A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked the question for females: which would you prefer be lost in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different perspectives and life encounters, illuminated divides between the sexes, and could easily cause an existential crisis for anyone pondering about it extensively. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where some males took to the internet to tell females how stupid they had been to select the bear and went on to limn the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to decide with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
The Bear-Cooking Tale skillfully brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to begin a fresh religious post within Kengis, a remote settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, not one of the locals particularly appreciate his strict approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which comes the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (the young actor) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon collaborating against him are the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), observed early on dismissing a newly injured laborer with minimal compensation as he remains babbling upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a populace who can be bought with some containers of the whisky sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness diminishes once itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, providing a performance of rare unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they still serve as effective ones.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict sown, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches on a tree are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast prowling the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to prove.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends thrive from the native legend that animals might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids idealising the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, whether that of the wild or people, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become beyond symbols – or maybe, while the conflicts between justice and revenge, rationality and faith, good and evil intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the entire production truly coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He positions himself observing shattered containers and strands of fur within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and saliva from his superior to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood at the crime scene), before announcing his latest deduction and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are bent on proving that Hilda met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to protect a fellow elite. The clergyman is bent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the show’s credibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and fears presented by science and belief. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it does seem to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
