Film (Cinema): “The Grizzly Man”

You may have read in the paper a couple of years back about this guy and his girlfriend who were eaten by a bear in the wilds of Alaska. As it happened, the guy had been spending summers with the bears for the previous eleven years and reckoned he had got the hang of interacting with them. The other bizarre feature of his death was that it was recorded on audio – in the confusion of the attack a camcorder (with the lens cap still on) was activated, recording for posterity the guy struggling for his life and advising the girlfriend to run for it in a futile attempt to save her life.

Tim Treadwell was the bear guy’s name. It turned out that in his many years hanging out with the bears he had compiled a lot of video-footage, both of bears doing bear stuff and of himself talking to camera. He had also become relatively famous, spreading the word of how kewl bears are to schoolchildren everywhere and appearing on Lenoman a couple of times (being asked once whether he would one day be eaten by a bear).

Now Werner Herzog has got his paws on the Treadwell’s footage, and has produced a film from it and his own interviews with people who knew Treadwell or were associated with his death (such as the coroner who presided over the inquest). A lot of it is about how disturbed Treadwell is, with Herzog doing a lot of grappling with the question of what kind of lunatic would spend their time camped out in the middle of nowhere with monstrous animals for companions. He also marvels at Treadwell’s skills with the camera and ability to approach filming in a methodical manner considerably divorced from the idea you would otherwise have of him as some kind of naively disorganised nut-job. Treadwell’s footage is very striking, both in terms of the beauty of nature and the majesty of the bears on the one hand, and of his ability to interact with bears. There are a lot of scenes in this film where a bear starts growling at him very aggressively indeed and he manages to just face them down and save his life. I suppose it helped that he had got to know these animals over a number of years, and they had developed some sense of him as that weird thing which does not act in a normal manner and is hence best avoided. It is telling that Treadwell was eaten by a bear who had wandered into the area and which he had not developed this kind of rudimentary rapport.

Grizzly bears are very impressive and very fierce animals. They are huge, for one thing, and this is something you maybe only grasp when you have something human sized beside them. They also do great strange stuff like eating their young in times of food shortages. One thing I do wish the film had done was focus a little bit more on the bears, as it ended without very much being communicated about what they do and how they interact with each other.

The other fascinating thing about all this was the strangeness of many of the other people whose lives crossed Treadwell’s. One great strange character is a woman who was his lover at one stage but remained his friend and worked with him in whatever Bear Love Foundation he had founded. And there is the coroner, already mentioned, who seems to have approached Herzog’s interviewing as his opportunity to ham it up big-time. Herzog himself is a calm and measured character by contrast, but he does seem to inhabit a world of existential bleakness, commenting at one stage that all Treadwell’s ideas on the harmony of nature and his rapport with the bears are entirely illusory, with chaos and disorder being the real principles that govern the universe (leading Mark S on ILX to suggest that it is a shame he did not provide the narration for “MARCH OF THE PENGUINS”). And there is an amusing bit where he plays some footage of Treadwell ranting to camera like a lunatic, denouncing the Alaskan park services in the most deranged fashion. “I have seen this kind of madness from actors before” the frequent director of Klaus Kinski laconically comments.

So, Treadwell, mad guy who thought he had a rapport with bears, bear then eats him – a cautionary tale about how humans and nature are profoundly different and the boundaries between them should never be breached. Perhaps, but one very striking thing from Treadwell’s footage is that he seems to have struck up a genuine rapport with this arctic fox, with the animal displaying the kind of relaxed demeanour in his company that suggests the easy familiarity of actual friendship. Maybe if Treadwell had stuck to animals too small to eat him we would be hailing him as someone who had breached the boundary between humanity and nature, and lived to tell the tale.