The rise of wilderness porn: how films like The Revenant are making us crave the great outdoors

Sorry, Leo - the real star of The Revenant is the landscape, and with more survivalist films and books hot on its heels, the call of the wild has got stronger. David Sexton looks at the rise of wilderness porn
Back to nature: The Revenant
Press
David Sexton22 January 2016

Even those who don’t like the story of The Revenant admit its vision of nature is stunning. Rosamund Urwin put it first and best here, saying: “As a tourism ad for Canada, The Revenant works like a dream. I’ve never seen a film that captures the wilderness more powerfully. But I’ve also seen few films more stomach-turning.”

It’s “torture porn trussed up to look like intelligent film-making”, she argued, a theme hammered home more heavily by other, mostly female, columnists since. But even they admit that the filming itself is gorgeous. And that the wilderness has its pull.

The cinematography is the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, who has won the Oscar in this category for the past two years running. He made the whole film in natural light, using camera movements that absolutely immerse you in the landscape, so that you feel part of it, right there, not just an observer. It’s a technique he developed with the visionary director Terrence Malick for his 2005 film about an early encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, The New World, the best solution yet found to the question “when you look through a viewfinder, how can you get into the natural environment?”

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant

Since its release, The Revenant has been eagerly reality-checked. Survival expert Ray Mears, no less, has advised that raw bison liver would be nutritious and he has eaten it himself, but that getting inside a dead horse naked would not provide enough insulation for survival. We have learned that, though Leonardo DiCaprio, being a bit of a beast himself, genuinely ate the liver and probably the live fish, both the bison and the horse were actually props, not real — while the fearsome grizzly bear was a stuntman called Glenn Ennis in a bright blue, crudely fashioned bear suit, subsequently enhanced by CGI. But nobody has questioned the beauty and power of the wilderness we see, filmed in high Argentina as well as Canada.

And that wilderness is what we crave. If The Revenant is any kind of porn, it is wilderness porn (just don’t put those words into Google, please). It has always been one of the functions of movies to take us to places that expand our horizons. Westerns have always been relished for their immense landscapes as well as the shoot-outs. Gravity, which Lubezki also filmed, persuasively took you into limitless space itself, from the safety of your seat.

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The more crowded the city becomes, the smaller our living spaces, the less contact with nature we have, the more wilderness seduces as an image and idea, perhaps even a salvation. Currently the No 1 bestseller among nature books, taking over from the chopping bible Norwegian Wood, is Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, the story of how she recovered from the low ebb of alcoholism she had reached after seven years in east London by returning to “the exposed, elemental landscape” she grew up in in Orkney. She cites contributing to the nature-writing website caughtbytheriver.net as an important part of her journey.

For those only seeking wilderness reverie as an escape, there’s a site and a book actually called Cabin Porn, full of “inspiration for your quiet place somewhere”. Wilderness addicts submit pictures of their most lusted-after solitary houses, Scottish stone bothies and huts perched on a rocky ledge, far from civilisation. Frank, anyway. And of course wilderness can still be reached, in comfort even. As it happens, the amazing wilderness home that the deranged genius of the film Ex Machina lives in, although purporting to be Alaska, was actually filmed in the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway’s Valldal Valley, where it is possible to stay yourself (from £247 a night).

Or you can read yourself into it. For further behind this wilderness yearning lies the new nature writing that has become one of the most distinctive British literary forms of recent years. If it traces its origins back to Richard Jefferies and WH Hudson in the 19th century, it was kick-started again by Richard Mabey in the early Seventies with books such as Food for Free and The Unofficial Countryside. Alongside Mabey, its current unofficial capo is the Cambridge don, Robert Macfarlane, who published The Wild Places in 2007, about finding wilderness that remains in Britain and Ireland.

Other key figures include Jay Griffiths, whose book called Wild: An Elemental Journey of the same year was a valuable feminist contribution to what can look a bit like a boys’ club, if not a scout camp. The TV wilderness pioneer Bear Grylls, for that matter, actually is Chief Scout, among other distinctions, and his many alarming exploits included using the corpse of a sheep as a sleeping bag, long before Leo got a similar idea.

Going native: Colin Farrell in The New World
Allstar/NEW LINE CINEMA

It’s becoming quite a crowded field these days and authors are having to get ever more inventively wild. In Feral, Guardian columnist George Monbiot hoped for the “re-wilding” of Britain with wolves, boar, bison and even perhaps bears, replacing the sheep he loathes. Richard Mabey wrote a frank memoir of coming out of depression called Nature Cure, while many writers, mostly men not doing well, have been trying to get inside a wood, a single meadow, tree or creature, for salvation.

But when it comes to real wilderness porn, it is going to be very hard to beat Being a Beast by Charles Foster, published in a couple of weeks, a book rightly described by Jay Griffiths as “flabbergasting” as well as stupendous and brilliant. Foster, an Oxford don qualified in medicine, law and as a vet, wants to rewild himself. So he tries to become a badger, an otter, an urban fox, a red deer and a swift. Literally. “When I’m being a badger, I live in a hole and eat earthworms. When I’m being an otter, I try to catch fish with my teeth.”

He may well be nuts but he can write. He takes you there. The badger chapter begins: “When you put a worm into your mouth, it senses the heat as something sinister. You’d have thought it might make a bid for freedom by going down, into the deeper darkness that usually means home and safety, and head for your oesophagus. But it doesn’t. It goes for the gaps between your teeth.” So now you know.

Going native: Martin McCann in The Survivalist

He and his eight-year-old son Tom lived as badgers in their own sett in Wales for weeks. “We put our front paws on trees and stretched as soon as we came out of our hole. We defecated on mounds chosen for their view of the hill. We acquired a thick patina of scent...” I’ll bet.

He became an urban fox lying “in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the terraced houses all around — which wasn’t hard”. He doesn’t like urbanites much, admitting he likes to give people a nasty shock by coming up right behind them on his bike in Oxford before they know he’s there, so atrophied have their natural senses become. We have been warned.

He may not actually quote Dr Johnson, who said of drinking that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”, but he knows the feeling.

Alas, it can never wholly work. “I cannot, for instance, make children with a fox. I have to come to terms with that,” says Foster dolefully, although as a father of six he does maintain that “human children are more like fox cubs than they’re like anything else”.

At least he has endeavoured to make a beast of himself a bit more thoroughly than most. As for the rest of us, penned up in the city as we are, perhaps wilderness, beastliness, can still be a resource just as an idea, a dream?

Even the beast Foster concludes: “I can’t always be in the wild. Sometimes I have to be in places that smell of fear, fumes and ambition. When I’m there, it helps very much to know that badgers are asleep inside a Welsh hill, that an otter is turning over stones in one of the Rockford pools, that a fox is blinking in the same sun that makes me sweat in my tweed coat...” Somehow that knowledge doesn’t taunt him but comforts him, he says. His readers, too, maybe. Or then again we can always get a ticket to the movies.

Being a Beast by Charles Foster is published by Profile at £14.99 on February 4, in time for Valentine’s Day

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