"The Wilderness"
(working title)

project initiated spring of 2007

“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”
- David Quammen, Monster of God

I'm fascinated by the role that predator animals play in popular culture, in particular how Hollywood movies utilize the “rogue beast” trope as entertainment. Whether they take the form of environmental precautionary tales (as in the global warming theme of 1977's Day of the Animals) or choose to eschew background in pure pursuit of action (1997's Anaconda, or any Jaws sequel), these movies speak to base fears that all humans share: the fear of “other” in the form of animals, the fear of subordination to them, the fear of being eaten or defeated by animals we cannot control. Our culture has always required the extermination of alpha predators as the basis for the conquest of any land.

It's not as though Hollywood films or even pulp novellas present new treatments of this theme - history is full of predator animals in fictional and mythical interactions with people. What I find intriguing is the repetition of this theme in entertainment today, and it's continual success at creating a binary understanding of “the wild” despite the usual absurdity of the presentation.

What originally began as a study of scenes of human-over-animal victories in contemporary movies has since evolved into a larger documentation of these violent interactions from any film I can get my hands on. From the giant octopus in the first 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) to Snakes on a Plane (2006), modern filmmakers continue to recycle formulaic stories in which people are forced into violent interactions with perverse versions of the natural world, usually ending in victory for the humans.

I am currently building up a video collection of these violent scenarios from fictional movies with the goal of editing the material together into one fluid work.