Conflation: thoughts prompted by “Pig” (2021)
Here I will discuss something pointless, which, hey, my blog, I say what I want. It’s about a very good film and a detail which is, it turns out, wrong. But, I think, interestingly wrong.
Nicolas Cage stars in Pig (2021). Pig both is excellent and sounds like a joke if you sum it up. Cage plays a retired gourmet chef living off the grid near Portland, his only daily companion a prize-winning truffle pig. One night thugs drive to his cabin, attack him, and steal his pig. After the attack, Cage walks into Portland to find the pig. That’s it. And it’s a lovely, quiet, moody, sad film. Cage has said it’s his favorite movie he’s ever made.
There’s a heightened reality to Pig, extrapolating from reality in surprising directions: for instance, the filmmakers know of the stress and abuse in the restaurant industry, and represent this with an underground chef fight club; Cage’s character fights to show he’s serious. Again, not real and almost a joke, but in context it works. And that heightened reality combines with a filmmaking style both poetic and grounded. It’s exaggerated, but not obviously.
During a scene in a nice downtown apartment, Cage lets down his guard with an acquaintance (he doesn’t really have friends), and talks about how in prehistoric times the area where Portland is now was repeatedly inundated by enormous floods. Then he says
Every 200 years we get an earthquake, right along the coast. One’s coming up. When the shockwave hits, most of the city will be flattened. Every bridge will fall into the Willamette. So, there’s nowhere to go, even if we could. Anyone who survives that’s just waiting. Five minutes later, they’ll look up, and they’ll see a wave, ten stories high. And then all this, everyone, it’s all gonna be at the bottom of the ocean. Again.
Except, no. It’s true we’re due (overdue) for a major quake, but the floods he mentioned have nothing to do with it. The Missoula Floods, which happened multiple times between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, were caused by glacial ice blocking what’s now called the Columbia River Drainage Basin; a giant lake forming behind the ice dam in what would be western Montana; then that ice dam breaking to send cataclysmic torrents rushing towards the Pacific, destroying so much in the path.
Prepare to be scared: there’s a good chance people saw these. The Columbia Gorge, downstream from the glacial lake, has supported human habitation for over 13,000 years, overlapping with the floods era. The destruction and death toll for the people then must have been unimaginable; not to mention the massive loss of animal and plant life. Just try to wrap your mind around the luck of being high enough in the Gorge or the hills not to get hit by the floods; even witnessing the floods would have been an immense trauma. The earth, we think, should not move like that.
This won’t happen again in anything like a timescale we can comfortably envision. The Earth will have other Ice Ages; but it will take tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years for those conditions to return.
Nicolas Cage’s character in Pig would have heard of the Missoula Floods. This information was not relevant to his life, when or after he was a chef; and the info got conflated with the knowledge of the earthquake to make his character think that something like this will happen. It won’t. But whoa, it would be vivid, and horrible.
His character has seen the vivid and the horrible. The whole plot hinges on trauma. The thugs’ attack is, in its small way, horrible. His description of the impossible wave has no eagerness; he doesn’t find it neat. He understands the damage it would cause, the horror. He does not treat it like an intellectual exercise, even though it is.
I sometimes run into people who do think like this, though, and seem eager about it. Who seem to seek worst-case scenarios, and go but they could happen. Some dwell on them; a few even maybe want them to happen, like a mass accident from a Final Destination film taking place for real. Cage’s character doesn’t. He’s trying to picture and describe something huge and horrible, and whoever listens to him probably won’t realize it’s impossible. But, of course, the reality of a massive earthquake where I live would be huge and awful enough.
Cage’s character in wants more gentleness in the world; he wants less of the huge and awful. He tries his best to live gently, though the film shows he can be un-gentle if needed. (It’s been said, though I’m not sure I 100% agree, that you can only truly be peaceful if you are capable of violence; that you can get violent but you don’t.) Pig is in part about wanting more gentleness, more peace. Maybe Cage’s character will find it. Maybe he won’t.
I think all this because of a film about a man searching for a truffle pig.
Nicolas Cage stars in Pig (2021). Pig both is excellent and sounds like a joke if you sum it up. Cage plays a retired gourmet chef living off the grid near Portland, his only daily companion a prize-winning truffle pig. One night thugs drive to his cabin, attack him, and steal his pig. After the attack, Cage walks into Portland to find the pig. That’s it. And it’s a lovely, quiet, moody, sad film. Cage has said it’s his favorite movie he’s ever made.
There’s a heightened reality to Pig, extrapolating from reality in surprising directions: for instance, the filmmakers know of the stress and abuse in the restaurant industry, and represent this with an underground chef fight club; Cage’s character fights to show he’s serious. Again, not real and almost a joke, but in context it works. And that heightened reality combines with a filmmaking style both poetic and grounded. It’s exaggerated, but not obviously.
During a scene in a nice downtown apartment, Cage lets down his guard with an acquaintance (he doesn’t really have friends), and talks about how in prehistoric times the area where Portland is now was repeatedly inundated by enormous floods. Then he says
Every 200 years we get an earthquake, right along the coast. One’s coming up. When the shockwave hits, most of the city will be flattened. Every bridge will fall into the Willamette. So, there’s nowhere to go, even if we could. Anyone who survives that’s just waiting. Five minutes later, they’ll look up, and they’ll see a wave, ten stories high. And then all this, everyone, it’s all gonna be at the bottom of the ocean. Again.
Except, no. It’s true we’re due (overdue) for a major quake, but the floods he mentioned have nothing to do with it. The Missoula Floods, which happened multiple times between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, were caused by glacial ice blocking what’s now called the Columbia River Drainage Basin; a giant lake forming behind the ice dam in what would be western Montana; then that ice dam breaking to send cataclysmic torrents rushing towards the Pacific, destroying so much in the path.
Prepare to be scared: there’s a good chance people saw these. The Columbia Gorge, downstream from the glacial lake, has supported human habitation for over 13,000 years, overlapping with the floods era. The destruction and death toll for the people then must have been unimaginable; not to mention the massive loss of animal and plant life. Just try to wrap your mind around the luck of being high enough in the Gorge or the hills not to get hit by the floods; even witnessing the floods would have been an immense trauma. The earth, we think, should not move like that.
This won’t happen again in anything like a timescale we can comfortably envision. The Earth will have other Ice Ages; but it will take tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years for those conditions to return.
Nicolas Cage’s character in Pig would have heard of the Missoula Floods. This information was not relevant to his life, when or after he was a chef; and the info got conflated with the knowledge of the earthquake to make his character think that something like this will happen. It won’t. But whoa, it would be vivid, and horrible.
His character has seen the vivid and the horrible. The whole plot hinges on trauma. The thugs’ attack is, in its small way, horrible. His description of the impossible wave has no eagerness; he doesn’t find it neat. He understands the damage it would cause, the horror. He does not treat it like an intellectual exercise, even though it is.
I sometimes run into people who do think like this, though, and seem eager about it. Who seem to seek worst-case scenarios, and go but they could happen. Some dwell on them; a few even maybe want them to happen, like a mass accident from a Final Destination film taking place for real. Cage’s character doesn’t. He’s trying to picture and describe something huge and horrible, and whoever listens to him probably won’t realize it’s impossible. But, of course, the reality of a massive earthquake where I live would be huge and awful enough.
Cage’s character in wants more gentleness in the world; he wants less of the huge and awful. He tries his best to live gently, though the film shows he can be un-gentle if needed. (It’s been said, though I’m not sure I 100% agree, that you can only truly be peaceful if you are capable of violence; that you can get violent but you don’t.) Pig is in part about wanting more gentleness, more peace. Maybe Cage’s character will find it. Maybe he won’t.
I think all this because of a film about a man searching for a truffle pig.