So, you remember a month or so back when there was a big headline on Drudge about how Leonardo DiCaprio's character was raped (twice!) by a bear in The Revenant? I have a crazy theory about that whole story. Spoilers below.
OK, so, there you were, sitting at work, checking social media and all of the sudden, everyone was talking about bear rape. Leo getting raped by a bear this, best actor in a scene of forced bear penetration that. Everywhere you looked: bear rape! Fox was quick to deny the report and critics who had seen the movie were like "wtf?" And I can tell you now, definitively, having seen the movie that there was no bear-on-man rape in The Revenant. (I reviewed the bear-rape-free movie here.)
Anyway. The story kind of went away ... except for the fact that people are still referring to it as the bear-rape movie. What was once hailed as a remarkably intense scene in a movie that some Oscar bloggers suggested* women wouldn't be able to stand because of their ovaries or whatever became a punchline. A frontrunner for best picture whose claim to the throne was based almost entirely on the film being an endurance test is now a literal joke for a vast swathe of the viewing audience.
Okay, so, the big question was: who fed Matt Drudge** this story? Vanity Fair suggested he cribbed the report from Roger Friedman, but that doesn't seem right to me; Friedman definitely didn't write the quote Drudge had ("He is raped -- twice!") in his piece.*** Cui bono is the important question, as always. Who benefits? And who benefitted most from denigrating an intense, male-driven movie ahead of awards season? What movie stood to benefit the most at the Globes and the Oscars if people thought a bear-rape film was too ludicrous to hand the trophies to?
Think about it: here's another violence-heavy film filled with intense situations from a renowned auteur that was picking up huge awards buzz. Frankly, you can only have one film like this in contention each year. And who is the executive producer of The Hateful Eight?
And what is Harvey Weinstein best known for?
Weinstein is a genius when it comes to manipulating the press during awards season. Consider, for instance, the campaign for Chocolat:
— Weinstein was able to secure a Best Picture nomination for the unlikely Chocolat with, as USA Today put it at the time, "such eyebrow-raising moves as a newspaper ad in which Jesse Jackson and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League praised the film."
Or his campaign for In the Bedroom:
— With their In the Bedroom going up against favorite A Beautiful Mind, Miramax reportedly perpetrated a "smear campaign unprecedented in the history of the Academy Awards for its viciousness." According to Down and Dirty Pictures, this involved pointing a Los Angeles Times writer to a Matt Drudge piece about how A Beautiful Mind omitted the parts of the original biography relating to John Nash's alleged homosexuality. Then after ballots went out, news came out of "Jew-bashing passages" from the book.
Now look, I'm speculating wildly here. I have no proof of anything. I am a humble pajama-clad, Cheetos-stained blogger.
But you're starting to see pictures, ain't ya?
*I actually more or less agree with Wells and think that the amount of guff he took for saying that men and women like different kinds of movies was silly, but that's a post for another day.
**A subplot here is the fact that Matt Drudge is still, after all these years, one of the five most powerful people in the media who can make literally anything a national story. You've got to respect that kind of power.
***Friedman didn't write that the bear rapes Leo in his post and the quote Drudge features ("He is raped -- twice!") appears in neither the post nor the comments. The only reference to Leo being raped ("twice!") in the piece is a comment that is timestamped after Drudge's report went live. Maybe Friedman wrote that in an email he sent to Drudge with the link ... or maybe someone else did. We don't know.