls in a necklace. And what you're hoping is that the thread between them is thick enough to pull it together. But if it's not, you want that pearl to be magnificent. So I'm just imagining mammoths hanging out. He's like, what would a couple of dudes being hunting by a bear, what would they say to each other? Because one, the milk toast, office drone, wealthy guy, you'd presume is meat, but he's coming out of his shell. He's figured out something. Something deep. So what's he gonna say to the guy who apparently is a big swinging dick, who's suddenly becoming a cowardly boy because the fear is put into him. He hasn't eaten properly in a few days. He's cold and he's wet. Campfire singing, man.

SPEAKER_04

Here it is. I'm gonna kill the motherfucker.

SPEAKER_05

At a certain point, when they do tangle with Bart, they finally lure this bear with blood. Got spears to drive the bear, we got more spears to drive the bear. We've got to impale it under his own weight and kill it. And at a certain point, the bear sets to uh to Bob and swipes him with that big old paw.

The Bear Fight And Movie Logic

SPEAKER_05

But come on now. A bear, a 1600-pound animal, swipes you with that paw, which would be enough, I think, to rip you in half if it got its its claws in you, just manages to puncture your side and you just wrap it up with the cotton of your shirt. What?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, I even even even if it was a relatively like superficial wound, I gotta believe that there's enough filth of bacteria on that bear's claw that you're getting sepsis or whatever, pretty much like that.

SPEAKER_05

Then winningly, they make bear meat steaks and roast them. But I can't accept that they're turning bar into their jackets. They're not just they're not just serapes that put over the page. They're tailored. It's bespoke gentlemen's clothes. Yeah, yeah. I was watching it this time with these more skeptical middle-aged eyes. I'm like, oh damn it, I want one of those off my Etsy store. That'd be great. Yeah, right. Can you imagine me rolling into a restaurant? Come on, wife, let's go sit down. Yeah, it would be Ed, we're gonna go out for coffee. Get your bear on. To restate what I opened up with. I liked this movie a lot and felt that it was underpraised in '97.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_05

In 26, I feel like it's appropriately kind of just left as an interesting relic from the 90s, but it doesn't really work for me, except now almost as a drinking movie.

SPEAKER_01

Like when they take a drink every time he calls, every time he says the name Charles.

SPEAKER_05

That would work. You'd be wasted. And every time you see that Charles is being goaded, you're not really much of a man. You just pencil push, you just run a bank, you just have money. Every time that happens, drink. Every time you sort of just look out at this vista of mountains, drink. Yeah. Yeah, I would be a sopping mess and kidney failure by the end of this movie. So I couldn't help but read it through that lens. This is an audience participation. Make fun of this very sincere, silly movie, which read as kind of butch and gnarly, and this is what man culture is all about, when I was really interested in that and opened to it, and felt like I was losing my man card. I was becoming an office drone, doing stupid stuff each day, wearing a suit to work, feeling proud. I have a 401k. One day, I you know, I was having those visions of my future in my 20s, and it was overlapping with seeing this movie and realizing that I was making choices, taking me far away from what I think the Garrett machine was planning to be when I was a boy, a young man, a collegian, all of these things. I was moving away from that path. To put a different bow on this, Charles's story in this was for me in my early 20s, the story of the kind of man I don't want to become, which is a man who is unfulfilled in the choices he's made that on worldly levels, through other people's eyes, he is a great success. He is an alpha, but he sees himself as a completely untested pile of nothing. He's a puddle of nothing. Yeah. He made that reference about you have no legacy that you could point out. He sees himself in exactly the same way. I don't really know what I'm all about. I am worth less, despite being worth more, until he has survived Bart and he's survived the plane crash, and he's survived his wife's boyfriend trying to murder him. He's survived, he finally understands his worth.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

And it's not his bank account, but he he knows in himself, surveying the crowd of reporters who've been brought into this log cabin. Ah, the returning hero. He's uninterested in their pablim and stupidity. He doesn't want to feed the cycle.

Rewatch Verdict And Drinking Game

SPEAKER_05

And we've learned earlier in the piece, he's thought about, now that he's kind of embraced nature, maybe he's just going to become a citizen of these mountains.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, he even says that. Now I can see myself as something other than just like a big flesh bag of money.

SPEAKER_05

As a message, then a theme, the memetian point of this whole thing, The Edge, is that title, The Edge, describes what the civilized man is supposed to be, and then what he is when he steps over it and discovers himself. That's kind of obvious and on the nose. We could think about knife edges and it's not a good thing. Yeah, that knife edges.

SPEAKER_01

That buck knife that you've got.

SPEAKER_05

And that's that's in the text. But I think beyond that, the edge is recognizing the ability to shear away the opinions and validation of others. Because the edge of life where none of that can or should matter, you simply have to care for yourself because nobody else can or will.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

And by the way, because I like this stuff, the game was in theaters, LA Confidential, uh, The Ice Storm, You Turn, which I went out of my way to go see, and it's Oliver's. It's fine.

SPEAKER_01

I but okay, because I'll it's Oliver Spill. He always like he always just like goes too far or something. He does that.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, I found myself just yipping at people. Oh, this is so terrific. I'm sure if I watched now, it would embarrass me because it's as bad as the bad stuff is, and I wouldn't yet be able to say that the good stuff matters, but I really liked it. Boogie Knights was making a rep for PT. Uh Sweet Hereafter, awesome stuff. And I know in in mixed company, you and I have watched The Devil's Advocate, which I also saw then with my parents because I was living with them to get away with my rent and pay for our wedding. And I thought that was a hoot. So this was not a bad season for me. This is about fellows accomplishing stuff.

SPEAKER_01

I've seen most of them, and all of the ones that I've seen are pretty good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

They're really good. And really the point of all of these movies to be swept up into a big lunt together. The only exception, well, the two exceptions, I suppose, would be the ice storm and the sweet hereafter, because they do have parts for women who don't just say, You're so handsome, you're so rich. Right. Which is what the women do in this movie.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05

But it does give you an understanding that I was turning out for, and a lot of American life was turning out for in 1997, which was stories of fellas accomplishing things against and with other fellows to try to discover what they're all about. Just to put it in the season, the game is about Michael Douglas trying to figure out his illusions are stupid, and his brother is trying to bring him into the light. Right. And it works. He learns something really important about himself through a really complicated set of illusions. That's what the game is. LA Confidentials, an old cop and a new cop, have to realize their boss cop is a bad man. And they're doing it in the illusion of Hollywood, where women are literally used for their bodies in order to help men become both gratified. But so these two fellows can make discoveries about themselves. You can go down the list, but this movie is certainly part of that. L. McPherson's body is there to get these two men in opposition to one another and send them off into the woods to argue for a while. Drink!

SPEAKER_01

I like the fact that they find this cabin that clearly Dirsuzala has stopped by because he's left them some supplies. Yeah, good supplies, too. Yeah, there's a few.

Reality Tunnels And Fire From Ice

SPEAKER_01

So there's an author that I'm a big fan of, name of uh Robert Anton Wilson. There's a book he wrote, I think it was in the 70s, called Prometheus Rising. And it's basically like an extension of work, I think, that Timothy Leary was doing in terms of mapping like human consciousness and the way we act and the way we do what we do and the way our lives go the way they go and stuff. And he talks about like um the bio, like the the circuits of consciousness. There's eight of them, right? And four of them are basic and four of them are like heightened, right? Like you have to like work to like open up like the circuits five through eight in your mind. Where you have to work to kind of uh uh understand and undo a lot of the stuff that is in the primary four circuits, right?

SPEAKER_05

Or control them so they don't overwhelm.

SPEAKER_01

Well, right, because the the the the the the the early circuits, the one through four is it's like because he talks about like imprinting and conditioning. Ultimately, though the whole point of the book is is trying to get you to understand why your consciousness works the way it works, as a guide to how you can maybe expand your consciousness in and by opening up these sort of other circuits. Because the book starts with this, you know, this line that I what the thinker thinks the prover proves, right? Yeah. He's kind of getting at this idea that you, what he calls your reality tunnel, you actually have way more power and agency to be able to positively to make positive change in your life and the way you think once you're aware of it and then do stuff about it, right? So he he talked about, I swear to God, he talked about this, the fire and ice riddle being one of the greatest examples he's ever seen of like this fifth circuit of wisdom.

SPEAKER_02

Fire from ice.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. If you take it into your hands, it can be molded into a lens, which will concentrate the sunlight into fire.

SPEAKER_01

Charles, he's like got access to these higher circuits because he is able to like alter his reality tunnel. Survival risks now become like tools.

SPEAKER_05

This is Blockbusters and Birdwalks, a conversation between Garrett Chaffin Kirai and Ed Rosa.