Speaker 1: Cool media.
Speaker 2: Hello, everybody, it could happen here or here, And this
Speaker 2: is Robert Evans. We're a show about things falling apart,
Speaker 2: and boy howdy, they sure seem to be doing just that,
Speaker 2: as they always are and have been four years, you know.
Speaker 2: In fact, anticipation of the end times I think is
Speaker 2: probably close to the number one hobby in the United
Speaker 2: States at this point. I suspect if you counted up
Speaker 2: the dollar value of all the collapse themed movies, books,
Speaker 2: prepping gear, monetize social media content, and of course religious
Speaker 2: sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of
Speaker 2: our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost one
Speaker 2: point two billion dollar business last year, and it's expected
Speaker 2: to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction
Speaker 2: can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent
Speaker 2: of modern future media takes place during or shortly after
Speaker 2: an apocalypse. The odd exception today, like Bong Jun Ho's
Speaker 2: recent Mickey seventeen, is so rooted in Trump's politics that
Speaker 2: we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In
Speaker 2: other words, in our fiction, there's no respite from the news.
Speaker 2: We watch a slow motion self inflicted global economic collapse,
Speaker 2: and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal
Speaker 2: wage slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words,
Speaker 2: it's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump
Speaker 2: invokes the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland,
Speaker 2: or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all
Speaker 2: just know our coming in some form or another, even
Speaker 2: if no one can say win. And I'm not here
Speaker 2: today to tell you how we're going to get past
Speaker 2: all of that or fix it, because I don't know.
Speaker 2: So today I'm just here as a merchant of hope.
Speaker 2: My job is to convince you that our species will
Speaker 2: someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim
Speaker 2: to the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to
Speaker 2: have anything to do with that. But in order to
Speaker 2: convince you of all this, I'm going to have to
Speaker 2: talk about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is
Speaker 2: technically a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an
Speaker 2: American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in
Speaker 2: Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit
Speaker 2: at the same time as a grant committee shows up
Speaker 2: to evaluate his project, which has an unclear goal. He's
Speaker 2: apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from
Speaker 2: all over the world can live together, which the movie
Speaker 2: shows they can't. It's really immaterial what happens in the plot.
Speaker 2: All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it.
Speaker 2: I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have
Speaker 2: very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This
Speaker 2: is because in any given scene, the script is only
Speaker 2: ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors
Speaker 2: trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors
Speaker 2: trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers,
Speaker 2: and panthers. I should probably step back a minute to
Speaker 2: explain some things. Roor is largely the brainchild of Tippyhedron
Speaker 2: and her husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side,
Speaker 2: Tippy Hedron was the female lead in a little movie
Speaker 2: called The Birds. It is a horror film and also
Speaker 2: an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited
Speaker 2: with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically
Speaker 2: harassed Hedron, but his worst actions came during a crucial
Speaker 2: scene where Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds.
Speaker 2: Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy
Speaker 2: the birds used in this scene would be animatronic, but
Speaker 2: when the time came to shoot it, she spent five
Speaker 2: days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in
Speaker 2: huge numbers by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly,
Speaker 2: and relentless. Carrie Grant, her co star, told her she
Speaker 2: was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other
Speaker 2: impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear
Speaker 2: of animals after this point in her life, though she
Speaker 2: really should. Her husband, Nol is a bit more of
Speaker 2: a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer,
Speaker 2: a film investor in, a serial entrepreneur whose best financial
Speaker 2: decision was putting money mind what became the Exorcist. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque
Speaker 2: while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which
Speaker 2: less is said the better. This is only relevant because
Speaker 2: during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of
Speaker 2: lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them
Speaker 2: an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching
Speaker 2: and conservation, something that could use the power of film
Speaker 2: to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All
Speaker 2: four of their children agreed to star in it and
Speaker 2: to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They
Speaker 2: wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary,
Speaker 2: but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat
Speaker 2: out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely.
Speaker 2: This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.
Speaker 2: After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first
Speaker 2: tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he
Speaker 2: suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of
Speaker 2: charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own
Speaker 2: bigg and trained them by adopting animals confiscated from their
Speaker 2: previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a lot
Speaker 2: of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd
Speaker 2: often been badly mistreated given them. This was the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: We must assume that some had been confiscated property of
Speaker 2: Coke dealers, Tippy and Noll had no professional or legal
Speaker 2: qualifications to care for dozens of big cats. When the
Speaker 2: authorities eventually found out, there was trouble, although since Hedrid
Speaker 2: and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of
Speaker 2: said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a
Speaker 2: house built specifically for they and their dozens of apex
Speaker 2: predators to live. While lions had inspired the initial vision,
Speaker 2: the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats
Speaker 2: of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in
Speaker 2: and raised them among and around their own children, who
Speaker 2: came to see the animals as something between pets and family.
Speaker 2: When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar.
Speaker 2: Making any kind of movie had become secondary to the
Speaker 2: act of caring for these men any many giant traumatized kiddies.
Speaker 2: As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind
Speaker 2: of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on.
Speaker 2: I can tell you, though, that none of these cats
Speaker 2: were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that
Speaker 2: every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts surrounded
Speaker 2: by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few lines
Speaker 2: before one or all of the cats began to bite
Speaker 2: and claw them, at which point each scene becomes about
Speaker 2: surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took more
Speaker 2: than five years to film in more than a decade
Speaker 2: to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production
Speaker 2: of this movie, but more humans were injured than in
Speaker 2: any other film production on record. Of the one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar, more
Speaker 2: than one hundred suffered significant injury, often more than once.
Speaker 2: Jan Debout, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by
Speaker 2: a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went
Speaker 2: on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter
Speaker 2: and a future star herself, left production at one point
Speaker 2: because she was worried a big cat might rip her
Speaker 2: face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large
Speaker 2: chuntic of her face ripped off, requiring extensive surgery. This
Speaker 2: all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify, but before you
Speaker 2: make a final judgment, I want to remind you of
Speaker 2: two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries,
Speaker 2: fewer people were killed on the set of War Than
Speaker 2: in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that
Speaker 2: you must remember is that Roar is a work of
Speaker 2: art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch
Speaker 2: it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace,
Speaker 2: you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet
Speaker 2: of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it
Speaker 2: over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we
Speaker 2: will one day get over our bullshit and escape the
Speaker 2: present hell that our species seems mired in. I know
Speaker 2: that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time.
Speaker 2: I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ads.
Speaker 2: We're back, and the first thing I need you to
Speaker 2: understand about all of these fucking cats is that in
Speaker 2: every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them,
Speaker 2: I see no anger or malice in the actions of
Speaker 2: these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me,
Speaker 2: as a cat owner that the cats didn't see these people,
Speaker 2: Tippy and her family and the cast and crew as
Speaker 2: prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them
Speaker 2: as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they
Speaker 2: extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind
Speaker 2: of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily
Speaker 2: by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie
Speaker 2: knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If
Speaker 2: you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given
Speaker 2: that nearly every person on this film was badly injured,
Speaker 2: including Tippy, who got ganggreen from infected cat wounds, and
Speaker 2: all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge
Speaker 2: who are a knol or both of them for risking
Speaker 2: their kids' lives to make this insane movie. I understand
Speaker 2: the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.
Speaker 2: The first thing you need to see to understand the
Speaker 2: deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from
Speaker 2: a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star,
Speaker 2: Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and
Speaker 2: this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk
Speaker 2: because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite
Speaker 2: the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh
Speaker 2: five hundred pounds, no Old Marshall won't stop focusing on
Speaker 2: his work, and so the cat inches away from his
Speaker 2: face roars. The sound of a male lion's roar is
Speaker 2: deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed
Speaker 2: down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the
Speaker 2: sound up close and lived to tell the tale. It
Speaker 2: has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro
Speaker 2: Goldwyn Meyer the film Studio, used it to open every
Speaker 2: movie they made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe
Speaker 2: they did this because the sound is a sort of
Speaker 2: hack to compel our attention. It pulls an audience out
Speaker 2: of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and
Speaker 2: makes them more attentive to the film that is to come.
Speaker 2: And so the first thing you need to understand about
Speaker 2: the people who made Roar is that Marshal, upon having
Speaker 2: a living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives
Speaker 2: the creature a look that says, hey, man, can you
Speaker 2: give me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle
Speaker 2: of something. I bring this up so that you will
Speaker 2: understand that these were not people operating on anything close
Speaker 2: to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives
Speaker 2: and their choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great
Speaker 2: photo from the set of that Playboy's shoot. While the
Speaker 2: camera people roamed the Heddron compound, one of them caught
Speaker 2: a shot of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool.
Speaker 2: An adult male lion, which he must have considered to
Speaker 2: be in some way. A member of the family sees
Speaker 2: this girl passing by in the corner of its eye,
Speaker 2: and that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like
Speaker 2: any cat of that size in the same situation, it
Speaker 2: reaches out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and
Speaker 2: the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened
Speaker 2: that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Mark almost
Speaker 2: as soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged
Speaker 2: that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her
Speaker 2: well being. She also does not seem to have ever
Speaker 2: seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she quote was
Speaker 2: into it every bit as much as he was, and
Speaker 2: that production was an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell Nol's son,
Speaker 2: who acted in the movie and like everyone else, was
Speaker 2: mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when
Speaker 2: his dad died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking
Speaker 2: asshole to do that to his family, he said recently.
Speaker 2: He also said this, it was amazing to live through that.
Speaker 2: I should have died many times, but I kind of
Speaker 2: want to do it again. If you have any friends
Speaker 2: or family who have survived extended periods of every combat,
Speaker 2: there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation
Speaker 2: of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes
Speaker 2: a drug taking. It can be more than just hell.
Speaker 2: It's often also a high, which is one thing that
Speaker 2: drives a lot of people crazy. I need to take
Speaker 2: a moment away from Roor to talk about some people
Speaker 2: that I'm in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate
Speaker 2: and ferocious urban combat against ISIS. The closer I drew
Speaker 2: to the front, the more guys I met who were
Speaker 2: elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the
Speaker 2: bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men, ranging
Speaker 2: from the tail end of their teens to their twenties.
Speaker 2: Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from
Speaker 2: the time they were seven or eight. Sometimes younger, they'd
Speaker 2: been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their
Speaker 2: earliest memories were as runners ferrying supplies and information to
Speaker 2: the older men and teenage boys who did most of
Speaker 2: the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped
Speaker 2: grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of
Speaker 2: whom were teenagers themselves. Now. They fought against ISIS in
Speaker 2: close quarters, building to building a few weeks at a time.
Speaker 2: Periodically they'd rotate off the front and would go to
Speaker 2: Erbil an hour or two away. Many of them were
Speaker 2: gangsters in their spare time, running drugs and guns and brothels.
Speaker 2: They spent their days off in a drunken haze of
Speaker 2: Turkish amphetamines. Than they would drive back to the front
Speaker 2: new brightly colored Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold
Speaker 2: to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers
Speaker 2: they can only be closed with bungee cords. The guns
Speaker 2: and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up
Speaker 2: enemy positions and the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of
Speaker 2: Mosl's old city. In every building, on every block, the
Speaker 2: fighting terminated with door to door, room to room battles,
Speaker 2: where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives,
Speaker 2: and pistols. In that order. I don't know if any
Speaker 2: of these guys were, at that point that I met them,
Speaker 2: capable of feeling what u Ori would recognize as fear.
Speaker 2: These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the
Speaker 2: petting edge of the fighting against ISIS and MOSL on
Speaker 2: occasion when they kidnapped Ice. As fighters, some of them
Speaker 2: committed war crimes with the ease and with as much
Speaker 2: thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad,
Speaker 2: of course, unforgivable, but I've never really given much thought
Speaker 2: to judging them for it. Where would I even start.
Speaker 2: A thing I've come to understand in my travels is
Speaker 2: that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the
Speaker 2: most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times
Speaker 2: they're forced to live in. This has been the story
Speaker 2: of our entire long journey on this earth, and if
Speaker 2: there is one reason our species has survived above all
Speaker 2: the others, it is our capacity for infinite variety and
Speaker 2: infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're
Speaker 2: given the right incentives, and to an extent, you can't
Speaker 2: judge individual humans without judging the incentives The world we
Speaker 2: collectively create presents for them. We evolved, and we still
Speaker 2: live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable,
Speaker 2: and those of us who survive the worst things that
Speaker 2: life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes
Speaker 2: to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to
Speaker 2: the people we experience it with. This is why the
Speaker 2: cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted
Speaker 2: to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why
Speaker 2: many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed. Roar happened
Speaker 2: because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for
Speaker 2: roughly one hundred and forty large cats and for each other,
Speaker 2: and almost exercised z hezero critical judgment Beyond that point. Now,
Speaker 2: I will understand if you still feel that nothing could
Speaker 2: justify the decision of two parents to risk their children's
Speaker 2: lives in such folly. And I know this essay is
Speaker 2: supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to get to that, but you know,
Speaker 2: we still live in twenty twenty five. So first, here's ads.
Speaker 2: So here's my best step at explaining why I find
Speaker 2: Rar inspirational. There's a scene about three quarters of the
Speaker 2: way through this movie, after roughly an hour straight of
Speaker 2: watching the Hedron, Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly
Speaker 2: mulled for real by giant cats, and in this scene,
Speaker 2: John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario
Speaker 2: that I am certain has never happened before or since
Speaker 2: in the history of this planet. He rides away from
Speaker 2: the home where his family is trapped and draws several
Speaker 2: dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away by making them chase him.
Speaker 2: The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try
Speaker 2: to murder or maim him, but he continues building up
Speaker 2: speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal
Speaker 2: killing machines to evolve on this planet. You can see
Speaker 2: from the look in John's eyes in this scene that
Speaker 2: he has no idea. If he seconds away from death,
Speaker 2: it would have been physically impossible to stop or control
Speaker 2: this number of giant cats. The only reason this number
Speaker 2: and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have
Speaker 2: existed together at any previous point in world history would
Speaker 2: have been across a distance of thousands of miles of
Speaker 2: rugged wilderness. But thanks to Tippean Knowles insane dream, and
Speaker 2: thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commitment of many
Speaker 2: of the crew and their family, a moment of utter
Speaker 2: novelty occurs where this singular assortment of big cats watches
Speaker 2: as a man fleeing in terror from them on a
Speaker 2: dirt bike does one of the sickest jumps in film
Speaker 2: history and lands directly into a river, and then keeps
Speaker 2: right until he is charged by a juvenile African elephant,
Speaker 2: which the Hedrons also kept on their property. In its uniqueness,
Speaker 2: this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the moon landing.
Speaker 2: After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the
Speaker 2: Moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene,
Speaker 2: although some of that may be due to the fact
Speaker 2: that it is extremely illegal for anyone today to even try.
Speaker 2: And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar
Speaker 2: My Dear Friends during the Dark Times, not because it's
Speaker 2: a good movie, but because it reveals what is best
Speaker 2: about humanity. What piece of art could better illustrate the
Speaker 2: infinite possibilities within us. If a group of human beings
Speaker 2: can learn to live among lions and tigers, despite the
Speaker 2: constant guarantee of severe injury without really understanding why is
Speaker 2: it so mad to think that perhaps we two can
Speaker 2: transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better,
Speaker 2: or at least something far stranger than money grubbing fascists.
Speaker 2: I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems
Speaker 2: to quach a bit further with each passing day, but
Speaker 2: I do know this. If we can make war, we
Speaker 2: can do anything.
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