Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by John Lamparski/Getty Images for Grounded, Universal Pictures, and Getty Images Plus.
In college, I took a psych class taught by a professor who I will call Frank. Not your typical academic, Frank wore an undersized sports coat that could barely contain his gargantuan biceps, rocked thinning hair held together by gel and a barber’s heroics, and sported an amount of necklaces that I would describe as several too many. I do not know where Frank was from originally, but I know in my heart that it was New Jersey.
This is an article about Cocaine Bear, but I need 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 respectable researchers around the country who feed coke to pigeons for perfectly good science reasons. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 dudes off the street and were told “one of these guys feeds cocaine to pigeons for a living,” you would have picked Frank 10 out of 10 times.
In college, I took a psych class taught by a professor who I will call Frank. Not your typical academic, Frank wore an undersized sports coat that could barely contain his gargantuan biceps, rocked thinning hair held together by gel and a barber’s heroics, and sported an amount of necklaces that I would describe as several too many. I do not know where Frank was from originally, but I know in my heart that it was New Jersey.
This is an article about Cocaine Bear, but I need 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 respectable researchers around the country who feed coke to pigeons for perfectly good science reasons. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 dudes off the street and were told “one of these guys feeds cocaine to pigeons for a living,” you would have picked Frank 10 out of 10 times.
One day, walking along the rolling green, both of us late to class, I had the occasion to ask Frank how he landed on his “research area.” At this, he shrugged, flashed a wolfish grin, and said, “because they let me.” I do not know what went into getting Cocaine Bear greenlit by Universal Pictures, but the film has unmistakable “because they let me” Frank energy.
Of course, there is really only one reason to see Cocaine Bear, and that is because you would like to see what happens when a bear does cocaine. And in a nation populated by hucksters and con artists, it is refreshing to have someone sell you exactly what you were promised. The plot of the film, which is based rather loosely on a true story, is straightforward. Drug smugglers drop cocaine out of a plane. A bear finds said cocaine. The bear turns the mountain red in pursuit of more cocaine. There are some other minor plot threads along the way, mostly revolving around a pair of kids who eat spoonfuls of cocaine and get lost, as well as a nice-guy drug trafficker mourning his dead wife (cancer dead, not bear dead), but that’s basically the gist.
Yet, what is most compelling about this lowbrow blockbuster is not its titular bear-on-blow rampaging through the Georgia wilds. What is most interesting about the film is its off-kilter environmentalism. Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear’s director, has insisted that her seemingly unserious film is about humanity’s hubristic desire to dominate its environment. “If you fuck with nature, nature will fuck with you,” she summarizes. This ecological angle might surprise viewers who came to the theaters lured by the promise of a black bear hopped up on nose candy and raising hell.
Indeed, if Cocaine Bear violates our expectations about what environmentalism looks like, it is because American consumers are accustomed to environmental discourse that is characterized by piety and a dash of mournfulness. The tone of most “green” messaging is solemn, accompanied by a minor soundtrack and grave warnings. Above all, environmentalist content—whether a feature film or a World Wildlife Fund commercial—is invariably didactic. It would have us learn something, and through that education, inspire us to act. Almost all environmental discourse in America is predicated on the old enlightenment idea that knowledge is power: that if we simply know more about humanity’s impact on the environment, we’ll change our behaviors and attitudes.
The unfortunate truth is that this premise is dubious. Research shows that being more informed about environmental issues doesn’t always change people’s habits or behaviors. What’s more, some scientists argue that the doom and gloom that often characterizes mainstream environmental messaging might actually be counterproductive, encouraging anxiety rather than action. Indeed, as a professor who teaches environmental film, I have seen firsthand the mixed effect that earnest movies about issues such as climate change or species loss can have on students.
Disaster films like Snowpiercer or Children of Men might make for brilliant cinema—and have sophisticated things to say about environmental problems—but they don’t exactly inspire the can-do attitude that is necessary to combat the very ecological crises they explore. My classrooms are mostly populated by bright-eyed Environmental Studies majors who want to save the world, and yet watching films and documentaries about ecological catastrophes often seems to dampen their enthusiasm for activism. “What’s the point of trying?” one student asked me in office hours after watching the bleak apocalyptic film The Road. “Things are going to hell no matter what.” Reactions like these often leave me torn between my responsibilities as a professor—to help young people confront the hard truths about our imperiled planet—and the sense that environmental art often seems to do more harm than good, producing despair rather than determination.
Recognizing this kind of environmental despair in herself and among her own students, Nicole Seymour—an environmentalist and English professor at California State University—has asked a provocative question: If pious messaging doesn’t inspire change, what if environmentalism might “work” better by becoming more irreverent? More ribald and less self-righteous? Silly rather than somber? More about giggles than guilt? Seymour calls this cheeky posture “bad environmentalism,” which she defines as “environmentalism with the ‘wrong’ attitude— without reverence or seriousness—and while also having a sense of humor about oneself.” It is an attitude that Cocaine Bear is shot through with.
The film’s desire to shun any pretense to illumination is communicated from the very start. Before we catch our first glimpse of the bear on booger sugar, the movie opens with an epigraph providing very official-sounding information about what to do in the event of a bear attack. As soon as the film finishes providing these helpful survival tips, though, the epigraph concludes by citing its source as none other than Wikipedia. The gag killed at my showing, doubly so because the joke was on us. (The movie is called Cocaine Bear. Did we expect a scientific report?) From the jump, the film confesses that it has no moral beyond the obvious, nothing to teach its viewers that they couldn’t learn from a quick Google search. (FYI, if you ever do find yourself being mauled by a black bear, your best chance is to fight! Though if I learned anything from Cocaine Bear, it is that squaring up with a coked-out Ursus americanus is not a good idea.)
If Cocaine Bear has a primary target, it might be crunchy do-gooders like myself who tend to get sanctimonious about their own mediocre environmental commitments and who are ever eager to spread their knowledge. (Congrats for composting, the planet is still on fire!) In the hyper-dilated eyes of our rampaging ursine, though, drug peddlers and tree-huggers are one and the same. An animal-loving detective, a park ranger who dreams of working at Yellowstone, an environmental activist coming around to “inspect the forest” (whatever the fuck that means), and a pair of European eco-tourists with beguiling accents are each unceremoniously dismembered by a bear who takes its orders from no god but Bolivian Marching Powder. In each case, their limpid “environmentalism” is insufficient: They get to die with the rest of the rubes, the dirty kids and coke dealers.
Yet, though the film is often grotesquely violent, there is also a weird kind of consolation in its bloodlust. If the bear is a metaphor for our current climate crisis—the murderous embodiment of nature out of control, fueled up on human abuse—I found myself drawing some small measure of comfort from its conclusion. The bear lives. So do some of the people. Life goes on and the sun rises. Of course, there is nothing especially nuanced to any of that. The whole of the film is predicated on a sort of tautology: Cocaine Bear works because there is a bear on cocaine. But there is also a pure and uncut delight in watching a vaguely green film that is neither obnoxiously sermonizing nor unremittingly depressing. Cocaine Bear is bad environmentalism at its finest, cranked up to 11 and rolling in the devil’s dandruff. And there is value in that.
In fact, the literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued that seemingly lowbrow works of “genre fiction”—like detective novels or space operas—are able to introduce their readers to serious topics precisely because they are low-brow. Someone coming home from a long day spent in a cubicle might not have the emotional bandwidth to read a 500-page historical treatise about 19th-century chattel slavery, but they might be game to read Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a riveting time-travel novel about that same period and problem. When it comes to shamelessly mass-market genres like science fiction, or movies about when animals attack, entertainment doesn’t always equate to mindless escapism. For Jameson, a novel or film’s most entertaining elements can sometimes function like a kind of Trojan horse, allowing the author or director to smuggle in serious topics without coming across as stuffy, preachy, or, worse, boring.
In college, I took a psych class taught by a professor who I will call Frank. Not your typical academic, Frank wore an undersized sports coat that could barely contain his gargantuan biceps, rocked thinning hair held together by gel and a barber’s heroics, and sported an amount of necklaces that I would describe as several too many. I do not know where Frank was from originally, but I know in my heart that it was New Jersey.
This is an article about Cocaine Bear, but I need 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 respectable researchers around the country who feed coke to pigeons for perfectly good science reasons. But the thing about Frank was that if you lined up 20 dudes off the street and were told “one of these guys feeds cocaine to pigeons for a living,” you would have picked Frank 10 out of 10 times.
One day, walking along the rolling green, both of us late to class, I had the occasion to ask Frank how he landed on his “research area.” At this, he shrugged, flashed a wolfish grin, and said, “because they let me.” I do not know what went into getting Cocaine Bear greenlit by Universal Pictures, but the film has unmistakable “because they let me” Frank energy.
Of course, there is really only one reason to see Cocaine Bear, and that is because you would like to see what happens when a bear does cocaine. And in a nation populated by hucksters and con artists, it is refreshing to have someone sell you exactly what you were promised. The plot of the film, which is based rather loosely on a true story, is straightforward. Drug smugglers drop cocaine out of a plane. A bear finds said cocaine. The bear turns the mountain red in pursuit of more cocaine. There are some other minor plot threads along the way, mostly revolving around a pair of kids who eat spoonfuls of cocaine and get lost, as well as a nice-guy drug trafficker mourning his dead wife (cancer dead, not bear dead), but that’s basically the gist.
Yet, what is most compelling about this lowbrow blockbuster is not its titular bear-on-blow rampaging through the Georgia wilds. What is most interesting about the film is its off-kilter environmentalism. Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear’s director, has insisted that her seemingly unserious film is about humanity’s hubristic desire to dominate its environment. “If you fuck with nature, nature will fuck with you,” she summarizes. This ecological angle might surprise viewers who came to the theaters lured by the promise of a black bear hopped up on nose candy and raising hell.
Indeed, if Cocaine Bear violates our expectations about what environmentalism looks like, it is because American consumers are accustomed to environmental discourse that is characterized by piety and a dash of mournfulness. The tone of most “green” messaging is solemn, accompanied by a minor soundtrack and grave warnings. Above all, environmentalist content—whether a feature film or a World Wildlife Fund commercial—is invariably didactic. It would have us learn something, and through that education, inspire us to act. Almost all environmental discourse in America is predicated on the old enlightenment idea that knowledge is power: that if we simply know more about humanity’s impact on the environment, we’ll change our behaviors and attitudes.
The unfortunate truth is that this premise is dubious. Research shows that being more informed about environmental issues doesn’t always change people’s habits or behaviors. What’s more, some scientists argue that the doom and gloom that often characterizes mainstream environmental messaging might actually be counterproductive, encouraging anxiety rather than action. Indeed, as a professor who teaches environmental film, I have seen firsthand the mixed effect that earnest movies about issues such as climate change or species loss can have on students.
Disaster films like Snowpiercer or Children of Men might make for brilliant cinema—and have sophisticated things to say about environmental problems—but they don’t exactly inspire the can-do attitude that is necessary to combat the very ecological crises they explore. My classrooms are mostly populated by bright-eyed Environmental Studies majors who want to save the world, and yet watching films and documentaries about ecological catastrophes often seems to dampen their enthusiasm for activism. “What’s the point of trying?” one student asked me in office hours after watching the bleak apocalyptic film The Road. “Things are going to hell no matter what.” Reactions like these often leave me torn between my responsibilities as a professor—to help young people confront the hard truths about our imperiled planet—and the sense that environmental art often seems to do more harm than good, producing despair rather than determination.
Recognizing this kind of environmental despair in herself and among her own students, Nicole Seymour—an environmentalist and English professor at California State University—has asked a provocative question: If pious messaging doesn’t inspire change, what if environmentalism might “work” better by becoming more irreverent? More ribald and less self-righteous? Silly rather than somber? More about giggles than guilt? Seymour calls this cheeky posture “bad environmentalism,” which she defines as “environmentalism with the ‘wrong’ attitude— without reverence or seriousness—and while also having a sense of humor about oneself.” It is an attitude that Cocaine Bear is shot through with.
The film’s desire to shun any pretense to illumination is communicated from the very start. Before we catch our first glimpse of the bear on booger sugar, the movie opens with an epigraph providing very official-sounding information about what to do in the event of a bear attack. As soon as the film finishes providing these helpful survival tips, though, the epigraph concludes by citing its source as none other than Wikipedia. The gag killed at my showing, doubly so because the joke was on us. (The movie is called Cocaine Bear. Did we expect a scientific report?) From the jump, the film confesses that it has no moral beyond the obvious, nothing to teach its viewers that they couldn’t learn from a quick Google search. (FYI, if you ever do find yourself being mauled by a black bear, your best chance is to fight! Though if I learned anything from Cocaine Bear, it is that squaring up with a coked-out Ursus americanus is not a good idea.)
If Cocaine Bear has a primary target, it might be crunchy do-gooders like myself who tend to get sanctimonious about their own mediocre environmental commitments and who are ever eager to spread their knowledge. (Congrats for composting, the planet is still on fire!) In the hyper-dilated eyes of our rampaging ursine, though, drug peddlers and tree-huggers are one and the same. An animal-loving detective, a park ranger who dreams of working at Yellowstone, an environmental activist coming around to “inspect the forest” (whatever the fuck that means), and a pair of European eco-tourists with beguiling accents are each unceremoniously dismembered by a bear who takes its orders from no god but Bolivian Marching Powder. In each case, their limpid “environmentalism” is insufficient: They get to die with the rest of the rubes, the dirty kids and coke dealers.
Yet, though the film is often grotesquely violent, there is also a weird kind of consolation in its bloodlust. If the bear is a metaphor for our current climate crisis—the murderous embodiment of nature out of control, fueled up on human abuse—I found myself drawing some small measure of comfort from its conclusion. The bear lives. So do some of the people. Life goes on and the sun rises. Of course, there is nothing especially nuanced to any of that. The whole of the film is predicated on a sort of tautology: Cocaine Bear works because there is a bear on cocaine. But there is also a pure and uncut delight in watching a vaguely green film that is neither obnoxiously sermonizing nor unremittingly depressing. Cocaine Bear is bad environmentalism at its finest, cranked up to 11 and rolling in the devil’s dandruff. And there is value in that.
In fact, the literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued that seemingly lowbrow works of “genre fiction”—like detective novels or space operas—are able to introduce their readers to serious topics precisely because they are low-brow. Someone coming home from a long day spent in a cubicle might not have the emotional bandwidth to read a 500-page historical treatise about 19th-century chattel slavery, but they might be game to read Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a riveting time-travel novel about that same period and problem. When it comes to shamelessly mass-market genres like science fiction, or movies about when animals attack, entertainment doesn’t always equate to mindless escapism. For Jameson, a novel or film’s most entertaining elements can sometimes function like a kind of Trojan horse, allowing the author or director to smuggle in serious topics without coming across as stuffy, preachy, or, worse, boring.
In this sense, it may be beside the point whether or not Elizabeth Banks’ film about a black bear who rides the white lightning is quality “cinema.” (The inevitable “is this a good bad movie or a bad bad movie?” debate has already started). Ultimately, Banks’ film may prove too polished to enter the pantheon of other preposterous cult classics—like Sharknado or The Room—whose creators straddle a delicate line between inept and idiot savant. Likewise, I would not go so far as to suggest that Cocaine Bear makes for game-changing environmental propaganda: I do not imagine most audience members will come away from the film with an awakened ecological consciousness. But in an atmosphere in which it is all too easy to feel suffocated by climate anxiety, Elizabeth Banks’ film cuts through our ecological malaise. And when you’re that worn down, who couldn’t use a little pick-me-up?
