twin bears: bear 71 critique

by sarah; published september 30th 2026

"The story is not so much that like the Bear, we too as humans are under a constant state of surveillance by cameras on street corners and bank machines," explained co-executive producer Rob McLaughlin. "The story is more about how today we truly manage and understand almost all of our relationships—human or otherwise—through an expanding and evolving range of data and technologies, including cameras" (Martel).

Bear 71 is an interactive documentary created primarily by Leanna Allison and Jeremy Mendes for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Originally released in 2012 and revamped in 2017 as Bear 71 VR ("Bear 71 VR"), it is generally understood to be about the life and death of a grizzly bear (the Bear) living in Banff National Park—from the day that she was tagged, fitted with a Very High Frequency (VHF) collar, and classified as Bear 71, to the day that she died after being hit by a train. Voiced by Canadian actress Mia Kirshner, the Bear is the narrator of the documentary, and is our main source of information. The secondary source of information is a digital mockup of a landscape that is similar to (but is not!) the Bow River Valley in the park. By exploring this map, you can uncover information about other tracked animals, as well as trail-cam footage.

Through this footage, as well as the footage that occasionally takes over the screen, the project recontextualizes wildlife footage associated with the Bear to create a story of the Bear's life. While there was other data gathered from the Bear throughout her life via a "radio collar" and "barbed-wire snags to collect [her] hair" (Allison and Mendes), none of this data is included in the project proper. Rather, a fictionalized representation of the data is created, either via facts that appear when the Bear's avatar is clicked (e.g. "AGE (YRS): 11") or the movement of the avatar on the map (Allison and Mendes).

The documentary's obvious point is that the surveillance of the Bear, as well as her proximity to humans, negatively impacted her life. This point places the documentary within the realm of animal rights activism. That is: by showing the player the extent to which the Bear was surveilled and affected by humans, as well as the consequences of this (the Bear's death from being hit by a human train), it advocates for a reality where animals could live untouched by humans, "do[ing] what comes naturally" and surviving (Allison and Mendes). Of course, it does not lay out actionable steps for getting to this potential future; it just points out that we are not there yet.

There is a secondary point that can be drawn from this first one, if we treat the surveillance of the Bear as a parable for the surveillance of humans: "Surveillance negatively impacts human lives." To me this is a relatively uncontroversial, obvious point, even outside of the documentary's context. Maybe it's reductive, but I think surveillance is bad! It's bad that, if I talk to my sister about the new Taylor Swift album and my phone is close to me while I do this, scrolling through TikTok later in the day will provide me with thinkpiece after thinkpiece about that new Taylor Swift album. Surveillance is the erosion of privacy, and knowledge of your own lack of privacy is depressing.

The documentary seems, initially, to both support and oppose this anthropomorphizing of the Bear's situation. For example, in support: parallels are frequently drawn between the Bear and the stock human trope of a self-sacrificing mother. "Cubs change everything," the Bear claims; "up until I had cubs, I always imagined that someday I'd leave the valley ... After the cubs, that just wasn't an option" (Allison and Mendes). The Bear wishes to pursue her dreams, but has to give them up to be a mom, just like the player, or the player's mother, might have. When she dies, it is because "[she] had cubs to defend," and was so focused on this that the train that killed her took her by surprise (Allison and Mendes). If the Bear is like a human mother, can't the Bear's surveillance be extended to serve as a metaphor for our own?

In opposition: the navigation of the website is very similar to the way that you might navigate Google Earth, or Google Maps (Not for nothing, but the current version of the project was created in partnership with Google [Allison and Mendes].) As the player, you get to move about the map as you please, looking at it like a chunk of globe. You are "playing God", with the whole world in your hands (Allison and Mendes). And as you move around the globe, the arrow following your cursor will displace the dots that make up the 3D space; you are human, and so your movement in this forested area, like the movement of the trains and cars on the map, is an intrusion. In contrast, the Bear and other animals' avatars are able to move seamlessly through the map, leaving no path in their wake. With these points, the web design and narration seem to be at odds.

In researching this article, I came across a quote from Bear 71's co-executive producer, Rob McLaughlin: "The story is not so much that like the Bear ... humans are under a constant state of surveillance ... The story is more about how today we truly manage and understand almost all of our relationships—human or otherwise—through an expanding and evolving range of data and technologies, including cameras" (Martel). I understand this quote as saying that, as players, we only understand the Bear through trail-cam photos, factoids, and fictional location data, which provide a very narrow view of the Bear's life (in the same way that I only understand a TikTok stranger through their videos, and, if I get creepy, their accounts and posts on other websites). In reality, the Bear's multiple surveillance methods—the barbed wire, the collar, and the cameras (Allison and Mendes)—worked to create a data double of her.

The data double concept comes up in Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson's 2000 article "The surveillant assemblage." The idea is that the current method of human surveillance functions as a disassembling and reassembling of the physical body via distinct surveillance methods (Haggerty and Ericson 611). While the concept is human-specific, I think the general idea can be applied to the Bear, particularly because of how physically intrusive most of the surveillance methods for her were; the physical removal of her hair, for instance.

Most physical is the harrowing footage of the capture of the Bear that opens the documentary. She is caught in a snare and drugged, so she can be tagged and fitted with a collar. When she is allowed to leave, she runs terrifyingly fast, and is chased by flare guns (Allison and Mendes). Even if the Bear does not understand why she was captured, and what she has been fitted with, it's fair to say that the process alone was likely nightmarish for her body. The result of the process is the increased ability to collect data from fragmented, physical pieces of the Bear. The data can then be reassembled by researchers to create an incorporeal, data-based version of her, able to be used for a variety of purposes: to protect her, to better understand the health of the park (Banff National Park Management Plan 40), to protect humans from her, and to entertain. This is how and why the cyborg, Bear 71, gets created, and when the Bear dies, it is all that remains of her.

The cyborg Bear 71, understood only through its reincorporated data flows, is complicated by the documentary process; a lot of the data that was separated and collected to create it is not utilized, only referred to as existing. The only data Bear 71 mobilizes is the single flow of the trail-cam footage, and this is not enough to create a data double. To compensate for this, the documentary leans on its narrative structure. Footage of the Bear is reinterpreted by narration, via tropes like the self-sacrificing mother, to paint a simpler picture of the Bear's character in the reader's head. The Bear is an animal, and frequently references the dichotomy between itself and humans, giving it further complexity—while the Bear is often human-like, it is not human. Finally, the Bear has been made omniscient through knowledge of facts, speaking to a kind of wisdom humans sometimes associate with nature; the Bear knows that platypi can smell electricity, and it knows that one year, 112,000 kilograms of grain leaked into Banff National Park, and it knows about the hypothetical method to recreate a passenger pigeon (Allison and Mendes). All of these choices narratively reconstruct the Bear.

One of the purposes of the surveillant assemblage of the human body is to "transform ... the body into pure information, such that it can be rendered more ... comparable" (Haggerty and Ericson 613). In my opition, the narrative reassemblage of the Bear through surveillance, tropes, and factoids serves the same purpose. The Bear has been generalized, for the purposes of the documentary, into a character that is easy to understand. She is easily comparable with the player. A real grizzly bear is complex, scary in real life for most humans, and seen to have inherent potential for violence. I don't know what goes through the mind of a bear, because I am not one. But I know what Bear 71 was thinking when she charged at the train that killed her.

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