Eat Me (‘Grizzly Man’)

Nature is chaos.  It will steal your sanity, it will swallow you whole.

That, at least, has been the story to which Werner Herzog’s been returning for thirty-odd years.  Aguirre, who fancied himself a world-conqueror, was overrun by madness and monkeys.  Fitzcarraldo, who wanted the voice of culture to echo throughout the jungle, dragged a steamship over a mountain only to have it sacrificed to an angry river.  All of man’s pride, all of his dreams, every last manifestation of his civilization – all lies in the face of the great truth of the natural world.

If you’re the type of person who likes film to take you places you’ve never been and are not likely to go, you could find yourself a far worse guide than Herzog.  Throughout his career the formidable German director has, through narrative and non-fiction, explored the most treacherous corners of both the globe and the mind.  Grizzly Man – his third documentary to see theatrical release this year – finds the artist contemplating, and confronting, a somewhat kindred spirit... and losing, a bit.

Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers living among grizzly bears on a remote corner of the Alaskan peninsula.  Nature allowed him that.  But he wanted acceptance, he wanted gratitude, he wanted importance, and he died wanting.

And filming.

A failed actor – Treadwell was an assumed surname – and recovering addict, he “found” himself when he encountered a bear in Katmai National Park, deciding it his life’s mission to know and protect the giant omnivores.  Every summer a pilot would drop him and his gear off near an area of the park known as “Grizzly Maze,” a low-visibility patch of brush frequented by the animals.  Unarmed.

Five years before his death Treadwell started taking a video camera along with him.  He’d established himself among the bears, by then, and managed to shoot a lot of casual-looking footage nature documentarians would kill for.  Much of what he shot, though, was himself, alternately performing for the camera and spewing bunches of video-diary style monologues.

By the autumn of 2003, when the pilot returned to find a bear pulling meat from Treadwell’s ribcage, he’d shot over 100 hours of footage.

The best parts of Herzog’s film were shot by Treadwell.  Though there’s no Blair Witch-style scare to the found footage, there’s an unexplainable tension:  Even though the film tells us, early on, that only audio footage exists of the man’s death – and that Herzog will not be including that footage in this doc – you expect Treadwell to get mauled in every single shot.  Because there’s a grizzly bear right over his shoulder.*

Herzog has whittled away at those hundred hours, but wasn’t looking to clean them up.  He includes much that Treadwell himself would have surely edited out, like incoherent, expletive-ridden tirades and belabored multiple takes of scene introductions;  but that’s why this is a Werner Herzog film, not Discovery Channel filler.  The director is as interested in happenstance as his subject’s trace dementia, and glowingly points out a gorgeous shot of wind-tossed foliage accidentally captured while Treadwell busied himself out-of-frame; he admired his

subject, Herzog says, as a filmmaker.

It’s a good thing the footage is so dynamic, because the man featured in it can – like any rambling loner – try one’s patience (a particularly unsympathetic interview subject suggests the bears finally ate him because “they’d had enough”).  While the circumstances and footage must have been irresistible to the director, Treadwell is hardly a typical Herzog hero.  Yes, there’s the shock of his perpetually-boyish blond bowl-cut (it’s hard not to mentally picture how terrifically ugly Klaus Kinski would have been with such a ‘do), a sense of adventure and an ego gone wild, but the conservationist oozed a naïve, hippie-dippie Disnified view of nature.  He constantly gushes “I love you,” in this fey, Jiminy Glickish dog-whistle of a voice at his childishly-named (Mr. Chocolate, Grinch, Rowdy”) “friends;” other than the odd rant about how dangerous his situation is, about how it’s important that he, “a friendly warrior,” never show weakness... everything he says is expressed in baby-talk (after a ferocious fight between two bears, he points out that “Sgt. Brownie went number two”).  It could simply be that he was not very bright:  During a drought that has a mother bear turning to cannibalism, Treadwell prays for the camera, to Jesus, Allah, and “Hindu Floaty Guy.”** 

It’s a fairly safe assumption that Treadwell’s Hindu Floaty Guy of choice would have been creator-preserver Vishnu; Herzog would side with world-destroyer Shiva.  The director has always cut an intimidating figure:  He’s bluntly physical, his perfect English is delivered with exacting Germanic definition, his natural outlandishness – as befits a man drawn to extremes, he embraces hyperbole and strains towards poeticism – has always been buttressed by a convincing intelligence.  There’s a reason Harmony Korine cast the man as the abusive father in Julien Donkey-Boy.  Early on, during Grizzly, you can almost hear him cackle with glee as those mythically ferocious Alaskan mosquitoes set upon an interview subject, taking over the frame and the soundtrack.

Much of Herzog’s own footage – interviews with friends, family, locals – comes off rehearsed, unnatural; the subjects seem at best odd, at worst phony, and the director seems to underline their “performances” by refusing to cut precisely into and out of them.  By making this film, Herzog agreed from the start to be upstaged, and by the end you feel his regret.  He starts to increasingly pile on footage of Treadwell’s instability, and makes a strong implication that the man did more harm than good, up there.  A local biologist (for whom he works is never made clear) testifies that the grizzly population is stable, poaching not a problem; a Native American museum curator maintains that Treadwell’s presence endangered the animals, domesticating them to a certain extent.  The director concludes that, while dallying with the natural world, the conservationist never really experienced it until it had its teeth in him.

But that’s not entirely true.

Treadwell’s death – which inspired the same sort of divisive reaction as Christopher McCandless’ – was an avoidable fluke, a tragic result of the conservationist’s impatience with his fellow man.  He had already left camp for the year when an airline mix-up frustrated him so much he demanded a return to the wild.  Treadwell wound up on the peninsula much later in the year than normal, at a time when the familiar bears had already migrated toward their winter dens.  While it’s clearly Treadwell’s fault that he was where he was, when he was, it wasn’t one of his fuzzy-wuzzy “friends” that turned on him; the grizzly that finally attacked –  bluntly designated “Number 141” by the park service – was an older bear, one desperate for food at the end of the waning season.  That bear didn’t have the time to get to know Treadwell.

Neither do we, really.  While the mannerisms and the ego are on full display, this bit of assembled footage can’t really tell us why this grizzlies filled such a huge void in the man’s life.  Sure, it got the would-be actor some of the attention he desired – he spent much of year touring schools, giving gratis speeches preaching conservation; he’d found some minor celebrity, appearing on Letterman and Rosie, and found some minor enemies among locals and the park service – but he was still all alone*** up there.  So why grizzlies?  Was it an early obsession – the man still slept with a childhood teddy bear – or the sort of primal power that made the bear mankind’s oldest worshipped idol?

No matter how foolish you might think him, there’s no denying that Treadwell had guts – heck, we get to see them in an autopsy photo – or that he successfully turned a My Side of the Mountain-style fantasy into a reality for the better part of thirteen years.  The footage is right here, in this film.  All of Herzog’s arguments against it wither away against the final, idyllic shot of Treadwell casually galumphing along, his furry friends in tow.

* This would actually be a pretty good movie to see with an overly-talkative audience.  “Look-the-f*ck-out, you dumb hippie mutherf*cker!  There’s a bear right behind your ass!”  Like, for the whole movie.

** When the rain does come, he says, “Hindu Floaty Guy, I am your gopher.”  Catchphrases are born, not made, people.

*** His last two summers, including the fatal one, were spent in the company of a girlfriend; if there’s any real victim in this story, it’s 37-year-old Amie Huguenard.  Unfortunately, there’s little footage of her – Herzog includes all of it in his film, to pay respect, but she was either camera-shy or crowded out by Treadwell’s ego – and her family refused participation in the documentary.  Sadly, she’s little more than a footnote, here.

Treadwell helped found Grizzly People, “a grassroots organization devoted to preserving bears and their wilderness habitat.”  The front page of their site reminds that, “People should remain 100 yards from bears at all times.”  Me, I’ll be in Brooklyn.

tags: timothy treadwell  grizzly man  movie reviews  werner herzog  movies  

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