I’ll be first in line to watch Cocaine Bear, the new film inspired by a 1985 true story about a bear in Tennessee who snuffled a stash of drug smugglers’ cocaine. In real life the bear was found dead but the story reimagines events had the creature gone into a deep-fried southern frenzy. Why Hollywood waited nearly 40 years to dramatise this is beyond me, but come 2023, Cocaine Bear is all of us: nihilistic, crazed, hypervigilant and doomed.
Other animals are role-modelling alternative attitudes to these end times. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from New York’s Central Park zoo, is living his best life. Despite being raised in captivity, he’s been hunting by night and visiting the park’s skating rink like a sanguine Manhattan flaneur.
Not everyone’s so positive. In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a 4ft alligator was pulled out of the lake. He was probably an unwanted pet and any gen X-er who grew up reading trash novels and watching movies knows exactly how that goes. From the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Gremlins, from Catwoman to dog attacks that turn out to be werewolf bites, everything ends up as a chaotic, supersize alien hybrid horror or urban vigilante.
Except this alligator. Described in news reports as lethargic, cold and sickly, even one of the world’s most resilient predators has succumbed to 21st-century ennui. Whither the jaws, the claws, the screams of terror? He’s an alligator, he’s not meant to mind the cold! He’s now moved to the Bronx (Bronx zoo, to be exact) to counteract gentrification and rediscover his joie de vivre.
Slake oil
Apologies to anyone reading this while drinking a normal beverage in a normal way, but Starbucks has announced that it’s going to desecrate – sorry, elevate – the time-honoured ritual of drinking coffee. The chain is pouring olive oil into it.
Another simple pleasure, another sacred moment, ruined. Imagine a thick rope of raw yellow salad oil oozing out of a giant squeezy bottle, coiling in slow motion into a dainty little espresso and swilling about in unmixed globs of pure fat. You know all those jolly vintage wartime tales about kids being forced to choke down spoonfuls of castor oil and how totally disgusting that sounds? Now imagine the oil being coffee flavoured, in that unique, fake-tasting, kids-drink, Starbucksy way. Now imagine the inside of your mouth and all your teeth and entire gullet being coated with it for the next two hours.
Excuse me while I heave. Coffee doesn’t need help to go down, it’s already a liquid. This is another fad made by a corporation that wants money for people who want attention. And diarrhoea.
Gestational guilting
A Dutch study has suggested that babies who were born after an induced labour might do less well in school tests at the age of 12 than babies who weren’t. “These interventions are not without any bearing on the future,” opined Amsterdam University gynaecologist Wessel Ganzevoort.
Oh yeah? I was 10 days late and had to be induced because I need the world to give an explicit sign that it wants me. Even so, I was eventually born by emergency caesarean at 9pm on a Saturday. Yep: primetime. I also refused to be breastfed. I still went on to be the best.
I don’t want any more fear-mongering about how women’s decisions in pregnancy or labour harm their baby. It’s just another way of bashing women, guilting women, frightening women, blaming women. It’s another way of saying, obey – or else.
To all the paternalistic meddlers helping their own careers by talking about women: why don’t you be quiet and do some childcare?
• This article was amended on 27 February 2023 to make it clear than in real life the bear who ingested cocaine was found dead.
• Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
