02.05.06
Movie: Grizzly Man
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/grizzlyman_herzog.jpg "Grizzly Man DVD Cover")
Documentary; 2003; Rated “R” for language; 1h 43m. Recommended.
On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported the deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. They were savaged and eaten alive by a grizzly bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve. According to the AP,
A self-styled bear expert who once called Alaska’s brown bears harmless party animals was one of two people fatally mauled in a bear attack in Katmai National Park and Preserve — the first known bear killings in the 4.7 million-acre park.
This is, in the end, a truly unfair characterization of Timothy Treadwell and, by extension, Amie Huguenard.
Treadwell was an exceptional man in a number of ways. Although he embodied the Malibu, California stereotype in his demeanor - thinning blonde hair, bright blue eyes with laugh lines etched beside them, fond of body-boarding, and often new-agey in speech and attitude - he was also capable of living for years in the vast, unforgiving wilderness of Alaska, where he sought both to protect the grizzly bears he lived among and to escape human civilization. As becomes apparent through the video footage he shot, he was attempting to protect the bears because he could not stomach human civilization. He projected onto the bears his own need to be free of it, his own need to be wild, his own need to be protected from it. But it is also not so simple as that.
Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog’s film - comprising video shot over the years by Treadwell (with few exceptions), narration by Herzog and his interviews with Treadwell’s friends and family - succeeds, in a most unsettling way, in giving the audience a clear look into human pathos and determination. Herzog’s approach is a gently unsparing one, a document of heartfelt admiration enhanced by very real criticism of its protagonist. Those who have seen 1999’s Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski (eng.: My Best Fiend) will likely smile at Herzog’s passing comparison of Treadwell to Kinski.
Treadwell was an intense character with an undoubted love of the grizzlies he filmed and photographed. It is safe to say that Treadwell did not look at being killed and eaten by a grizzly as a horrible fate, per se, but it was not just him who died that day. Amie Huguenard, a good deal younger than Treadwell, was frightened of the bears and was on the verge of leaving him. The events leading up to the fatal attack seem, in hindsight, ominous. In the video footage - some shot by Huguenard - we see an odd tension develop. Something seems off about the day the final footage was shot. In part, this is so because Treadwell and Huguenard were in the park at a time they normally would not have been. The season is different, and so are some of the bears. The final footage, shot mere hours before their deaths, is weighted with feelings of discomfort and the kind of vague uncertainty that disturbs the stomach.
“My transformation complete - a fully accepted wild animal - brother to these bears. I run free among them - with absolute love and respect for all the animals. I am kind and viciously tough.” (Last letter from Timothy Treadwell, dated Sunday, September 14, 2003.)
In one of the most difficult scenes of the movie, Herzog attempts to listen to the final record of Treadwell’s and Huguenard’s lives. Treadwell did not have time to remove the lens cap of his camera, but for six minutes it recorded the audio of the attack. Wearing headphones and sitting across from one of Treadwell’s dearest friends, we hear Herzog begin to choke up. It is too awful. He cannot listen to it all, and he suggests that out of respect the tape ought to be destroyed. The documentary does not contain any portion of those final minutes.
What I keep going back to, though, are the scenes of Treadwell with the foxes who came to accept his presence. Where the bears seem disinterested or curious in a trepidatious way, the foxes play with Treadwell, follow him around, sleep beside him in the noonday sun. These moments illustrate very clearly the depth of Treadwell’s character, as well as its shortcomings. He loved the bears and the foxes, but in the end it was his desire to be more like the former than the latter that probably lead him - and Huguenard - to be lost forever in “the Grizzly Maze”.
