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The dying screams of a failing marriage are frightening to all of Earth’s creatures. That’s why the U.S. Department of Agriculture is using the fight scene from Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story to scare off gray wolves from attacking livestock in the American west. Adam Driver raging at Scarlett Johansson that he wakes up every day hoping she’s dead puts those wolves right off their dinner, according to an Oregon USDA district supervisor actually named Paul Wolf. “I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” he tells The Wall Street Journal.
The mechanism for deterring wolves comes in the form of drone cowhands, which are equipped with thermal cameras that can spot a wolf creeping through the night. The drones also have speakers which can play various wolf-deterrent sounds like fireworks, gunshots, and people arguing (like in Marriage Story). Other anti-wolf audio mentioned in the piece includes AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and Five Finger Death Punch’s song “Blue On Black.” It seems like the audio options are sort of a dealer’s choice situation; sometimes it’s just the drone operator scolding the wolf. (“Hey get out of here! Get!” Wildlife biologist Colby McAdams “sternly yelled” to a wolf via the microphone on his drone’s controller at one point in the WSJ piece.)
It just goes to show that great art can serve a variety of purposes, whether it’s an Oscar-caliber entertainment mechanism or just freaking out some wolves. Surely that must put a smile on the face of Noah Baumbach, who recently told Vanity Fair that the middling success of his post-Marriage Story film, White Noise, sent him into “quiet crisis.” “I had this feeling of, like, ‘Am I doing this just because I always wanted to do it—do I even like doing it anymore?'” To that we say, don’t do it for yourself, Noah. Do it for all the innocent cows out there who need a hero.
