It seems an age since The Wolfman. Since Marmaduke, even. The space between movies is unfathomable chasms. I can’t stop thinking of “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip”—doesn’t every exchange happen over a gap like that, across which there is no taking back? Indy plunges across and calls forth, lover-like, the rolling boulder, which is of course the furious moon. Do you know why wolves howl at it? Legend has it, it’s the boulder rolling away from the cave, and with their cries they greet the resurrected Lord. “I am the Alpha and the Omega”—the bad, bad dog and the yummy, yummy lamb.
Why can’t the Justin Long-wolf get with the Hayden Panettiere one? Because she’s an Alpha and he’s an Omega, it’s the law of the pack, her kind hunts and his are their clowns, good only for romping fun. Those too-familiar tribes: the chosen and the fools—if you’re not taken seriously, what can you do? If you scream and yell, people just laugh all the harder. And you can’t mope—at a certain age, it’s a point of pride to show up and give everyone your best. To be marked as superfluous sucks. Or at least, that’s how this Alpha imagines it feels.
When some vague humans cart the couple away, by chance, to repopulate Idaho, they must set off on a dangerous quest for home. The taiga of the achieved. Wolf fist-bumps and melisma-howls—I understand entirely the urge to try to mitigate the trauma of Watership Down. It’s reasonable to decree that the beginning shall not touch the end. Malka’s favorite phrase: “Another one?” Addition, series, cycle, speed. Anything else is just woofing in the wind.
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