DAne Dehaan Talks to a Bear
On the 2016 Film, Two Lovers and a Bear
BY RUTH COOLIDGE
What’s funny is the mouth on this bear. Dane nearly drops a double-barrel shotgun too big for
his boy-body and says
What the fuck are you doing here
and the bear peels his black lips back and says something like
You can’t keep this up forever
What is it in the weighty dinner-plate feet and loose skin of a bear that begs a prophetic voice?
More importantly: will Dane give him the whiskey?
That question answered (he won’t), the focus shifts from hallucination to flight. The girl can see
the bear too now, moaning
I’m hungry
Dane has shrugged off suicide in favor of a heavier coat, says
This is all you’ll get
to which the bear replies
You’re on the right track
The only thing is the running joke: two lovers and a bear walk into a bar.
Why does a bear only follow two lovers?
The crunch of the bear’s face breaking ice is the final shock. Dane’s drowsy eyes meet the bear
who begins to say
Two lovers and bear walk into a bar
but Dane tucks his head back into the snow and says
I’ve already heard that one
and the bear withdraws his white snout.
Be seeing you real soon.
If death is a white ice bear, why does he ask for whiskey? Or why does he need to eat?
And if two lovers walk into a bar, why does it end with the bear?
Is it a story of overcoming or succumbing, and why does it feel like both?
3001: A Neolithic Odyssey
It will begin, as it ended, with the fetus in the bubble.
Also sprach Zarathustra will drone slowly over the moon-horizon,
and a hundred wide-eyed plastic heads will swivel.
Rain was your birth
Gathered deep
Beneath the earth.
Next the pirated avant-garde strains of György Ligeti will
descend in atonal whining to a chorus of petrified silences,
as the slab touches down with a metaphysical whump.
Search and seep,
Hollow stone
Issue and flow
The cosmic reverberations will begin to ring less like
an airlock siren and more like a primordial prayer chime.
Cracks dripping down the monolith will softly hiss.
Virgin stream
Meander free
It’s a long way to the sea.
Slowly, the fully formed body of Keir Dullea will rise,
claw through the membrane like an ice-starved snow leopard.
He will press and stretch against an iridescent placenta.
Caves and canyons
Stark prison walls
Swirl and hurl you
Rupturing, he will breathe his first air in a thousand years,
slip like a cold fish across titanium floor panels, and the echo
of his glacial pulse will begin to wail: remember.