The Gray Area

Sometimes, to offset our regular intake of indie, underground, queer, feminist films and films made by immigrants and people of color, my partner and I sometimes grab a movie from one of those Red Box things at the grocery store. We expect these movies to be shmaltzy or shlocky or just bad in a variety of other ways. However, I was shocked when my partner brought home The Gray, starring Liam Neeson.

In order to make it through the movie without breaking something, I had to make up a drinking game where every time  a character in the movie stated something factually inaccurate about wolves, we would take a drink. I drank three glasses of wine during the movie due to this game. My partner takes bigger gulps than me, and went through two bottles of beer and two glasses of wine.

I remember that when this movie came out, there were protests by different wildlife and pro-wolf groups around the country. Not a big deal to anyone. But in the light of all the rampant wolf-killing that's happening in Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon, among other places, this country can't afford to have hatefully false bits of media like The Gray floating around for the ignorant and unintelligent to happen upon.

The film paints a picture of the North American gray wolf that is scientifically false and entirely based on fairy-tale fear. Unfortunately, there are ranchers and other anti-wolf entities across the nation that use these same untrue reasons to validate exterminating wolves, regardless of their right as a wild animal to exist, even if sometimes inconvenient to certain humans.

In the movie, wolves are said to have a "kill radius," meaning they will kill any living being found within a certain circular area of their territory. I don't even know where the filmmakers made this up from. Pulled it completely out of their asses, from what I can tell. The characterization of wolves as heartless killers who target the plane crash survivors, just for the fun of it, is patently ridiculous in the light of the fact that the only species of animal on earth that kills for fun is homo sapiens. There were many other false claims about wolves in the film, including stuff about how wolf pack hierarchy works, plus a pack of wolves with like fifty animals in it is pretty unheard of.

I would call the film hilariously incorrect if not for how many people believe that wolves are always waiting in the woods to take our children, and ranchers that think that two wolves living in their state is "overpopulation." I did laugh out loud at the final scene, when Neeson's character tapes a bunch of broken bottles to his knuckles for a final mano a lobo  showdown in the wolves' "fucking den" against the alpha.