“You Will Say, ‘Wow’”: Cinematic Glamping and Ecomasculine Crisis in (and around) The Revenant

Abstract

This article explains how the promotional studio narratives and filmmaker interviews for the frontier drama The Revenant (2015), along with the film’s masculinist adventure narrative, have misrepresented and underserved the ecological conditions at the film’s primary shooting locations in western Canada. Although the film ostensibly pays tribute to the beauty and power of spectacular wilderness regions, the media events involving its release and reception amplified the story’s tropes regarding male suffering in the face of hostile nature, thus hampering the film’s ability to call forth environmental identifications from audiences sufficient to helping effect systems change.