Earlier today, Matt Drudge set the world on fire with what future historians will almost certainly deem one of the 10 or 20 greatest headlines in internet history, “DICAPRIO RAPED BY BEAR IN FOX MOVIE.” Seven individual words, every letter of them capitalized, strung together in a way they never had been before. Think about that. Prior to today, in all likelihood, no one had ever written the sentence “DICAPRIO RAPED BY BEAR IN FOX MOVIE.” Not once. Not in thousands and thousands of years of written communication. It’s almost an achievement, really.
But beyond the historic nature of all of this, the headline raises a very important question. Actually it raises two questions, the other being “What if by ‘FOX MOVIE’ he meant a movie about foxes instead of a movie made by Fox?,” but that’s besides the point. (Seriously, though, what if that was the movie?) The real question it raises is “Does Leonardo DiCaprio — star of Titanic — get sexually assaulted by a bear who ‘flips Leo over and thrusts and thrusts’ in the new movie The Revenant, from the Oscar-winning director of Birdman, Alejandro Inarritu?”
Luckily, Keith Phipps, Uproxx’s Editorial Director of Film and Television, saw a screening of The Revenant and agreed to shed some light on the situation.
Danger Guerrero: Hey Keith, does Leonardo DiCaprio get raped by a bear in The Revenant?
Keith Phipps: No. He does not. He is attacked by a bear, brutally, but there is no rape.
DG: Okay, so he doesn’t get raped by a bear. But does he get raped by a bear… twice, as Drudge claims in his post?
KP: He does not get raped once, much less twice. Let me give you a fact that should shut this conversation down: It’s a female bear who attacks him.
DG: Right, but there’s no way you could have, like, gotten up to get popcorn and gotten stuck in a long line and missed Leonardo DiCaprio getting sexually assaulted by a male bear on two non-consecutive occasions?
KP: I can state definitively that I was present in the theater and fully awake throughout The Revenant and that it contains no scenes of a bear raping Leonardo DiCaprio, or anyone else.
DG: And you’re very sure about this? The no-bear-raping thing?
KP: I believe that part of what makes movies such a wonderful art form is the act of interpretation. There’s no “right” or “wrong” reading of a film. Having said that, anyone who tells you a bear rapes Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant is wrong.
DG: Right, but are you like very, very sure?
KP: I am.
So there you have it. Leonardo DiCaprio does not get raped by a bear in The Revenant. And, somehow, I was probably not the first person to write that sentence this afternoon, let alone in all of history. Strange day.
