Grizzle

Over the weekend I saw Grizzly Man. It’s a Werner Herzog movie/documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly enthusiast who died in 2003 (along with his girlfriend Amy) in a (surprise!) grizzly attack.

I expected this movie to be a bit like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, which is the movie that Netflix used to tell me that I would like Grizzly Man. If not Into the Wild, then I was thinking it would be a documentary that was heavy on the bear information, and one man’s complete exhilaration and one-ness with nature.

Mostly, all I got was a bunch of crazy.

Based on this movie, it seems that Timothy Treadwell was a very sad, very lonely, narcissistic man who thought that by educating people about grizzlies, he was protecting them. Now, I can get on board with that. I think it’s a noble mission to go around to schools and without getting paid teach people about your experiences in nature. And after seeing Gorillas in the Mist years ago, I absolutely understand what would compel someone to spend large swathes of time in the outdoors, shadowing animals that are the focus of your passion – even if those animals are dangerous. But. The hubris this man showed in thinking that he was an advocate for the bears, while completely misunderstanding them every bit as people who don’t care to protect them… well… that I don’t understand. TT was running away from people (who didn’t understand him) and into the woods to attempt to integrate himself in nature, where we just do not belong. We cannot survive alongside bears because they are not our friends, as he alleges in the movie. They are giant carnivores who are trying to survive despite dwindling resources and shrinking wilderness. They do not respect him, and with all of the times he said “I love you” to the furry giants in the movie you’d think he was really deluded enough to think he was one of them.

I think he was just a man, who was depressed and felt alienated. If you add a dash of crazy to that mix it’s conceivable that he would consider himself more one of them than one of us. He talks about his persecution and his loneliness and his bad luck with women in the movie as much as the bears. I think that he wanted as much attention for himself as for them.

Of course, part of this is the directing and editing if Werner Herzog. He uses the most telling clips to make TT’s narcissism, rather than his efforts to protect bears, the focus of the movie. He also chooses as speakers for the film the most self-serving people I imagine were in TT’s life. It’s clear that none of these people knew Treadwell any better than he knew them –they were just shallowly sliding past each other hoping to get a boost to something better. I kind of wanted everyone in this movie to go to therapy. And get over themselves.

This movie was like an accident that I didn’t want to see but couldn’t look away from. I can only recommend it if you want to see a self-indulgent nut-job making a spectacle of himself under the guise of environmental stewardship.

Side note: I think this movie made me angry because it gives credence to the opposition’s idea that environmentalists and people who care about animals’ place on “our” land are crazy, crunchy potheads with no practicality. I’m not passing judgment on Treadwell’s life so much as his “mission”. The people in the movie seemed very taken with him as a person, but the picture he paints of himself isn’t pretty, and Werner Herzog’s editing does him no favors. Also, Treadwell is a stage name he chose for himself when he left home to be an actor in CA. He’s so surrounded with artifice it’s tough to tease out the truths in the movie. Ugh.