Action Overload
When The Crocodile Hunter debuted on the cable station
Animal Planet in 1996, it quickly garnered an audience. While
wildlife shows have been around forever, this one was different,
featuring the enthusiastic Australian Steve Irwin as force of
nature. It's hard to turn away each week, as he harasses
poisonous snakes, spiders, and of course, crocodiles, in order
to show us just how hazardous they can be.
As Irwin whoops and hollers after his prey, his ever-patient
wife Terri stays in the background, every now and then offering
snippets of information about the eating habits, living
conditions, and mating practices of the animals she and Steve
encounter. Terri's commentary is surely instructive, but she
mostly serves as welcome counterpoint to Steve's hyperactive
persona.
Playing "themselves," the Irwins adapt this basic formula for
their first feature film, Crocodile Hunter: Collision
Course: they're tracking a crocodile in the Outback. Unlike
the tv series, the movie includes a rudimentary fictional
"plot." Unbeknownst to the Irwins, the crocodile has swallowed a
top secret U.S. satellite; when they find themselves being
chased by two CIA agents (Lachy Hulme and Kenneth Ransom), they
assume that they're poachers and work ever harder to foil them.
Interwoven into these two stories is a subplot involving a
rancher named Brozzie (Magda Szubanski), on a quest to hunt down
and kill the crocodile that's been feasting on her cattle (which
turns out to be the same crocodile that Steve and Terri are
trying to relocate). This subplot appears irrelevant to Steve
and Terri's efforts to rescue the satellite-eating crocodile,
but maybe that is the point. After watching Steve battle not
one, but two crocodiles, sift through lizard excrement, tangle
with a bird eating spider, and narrowly miss being bitten by a
poisonous snake, the other plots, not to mention a bunch of
explosions and gunfire, are extraneous.
The film's primary focus is, of course, Steve Irwin. In one
telling moment, Steve holds a snake that has enough venom, he
says, to "kill 100 blokes my size," so that its head is level
with his crotch. The choice to shoot this antic -- especially
when the snake snaps its jaw, attempting to strike at Irwin's
package -- suggests that this is a guy with severe masculinity
issues.
You have to wonder about a guy who goes out of his way to look
for poisonous snakes, venomous bird-eating spiders, and
sharp-toothed crocodiles, in order to wrestle them, poke at them
with sticks, and pick them up and dangle them in the air. While
his passion for wildlife appears sincere, he reveals a certain
ambivalence on this point in his repeated reminders that the
animals are "dangerous," as well as his provocations of them,
until they appear to prove his case: they do look dangerous.
Still, it's near-endlessly entertaining to watch him handle
them. His eyes get wide and he contorts his arms and legs in all
sorts of awkward positions to maintain control over the
snake/crocodile/bird-eating spider without losing a limb, "or
worse," as he exclaims. And Irwin's and our fascination is
manifestly derived from the potential threat they pose, whether
real or not. Otherwise, he wouldn't remind us, over and over, of
the danger he's putting himself in, and we wouldn't watch him do
it, again and again.
— 18 July 2002
