Cocaine Bear and the Joy of an Unlikely Scenario
- cepmurphywrites
- 57 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Being enthusiasts of alternate history, everyone reading this is probably able to name an iconic piece of AH fiction in most formats. A book, a comic, a tv show, a video game etc. But it's maybe a little harder when it comes to motion pictures. There have obviously been a bunch of AH feature films but none have really been advertised as the big new AH media in the way TV shows like The Man in the High Castle have been.
This is, I would argue, is less to do with what is being made and more to do with the marketing not making the link to AH. Quentin Tarantino, one of the most talked about directors of his generation, has released two major big budget AH films, but neither were spoken about in those terms in the promotion of them, partly because to do so would spoil their surprises. But, even more importantly, fundamentally genre is an advertising concept and there is no commercial advantage to selling a war film as an AH film, given the lack of a proven AH market among film goers, so Inglourious Basterds is not promoted as such.
Which is why the biggest AH film of 2023, and possibly I would argue, the most iconic AH film of all time, is not one that comes to mind as being AH. I am talking of course, as the title should give away, about Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear.
Now this is not meant to be a smart alec thing where I point out that technically all film with a major animal attack is secretly alternate history because in real life there was no such attack. By that standard, all fiction is alternative history. The reason why I think Cocaine Bear is AH is, as the film makes clear in the opening credits, it is based on a true story.
This true story is that, in 1985, drug runner Andrew Carter Thornton II jumped out of a plane with 35 kilograms of cocaine on him, his parachute didn't open as planned, and instead he crashed into the driveway of a suburban home in Knoxville, dying when he hit the ground. Later it turned out that Thompson and his partner had jettisoned around another 34 kilograms of cocaine in the wilderness as they couldn't carry it. This stash was then found by a bear who ate it and died of an overdose.
This fact was discovered by film writer Jimmy Warden while he was scrolling on the internet, and it struck him as a potential movie plot. But not because of what did happen, which is just another depressing case of a wild animal dying due to reckless littering, but because of the potential ‘what if?
What if instead of just dying, the bear survives but goes on a coked up killing spree? That's a fun creature feature premise, right? But the fun is in the diversion from reality. As Elizabeth Banks, the director, described it, it felt like a way to give the real bear some revenge.
And so, the first part of the film is a period piece which describes a real incident which happened forty years before the film is made but instead of following what actually happened, we go on to what could have resulted from that if the cool pulpy thing had happened rather than morbid real thing.
And that feels so familiar to me as someone with years in amateur AH communities. The discovering a thing in Wikipedia or social media and going, ‘but what if this actually came about’?
"I just discovered that there was a plan among the rebels against Henry IV to divide England into three if they won. What if that happened?"
"I just discovered that King John of England was accused of wanting to convert to Islam. What if he did?"
"I just discovered that the Sultan of Morocco aimed to conquer the Spanish Empire. What if he did?"
"I just discovered that a bear once ate 30 kg of cocaine. What if it went on a coke filled rampage?"
And people who take AH seriously, of which I am one, tend to be the ones to dim enthusiasm about such things. We care about history and we delight in pointing out that the plans to conquer Spain were internal propaganda that were never going to be enacted and John was never going to actually convert to Islam, that was slander, and that there's no real evidence that cocaine would turn a bear into a manhunter.
And that's fair and should be said but I think there is still space for AH like this, just in terms of fiction rather than speculation. I think you often want fiction to go with the most fun pulpiest possible result rather than the most plausible.
Surely, in terms of fiction, whether a scenario is interesting is more important than whether it is plausible and like sometimes you want to watch a coked up bear killing hikers.
I would still probably throw water on it in a thread post about what might have happened (where we are talking about history rather than fiction), but pulp fiction has a lower threshold for suspension of disbelief than historical discussion. If you want to write a pulpy story with characters and suspense set in an AH setting, that’s my jam and I am happy to read about Tibetan monks fighting invading Nazis and just ignore the logistics of them getting there. And that is the spirit of Cocaine Bear.
I'm not going to review the film as a film; it's exactly the film you think it'll be from the title and the perfect length (90 minutes) for a film about a coked-up bear. What I am reviewing it as is as AH. And I think it is fair to say I do not think you can come up with a more interesting resulting ‘what if?’ scenario for Andrew Carter Thornton II's missing coke than the one the film posits. So, in my mind, this is the perfect AH film. It features a true and interesting bit of history and then twists it into the most interesting scenario that could have resulted and tells a story about the result. That’s what good AH does.
Full marks, no notes.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.