When a rescue team from California finally reached the stranded Donner Party on this day, February 19th, 169 years ago, it found that 38 people, mostly men, had already died. But the news of (the expected) deaths was not what shocked the rescuers. It was the knowledge that many of the dead bodies had been eaten by the surviving members of the party to keep themselves alive. According to Georgia Donner, the daughter of George, the leader of the party, it was only the youngest children, "we little ones", who were kept alive by feeding them human flesh as "there was nothing else."
Historians today remember the Donner tragedy as the price American pioneers like George Donner had pay for their venturesome spirit. There is always a price to pay if you try to go beyond the conventional, to explore the unknown. That is also the stuff of which Hollywood films are made. In 2009 director TJ Martin tried to recreate some of the horrors of the doomed 19th century expedition in The Donner Party. Were it not for the constant reminders that it was based on a harrowing true story, it was a rather dull affair overall. But how could the surreal scenes of men eating men ever be easily captured in a two, limited dimensions?
Perhaps it is not a surprise that what got me thinking about the doomed Donner expedition was Deadpool, another bloody Hollywood offering based on the eponymous fictional comic character. Wade Winston Wilson is a mercenary (with a sense of humor) who is swimming along nicely in his life and is about to get married to his girlfriend, Copycat, a bewitching one-time prostitute, when he discovers he has terminal cancer.
The only way he can live, he learns, is if he kills Wilson, his old self, and agrees to be a mutant, in a cruel experiment on his body. And thus is born Deadpool, an anti-hero on a mission to take revenge on those who, in his reckoning, turned him into a living monster. Deadpool, unlike some members of the Donner expedition, doesn't eat the dead. But he is not far off. For he doesn't just kill his enemies in blind fury: he pulverizes their bones, tears off their limbs and hacks off their bowels. It's not easy viewing.
Yet it does make for a compelling spectacle, which is the reason the film, despite being rated for strong violence and explicit nudity, has broken many box-office records in America. In Vladimir Putin's Russia, it has become simply the highest grossing film, ever. The bitter cold of the harsh Russian terrains, in the reckoning of many—including the bestselling author of Revenge of Geography, Robert D Kaplan—make Russians more tolerant of violence. This is perhaps why the most lurid accounts of cannibalism come not from the American Wild West but the frigid swathes of Russian Siberia, home to the Cannibal Island.
Back to blood-drenched movies. Nepal doesn't do them well, not yet. In time some enterprising director will undoubtedly make a compelling movie about, say, the Maoist war, the ten-year insurgency that claimed over 13,000 lives. For now we have to make do with patch-up jobs like Jana Yuddha, a 2015 Nepali film, which, though passable for a work of fiction, is also unconvincing for its legions of inaccuracies—and a touch too light crimson Nepali blood.
I don't know of any Nepali movie based on the life of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of modern Nepal. But if one is ever made, his sword-swinging conquests of the baise and chaubise kingdoms, if convincingly captured, would be one hell of a film. But poor histories of poor countries like Nepal—however violent, however compelling—seldom get glorified on the big screen, unlike the rich histories of rich countries like America or Britain, or even India with its billion-plus potential movie-going audience.
Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. TJ Martin's The Donner Party epitomizes the impossibility of trying to recreate a different world, of a different time, through limited means. Besides, history is a touchy subject. The danger is that in an attempt to relive it, you might also rewrite it, a blood-splattered page at a time.
biswasbaral@gmail.com
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