Grisly Man
8/20/05
GRISLY MAN
(We all yearn to return, but what if we did?)
Hard to say what amazes me the most about Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Is it the throat-constricting nature footage, especially the epic grizzly Sumo wrestling match? Or the portrait & self-portrait of a cosmic fool headed for death? Tim Treadwell is so utterly deluded------trying to "pet" those gigantic ursine predators, even after they gruffly warn him not to---not really understanding who they are even after camping near them for 13 years, fancying himself to be their protector though he actually gets one of them KILLED, risking not only his life but that of his girlfriend. It is hilarious, really-----his vanity, his high lisping voice, his absurd vocabulary, his uncanny resemblance to Owen Wilson and to the Chris Guest character in Waiting for Guffman----but the hilarity is undercut by our ironic knowledge that he is headed toward a grisly end and dragging his girlfriend with him. The levels of irony are breathtaking: for example, the moment when he guests on Late Night and Letterman asks him if we are some day going to read that the bears have eaten him.
We keep saying to ourselves: this can't be real. Surely this is a Spinal Tap-like comic fraud, a put on. But it really happened. It's as if Oscar Wilde, or Mr. Rogers, got outfitted at Adventure 16 and his neighborhood were the wilderness primeval. Tim, who pretends to be Australian, has more than a little in common with that showboating Aussie who's built a career on relentlessly, obnoxiously, heedlessly, baiting crocs and other wild, lethal creatures for the camera, and who seems constantly on the verge of being eaten or stung to death. Can't they let these poor beasts well enough alone?
Though Tim Treadwell is impoverished, apparently a nobody, the interviews and flashbacks and footage going back to his childhood, his mother, and his stuffed teddy bear parody Citizen Kane, with his hubris and his sled, "Rosebud." Citizen Kane, though purportedly a fictional movie, has a documentary feel which, by analogy, examines the real life mystery of William Randolph Hearst's life. Grizzly Man is prima facie a nonfiction documentary, yet quickly, eerily, begins to seem stranger-than-fact. It crosses into a cinematic no-man's-land, call it faction, between fact and fiction.
I haven't seen such a fascinating documentary character study since Crumb, the movie. We learn, for example, that Tim, as a boy, liked to dive partly for the adrenaline (it takes courage and derringdo to be a diver.....or a bearbaiter), and that he craved a similar adrenaline rush from constantly hanging too close to predators. Also, he's physically goodlooking (in a goofy way), and is constantly demonstrating his vanity, even in the wild, by the way he brushes back his golden locks, profiles for his own camera, etc. This performance vanity, too, can be traced back to his earlier incarnations as diver (the most exhibitionistic of sports) and wouldbe actor.
In the interview with his mother, we see that Tim's bond with animals goes back to early childhood, and that he was very close to his mother, indeed, was a mother's boy.
And his bevy of female admirers are fascinating types: Northwest nuts 'n berry mommas, credulous nature-lovers, physically attracted to Tim and not thinking too hard about the craziness of his proximity to the bears...... The ex-girlfriend's tormented expression speaks volumes when she watches Herzog listen to the audio track of Tim & Huguenard's last agonies. She knows what he's hearing. It's too awful. Even the intrepid Herzog can only listen to a little bit of it before taking off the earphones and suggesting to her that she destroy the tape.
One of Tim's many comic traits is that he is so fey---the high voice, the Mr. Rogerslike mannerisms, the prettiness---yet he is apparently straight, insists upon his straightness. Does he know himself at all? Does he know the world around him? The contrast between his almost mincing demeanor and the natural setting, red of tooth & claw, is priceless. He has a pied piper quality which makes him very good with groups of kids back in the States. He even resembles Depp's Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka, too, seems ageless, still part of the neverneverland of children, yet harboring reserves of fury. But this is no fairy tale; Tim actually pipes Huguenard to her death. The chasm between Tim's absurd endearments for wild animals and what the surly bear does to him (and her): literally tear him limb from limb, decapitate him, devour him alive.... has to be seen to be believed. Remember, the coroner said all that was left of Tim at the campsite was his head and a bit of his spine. But they found 4 bags of human remains in the bear's gut. How often do we see horror and hilarity this closely juxtaposed? It's also fascinating that he invented an alternative self with a fake name, pretended he was really from Australia, etc. And many of his closest friends didn't know he was an impostor.....but forgave him for the deception once they learned of it.
And underneath Tim's childlike manner are huge reserves of rage. His contradictions are many. For example, he purports to be an open-hearted nature boy, but is territorial as hell about his wild bears, deeply resentful of visits by other humans, and paranoid about their messages to him. He purports to be brokenhearted when he sees the remains of the grizzly cub devoured by a male grizzly. What would he say & feel if he saw the splayed out remains of the grizzly that was shot because he gave it the chance to eat him....& Huguenard?
We can all identify with his purported desire to protect & publicize the wilderness and the bears in particular, but how much was he USING the bears as a way to puff up his own fragile ego----the same ego smarting from not getting the Woody Harrelson part in Cheers? He has something in common with people who get off on swimming in tanks with dolphins, dolphins who have been imprisoned so they can give eco-tourists a brief thrill.
And some of the lesser characters are also wonderful: for example, the bush pilot/ex rodeo rider. The bush pilot's description of HIS encounter with the killerbear alone is worth the price of admission, and he also helps score the tale the pilot by singing along with a Country Western ballad on his plane radio. Then there's the the Inuit scientist with Norwegian surname talking about the line between men and bears which Tim blithely transgressed but which Inuits have respected for 7,000 years. And the no-nonsense chopper pilot who damns Tim with the unvarnished diction of a northwoods veteran. Or the coroner, standing beside a bagged corpse, bizarrely recounting Tim's final moments. Herzog is a genius at delineating madmen & their struggles with nature---Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, a German mountain climber, a Norweigan ski jumper. Most of the action is played out against the inconceivably beautiful panorama of the Far North. Who IS this absurd & heedless Long Islander, this urban pygmy, traipsing about in a timeless, primeval, landscape? It's startling he survived as long as he did. If we all tried to do what Tim did, we would soon extinguish the few thousand grizzlies surviving in the Far North. After all, there are 300 million Americans, rubbing shoulder to shoulder in our congested cities, living out our antlike, workerbee, existences, and only 35,000 Alaskan grizzlies. But the siren call of the wild is undeniable---just ask Jack London, a writer Herzog doubtless read in childhood. Didn't Paleolithic man spend MOST of his life in close quarters with giant predators like the bears? Weren't we really designed more for that kind of existence than for the pathetic urban ones we are condemned to lead? Isn't the memory of that existence, going back hundreds or thousands of generations, for tens of millenia, still in our genes, in our very blood? Don't we all yearn to return, though we would instantly blot out the few scraps of wildnerness left on Earth if we did?
Tim is deeply inauthentic, he's not who he says he is. And the natural world he perceives is a far cry from what it really is. And yet he does find a kind of authenticity in his embrace of the wild and of the bears in particular. And back in the States, he does succeed in publicizing these nature reserves, reserves which are always threatened by Bushian exploitative, corporate forces. There's undeniably something heroic, or at least recklessly brave, about Tim. And he at least tries, or claims, to be fighting on the side of the angels. These irreconcilable contradictions make his silly character riveting and comic and dramatic. He becomes more than the sum of his parts. Tim says he had nothing in Hollywood, that he found his life in the wild. Thoreau says: "In the wild is the preservation of mankind." But there's not room in the wild for us all. If we moved there, we'd destroy the very thing we admire and crave. So Tim saves us the trip and gives us a vicarious, a virtual, a video experience----right down to being eaten alive. How much more real does virtual reality get? Thank, Tim, for being our proxy. Better you than us. We guess that cinematic experience was worth the sacrifice of you, of Michelle, of the surly, magnificent, hungry, grizzly. And we KNOW you didn't do it for the money.
The coroner says that at least Tim was selfless when the bear had his head in its mouth and Tim told Huguenard to run for her life. But wasn't that a bit LATE to be selfless? By that time the game was up, Tim was doomed, and he had already engineered a situation which doomed Huguenard as well, doomed Huguenard not least because it was not in her character to run at that point, she was going to stay and fight to the death to save the man who led her to her doom, who led her to the bear who would devour them both. Instead of saving the damsel FROM the monster, white-knight Tim leads his ladylove TO the monster's lair and makes sure she stays there until they are both devoured.
When we see the bear maze from the air, even the most ignorant of us can see it's a terrible place to camp. A bear could suddenly surprise a man, or a man a bear, at any point in the maze, and the results would be lethal. And then when we hear that the bears Tim knew best are already in hibernation, and only the surly, less successful bears are still in the maze, foraging for food, and that the surliest, hungriest, bear of all is hovering close to Tim's camp, desperately diving to the pool bottom for the last rotten salmon of the season..... Well, it's nothing less than a video self-portrait of a protracted, orchestrated, suicide. And homicide, really, because Tim is also putting Huguenard in terrible peril. And Tim's final speeches to his camera are video suicide notes, valedictory sign offs. He's so self-absorbed that he barely photographs Huguenard or concerns himself with her welfare. And where is her own sense of self? She's amost a cipher. How much room is there for a another self around a personality as grandiose and narcissistic and deluded and self-congratulatory and self-dramatizing as Tim's? He's the star of his own life, in the movie of his own life, and there is precious little room for supporting characters, other than the foxes & bears themselves. Even in Tim's journal he records that the bears frighten her----as they would any SANE person. It's fairly easy to understand why Tim, wearying of the burden of his fantastic life, would finally yearn to MERGE with a killerbear. He's the very embodiment of a man with a boundary problem. He can't distinguish his love for bears from his deathwish. But why would he bring Huguenard down with him? Was he so self-absorbed that she really wasn't alive to him? Or, underneath his childlike magnetism did he bear secret reserves of resentment or loathing toward women?
Herzog senses that Treadwell is a wouldbe artist, a movie director who needs a brilliant collaborator to posthumously edit his footage and his performance. Treadwell needs one of those t-shirts: "But what I really want to do is direct." And like so many directors, like, for example, Jonathan Landau pushing Vic Morrow to his death during the shooting of The Twilight Zone, Tim puts his project ahead of the welfare of his cast. He and Huguenard are stuntmen, and their greatest stunt will be their last. Imagine how the movie The Bear must have made Tim's hair stand on end. But Tim would go The Bear one better---his final grisly encounter would not only be real, but fatal for man, woman, AND bear.
Treadwell is a Quixotic figure, but instead of looking at windmills and seeing monsters, he looks at half ton grizzlies and sees teddy bears. When have we been given a more fascinating documentary portrait of a fool, a madman, an artist, a conman, a clown, a lover, a killer?
GRISLY MAN
(We all yearn to return, but what if we did?)
Hard to say what amazes me the most about Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Is it the throat-constricting nature footage, especially the epic grizzly Sumo wrestling match? Or the portrait & self-portrait of a cosmic fool headed for death? Tim Treadwell is so utterly deluded------trying to "pet" those gigantic ursine predators, even after they gruffly warn him not to---not really understanding who they are even after camping near them for 13 years, fancying himself to be their protector though he actually gets one of them KILLED, risking not only his life but that of his girlfriend. It is hilarious, really-----his vanity, his high lisping voice, his absurd vocabulary, his uncanny resemblance to Owen Wilson and to the Chris Guest character in Waiting for Guffman----but the hilarity is undercut by our ironic knowledge that he is headed toward a grisly end and dragging his girlfriend with him. The levels of irony are breathtaking: for example, the moment when he guests on Late Night and Letterman asks him if we are some day going to read that the bears have eaten him.
We keep saying to ourselves: this can't be real. Surely this is a Spinal Tap-like comic fraud, a put on. But it really happened. It's as if Oscar Wilde, or Mr. Rogers, got outfitted at Adventure 16 and his neighborhood were the wilderness primeval. Tim, who pretends to be Australian, has more than a little in common with that showboating Aussie who's built a career on relentlessly, obnoxiously, heedlessly, baiting crocs and other wild, lethal creatures for the camera, and who seems constantly on the verge of being eaten or stung to death. Can't they let these poor beasts well enough alone?
Though Tim Treadwell is impoverished, apparently a nobody, the interviews and flashbacks and footage going back to his childhood, his mother, and his stuffed teddy bear parody Citizen Kane, with his hubris and his sled, "Rosebud." Citizen Kane, though purportedly a fictional movie, has a documentary feel which, by analogy, examines the real life mystery of William Randolph Hearst's life. Grizzly Man is prima facie a nonfiction documentary, yet quickly, eerily, begins to seem stranger-than-fact. It crosses into a cinematic no-man's-land, call it faction, between fact and fiction.
I haven't seen such a fascinating documentary character study since Crumb, the movie. We learn, for example, that Tim, as a boy, liked to dive partly for the adrenaline (it takes courage and derringdo to be a diver.....or a bearbaiter), and that he craved a similar adrenaline rush from constantly hanging too close to predators. Also, he's physically goodlooking (in a goofy way), and is constantly demonstrating his vanity, even in the wild, by the way he brushes back his golden locks, profiles for his own camera, etc. This performance vanity, too, can be traced back to his earlier incarnations as diver (the most exhibitionistic of sports) and wouldbe actor.
In the interview with his mother, we see that Tim's bond with animals goes back to early childhood, and that he was very close to his mother, indeed, was a mother's boy.
And his bevy of female admirers are fascinating types: Northwest nuts 'n berry mommas, credulous nature-lovers, physically attracted to Tim and not thinking too hard about the craziness of his proximity to the bears...... The ex-girlfriend's tormented expression speaks volumes when she watches Herzog listen to the audio track of Tim & Huguenard's last agonies. She knows what he's hearing. It's too awful. Even the intrepid Herzog can only listen to a little bit of it before taking off the earphones and suggesting to her that she destroy the tape.
One of Tim's many comic traits is that he is so fey---the high voice, the Mr. Rogerslike mannerisms, the prettiness---yet he is apparently straight, insists upon his straightness. Does he know himself at all? Does he know the world around him? The contrast between his almost mincing demeanor and the natural setting, red of tooth & claw, is priceless. He has a pied piper quality which makes him very good with groups of kids back in the States. He even resembles Depp's Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka, too, seems ageless, still part of the neverneverland of children, yet harboring reserves of fury. But this is no fairy tale; Tim actually pipes Huguenard to her death. The chasm between Tim's absurd endearments for wild animals and what the surly bear does to him (and her): literally tear him limb from limb, decapitate him, devour him alive.... has to be seen to be believed. Remember, the coroner said all that was left of Tim at the campsite was his head and a bit of his spine. But they found 4 bags of human remains in the bear's gut. How often do we see horror and hilarity this closely juxtaposed? It's also fascinating that he invented an alternative self with a fake name, pretended he was really from Australia, etc. And many of his closest friends didn't know he was an impostor.....but forgave him for the deception once they learned of it.
And underneath Tim's childlike manner are huge reserves of rage. His contradictions are many. For example, he purports to be an open-hearted nature boy, but is territorial as hell about his wild bears, deeply resentful of visits by other humans, and paranoid about their messages to him. He purports to be brokenhearted when he sees the remains of the grizzly cub devoured by a male grizzly. What would he say & feel if he saw the splayed out remains of the grizzly that was shot because he gave it the chance to eat him....& Huguenard?
We can all identify with his purported desire to protect & publicize the wilderness and the bears in particular, but how much was he USING the bears as a way to puff up his own fragile ego----the same ego smarting from not getting the Woody Harrelson part in Cheers? He has something in common with people who get off on swimming in tanks with dolphins, dolphins who have been imprisoned so they can give eco-tourists a brief thrill.
And some of the lesser characters are also wonderful: for example, the bush pilot/ex rodeo rider. The bush pilot's description of HIS encounter with the killerbear alone is worth the price of admission, and he also helps score the tale the pilot by singing along with a Country Western ballad on his plane radio. Then there's the the Inuit scientist with Norwegian surname talking about the line between men and bears which Tim blithely transgressed but which Inuits have respected for 7,000 years. And the no-nonsense chopper pilot who damns Tim with the unvarnished diction of a northwoods veteran. Or the coroner, standing beside a bagged corpse, bizarrely recounting Tim's final moments. Herzog is a genius at delineating madmen & their struggles with nature---Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, a German mountain climber, a Norweigan ski jumper. Most of the action is played out against the inconceivably beautiful panorama of the Far North. Who IS this absurd & heedless Long Islander, this urban pygmy, traipsing about in a timeless, primeval, landscape? It's startling he survived as long as he did. If we all tried to do what Tim did, we would soon extinguish the few thousand grizzlies surviving in the Far North. After all, there are 300 million Americans, rubbing shoulder to shoulder in our congested cities, living out our antlike, workerbee, existences, and only 35,000 Alaskan grizzlies. But the siren call of the wild is undeniable---just ask Jack London, a writer Herzog doubtless read in childhood. Didn't Paleolithic man spend MOST of his life in close quarters with giant predators like the bears? Weren't we really designed more for that kind of existence than for the pathetic urban ones we are condemned to lead? Isn't the memory of that existence, going back hundreds or thousands of generations, for tens of millenia, still in our genes, in our very blood? Don't we all yearn to return, though we would instantly blot out the few scraps of wildnerness left on Earth if we did?
Tim is deeply inauthentic, he's not who he says he is. And the natural world he perceives is a far cry from what it really is. And yet he does find a kind of authenticity in his embrace of the wild and of the bears in particular. And back in the States, he does succeed in publicizing these nature reserves, reserves which are always threatened by Bushian exploitative, corporate forces. There's undeniably something heroic, or at least recklessly brave, about Tim. And he at least tries, or claims, to be fighting on the side of the angels. These irreconcilable contradictions make his silly character riveting and comic and dramatic. He becomes more than the sum of his parts. Tim says he had nothing in Hollywood, that he found his life in the wild. Thoreau says: "In the wild is the preservation of mankind." But there's not room in the wild for us all. If we moved there, we'd destroy the very thing we admire and crave. So Tim saves us the trip and gives us a vicarious, a virtual, a video experience----right down to being eaten alive. How much more real does virtual reality get? Thank, Tim, for being our proxy. Better you than us. We guess that cinematic experience was worth the sacrifice of you, of Michelle, of the surly, magnificent, hungry, grizzly. And we KNOW you didn't do it for the money.
The coroner says that at least Tim was selfless when the bear had his head in its mouth and Tim told Huguenard to run for her life. But wasn't that a bit LATE to be selfless? By that time the game was up, Tim was doomed, and he had already engineered a situation which doomed Huguenard as well, doomed Huguenard not least because it was not in her character to run at that point, she was going to stay and fight to the death to save the man who led her to her doom, who led her to the bear who would devour them both. Instead of saving the damsel FROM the monster, white-knight Tim leads his ladylove TO the monster's lair and makes sure she stays there until they are both devoured.
When we see the bear maze from the air, even the most ignorant of us can see it's a terrible place to camp. A bear could suddenly surprise a man, or a man a bear, at any point in the maze, and the results would be lethal. And then when we hear that the bears Tim knew best are already in hibernation, and only the surly, less successful bears are still in the maze, foraging for food, and that the surliest, hungriest, bear of all is hovering close to Tim's camp, desperately diving to the pool bottom for the last rotten salmon of the season..... Well, it's nothing less than a video self-portrait of a protracted, orchestrated, suicide. And homicide, really, because Tim is also putting Huguenard in terrible peril. And Tim's final speeches to his camera are video suicide notes, valedictory sign offs. He's so self-absorbed that he barely photographs Huguenard or concerns himself with her welfare. And where is her own sense of self? She's amost a cipher. How much room is there for a another self around a personality as grandiose and narcissistic and deluded and self-congratulatory and self-dramatizing as Tim's? He's the star of his own life, in the movie of his own life, and there is precious little room for supporting characters, other than the foxes & bears themselves. Even in Tim's journal he records that the bears frighten her----as they would any SANE person. It's fairly easy to understand why Tim, wearying of the burden of his fantastic life, would finally yearn to MERGE with a killerbear. He's the very embodiment of a man with a boundary problem. He can't distinguish his love for bears from his deathwish. But why would he bring Huguenard down with him? Was he so self-absorbed that she really wasn't alive to him? Or, underneath his childlike magnetism did he bear secret reserves of resentment or loathing toward women?
Herzog senses that Treadwell is a wouldbe artist, a movie director who needs a brilliant collaborator to posthumously edit his footage and his performance. Treadwell needs one of those t-shirts: "But what I really want to do is direct." And like so many directors, like, for example, Jonathan Landau pushing Vic Morrow to his death during the shooting of The Twilight Zone, Tim puts his project ahead of the welfare of his cast. He and Huguenard are stuntmen, and their greatest stunt will be their last. Imagine how the movie The Bear must have made Tim's hair stand on end. But Tim would go The Bear one better---his final grisly encounter would not only be real, but fatal for man, woman, AND bear.
Treadwell is a Quixotic figure, but instead of looking at windmills and seeing monsters, he looks at half ton grizzlies and sees teddy bears. When have we been given a more fascinating documentary portrait of a fool, a madman, an artist, a conman, a clown, a lover, a killer?
posted by mobydoug at 3:19 PM
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