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Like Nothing Else in the History of Cinema
Or
My Love Letter to Steve Irwin
On the surface, it seems innocent enough: Steve Irwin, a
real-life Crocodile Dundee, travels around the world, grabbing
nature by the tail and showing it to kids for fun and profit.
He offers his animals to the camera for our affection—he's
talking directly to us, challenging us to love nature
as much he does. And when the audience feels the rush
he gets from wrangling a King Cobra, it's as if he's challenging
us to love life as much as he does. To put a finer
point on it, there's an erotic charge in each episode of "The
Crocodile Hunter." Steve Irwin genuinely gets off
on what he's doing. He walks over to a snake or a spider or
a whatever, pokes it with a stick, arouses it, grabs it, and
dances with it as they tease each other. The concentration
of his face builds the tension, and where lesser daredevils
like Jeff Corwin let go when things get too dangerous, Steve
hangs on until he's done telling us everything he knows about
its habitat, coloration, eating habits, and whatnot. My favorite
part is when Steve releases the animal back into the wild,
glowing with excitement, and raises his arms over his head
in ecstasy, "Whoo-Hoo! The Black Mamba! Isn't She A Beauty!"
Anyone who has ever had to get up off the couch and walk it
off during a Croc Hunter commercial break knows exactly what
I'm talking about.
Sometimes, this erotic undercurrent rises to the surface
of the show, resulting in some genuinely bizarre, disconcerting
images. Many of these come from Terri Irwin, Steve's American
wife who came to Australia Zoo as a tourist and fell in love.
As she explained on "Oprah," she saw this "incredibly
sexy" guy explaining crocodile foreplay ("It goes
on for hours," she said), and just decided to leave her
home and head for the bush when Steve proposed to her. On
the surface, Terri seems like Steve's dopey sidekick who's
there to shine the flashlight or carry the koalas, but it
only takes a couple of shows to see that Terri's ambition
really is the driving force behind the Croc Hunter media blitz.
And when Terri's sexuality manages to work itself into the
show, the result is the most bizarre television imaginable:
My favorite being the episode in which Terri spreads peanut
butter on her face and lets a giant bear lick it off, as she
carries on like an Herbal Essences commercial.
As their celebrity has grown, I've sensed a growing tension
in Steve and Terri's marriage. Terri had to have known that
this guy was going to be rich and famous. Yes, of course,
she was turned on by Steve, but I've always sensed ambition
in Terri. I point to the episode of "The Crocodile Hunter"
in which Steve first ventures to the wild outback of the American
talk-show circuit. There's palpable resentment in Terri's
voice when she describes her sadness when her pet cougar doesn't
even recognize her, just a few years after she left Oregon
for Australia. It got worse when the Irwins landed in New
York to be on "The Conan O'Brien Show": "Steve's
not quite sure how to handle himself in the city. All these
years I've been totally dependent on Steve to survive in the
Australian Outback, now he's totally dependent on me just
to get around." Later at some Hollywood dinner party,
Terri shows up in an elegant black dress, while Steve is making
the rounds in his usual khaki shorts and shirt. All these
black-tied, drunken screenwriters converge on Steve while
he goes on about wrestling crocs and whatnot. Terri is pissed:
"Steve doesn't understand that in America, sometimes
it's appropriate to dress up and look nice." The very
next scene is the Irwins on the sidewalks of New York, Steve
wearing slacks and a nice sweater.
Interestingly, John Stainton, director of The Crocodile
Hunter: Collision Course, never filmed Steve until his
wedding ceremony, at the behest of Terri. From then on, the
camera has virtually been an Irwin family member—Steve
even invited the crew along to film Terri giving birth to
Bindi Sue. It's like Steve had an imaginary playmate as a
child and he's finally found that friend again. Steve tells
us constantly that the stars of his show are the animals,
and we know that's not true, but I don't sense false modesty
in Steve Irwin. You cannot act the pain in his eyes when he
finds a beached sea turtle or a kangaroo smashed on the side
of the road. You cannot act the glee in his voice when he
releases a crocodile back into the wild. Yes, Steve Irwin's
act has made him very rich and famous, but he's also given
millions to wildlife charities and saved thousands of animals
because of that celebrity.
That celebrity has brought Steve Irwin under fire some environmental
groups, but such scrutiny seems a might cynical, if not jealous.
If there's one thing the environmental lobby lacks, it's an
image to sell to the public—perhaps if the Left were
a little more media savvy, they would win more battles against
loggers and oil companies. Environmental groups come across
as a bit disingenuous when predicting catastrophes (whether
they are actually impending or not); the words of Armani-clad
Green warriors (Al Gore) and soft, "Kum-ba-ya"-singing
tree huggers lack flesh and, hence, drama. Part of Steve Irwin's
appeal, and his ability to have a voice, comes from his natural
ability to create his own drama from the subject matter itself.
Said another way, when the Left attacks big business, it lacks
the balls of Steve Irwin wrangling a bird-eating spider.
Another part of the drama of "The Crocodile Hunter"
is, of course, Steve Irwin's one-on-one running dialogue with
the camera—as if he's a self-contained, live-action stream-of-conscious
adventure. In short: Steve Irwin's method is a happy-go-lucky
Ernest Hemmingway at accelerated speed and volume. He's also
an embodiment of the inherent irony of the righteous crusader
in the mass media age. He has to sell to save, exploit to
help, and do enough off-camera to persuade us when he's on.
Only the cynical would question Steve Irwin's devotion to
his cause after viewing the episode in which he rescued a
crocodile mired in a concrete pit in India, requiring three
shoulder surgeries in its wake. In this way, Steve Irwin reminds
me of Bono, who also takes criticism from outsiders who don't
know how to play the game. Of course he stands perilously
close to the precipice of hypocrisy—to me, the defining
image of the Crocodile Hunter phenomena is Monty the Croc
chomping a remote camera in his habitat at Australia Zoo.
My rebuttal is this: How can you question a man's conviction
who wrestles a sixteen foot crocodile with his bare hands?
You get to see all that and much more in The Crocodile
Hunter: Collision Course, a must-see for the most casual
Steve Irwin fan, or for any movie-goer curious to see a movie
like no other. Steve battles the most poisonous snake in Australia,
a bird-eating spider, the largest croc he's ever tackled (sixteen
feet, for the record)—all stuff we've more-or-less seen
before. The movie, however, wraps the Steve Irwin method around
a plot that's a crazy as anything I've ever seen. The film
opens with ominous talk of United States intelligence capabilities;
next, a spy satellite explodes and a "top-secret US satellite
spy beacon" goes crashing into the Australian Outback,
where's it's promptly swallowed by, of course, a crocodile.
The mom from Babe has had enough of this croc, so she
tries to take the shotgun to it. Steve and Terri are dispatched
to save the croc, but not before the CIA(!) dispatches two
agents and a hot blonde to recover the beacon.
It sounds like the film is going to make the CIA agents into
Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in Home Alone, but that's
far from the case. The scenes at CIA headquarters are played
straight-faced, and the agents aren't bumbling buffoons. This
is serious work, when in any other movie it would be played
for cheap gags—no one winks at the camera. I admire John
Stainton's willingness to take the concept all the way: Apparently,
Steve Irwin has been present at every major world coup of
the last decade, requiring the President of the United States
(Timothy Bottoms from "That's My Bush") to issue
a unilateral strike against Steve Irwin himself. This is the
most bizarre plot of any film since Saddam met Satan in South
Park.
Even more bizarre is the general method of the movie. Steve
never read the script—he was merely given a broad outline
and told to get from Point A to Point B. In an inspired decision,
Stainton doesn't try to make Irwin into an actor; Steve tackles
the movie like his show. This makes sense when he's chasing
lizards through the desert, but Steve talks to the camera
even while wrangling CIA agents on top of his truck. The internal
logic of the film is that Steve is the only one who knows
that the camera's on. And like the show, Steve's speeches
aren't the sort of Ferris Bueller or Rob Gordon soliloquy,
he's talking right to us in the theater, like a first person
narrator in the stream of consciousness. This sort of bizarre
method, which I've never seen on film, draws us into the sort
of intimate relationship he naturally has with his audience.
The movie enters a whole other plane when the erotic undercurrent
rises to the surface. In perhaps the most shocking scene in
film in the last five years (I'm not kidding), Steve finds
an abandoned joey kangaroo on the side of the road. Terri
rips off her shirt, and we get a close-up cleavage shot as
she prepares to breast feed it right there, as if she's giving
it first aid. Later, Steve is handling a deadly snake that
nearly bites his leg: We get a close-up of his inner-thigh;
then the camera pans back, but stays focused on Steve's crotch,
all the while he tells us that the venom would make "things
rot off the human body." There's even a good fart joke:
the fat woman gets caught with butt stuck out a window; she
farts, and simultaneously the CIA blows up her barn with dynamite.
I'm not sure what else to say about Collision Course
other than it's simply one of the best times I've had at the
theater. It rewarded my faith in Steve Irwin by taking things
farther than I anticipated. I should say that a Snobby For
Special Merit in Direction should go to Wes Mannion for, even
though he didn't direct the movie, not letting anyone get
killed on the set. Longtime Croc Hunter fans will know Wes
as Steve's best mate whom he drags out of the pub when he
wants to go do something really stupid. Wes pretty much set
up all these scenes with the animals, which I can honestly
say are as compelling as anything I've seen on the show. There's
something genuinely enrapturing about Steve Irwin poking a
poisonous spider with a stick, and if it earns him the ability
to go on "Oprah" and name a koala after her, then
so be it. If a few Croc Hunter fans decide to join the Sierra
Club, or support their local Greenways or animal shelters
because of his show, then the end justifies the means.
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