Highly recommend Project Grizzly
Last week I saw the 1996 Canadian documentary Project Grizzly. It's about a man who builds a suit he hopes will allow him to survive being attacked by a bear.
The documentary contains no narration commentary on Troy Hurtubise, the suit-maker - it's just him yammering at max speed, hanging out with his friends, and arranging for them to cart him into the woods and smash him with giant logs and shit to prove that his bear armor is good. They shoot the armor with a gun. They speak about bears in a kind of dazed, awe-filled tone. The dream of being mauled by a bear is under constant discussion.
Everyone involved seems to understand that this is some bizarre traumagenic experience stemming from a close bear encounter he had years previously, but unlike the people of the 2020s, this doesn't seem particularly sad or regrettable to any of them. A deeply unwell fascination with bear attacks has brought so much energy and vitality to this guy's life!! He's become the Type Of Guy he was born to be, maybe.
Anyway, this is a phenomenal meditation on a specific Type of Guy and on a type of masculinity that is just dazzlingly strange and terrifying. Troy is agreeable and kind to everyone he interacts with in the film, but the stuff he says about himself and his dream of being attacked by a bear, and about the various spiritual resources he's used to try and understand his own fascination with the bear shit... it's alarming! It's like looking at a car crash. It's scary and weird to see a guy so enthusiastically endanger himself in this embarrassing, awkward, deeply unsexy way.
There is a sequence where he and his friends go into the woods to try and get a bear to actually attack him. They're all marching around like soldiers and treating it like it is real "science" and he's wearing a red beret. It looks crazy, man. What a cultural artifact. You could use this to write a dozen essays about what nature, science, spirituality, the military, small business ownership, university jobs, and bears mean to these people.
I highly recommend watching it. I then recommend reading the wikipedia page about Troy here. What a guy!!