Grizzly Man
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Grizzly Man
Throughout Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell, the movie's star, constantly talks like a junior executive pumping himself up in front of a mirror before a big presentation. Except in this case, Treadwell is in the Alaskan wilderness in front of a camera, and his presentation is not in front of a bunch of senior executives but in front of a few 500 pound grizzly bears. "No one knew," he says to the disembodied and presumably harshly judgemental presence behind the camera, "no one ever fucking knew, that there are times when my life is on the precipice of death. That these bears can bite, these bears can kill, and if I am weak, I will go down." In true cinematic fashion, these words come true: he goes down. We're told the results are too horrible to be presented. Like Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross, Treadwell starts this movie dead, both literaraly and figuratively. Like him, he is a criminal. As a criminal, he can enjoy nothing. He has only a singular goal, one which will get him out of his life: to criminally shove cameras into the faces of wild bears.
So he begins his movie, spliced together reverently by Werner Herzog, in a maniacal mode from which he does not swerve. He never takes a moment to enjoy the reserve around him or pass affectionate words to his girlfriend. He claims to be protecting bears by living among them: in doing this, he acclimates them to human life and therefore endangers them. He's dead: and to top it off, he has the mild indignity of Werner Herzog reading over his final testament in a tone of prickly but worshipful reverence which nonetheless comes across as slightly condescending.
There's something here that Herzog doesn't get about American life--namely, that the Treadwells in this country are a dime a dozen. I can't feel any sympathy for Timothy Treadwell. It's not just that he represents the "dark side" of superimposing a professional attitude over a neccessarily pragmatic one. It's not just that he reminds me of some of my worst bosses--he reminds me of every "fully-engaged" character I've ever met. In him dwells the flop sweat of every neocon politician, every university Marxist in opposition to him, every avant-garde poet ("contemporary poetic models have grown stale, etc."), every overzealous Cubs fanatic who mourns the World Series victory last year of the White Sox, every paranoid schizophrenic, Robotussin guzzling heavy metal kid who could pinpoint with increasingly myopic certitude which bands were "posers" and which were real. It's certain that Herzog sees these as "his" people (excepting the ones who are not)--I suppose he thinks of them as visionaries, worthy of documentation. I don't think he understands that every American mind is wired this way. One can't have a job here, or an academic distiction, or a love of music, without also having a fanatical devotion to it and a repulsion of all those who don't. Think of all those Wal-Mart middle managers doing jumping jacks and yelling Red Army like affirmations about Wal-Mart. This fanatacism lasts eight hours a day, after which we sleep fitfully, drink dangerously, and go to see the movies. Timothy Treadwell is no Isadore Ducasse: his was not a European suicide.
To quote the sole voice of reason in Grizzly Man (one which Herzog is impatient to move past), Sven Haakanson, the direstor of Kodiac's Alottiiq Museum: "I think he did damage to the bears. Where I grew up the bears avoid us and we avoid them...[this is a boundary] that we have lived with for 7,000 years. It's an unspoken boundary, but when we've crossed it we've paid the price."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:47 PM,
