There’s Never Been Anyone More Relatable Than Bigfoot
I’d understand if you labeled Sasquatch Sunset a farce. The new film from brothers David and Nathan Zellner, now playing in select cities, follows an isolated Sasquatch family: a patriarch (Nathan Zellner), his beleaguered mate (Riley Keough), and their offspring, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek. The family is objectively beastly; they communicate in grunts, snarls, and roars, and they’re covered in matted fur which barely camouflages their barbed genitals and grotesque teats. They release rip-roaring flatulence and streams of diarrhea into their idyllic surroundings, scratching their orifices with abandon. But their personalities are, against all odds, decidedly human.
Like humans, the Sasquatches engage in jubilant sex, then primly clean themselves with nearby foliage. Like humans, they get really, really excited when they find a turtle. And, like humans, they struggle with existential despair, sensing that their time—a time of ethereal flora and fauna, of abundant resources, of privacy and security—is coming to an end. So, no, Sasquatch Sunset isn’t a farce. It’s an expression of our collective anxiety pulsating in the wake of a relentless pandemic, ongoing economic uncertainty, imminent climate catastrophe, and unthinkable global atrocities. It’s also the latest in a recent spike in Sasquatchery throughout American pop culture. As Sasquatch mania sweeps the nation, one thing is clear: In the immortal words of mega-hottie Fox Mulder, we want to believe.
These days, if you go looking for Bigfoot, you’re liable to find him. The Travel Channel docuseries Expedition Bigfoot is currently on its fourth season, having premiered in 2019. In June 2020, World War Z author Max Brooks published Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, a work of horror fiction set in the Pacific Northwest. On TikTok, there are 121,800 posts tagged under #cryptid and 167,000 tagged under #bigfoot, including dozens of responses to the alleged Sasquatch footage captured from a passenger train in southwest Colorado last fall.