My pop, he weren’t a, uh, he weren’t a religious man, y’know?

If you couldn’t kill it or grow it or eat it then he just plain old didn’t believe in it, and that was it.

And this one time, he head up the old Saba hills. San Saba hills?

Joined up with a couple of Texas Ranger buddies of his to hunt. Pretty routine, y’know, he’d done it like a hundred times before, shoulda been a three day kill but on the second day, well it all went fuuucked.

Somehow that night he managed to lose his buddies, and to top it off, them Comanches then went and took the horses, so.

Now he were starvin’, and he were delirious, and he crawls up into this motte, like a...group of trees out there in the middle of nowhere stickin’ up in this ocean of scrub, and he found religion.

At that moment, he told me...he found God.

Mmm-hmm.

And it turns out...that God? He’s a squirrel.

Yeah. A big ol’ meaty one!

’I found God.’ he used to say.

’And while sittin’ and baskin’ in the Glory and the Sublimity of Mercy...’

’I shot and ate that son of a bitch.’



I always found this scene in The Revenant to be one of the most brilliant aspects of a brilliant movie, and I have always adored it. A lot of people I know and talk to who have watched the movie before have had a hard time understanding what Fitzgerald meant when he made the monologue to Bridger, and to be honest, when I first watched the movie on an airplane I didn’t know what he meant either by all of that. At first I thought it was simply the rambling of a madman, a scene where Fitzgerald goes on a talk about an absurd topic as a way for the scriptwriters to pass across the idea to the audience that Fitzgerald was just crazy, as villains in bad movies tend to be. But the more times I watched it and observed Fitzgerald, well, his behavior was hardly that of a man who was not in control of himself or his mind. There were a few moments where he lost control of himself, but hardly an indication of insanity – rather his was a calculative and manipulative demeanor, with one aim, and one aim only – survival at any cost, and his dream of a decent piece of land.

That was what made this scene for me, because it perfectly illustrates his mentality. His father was a godless man, lacking the morals that belief in religion would (theoretically) have brought about. Instead, as he was starving and dying, his God was the squirrel he ate. His God was whatever would allow him to stay alive, to keep on surviving and going. Whatever morality and conscience he had was based around whatever would keep him alive. And of course, the son follows the father, to make a man that would be willing to do anything, cross any boundary, break any rule and any moral standard to survive another day. After all, if your God – and thus your source of all morality – was simply whatever kept you alive, nothing else would stop you from doing whatever needed to be done to stay that way.

I’m sure I’m going to sound like an obsessive nut, but ever since I watched The Revenant for the first time on an airplane several years ago, I must have rewatched the movie at least a good hundred or so times since then. There’s something about the movie (and it’s not just the scenery) that greatly appeals to me in a way I cannot quite explain, and the malevolent character of Fitzgerald, as well as his brilliant portrayal by Tom Hardy, absolutely sealed the deal for me. I don’t think I’ve ever found another movie then or since that has enthralled me in the same way The Revenant did, and continues to do to the present day.


Art done by the amazing  Teragabba~, as always! She did such an amazing job with the costume, exactly like the way it was portrayed in the movie! Go check out her page, and commission her! :D


Art (C)  Teragabba~
Character (C)  AWandererfromtheEast
The Revenant, Fitzgerald's clothing and equipment etc. (C) 20th Century Fox