(I don't know why, but posting this picture made my footnote numbers huge. Go figure.) (Finally, the) Netflix Diary: Grizzly Man
In a better, saner world, this movie would have been named Fox Man, and it would have been about a manic 48-year-old fox lover named Timothy Treadwell and his yearly journeys into the Alaskan wilderness to frolic with his black-footed friends. However, since the world is totally nuts, Timothy fixated on giant grizzly bears instead. He was consequently eaten by one of them at age 46. Of course, Fox Man would have been a boring but terribly cute Disney-produced study of one man’s harmony with nature; Grizzly Man is something else entirely, and director Werner Herzog uses Treadwell’s footage as a backdrop for exploring issues such as nature’s indifference to man and man’s desire to anthropomorphize anything that’s not nailed down.
Here’s what we know before the movie starts: Timothy Treadwell spent 13 summers in Alaska among bears and other wildlife such as super-cute foxes. The last 5 summers, he had a video camera with him. At the very end of his 13th summer, he was killed and eaten by a bear. This movie, Grizzly Man, consists of mostly Treadwell’s compiled and edited tapes (T.T. shot more than 100 hours of footage over the 5 summers, about 1% of which makes it into the film), along with narration and commentary by Mr. Herzog and other notables from Alaska and Mr. Treadwell’s life. Oh, we all know of Herzog and his attraction to noble but tragic lead characters that also happen to be kinda insane. I don’t know how it happened, but Herzog somehow stumbled onto a human being that could stand alongside Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, and even nutty old Klaus Kinski as far as being a great Herzogian lead. Not only that, but this human being also happened to be a filmmaker who shot over 100 hours of footage of himself, seemingly without any self-conscious filters to stop him from making a fool out of himself. Not only only that, but his story came ready-made with an ending both perfectly ironic and sublimely creepy. What Werner Herzog found was practically a real-life Blair Witch Project; now what did he do with it?
The first bad sign I see is the ominous white-lettering-on-black-background message: “This film has been modified from the original version.” Now, I thought they’re supposed to give you an explanation of how a film was “modified” – i.e., “for time” or “for content” or “modified to fit your screen.” The DVD just presents the thought without explanation, as if it’s up to the viewer to figure out exactly how the film differs from the original version. My guess is they digitally added more bears for the DVD version, or made them cuter somehow. The bears sure are suspiciously cute. Have you seen “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”? None of those animals were real, but they sure looked good. Wait -- maybe Treadwell digitally added bears to all his blank Alaskan nature footage, and then paid people to say he got eaten by a bear to make himself a legend. I’ll have to look for signs of clipping or plastic-ness in the bears and get back to you on that one. For now, let’s assume this whole thing is to be taken at face value.
The movie starts out with a scene we’ll come to be very familiar with: Bears walking in a sunny green field, with mountains looking all majestic in the background. Alaska is undeniably pretty. The bears have a lumpy quality that makes them look cute, and the first thing I notice is that their heads are fatter than I would have expected. They are also large, brown, and furry – but everyone expected that. The music in the background sounds like longtime Herzog collaborators Popol Vuh. It’s serene guitar music with a hint of 70’s art-rock to it – It’s royal-sounding and atmospheric and looping and hypnotic. Only, as I discovered later, this isn’t actually Popol Vuh, it’s a group of 5 musicians thrown together and told to make music specifically for this project. Of course, with Herzog involved, it came out sounding exactly like the score for all his other films -- in other words, Popol Vuh. The one special featurette on the DVD involves their recording sessions; I watched about 2 minutes of it and realized it was going to be super-boring. But if you’re the type of human who likes to hear Werner’s German accent drone on and on about “the certain magic found in music,” then by all means check it out.
This scene also gives us our first look at Mr. Treadwell, and my first impression of him is that of a high-voiced surfer dude. He is wearing shades and an oversized black button-down shirt, and his haircut is eerily reminiscent of Prince Valiant. His first soliloquy to the camera is scatterbrained, myopic, and animal-obsessed – and about 5 minutes into the movie, you realize that all his soliloquies are like that. That’s the way he is, or at least that’s the way he constantly presents himself. He’s claiming to be a “kind warrior,” which is his way of saying that he loves the bears but has to pretend to be strong when challenged so they won’t eat him. “The kind warrior must become a samurai,” he says. You know, he’s been out here every summer for 8-13 years when this statement is made, and we can see that TT’s clearly knows a bunch about living with bears. In fact, if you ignore the raving lunatic part of his screechy voice, what he’s saying is undeniably wise. Most of his statements about bears in the movie are full of a healthy fear and awe (albeit mixed with probably unhealthy attachment and desire for acceptance.) I don’t mean to be too amateur psychologist here – the point I’m trying to make is that he’s not dumb. He knows what the dangers are, and is choosing to ignore them. Ok, maybe that is dumb.
At times during Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog will jarringly start talking over TT’s footage in his meaty German accent, often to make a point about how good a natural filmmaker TT was or to scold him for his naïve attitudes toward nature. It’s ok once you get used to it, but the first time he speaks you can’t help but wonder if he couldn’t have gotten some deep-voiced American or Leonard Nimoy to narrate this thing.
Herzog starts by introducing a theme that resonates through the entire film – that Treadwell, good-intentioned as he might have been, crossed an invisible barrier between man and nature that was never meant to be crossed. This brings up a multitude of questions that the film doesn’t care about and never addresses, like “intended by whom?” But it’s an interesting idea made more interesting as the film goes on. More on this in a bit, because now it’s time for:
INTERMISSION: MOST POPULAR BEAR ACTIVITIES, JUDGING BY TREADWELL’S VIDEOS: Walking around, standing up and chewing on trees, sneaking up on humans, mauling humans, eating humans, eating other bears, climbing on rocks in the river, sniffing grass, possibly eating grass, grabbing fish from the river, stealing fish from other bears, sitting with members of their family, swimming like gators with only their heads above water, bathing, sumo wrestling for the right to court female bears, synchronized salmon diving (you have to see it to understand), running on the beach. In other words, they’re a lot like the lifeguards of Baywatch. Is David Hasselhoff a bear? He’s hairy enough. END INTERMISSION.
Treadwell spent his non-Alaska days (i.e., fall/winter/spring of every year) traveling around giving bear presentations to schoolchildren, whom I bet loved his “surfing grizzly man” shtick with his slides and tales of bear battle royals. While teaching, he slicks his hair back and dresses a bit like Angus Young of AC/DC. (Insert snarky line about “crossing the invisible barrier” between teacher and student here.) Treadwell also has been on Letterman (who famously asked him if he (Letterman) could expect one day to hear that TT had been eaten by a bear), and on an unnamed NBC show, probably Dateline, judging by the weird-looking interviewer I recognize but can’t name.
Back in Alaska, Herzog tells us that Treadwell’s girlfriend, a blonde woman named (something like) Amie Heugenard, died with him in that bear attack. It is here we start to learn of the exact story of TT’s demise, as related through locals who liked him (a pilot who discovered his body as he flew up to the “grizzly maze” to pick him up and take him to the airport), didn’t like him (one of the officials who recovered his body and shot the bear who ate him), or are just plain weird (the coroner who examined his body). We follow the pilot as he lands in the same spot he did on that September day in 2003, and he points up a hill to the area where he found what was left of Treadwell. There’s a lot of grisly talk of the grizzly attack in this movie. And no, I’m clearly not above writing that last sentence. I’m so sorry.
Herzog intersperses the stories of the locals who dealt with TT’s bloody aftermath in-between Treadwell’s bear footage, so the death tale unfolds quite slowly. In fact, not until the very end of the film do we understand the fully foreshadowed creepiness of it. For now, we listen as the pilot and another guy talk about finding a “rib cage” in the woods with a bear munching on it. They were part of an expeditionary party that set out to find TT and his poor girlfriend. The pilot described ducking as the other men riddled the dirty grizzly’s body with bullets, and one can imagine the bear clutching his chest and jerking this way and that like James Caan in the Godfather. Or at least that was what I was imagining. Eventually, we are told that this, the murderous bear, was tagged “bear 141” as a cub, and that they recovered four garbage bags worth of persons from his stomach. See what I mean? Grisly. The pilot refers to this bear as “The bear they found Tim in.” I guess nobody taught him not to end a sentence with a preposition.
Footage from Tim shows a bear on his hind legs, seemingly attacking a tree. It’s sheer size is awe-inspiring, to be sure, and Tim says, “If you were weak around him, you’d be down his gullet!” At one point, as he’s talking to the camera, a bear sneaks right up behind him without him realizing it. Since we know his story, we know nothing happens here – but it still feels like Blair Witch all over again. He sees the bear, punches it in the face a few times, and it leaves. As it’s lumbering away, Tim is saying, “It’s ok…it’s ok… I love you,” as if it spoke English and could accept an apology.
One of the expedition members speaks negatively of Treadwell, telling us that he “acted like he was working with people in bear costumes” and that “he wanted to mutate into a wild animal.” From the tapes we see that both these statements are true, but they don’t tell the whole story. He knows the danger, and he knows these are actual bears, but he ignores all that and chooses to think of the bears as friends rather than animals. Hey, you do it with your dog, right? Anyway, TT’s attitude towards the bears is ultimately endearing, because he’s so full of obvious love and respect for them. As Herzog puts a fine point on again and again, he loved bears way more than he loved humans.
His message of “bear protection uber alles” made him controversial, and some of the typical “you dirty tree-hugger” hate-mail (chosen for its vitriol rather than intelligence) is read aloud. While I don’t necessarily agree with the “I hope you get eaten by one of them there bears” sentiment, I can see why his whole presentation about protecting the grizzlies, who (as noted by a local official) live on a nature preserve and as such don’t really need protecting, might rub people the wrong way. There was probably much rejoicing after news of his death spread, which is schadenfreude of the worst kind.
Herzog talks about how Treadwell captured some amazing scenes, and shows us our first look at the foxes. They end up stealing every scene in which they’re featured. The foxes are on top of the tent, and he’s playing with them, and it looks like he’s on a fun vacation. Could one have a pet fox? They sure are cute. He treats the foxes pretty much the same way he treats the bears, but with less talk of them killing and eating him. He’s named all the foxes, and we see “Ghost” adorably gnawing on TT’s cap like a cat with a ball of yarn, and then just take off with it. TT runs after it, yelling “Ghost, come back here with my f___in hat!” You see? This totally could be a Disney movie, if he were the Fox Man. They’d just have to use that bleeper a lot.
Next we get a faceful of the opinions of a clean-cut and judgmental Alaskan museum curator. Herzog interviews him in front of a giant stuffed(?) bear with one paw all taped up (it was cut off and stolen once.) Apparently, the bear is on loan from somewhere else, and we needed to know that. Anyway, he advances the notion that for hundreds of years the local Eskimos knew not to “cross the invisible boundary” (there’s that term again) between man and bear, and that what TT did by “trying to be a bear” was disrespectful to himself and nature. Judgmental man has a point. As another official will point out later, his presence with them could potentially cause those bears to lose their fear of humans, which fear is very healthy for bears and humans alike. Perhaps the well-meaning Treadwell was actually an enemy of nature. If so, nature definitely won, as usual.
TT’s former girlfriend of 3 years, a strange 40ish woman named “Jewel,” goes to the coroner’s office to pick up TT’s watch, which was found on his disembodied arm, still ticking away. It still works at the time of filming, in fact. This watch-passing scene would be touching were it not for the overdramtic, unctuous, and downright creepy coroner, who touches Jewel’s shoulder as if he’s been rehearsing this watch ceremony for months. There’s just something – off – about him, in the same way there’s something – off – about the way James Lipton interviews actors on Inside the Actor’s Studio. I suppose he’s just being overdramatic. Jewel isn’t put off by the overdrama, so why should I be? She’s clearly touched by the watch, and not just because they got it off her ex’s arm.
Next we see Jewel sitting in a chair with her eyes closed. I think Werner has hypnotized her! Hey, he hypnotized the entire cast of Heart of Glass, so don’t laugh, it’s totally possible. She dreamily opens her eyes and talks about how she met Tim, what Tim was like, blah blah blah. We never hear how the Jewel/Tim romance ended, but I’m betting even she, as the co-founder of the bear advocacy group “The Grizzly People,” got tired of hearing every day about how great those f___ing bears were. For the record, Jewel still seems as though she’s in love with the guy – but that might be the hypnosis talking.
Discussion of Tim’s love life leads us to diary-like footage where he’s walking with the camera aimed at his face, talking about how he’s “great in the (sack)” and always fails with women and loves those bears and wishes he was gay so he could just do it in the bushes and hopes he’s not hurt by a bear. You can see how bears creep into whatever subject he’s discussing. This is the first time I notice Tim without his shades, and he looks both kind and honestly a bit gay with his unshaded eyes, especially when he’s talking about how he wishes he was gay. Only in California.
But he wasn’t (or so he claims), which brings us to the mysterious girlfriend who died with him, Amie Heugenard. She shows up in his 100 hours of film exactly three times: disembarking the plane in the grizzly maze; walking in a field, covering her face; and trying to stay out of a shot, about 5 feet away from the bear that may have been her ghostface furry killa a few days later. All we know about her is from diaries, both Tim’s and hers. She was planning on leaving Tim when they got back to Malibu, and she was deathly afraid of the bears. Everyone seems to think that Tim’s death was in some sense deserved, but hers was the real tragedy, because she wasn’t a bear-loving nut. It’s hard to argue against that logic, especially since they only went back out there to the maze because Tim was mad at an airline representative and refused to board their scheduled flight.
The creepy coroner comes back, this time overdramatically explaining that somebody turned the video camera on during the bear attack but left the lens cap in place, so we have audio but not video of it. He tells us that Tim was being attacked, and was yelling at Amie to run away, but that you could also hear Amie attack the bear with a frying pan. After he says all this, he looks into the distance and slowly lets his arms down, which looks unnatural and rehearsed and brings up the issue of whether or not Herzog coached any of the movie’s participants while they were on camera. He is a control freak, after all. And if you’ve seen Heart of Glass, you start to notice a familiar focused gaze on some of his interviewees. I’m not saying for sure that Jewel and the coroner were hyp-mo-tized, but I am saying that people don’t act that weird unless they’re coached by a weirdo. Oh, wait – the coroner’s from Alaska. I forgot -- according to Northern Exposure, all Alaskans are quirky. Never mind then.
So back to that deadly audio tape, the one that Werner has conveniently failed to mention until now. As the director and head control freak of the film, he decides that he alone will listen to it and relate to the audience what is going on. Werner’s back is to the camera, and he has a pair of old-school headphones on, the ones that cover the whole ear. The headphones are attached to a boombox, which Jewel is holding in her lap. She presses play, and Werner confirms what the coroner told us a few minutes earlier – Treadwell was yelling for Amie to run away, and she was screaming and hitting the bear with a metal object that Werner calls a frying pan. Werner starts crying, and he tells Jewel to turn it off and basically forbids her from listening to it. He gets all German on her and tells her to destroy the tape, because it will be the “elephant in the room” for the rest of her life. Jewel looks puzzled by the butchered metaphor, but tearily nods her head, agreeing to destroy it. So not only do we not get to hear the central event of the film, nobody ever will. It’s a gutsy call that’s probably the right one, considering he’s not making Faces of Death here. Still, it’s hard to keep from wondering what that horrible scene sounded like, or whether a more compelling movie could have been made by just chronologically editing the Treadwell movie footage Blair Witch-style and ending it with Amie’s bloodcurdling screams. I think that would have been pretty fricking scary, especially with his habit of talking about death every 5 seconds.
In other footage, it turns out that bears wrestling looks a lot like high school wrestling, except with a lot more biting. Two bears, one of whom Tim has named Mickey, are going at it like two giant hairy sumo wrestlers. Mickey is bigger, but the other bear has the wrestling technique down, and pretty soon it appears the larger bear is fighting for his life against his darker, more bitey opponent. After the fight is over, Treadwell stands on the torn-up battleground and explains that the fight was over (you guessed it) a girl bear. Treadwell tells Mickey, “You don’t always get the chick you want.” He then goes on to stage a one-sided interview of the defeated bear as it lies on its stomach nursing its wounds about 100 feet away. It’s at this point that I yell at the TV, “BEARS DON”T SPEAK ENGLISH!” Yes, it appears that Treadwell’s manner has finally gotten to me. Where’s that death scene? Is it coming up?
Herzog shifts gear and tries to explain how TT became a bear-loving freak, but comes up way short. Talking to his parents, we find out that he always loved animals, but was generally a normal, all-american boy. Werner didn’t dig too deep here, which is probably also a good call. There’s not a whole lot to be learned from his childhood anyway. He grows up, and after an injury ruins his diving career, he moves to LA and becomes a typical druggie failed-actor/surfer dude who pretends to be from Australia. One of his actor friends says he always suspected that TT wasn’t really Australian, because his accent sounded more Kennedy than Crocodile Dundee. Ha! That’s the problem with my Australian accent, too! For real, yo -- all my accents eventually devolve into either Kennedy or hick. For the first time, I feel a kinship with the man, and this after he has worked so hard to annoy me. Now I hope he really did fake his own death.
Ok, now we’re to the point in the movie where Treadwell does and says some really crazy stuff, starting with this statement about the bears: “I’m so in love with them…and they’re so f’ed over…that so SUCKS!” That’s his philosophy in a nutshell. Then we see him weepily petting a fox that’s just died and calling one of the flies hovering over it a “f___er.” Then, in a famous scene, he pauses at the scene of a motionless bee on a flower and declares his love for the bee and despair at the tragedy of its death, but then a few seconds after that it totally moves. The best bit, though, is him kneeling over some recently-excreted bear droppings, marveling at the warmth of the “poop” (his term) and the fact that it was just “inside” the bear he so loves. Does that not sound like an obsessed stalker? He’s the protector of the bears, but who’s going to protect the bears from him, I ask you?
Here’s another thing I just thought of: bears are a natural predator of all sorts of things, most notably the Alaskan salmon. Doesn’t TT care about them? The bears cause the death of thousands of those cute little fish, and to him that’s just nature. However, a motionless bee apparently deserves a full eulogy. What does this guy have against fish? Did a fish cause his diving injury? This deserves deeper investigation.
Anyway, one summer there’s this drought that’s keeping the salmon from “running” through the valley, and Treadwell is freaking out about this. Herzog rightly points out that death “did not fit with his sentimentalized view” of nature. He picks up a bear skull and marvels that this was one of his good friends (I forgot the name) who just died 5 days previously. The other bears ate him, which should be a giant neon sign telling him that being a bear is not a worthwhile goal. He sits in his tent and sort of prays, mocking “Jesus-boy, Christ-man, Allah, Hindu floaty-thing” and yelling at any one of them to make it rain. Then a funny thing happens – it rains so hard it caves his tent in, and he promptly forgets about God. It’s great being a Unitarian, isn’t it?
And “Hindu floaty-thing”?! If they gave out an Oscar for “Clause of the Year,” that would be the winner. Wow. This dude knows a lot about bears, but apparently not much else.
After a scene of Treadwell in full camouflage gear including makeup, the film gets to talking about his mission Re: the bears and the protection they supposedly aren’t getting. A white-as-you’d expect Alaskan official insists that “poaching isn’t a problem,” which Herzog repeats a couple of times during Treadwell’s increasingly poaching-obsessed rants. There is apparently a fairly stable population of 35,000 bears in the frigid state, all of whom have “unique needs” which seem to revolve around salmon. About 6% of said population is killed by hunters every year. This is a good thing, according to the lily-white man. It keeps that population stable. Treadwell begs to differ, though Herzog never tells us why.
Nevertheless, camouflage Tim appears as the “kind warrior,” and at this point in the movie he just looks crazy. Herzog says that for all his talk about poachers, the closest contact with humans (or as Herzog calls them, “intruders”) on TT’s footage is a few tools throwing rocks at one of the bears in the nature preserve. As he watches them from behind the safety of some bushes, he curses them quietly and literally cries for the emotional and physical pain that “Quincy” must be going through. Like rocks would really hurt a bear. He should probably be warning the people of their stupidity, but he doesn’t care about them as much as he cares about Quincy.
This part of TT’s psyche is explored further as we see him go on an expletive-packed rant against the US Park Service, who apparently aren’t looking after the bears as much as TT would like. TT scolds them for “only flying over this area twice” during the summer, and by the looks of it is very proud of his two middle fingers and his creative use of the word f___. As a cocky and delusional TT blathers on and on about the neglectful (and, he implies, anti-Treadwell himself) Park Service, Herzog jarringly talks over him and says, “I feel I must disagree with Treadwell here.” He goes on to more fully explain his theory that TT felt more at home with the bears than with humans, and that he was in some sense at war with USA civilization. It’s hard to argue with Herzog’s point, since we see the manic TT with middle fingers galore in the background. It would have been fun to see how this footage would have played with grade school kids, actually. Highlight of the school year, I would say.
Like a lot of gay men who aren’t really gay, TT has a lot of close women friends, many of whom insist their relationships are platonic but then act more attached than most wives would. Case in point the chick who stored his “gear” during the winters. I don’t remember her name (Carol?), but she, Jewel, and the pilot go to spread a Skoal-can of his ashes into the winds of the nature preserve. I’m serious, his ashes fit into a Skoal can, and there was like brush and twigs in there too as filler. I guess you don’t leave many ashes behind when a bear eats you. The platonic friend does the honors, saying “I love you” to him as his dead ashes spread across the countryside that was home to the bears he loved. One of them comments, “He finally found a way to live here forever,” which is a nice (albeit man-made-religionish) sentiment even if he does wash away in the first significant rainfall and ends up in Kamchatka.
At the end of the film, Herzog ramps up the foreshadowing (which we had been just postshadowing) with footage of Treadwell saying to himself “You will fricking die here” and “I’m right on the precipice…of death.” Most of the footage in this last part has little notes on the bottom that say things like “Five days before his death.” Very Blair Witch. Herzog also makes his big, grandiose Jerry Springer-esque final thought as Treadwell zooms right into the black bear face that might well have eaten him – Where Tim Treadwell saw intelligence, and beauty, and other better-than-human qualities, Herzog just saw “the overwhelming indifference of nature” and a “half-bored interest in possible food.” That, my friends, is a slam dunk, and after Herzog makes it you can picture him hanging on the rim a little too long and risking a technical foul because he knows that what he just made was the winning point. Sure, he knew he would win before the game every started, every good debater does – but that doesn’t take away from the victory he earned. The score: Herzog’s brutal, deadly, and cruel nature 1, Treadwell’s cute, misunderstood, and in-need-of-protection nature 0.
“Ooo-yip-ooo-yip-ooo,” sings the Herzog-coached pilot as he flies us one last time over the scene of the crime, and he ends his little song with the doctored line, “And Treadwell is gone.” Did he get what he deserved? I think we all do -- not in a karmic way, but in the sense that our demise is the result of our choices in life. Some people smoke like a copper smelter and get death lung. TT loved bears a little too much, and on top of that decided to stay for one week too many among “unfamiliar and wilder” (as he wrote in his diary) bears. Amie Heugenard chose to follow the wrong guy, and then chose to scream rather than run. Werner Herzog was once almost killed by Klaus Kinski, and therefore almost never made this movie. For all parties involved, what they loved led them into imminent danger, but they didn’t care. I can’t help thinking that we should all be so fully alive.
