Wolves In Captivity

I finally got around to watching The Wolfpack and boy do I have feelings.

First, however, a slight disclaimer. I usually hate documentaries. My idea of what makes a good movie is as many of the following as possible:

• explosions (I really like watching things go boom)
• PRACTICAL explosions (example – my primary reason for going to see Mad Max: Fury Road BEFORE the internet latched onto it for various reasons is because I read somewhere that it had the largest practical effects budget EVER and like… that is so, so relevant to my interests)
• pretty people (which for me is a little different than for most people, but whatev, I’ve still watched my share of trash movies because of various actors)
• pretty people making out (and yet not rom-coms because I hate them unless Amy Adams is involved. I’m talking more like weirdly sweet romantic subplots in action movies here, and no I can’t think of a good example)

Needless to say, the average documentary doesn’t even register with me as a thing. My attention span is questionable at best, and I’m not gonna use it on anything involving real people. Like, ever. But rules are made to be broken, and sometimes exceptions happen. And oh what an exception it was.

For those of y’all who have not heard of it, The Wolfpack is about the Angulo brothers, six teenage boys raised in almost-total isolation in an apartment in New York. (There’s also a sister, but she’s irrelevant in the film.) Until shortly before the film picks up, the boys had never been allowed into the outside world without supervision, and even that was extremely rare. However, they were allowed one window into the unknown – movies, and lots of ’em – and that completely shapes their view of human behavior.

It’s tragic, yes, but I couldn’t look away because I understood that. I could relate because, to a lesser extent, been there done that. Sure, I got out a lot more, but just try to tell me that homeschool culture resembles the Normal World in any genuine way. Fact – it really doesn’t, and most of what I know about how the outside world works, I learned from books and TV. It’s a running joke that most of my sex-ed came from reading fanfic, and considering some of the things I have seen, I got lucky on that front. (I got the technical details in a Human Sexuality course I took towards the end of my college attempt, but thank yooou people who were writing a particular ship in the mid-2000s for informing this particular Bubble girl that women CAN want and enjoy sex.)

It’s also a running joke, albeit a slightly less funny one, that my weird background will come up in just about any social situation. When I know I’m gonna be dealing with people who don’t know about that part of me, I like to play a game called “how long before this comes up?” because it will come up. It always does. The fact that I have a very different starting point than most people is something I can’t avoid or ignore, and it changes things.

Sooo, back to Wolfpack. If you want your heart to get broken over the course of an hour and a half, you should watch it. If you want to watch teenage boys reenact scenes from a variety of classic movies from memory, you should watch it. If you want an interesting look at how isolation can shape people… you know the drill.