It’s easy to come away from
the new Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man,
persuaded that its subject was a delusional crackpot who deserved
his fate: to be killed and eaten by a bear.
That
certainly is the popular impression of Timothy Treadwell, who died
in Alaska nearly two years ago at the claws and fangs of a creature
whose protection he had championed.
But like the man
whose life and work it analyzes, Grizzly Man is
a complex piece of work, and it is more than a superficial
character study. As it fills in the contradictory and frequently
infuriating details of Treadwell’s outsized personality, it invites
reflection on the similarly complicated relationship between
Americans and our shrinking wilderness.
Herzog, a film
director more known for deeply individualistic features than for
traditional documentaries, was no doubt drawn to the story by many
of the same characteristics that drove heavy media attention after
Treadwell’s death. There was profound irony at the heart of the
event: a defender of wildlife being slaughtered by one of the
animals he sought to protect from slaughter.
But there
were other plot elements that made the story even more
irresistible: the death of Treadwell’s girlfriend, Amie Huguenard,
who stuck by her companion during the attack rather than flee for
her life and thereby doomed herself to share his fate; the lurid
and rare spectacle of a human being demoted to a subordinate rank
in the food chain; the I-told-you-so response from the biologists
and park officials with whom Treadwell had feuded, who said they’d
warned him for years that he was courting death by not taking
proper precautions.
The cartoonish picture of Treadwell
that emerged from news coverage of the fatal attack was that of a
confused and foolish man — well-intentioned but not very
bright — who paid with his life because he ignored the advice
of those who were wiser.
Herzog’s documentary about
Treadwell’s life and death, drawn largely from the 100 or so hours
of gripping video footage Treadwell shot during his 13 summers on
the Alaskan peninsula, manages to turn the cartoon character into a
real person. It is not a flattering portrait, for it reveals
Treadwell to have been narcissistic and misguided.
Similar traits are apparent in Treadwell’s 1997 book about his
experiences, Among Grizzlies: Living With Wild Bears in
Alaska. He exaggerates his role as the bears’ guardian
against development of their habitat, poaching and other threats.
Poaching, though, has never been much of an issue in Alaska, where
grizzlies may be hunted legally, and the area in which he spent
most of his time is already protected from development because
it’s in a national park.
He also fails to
appreciate how his frequent interference in the bears’
activities negates any potential scientific value of his
observations of their behavior, which he altered even as he was
observing it.
But the film makes it clear that Treadwell
was sincere in his uncritical love of the wilderness and its
inhabitants, and that the backcountry served him as a healing
refuge from modern American life. Treadwell is hardly the only
person to find the urban environment spiritually toxic, and to flee
for refuge into the wild. American history is littered with poets,
writers and just plain folks who have done the same.
For
those tempted to write off Treadwell as just a pampered city kid
playing a survivalist game in the bush, the film helps show how
difficult it is to live alone, or nearly so, for months at a time
on a soggy, bug-infested coastal plain periodically whipped by
powerful storms and located hundreds of miles from telephones,
electricity, plumbing and medical aid. Beneath Treadwell’s goofy,
childlike surface was an inner toughness.
Grizzly Man is a reminder that, for all his
romanticizing of the half-ton predators among whom he lived —
giving them cute names and imputing to them human emotions and
motivations — Treadwell managed to avoid trouble for many
years. His scientific insights may have been mostly trivial, but he
understood something about bear behavior. Or maybe he was just
lucky, and then his luck ran out.
What Treadwell’s story
ultimately tells us is that despite the fervent wish of many to
believe otherwise, wild creatures, like the landscape they inhabit,
are indifferent to human needs and desires. Whether you regard this
as gratifying or annoying says more about you than about them.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He writes for the Ventura Star in
California.
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