Film Review: <i>Grizzly Man</i>

“Learning changes the learner.” (Gay Bradshaw, Talking with Bears) The moment that I learned about the documentary Grizzly Man is distinct in my memory. In the wee hours of the morning on the day in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, my family and I were evacuating from our home in New Orleans. We had resolved to leave at midnight on the eve of Katrina's predicted arrival in order to avoid the inevitable traffic of hundreds of thousands of other evacuees from the city and region, to travel to Houston, where we would find refuge for a sojourn that stretched from days into weeks and trailed into months, as my community recoiled from shock and grief. At the time, however, en route to Houston via the backroads of southern Louisiana, through darkness and uncertainty, my apprehension and fear were suspended by an interview on public radio, replayed from a month earlier, with the German film director Werner Herzog, about his soon to be released documentary film on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in the back country of the Alaskan peninsula tracking the brown bears of Katmai National Park before meeting his unhappy, if “timely”, end, was a complicated figure. An individual of impressive resilience, to whom Herzog refers somewhat provocatively as “grizzly man”, in a narrative framing that reflects the filmmaker's alternately intrigued, mocking and compassionate lens, Treadwell was possessed of an intense devotion to animals, an appetite for extremes and a paradoxical yearning for both the celebrity style fame and self-dissolution that he managed, in his death, to achieve. My immediate absorption by the subject of a man who had risked sustained physical proximity to larger-than-life grizzly bears (specifically that massive subtype of Ursus Arctos, the Alaskan coastal brown bear [see Figure 1], which can weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds) marks a lifelong fascination with apex predators, those awe-inspiring non-human animals that we humans perceive as a threat to our distended legacy of dominance and species centredness. The documentary, which I viewed in an art theatre in Houston that fall, did not disappoint. Herzog's admixture of pointed psychological analysis and snark aside (evident in both the film's voiceover and the director's editorial cuts), the footage Treadwell ably captured of these mythic creatures lumbering across the desolate and dramatic backdrop of Katmai National Park is nothing short of stunning in its natural beauty and emotional power. While Herzog, following his subject's lead, casts Treadwell in the film's starring role, seemingly to explore the contours and genesis of Treadwell's undeniable eccentricity, the bears and their startling images steal the show. Running, fishing, fighting, lounging, “leaning into” Treadwell with aggressive curiosity or visible irritation; Treadwell's camera intrudes upon the privacy of what Herzog refers to as “wild nature” in thrilling sequences that challenge the viewer's notions of safety and decorum. In so doing, he crosses lines between human civilization and its “Other” that we have been conditioned to avoid (unarmed, that is). Where Herzog's lens emphatically pans in on Treadwell's grandiose inner world—spliced here in obsessive retakes of himself as a lone explorer in the drama of “man v bear” (an image of America's old-fashioned pioneer sensibility that Treadwell unwittingly perpetuates while attempting to educate the world on the “humanity” of his subject), the viewer is nevertheless pulled into Treadwell's voyeuristic participation in the secret world of the bears, always moving closer, as he flirts with and flaunts an implicit boundary in the interest of a deeper, more daring psychological and physical intimacy. And therein lies the heart of this film, both for Treadwell and Herzog's audience: the thrill and ecstasy of “touching” a thing that should not be touched and yet which, by virtue of our transgression, leads to the kind of numinous encounter so rarely experienced within the predictable confines of the concrete and circumscribed people's world. Beyond his posings, the camera was his only present companion. It was his instrument to explore the wilderness around him, but increasingly it became something more. He started to scrutinize his innermost being, his demons, his exhilarations. Facing the lens of a camera took on the quality of a confessional. [H]ow did I come into this work, Iris? Did you ever get that story? I was troubled …. I used to drink to the point that I guess I was either gonna die from it or break free of it. But nothing, nothing, could get me to stop drinking … I went to programs. I tried quitting myself. I did everything that I could to try not to drink, and then I did everything I could to drink. And it was killing me until I discovered this land of bears and realized that they were in such great danger that they needed a caretaker, they needed someone to look after them. But not a drunk person. Not a person messed up. So, I promised the bears that if I would look over them, would they please help me be a better person and they've become so inspirational, and living with the foxes too, that I did! I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle … an absolute miracle. And the miracle was animals. The miracle was animals. While Treadwell suggests that assuming the role of “caretaker” for creatures in need enabled him to sober up heroically, it is clear that it was his discovery of brown bears and the intensity of his encounters with them embedded, more broadly, in an immersion in nature that ultimately supplanted the urge to drink (or use drugs), providing him with a fresh sense of purpose and vehicle of sublimation. That is, it was the bears who healed Treadwell. Treadwell's obvious recognition of his debt to the bears and their environment is evident in his repetition that “the miracle was animals.” In another sequence, as he weeps and strokes a second fox friend, Treadwell reiterates his gratitude, “Do you know that you're the star for all the children? They love you. And I love you so much …. Thank you for being my friend.” Expedition coming to an end for Grizzly People, for me, Timothy Treadwell. I came here and protected the animals as best I could. In fact, I'm the only protection for these animals out here. The government flying over a total of two times in two months. How dare they! How dare they challenge me! How dare they smear me with their campaigns! How dare they, when they do not look after these animals out here! As his rant escalates, Treadwell attacks the individuals with whom he has worked for years in the National Park Service (at least one of whom will be party to the discovery of his remains following his death, and many of whom will be responsible for cleaning up the damaging PR his death will create for bears, as the first and only recorded bear mauling in the history of the park). Of the affinity that Treadwell seemed to feel towards the rugged environment of his “Grizzly Sanctuary”, in which hostile weather conditions and swarms of mosquitos are as omnipresent as ursine predators, Herzog reflects that, “This gigantic complexity of tumbling ice and abysses separated Treadwell from the world out there. And more so, it seems to me that this landscape in turmoil is a metaphor of his soul.” And yet, when Herzog mines Treadwell's upbringing for sources of the mental instability that “drove Timothy into the wild,” his research renders little more than amusing objects for the documentarian's patronizing lens. He guides his viewers on a sojourn through Treadwell's early development as “Timothy Dexter”, the third of five children in a middle-class Long Island household, to his parents’ suburban retirement home in Florida, in which Herzog sits with Treadwell's elderly parents, his mother clutching her son's favourite stuffed bear, as she reminisces about Treadwell's connection to animals as a child, noting that he was otherwise an average student, his father in turn drily recounting his son's descent into drug use as he missed or boggled a series of opportunities, from college to Hollywood, attributing Treadwell's final “spiral down” to a failed audition for the TV sitcom Cheers, in which Treadwell allegedly came in second to the actor Woody Harrelson. “[T]hat is what really destroyed him,” his father notes confidently, “That he did not get that job on Cheers.” Adult friends of Treadwell's, including southern California surfer buddy Wayne, and his old friend and business partner Jewel Palovak, offer little more insight into the puzzling contents of Treadwell's psyche, expressing, instead, a shrugging acceptance and obvious affection, as they acknowledge his undeniable quirkiness and need to reinvent himself. Wayne: “He claimed to be an orphan from Australia, and even checked out details of a small town in the Australian outback in order to sound convincing…. After Timothy's death, people said, “Well, don't you feel betrayed that he did that? That he didn't tell you the truth about his accent or his origins?” And that never bothered me. Timmy always amused me. There's an old saying on the farm, “If it doesn't scare the cows, who cares?” Well, I don't think Timmy ever scared the cows, so who cares?” Jewel: “One time he went to a doctor. They wanted to put him on some kind of antidepressant or something … ’cause his moods were so up and down … he started taking it for a while and then he stopped…. I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because … I can't have the middle grounds. I have to have the highs and the lows. That's my life. It's a part of my personality’.” He tried to act like a bear, and for us on the island, you don't do that. You don't invade on their territory. For him to act like a bear the way he did … was the ultimate of disrespecting the bear and what the bear represents.… Where I grew up, the bears avoid us and we avoid them. They are not habituated to us. If I look at it from my culture, Timothy Treadwell crossed a boundary that we have lived with for 7,000 years. It's an unspoken boundary, an unknown boundary. But when we know we've crossed it, we pay the price. As the curator speaks, Herzog cuts to an image of Treadwell wading into a river to meet an enormous bear who is swimming to shore. As the bear tries to move away, to the banks of the river, Treadwell extends a hand towards his back. The bear jerks its head around and Treadwell jerks his hand back, foreshadowing the price he will pay for daring to touch. Due to freak weather conditions—probably a combination of frost and drought at the wrong times—the entire berry crop along the Katmai Coast has failed…. Even when fish are available, berries of several varieties (blueberry, crowberry, highbush cranberry, salmon berry, and lingonberry) are vital and much sought-after mid- and late-season food sources. Moreover, Jans observes, “At this time of season, bears are in the final throes of hyperphagia—a genetically programmed metabolic overdrive that short-circuits the body's normal tendency to stop eating when full” in order to consume enough calories to survive the winter (pp. 86–87). Treadwell may not have known about the shortage of berries that fall, but he was certainly versed in the biological imperative of hyperphagia. And what haunts me is that, in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as the secret world of the bears and this bland stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. He wanted to become like the bear. Perhaps it was religious, but not in the true sense of religion. I think perhaps he wanted to mutate into a wild animal, as he says in this last letter: “I have to mutually mutate into a wild animal in order to handle the life I live out here.” And I think there's a religious sense in that in the sense of connecting so deeply that you're no longer human … that is a religious experience. While part of Treadwell wanted to protect and educate the public about bears, as hero and saviour, another part of him wanted to merge, in the truest Dionysian sense of a self dismembered, with the object of his passion. This is the truer meaning of Treadwell's refrain throughout the documentary: “I will die for these animals.” I can only imagine that the walking of that tightrope, flirting with the abyss, is what enabled Treadwell to feel alive. Michio Hoshino, the Japanese nature photographer who was killed by a brown bear in the wilds of Russia several years before Treadwell's death, wrote that “when we visit the few remaining scraps of wilderness where bears roam free, we can still feel an instinctive fear. How precious that feeling is” (Jans, 2006, p. 185). This summer (2024) I visited Katmai National Park and participated in the bear viewing tourism that has exploded in the decades following Treadwell's death. On the eve of my adventure, I sat at the bar of a fishing lodge in the tiny outpost town of King Salmon, to which no roads lead, but from which one is able to take a boat or plane into the park. Various chance meetings led me to an extended conversation with Mark Emery, an Emmy award-winning wildlife photographer, filmmaker and outdoor guide, who had met Treadwell in the early years of his travel to the Alaskan Peninsula. “I only met Timothy Treadwell one time, but I did spend quite a bit of time in that one encounter,” Emery chuckled. He went on to describe the encounter in which he and a film crew from National Geographic, two of whom were women, encountered Treadwell in Hallo Bay, the bear paradise to which he refers in the film as “the Grizzly Sanctuary”. According to Emery, Treadwell screamed to them from the surf for help as they were flying over. When the crew landed, he showed Emery a water canister that bears had destroyed after getting into his tent in search of food (Figure 2). “He was really a newbie, I think this was maybe his second summer?” Emery observed, in an effort to explain why one might not know not to keep food in one's tent in the middle of bear country. “So, then the two gals came up and he started speaking to them in an Australian accent, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ We had just landed in an airplane that we chartered for $1,000 a day and had a lot of stuff to film in the field. He goes ‘The girls like it when you talk Australian!’ ‘Not these girls,’ I answered.” I laughed at this, unsurprised. Emery went on to recount how they helped Treadwell that day to charter a plane to Kodiak Island. My sense from him was that Treadwell was a character who amused, bemused and at times annoyed Emery and other Alaskans who spent time in the backcountry, but that he, like others, also accepted Treadwell's eccentric presence in their world. As Jans writes, the “out of control lunatic” presented by Herzog was not the man that native Alaskans, friends and foes had come to know (p. xii). In fact, Jans concludes, after consulting with a number of individuals who actually spent time with Treadwell during his summers in Alaska, “Far from sliding downward into madness and despair, he'd become, if anything, happier and more stable as the years went on” (p. xiii). One wonders how much of the video Treadwell took of himself was meant for the public and how much was merely venting or goofing around. Emery did mention that a ranger in the field [in Katmai] had confided in him her impression that Treadwell suffered from bipolar disorder, evidenced by his rapidly swinging moods and attitude towards the park service. This, too, I registered without surprise. Treadwell's history of alcohol and drug abuse, his attachment to the “highs and lows” and the paranoid tirades that run through the video clips included by Herzog fit with such a diagnosis. And perhaps this is the key that Herzog sought as he attempted to plumb Treadwell's psyche. I am left primarily with compassion and sadness for this man whom nature touched so deeply and who spoke so kindly to the bears and foxes he met in the field. As the Canadian Charlie Russell—rancher, bear viewing guide, and adoptive “mother” of multiple sets of orphaned grizzly cubs in Kamchatka, Russia—wrote after Treadwell's death: “If Timothy had spent those 13 years killing bears and guiding others to do the same, eventually being killed by one, he would have been remembered in Alaska with great admiration. That story would have meant nothing to Herzog because there would have been no lines crossed whatsoever.”

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