Man: 13, Wild: 0

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Friday 13 July 2007 @8:45

Somehow we got hooked on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild, where former UK special forces soldier Bear Grylls parachutes into some god-forsaken landscape with just a knife and a windbreaker, and demonstrates how to survive for several days and find civilization again. Along the way, he ingests unspeakable things and gets himself in more trouble than needed — knowingly jumping breast-deep into quick sand, for example — ostensibly to instruct us on how to get out.

It’s a little hard to explain my fascination. I can tell just from the adverts that I’m not the expected target audience. But I think it stimulates some deep-seated survival instinct that we all must have. (And if this effete urbanite has any interest in survival under such conditions, then it must be innate.)

I sense a certain connection to another of my unlikely interests: dystopian literature and film. I am fascinated by the various ways healthy societies collapse, and what it takes to navigate the new world order. Bear’s adventures end the moment he finds a paved road, but I’m much more interested in what would happen when there’s no reasonable civilization to return to. If you can never again be certain of getting your next meal from a supermarket or restaurant, what then? How to organize a new society, and possibly a resistance, whilst surviving in the jungle?

Perhaps these questions are beyond the scope of the show, and the only question needed to explain our fascination is this: When will the Etonian hottie take off his shirt?

There’s also a sense in which I’m waiting for him to fail. Just once, one of his ballsy maneuvers should land him in enough trouble that he needs an airlift. For the sake of realism, of course, not Schadenfreude…

Formula 309

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Thursday 15 March 2007 @9:36

For some reason, we went to see ‘300’ this weekend. Spartan values don’t need such glorification — particularly in this age, which doesn’t exactly seem to be a new Enlightenment. The Village Voice had it about right: “Spartan hotties trounce Persian trannies.” I heard someone behind me shout “Take that, faggot!” when Leonidas reached Xerxes with his spear. (I’d like to hear that repeated directly to Xerxes, who — despite some eye liner, facial hardware, and gold body paint — was portrayed as about 3m tall.)

Shallow parallels to today’s geopolitics abound, but I wonder how ‘pro-life’ warmongers interpreted the portrayal of Spartans chucking less-than-perfect newborns off the cliff.

To its credit, there was some truly spectacular imagery. And I enjoyed lines that revealed (in my view) that the film wasn’t taking itself too seriously:

King Leonidas: “Dilios, I trust that scratch hasn’t made you useless.”
Dilios, bandaging half his head: “Hardly, my lord. It’s just an eye. The gods saw fit to grace me with a spare.”