Just now, I clicked on a YouTube video that I thought was music from Werner Herzog’s disturbing yet strangely uplifting documentary, Grizzly Man. But it wasn’t music. It was, supposedly, the previously unheard audio recording of the death of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard by a bear attack. Herzog listens to the clip in the film but refuses to share it. I don’t know if the recording is authentic or not (I hope it’s not, to tell you the truth), but I turned it off after just five seconds of the nearly two-minute long track. I’d had enough. What I heard is some of the most unsettling audio I’ve ever experienced. I fear I won’t be able to get it out of my mind for some time.
Grizzly Man begins with Willy Fulton, the man who discovered the partially digested remains of Treadwell and Huguenard. He’s clearly affected by what he’s witnessed and what he knows to have taken place in Alaska’s Katmai National Park in the fall of 2003. Everyone in the film is affected in one way or another. Many are sympathetic to Treadwell’s cause of studying and protecting grizzly bears, his passion and his drive. Others, however, see him as a naive idealist who, despite years of maintaining an uneasy truce with the bears, did more harm than good with his interactions.
Were the deaths of Treadwell and Huguenard a tragedy or the logical conclusion to living among dangerous wild animals for such an extended period? It is possible for the events to be both, I suppose, but many in the film lean towards the latter. For 13 summers, Treadwell spent months with the bears. Some argue that him lasting as long as he did should be commended, and maybe it should. He figured out how to make it work for a long time, this is true. But whatever skill he may have possessed (or thinks he possessed) only worked until they didn’t.
Herzog is the perfect director to tell the story of Timothy Treadwell. He’s often drawn to madmen with obsessive, singular visions. Treadwell was certainly that. Oddly, for a filmmaker who spends so much time in remote locations, Herzog seems to have a strange and uneasy relationship with nature and the natural world. In Les Blank’s 1982 documentary, Burden of Dreams – about the making of Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo – the director goes on a tirade of sorts about his disdain for the jungle environment that served as the film’s location. He’s disgusted by the chaos, the death, and the callousness he witnesses out there in the wild. He brings some of this disgust to Grizzly Man, remarking more than once about Treadwell’s naive notions of fairness in nature.
“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”
-Werner Herzog, narration from Grizzly Man
Despite statements like the above, Herzog often contradicts himself. In the last handful of summers Treadwell spent in Alaska, he began filming his encounters and day to day life. The footage he captured makes up the bulk of Grizzly Man and much of it is nothing short of astonishing. Herzog combed over 100 hours of video and brilliantly uses it to help us, and him, get to know Treadwell and to understand why he did what he did. It’s in these moments that Herzog pauses to admire the beauty of the land and the animals he sees. He often praises Treadwell as a filmmaker and seems to truly appreciate the natural world.
Grizzly Man is a grim story but it’s also a celebration of a life led in pursuit of a cause. Herzog has crafted his film in such a way that he’s left any conclusions to be drawn in the hands of the viewer. Was Treadwell helping or hurting the bears? Was he crazy, naive, or misguided? Treadwell’s astonishing dedication mixed with his eccentricities cloud the issue. We’re given the evidence required to pass judgment, but I find absolute judgment difficult – and so does Herzog. The only thing that’s certain is that Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard are dead. They were killed by a grizzly bear on October 6, 2003.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.