Grizzly Man

That Tim Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog‘s documentary Grizzly Man, was a bit unstable is beyond question. But was he mad? I think of this as I’m still reading Foucault’s History of Madness and sifting through recent posts on other “madmen” such as Blake, The Joker, Henry Darger — as well as Andrew’s mention of another favorite of mine, Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp of Into the Wild — who, like Treadwell, invented a persona for himself and found death in the Alaskan wilderness.

The film is quite disturbing. This would be true even if Herzog hadn’t given airtime to some marginal characters who are wacky in their own right, most notably a coroner who takes his role in the documentary a little too seriously. Treadwell’s own footage, often capturing truly majestic scenes of bears and foxes feeding and cavorting in the background, is breathtaking though ominous given that we know early on he’ll be killed and eaten by one of the bears. In almost every one of these scenes, Treadwell himself enters the frame to rant about enemies he believes are trying to stop him, or else rhapsodize about the animals he loves. It’s here that we watch him reveal himself, building up the “kind warrior” persona he’s created while tearing down the walls protecting the deeply vulnerable person inside.

Here, some quotes from Foucault might be useful:

Madness begins when images, which are so close to dreams, are compounded by the affirmation or the negation that are essential to mistakes. It is in that sense that the Encyclopedie proposed its famous definition of madness: abandoning reason ‘to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad‘.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the madman is not so much the victim of an illusion, of a hallucination of the senses or a movement of his mind. He is not misled, he is making a mistake.

Madness begins where man’s relationship to the truth becomes cloudy and unclear.

Madness is precisely the point of contact between the oneiric [dreamlike] and the erroneous, covering in all its various forms the surface where they meet, which joins and separates them at the same time.

[In the above, it’s important to note Foucault is not defining madness once and for all, but tracing its meaning for various ages and times.]

What’s illuminating here is the idea of madness as mistake, an idea that Herzog and others seem to share when it comes to analyzing Treadwell. Even though Treadwell mentions many times in narrating his own footage that he risks death by living in such proximity to the bears, there’s a sense he doesn’t really believe this; he worships the bears, thinks he’s one of them, and therefore in the end they won’t hurt him.

In his own narration of the footage, Herzog says that he sees only cruel and indifferent nature when he looks at the bears. This is the essence of the critique voiced many times by others in the film: Treadwell did not see reality. He was in error, and it killed him.

But perhaps Treadwell simply saw a different truth. It’s astonishing how often the word “love” comes up when he speaks of the bears and foxes and nature. I was struck by the similarity to Blake’s ecstatic visions, his seeing a chorus of angels rather than a ball of burning rock when he looked at the sun. Yet Blake was an artist and poet. Darger likewise found an outlet for his visions in art and writing, and even McCandless comes across as a highly sensitive amateur version of Thoreau or Muir in his diaries.

By all indications, the first part of Treadwell’s life was at best mediocre and at worst a failure. He had been an average student and went to college on a diving scholarship, but dropped out and drifted into a life of drinking and drugs. He became an actor and was devastated when he lost out on the bartender part in Cheers to Woody Harrelson. A friend suggested he go to Alaska to see the bears, and his life instantly changed from one of obscurity and depression to one of bliss and a kind of kooky celebrity.

I think Herzog’s right to see Treadwell as perhaps primarily an actor and filmmaker. This is his response, his outlet, his art. The creation of this character who stars alongside bears and foxes, not so much interpreting their world as placing himself within it. There’s a poignancy to his constant urge to come close, to touch the bears, even if it means fondling a mound of bear shit. To again and again be able to scare an approaching bear off. This is an audition where failure equals death. And for the better part of 13 years, he passed.

It’s no wonder that Treadwell preferred the ecstasy of his insane embrace of nature to the dullness of our culture’s insane rejection of it. That he found it more and more difficult to endure the long months away from his “grizzly maze,” where the stakes were so high and his character had attained such reality. That just before his death he flew back quite late in the season after an unpleasant encounter with a flight attendant in the “real world,” where disputes are so petty and abhorrent.

There’s a temptation to see the whole film as fake, but that’s only because the reality it depicts is so incredibly strange. Treadwell is Blake or Darger or McCandless with a camera and without any relieving introspection, because self awareness is exactly what’s sacrificed to enter the mistake of his dream. But to see it as only a mistake allows us to ignore what his life, with its risks and ecstasies, had to say — and that, too, is an error.