The closest encounter I’ve had with a bear was hiking in the woods and coming across a huge paw print on the trail. While I’d love to someday see one in the wild, I hope to do so from a great distance.
Not so Timothy Treadwell, on whom Werner Herzog’s captivating Grizzly Man focuses. Culled from over 100 hours of the late Treadwell’s footage - shot over the course of five seasons before he was killed by one of the bears he chose to live amongst - and reconstituting it to address his own concerns and queries, the director creates a moving account that perfectly expresses how the form is as much about the documentarian as the documented. I’ve never understood the argument lobbied against the insertion of the “I” into non-fiction, when said foregrounding simply emphasizes a latent truth: That if an artist chooses to spend a significant amount of time with a subject, it’s because it resonates on a highly personal level. And I suppose my own predilection for accentuated subjectivity is evidenced by the fact that I often go into more autobiographical detail than straightforward movie reviewing generally prefers; individual proclivities have so much to do with readings of art that it seems false to pretend otherwise.
Watching Grizzly Man, I was reminded of Jon Krakauer’s journalistic rumination, Into the Wild, both for its content and style. I find the book so engaging, in part, precisely because of the author’s extensive acknowledgement that Christopher McCandless – a privileged 24-year-old who chose to donate all his material possessions to others and live in the Alaskan wilderness (only to turn up dead four months later) - holds a particular fascination for him, which adds an emotional dimension to what might’ve been a dry chronicling. Much as in Krakauer’s analysis, what arises from Herzog’s poetically-narrated inquiry into the central mystery of what motivates a man to abandon the company of his own for that of another species are more questions, demonstrating powerfully the irreducibility of a human being. Before seeing the film, I romantically envisioned Treadwell as a noble environmentalist who’d conscientiously opted out of the mainstream to protect the grizzlies of Alaska’s Katmai National Park; of course, that says more about me than him. My simplistic preconceptions made Herzog’s deconstruction of the somewhat loopy real-life Treadwell - via highlighting of the myriad contradictions animating his personality, the gap between person and persona, his drive towards self-mythologizing - even more remarkable by comparison. This is no paean to a heroic figure, some badass eco-warrior, but a portrait of an individual, one as confused, grappling, and plagued by emotional issues as the rest of us.
The filmmaker enticingly allows some of the rough footage to play uncut so that we witness Treadwell in various poses - rehearsing lines, re-recording scenes, trying on different bandanas and sunglasses – in attempts to cultivate an adventuring-lone-man-in-the-woods image. Such sequences are contrasted with moments when he lets his facade fall away, captured in refrains cooed to both bears and foxes – iterations of “Thank you for being my friend,” and “I love you” – which evince nothing so much as a deep-seated loneliness. And while the self-proclaimed grizzly expert talks loudly and often about his mission to save the bears from poachers and other encroachers, he seems to need the creatures more than they need him. Occasionally - making constant reference to the dangers of his mission, along with hearsay from friends noting his oft touched-upon reassurances that he’d be happy to die amongst the bears - rather than coming off as a sophisticated desire for preservation, Treadwell’s dedication strikes one as a pronounced death wish. Herzog aptly notes Treadwell’s broadly knee-jerk denigration of human culture and sentimentalizing of the grizzlies: He gets upset when their predatory instincts leaves one of his fox friends dead, for example, and doesn’t want to confront the fact that bears will eat their own when no other food is available. The director’s worldview, encompassing “chaos, hostility, and murder,” markedly clashes with Treadwell’s childlike conceptions.
In addition to keen insights, Herzog’s mode of investigation neatly coincides with spectator expectation. Often, just as my mind formed a question about an aspect of the documentary, the director would address it, filling in the blanks. For me, the foremost issue had to do with the apparent absence of Treadwell’s girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, who was killed alongside him. We know from Herzog that she was afraid of bears, that her family refused to be interviewed for the documentary, that she only appears twice in Treadwell’s copious coverage, and is indicated in a third hand-held shot. By talking about her, showing us the few brief glimpses of her caught on camera, the director overcomes the visual lack and gives her presence.
That Herzog keeps the ultimate from us – the audiorecording of Treadwell and Huguenard at the moment of death – instead framing the back of his head as he listens to it on headphones in the presence of Treadwell’s friend, Jewel - whose responsive face is terrifyingly poignant - emblematizes the project: Rather than exploit, he displays a compassionate respect, refuses to take the reductive way out. What emerges is a profoundly humanist essay, one which captures with particular resonance the beauty and ferociousness of the world.
- km
