Why Watching Actors Get Maimed By Big Cats Gives Me Hope For The Future

States at this point. I suspect if you counted up the dollar value of all the collapse themed movies, books, prepping gear, monetize social media content, and of course religious sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost one point two billion dollar business last year, and it's expected to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction

can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent of modern future media takes place during or shortly after an apocalypse. The odd exception today, like Bong Jun Ho's recent Mickey seventeen, is so rooted in Trump's politics that we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In other words, in our fiction, there's no respite from the news. We watch a slow motion self inflicted global economic collapse, and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal

wage slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words, it's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump invokes the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland, or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all just know our coming in some form or another, even if no one can say win. And I'm not here today to tell you how we're going to get past all of that or fix it, because I don't know. So today I'm just here as a merchant of hope.

My job is to convince you that our species will someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim to the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to have anything to do with that. But in order to convince you of all this, I'm going to have to talk about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is technically a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in

Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit at the same time as a grant committee shows up to evaluate his project, which has an unclear goal. He's apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from all over the world can live together, which the movie shows they can't. It's really immaterial what happens in the plot. All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it. I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have

very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This is because in any given scene, the script is only ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers, and panthers. I should probably step back a minute to explain some things. Roor is largely the brainchild of Tippyhedron

and her husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side, Tippy Hedron was the female lead in a little movie called The Birds. It is a horror film and also an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically harassed Hedron, but his worst actions came during a crucial scene where Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds.

Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy the birds used in this scene would be animatronic, but when the time came to shoot it, she spent five days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in huge numbers by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly, and relentless. Carrie Grant, her co star, told her she was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear of animals after this point in her life, though she

really should. Her husband, Nol is a bit more of a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer, a film investor in, a serial entrepreneur whose best financial decision was putting money mind what became the Exorcist. In nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which

less is said the better. This is only relevant because during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching and conservation, something that could use the power of film to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All four of their children agreed to star in it and

to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary, but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely. This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.

After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own bigg and trained them by adopting animals confiscated from their previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a lot of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd often been badly mistreated given them. This was the nineteen seventies.

We must assume that some had been confiscated property of Coke dealers, Tippy and Noll had no professional or legal qualifications to care for dozens of big cats. When the authorities eventually found out, there was trouble, although since Hedrid and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a house built specifically for they and their dozens of apex

predators to live. While lions had inspired the initial vision, the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in and raised them among and around their own children, who came to see the animals as something between pets and family. When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar. Making any kind of movie had become secondary to the act of caring for these men any many giant traumatized kiddies.

As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on. I can tell you, though, that none of these cats were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts surrounded by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few lines before one or all of the cats began to bite and claw them, at which point each scene becomes about

surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took more than five years to film in more than a decade to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production of this movie, but more humans were injured than in any other film production on record. Of the one hundred and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar, more than one hundred suffered significant injury, often more than once. Jan Debout, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went

on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter and a future star herself, left production at one point because she was worried a big cat might rip her face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large chuntic of her face ripped off, requiring extensive surgery. This all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify, but before you make a final judgment, I want to remind you of

two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries, fewer people were killed on the set of War Than in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that you must remember is that Roar is a work of art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace, you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it

over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we will one day get over our bullshit and escape the present hell that our species seems mired in. I know that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time. I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ads. We're back, and the first thing I need you to understand about all of these fucking cats is that in every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them, I see no anger or malice in the actions of

these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me, as a cat owner that the cats didn't see these people, Tippy and her family and the cast and crew as prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If

you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given that nearly every person on this film was badly injured, including Tippy, who got ganggreen from infected cat wounds, and all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge who are a knol or both of them for risking their kids' lives to make this insane movie. I understand the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.

The first thing you need to see to understand the deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star, Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh five hundred pounds, no Old Marshall won't stop focusing on his work, and so the cat inches away from his

face roars. The sound of a male lion's roar is deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the sound up close and lived to tell the tale. It has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro Goldwyn Meyer the film Studio, used it to open every movie they made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe they did this because the sound is a sort of

hack to compel our attention. It pulls an audience out of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and makes them more attentive to the film that is to come. And so the first thing you need to understand about the people who made Roar is that Marshal, upon having a living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives the creature a look that says, hey, man, can you give me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle

of something. I bring this up so that you will understand that these were not people operating on anything close to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives and their choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great photo from the set of that Playboy's shoot. While the camera people roamed the Heddron compound, one of them caught a shot of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool. An adult male lion, which he must have considered to

be in some way. A member of the family sees this girl passing by in the corner of its eye, and that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like any cat of that size in the same situation, it reaches out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Mark almost as soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her

well being. She also does not seem to have ever seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she quote was into it every bit as much as he was, and that production was an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell Nol's son, who acted in the movie and like everyone else, was mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when his dad died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking asshole to do that to his family, he said recently. He also said this, it was amazing to live through that.

I should have died many times, but I kind of want to do it again. If you have any friends or family who have survived extended periods of every combat, there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes a drug taking. It can be more than just hell. It's often also a high, which is one thing that

drives a lot of people crazy. I need to take a moment away from Roor to talk about some people that I'm in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate and ferocious urban combat against ISIS. The closer I drew to the front, the more guys I met who were elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men, ranging from the tail end of their teens to their twenties. Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from

the time they were seven or eight. Sometimes younger, they'd been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their earliest memories were as runners ferrying supplies and information to the older men and teenage boys who did most of the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of whom were teenagers themselves. Now. They fought against ISIS in close quarters, building to building a few weeks at a time.

Periodically they'd rotate off the front and would go to Erbil an hour or two away. Many of them were gangsters in their spare time, running drugs and guns and brothels. They spent their days off in a drunken haze of Turkish amphetamines. Than they would drive back to the front new brightly colored Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers

they can only be closed with bungee cords. The guns and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up enemy positions and the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of Mosl's old city. In every building, on every block, the fighting terminated with door to door, room to room battles, where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives,

and pistols. In that order. I don't know if any of these guys were, at that point that I met them, capable of feeling what u Ori would recognize as fear. These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the petting edge of the fighting against ISIS and MOSL on occasion when they kidnapped Ice. As fighters, some of them committed war crimes with the ease and with as much thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad, of course, unforgivable, but I've never really given much thought

to judging them for it. Where would I even start. A thing I've come to understand in my travels is that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times they're forced to live in. This has been the story of our entire long journey on this earth, and if there is one reason our species has survived above all the others, it is our capacity for infinite variety and

infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're given the right incentives, and to an extent, you can't judge individual humans without judging the incentives The world we collectively create presents for them. We evolved, and we still live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable, and those of us who survive the worst things that life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to

the people we experience it with. This is why the cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed. Roar happened because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for roughly one hundred and forty large cats and for each other,

and almost exercised z hezero critical judgment Beyond that point. Now, I will understand if you still feel that nothing could justify the decision of two parents to risk their children's lives in such folly. And I know this essay is supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential, and I'm going to get to that, but you know, we still live in twenty twenty five. So first, here's ads. So here's my best step at explaining why I find

Rar inspirational. There's a scene about three quarters of the way through this movie, after roughly an hour straight of watching the Hedron, Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly mulled for real by giant cats, and in this scene, John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario that I am certain has never happened before or since

in the history of this planet. He rides away from the home where his family is trapped and draws several dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away by making them chase him. The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try to murder or maim him, but he continues building up speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal killing machines to evolve on this planet. You can see from the look in John's eyes in this scene that

he has no idea. If he seconds away from death, it would have been physically impossible to stop or control this number of giant cats. The only reason this number and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have existed together at any previous point in world history would have been across a distance of thousands of miles of

rugged wilderness. But thanks to Tippean Knowles insane dream, and thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commitment of many of the crew and their family, a moment of utter novelty occurs where this singular assortment of big cats watches as a man fleeing in terror from them on a dirt bike does one of the sickest jumps in film history and lands directly into a river, and then keeps right until he is charged by a juvenile African elephant,

which the Hedrons also kept on their property. In its uniqueness, this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the moon landing. After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the Moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene, although some of that may be due to the fact that it is extremely illegal for anyone today to even try.

And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar My Dear Friends during the Dark Times, not because it's a good movie, but because it reveals what is best about humanity. What piece of art could better illustrate the

infinite possibilities within us. If a group of human beings can learn to live among lions and tigers, despite the constant guarantee of severe injury without really understanding why is it so mad to think that perhaps we two can transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better, or at least something far stranger than money grubbing fascists. I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems to quach a bit further with each passing day, but

I do know this. If we can make war, we can do anything.