Grizzly Man

In October of 2003, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed by a grizzly bear in Alaska.  Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, is a fascinating story of Treadwell’s life and death.  The film is disturbing, funny, tragic, and great..

Herzog weaves Treadwell’s own footage with interviews he conducted with Treadwell’s friends, scientific experts, and the coroner (a strange man who would not have been miscast on The X-Files) who examined the remains and explains what happened.  

Treadwell thought the bears knew and loved him, the way he loved them. He gave them cute names like Mr. Chocolate, and while edging away from them, talked to them like recalcitrant children.  He describes himself as a “gentle warrior” and the bears as his good friends.

It is telling that while Treadwell certainly filmed the bears, he spent a significant amount of time filming himself.   His capacity for endlessly talking about himself was limitless.  He also, amusingly, filmed himself leaping down trails, with an idea towards creating a TV show, a la the Crocodile Hunter.  As Herzog points out in his narration, Treadwell thought like a filmmaker.  He also thought like an egomaniac.

It is unfortunate that no one got Treadwell the help he so clearly needed.  His manic depression is obvious in the film, as he weeps about how the bears saved his life, or over a bee he thinks is dead (it eventually moves), and then at other times, screams and curses at the camera in a out-of-control rage.  At one point, he yelled invectives against the Park Service for a good ten minutes.  At another time, he overreacts to a fox stealing a baseball hat, screaming, “Oh my God” and “Damn you,” all out of proportion to what is happening.  The audience wants to laugh, but it’s uncomfortable laughter, because it’s clear that Treadwell was a deeply troubled person.  And, of course, hovering over the whole film is the fact that he was killed.

Treadwell repeatedly says that he knows that his life is on the line the entire time that he is living near the bears.  He says over and over, “I could be killed at any moment.”  But it does not seem that he really thought about that reality, or understood what it meant.  It seemed more likely that he was bragging, as he often did, about his own bravery and his self-appointed role as the bear’s “protector.”  There is no evidence that he actually did protect the bears from anything – in fact, he films some people who throw rocks at a bear, but claims that he did not want to “reveal” himself to them.  

A few hours before he died, Treadwell filmed himself in a melancholy mood, just feet from the site of his brutal killing.  It’s very difficult to watch, and hard not to extrapolate that Treadwell perhaps had a premonition about his own death.  Either way, it makes for chilling cinema.

Outside magazine has a great article, written a few months after the attack, that details the events surrounding the killings, most of which are illuminated in the film.