Just out on DVD and available at both Premier and Princeton video, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is one of those films in which the world becomes a museum or, if you like, a zoo, except that the specimen on display is not a grizzly bear (Ursus horribilis) but a blond, apparently bi-polar male human being in his forties named Timothy Treadwell who had spent 13 summers living unarmed among the bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park until one of the animals he had been filming attacked and devoured him and his girl friend.
People watching this unique and provocative documentary — a film of sunlit green pastoral brilliance with a deadly dark center — are going to have a lot to say about it, and probably quite a lot more than they would about the latest version of King Kong or any number of Alien sequels or slasher gore fests that spend millions of dollars in an effort to make your flesh creep.
If you had a preconceived notion of the human type most likely to summer among the grizzlies, you might reasonably expect a serious environmental activist and not a washed-up actor who became an alcoholic after losing out to Woody Harrelson in an audition for the part of the new bartender in Cheers. Most viewers are going to roll their eyes when the film's self-styled hero sets up his camera and poses in front of it like a demented performance artist ("I would die for these animals!" "Ooo, what a big bear! That's a big bear!"). Some will say (as did one of the men who helped clean up the gruesome remains) that he "crossed a line" and "asked for it" and got exactly what he deserved. The anti-environmentalist crowd and others on the far right will gloat, claiming Treadwell as proof that all those protect-the-land-and-animal types are obnoxious wackos. Even people who agree with the man's cause may find him a bit hard to take. He ultimately comes off as a profoundly American character, the sort of noisy, slangy, obsessive, super-gregarious Yank who turns up in odd corners of the world: he's at once foolish, peevish, boorish, childish, boastful, bumptious, absurdly full of himself, and sometimes almost touchingly immature: a full-grown preadolescent who never quite broke the bond between himself and the childhood Teddy bear he actually took to Alaska with him and that is perched on his mother's lap during Herzog's meeting with his parents: a sequence that could have been staged by Christopher Guest with some help from the makers of Saturday Night Live.
Like it or not, however, there's some Timothy Treadwell in all of us. Do you talk to your pets in a funny, high, squeaky voice? Do you tell them you love them and give them pet names? When you're alone in the middle of nowhere, do you find yourself performing to keep yourself company or do you prefer some other version of whistling in the dark? It goes without saying that Treadwell never grew up. In that sense, he fits right into one of Leslie Fiedler's favorite American types. If the author of Love and Death in the American Novel were around, he'd have no problem finding a place in his literary mythology for this self-proclaimed "kind warrior," yet another benighted descendant of the boy-men of American literature, Huck Finn crossed with Tom Sawyer and set loose in the wilderness. He's as ornery as Huck, as sly as Tom, and as disarmingly sentimental as Jack Kerouac.
Just in case you're tempted to write Treadwell off as a crooning, babytalking sentimentalist, prepare yourself for the true scene stealers in Grizzly Man. Can anyone not love the foxes in this film? They are as irresistible as Puss in Boots in Shrek 2. When Timmy gently strokes one of these beautiful animals while making a heartfelt case for its protection, the self-promoter has given way at least for a moment to the loving child.
The question is not so much how did a character like Timothy Treadwell end up being eaten by a bear in Alaska: it's how did he end up in a film by Werner Herzog, the man who gave us Klaus Kinski as Dracula and then cast the demonic Kinski as an impresario building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle in Fitzcarraldo?
Regardless of how fascinating Herzog may have found the 100 hours of film Treadwell managed to shoot, he would never have taken the time to fashion it into his own movie except for the grisly denouement. No pun is intended here. Look up "grizzly" and you'll find that the word is actually derived from "grisly," which is defined as "inspiring horror or intense fear" and "disgust or distaste" and dates back before the 12th century. The horror at the heart of Grizzly Man is painful to contemplate. During an NPR interview a few months ago Herzog was explaining how Treadwell's camera had been set up and turned on, thus recording the screams and moans of Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, as they were dismembered, decapitated, and devoured. He didn't put it that starkly but his German-accented voice and grim world view said as much. Only a lens cap confined the hideousness to what can be heard on the tape. You couldn't have shown it, anyway. Even in this age of infinite tastelessness with its appetite for so-called "reality" shows, an atrocity that graphic could not be tolerated. You can be sure, though, that there are plenty of ghoulish entrepreneurs out there who would pay a small fortune to obtain the audio.
For all the film's extraordinary moments — the bear fight, the beauty of the foxes, the comedy of Treadwell pursuing the fox that made off with his hat — the most stunning single image may be the view of the back of Herzog's head as he listens to the recording of the massacre while Jewel Palovak, Treadwell's former girlfriend and helper, looks on, registering Herzog's reaction in her eyes. What he hears produces a convulsion: it's as if an invisible hand clutched him by the throat. It may be a piece of cunning filmcraft but it tells you everything you need to know about what happened that October afternoon in 2003. Herzog tells Jewel, an employee of Treadwell's bear habitat organization called Grizzly People, that she should never listen to the tape: that it should be destroyed, as if it were Pandora's Box, or forbidden fruit.
Herzog's Vision
Werner Herzog was one of three extraordinary German directors who gave movies in the 1970s a badly needed dose of cinematic energy. Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were the other two. I wonder what they would have made of this material? I doubt very much that either one would have begun with Treadwell delivering the first of a series of Famous Last Words wherein he inadvertently specifies the terms of his own destruction ("I may be hurt, I may be killed. They will decapitate me, chop me into bits and pieces, I'm dead"). It's hard to take him seriously because the bear in the green background looks to be placidly grazing in a pastoral dream. Moreover, Treadwell himself doesn't even seem to take the words seriously. His manner is flip, whimsically fatalistic. Herzog can't resist those juicy portents. Wenders might have sought to emphasize the quirky humanity in Treadwell, perhaps turned him into a displaced American cowboy. Fassbinder's version surely would have given prominence to Treadwell's nervous, rawly revealing soliloquy about his sexuality, how good he is with women, and how much easier life would be if he were gay.
When I think of Herzog, I think of the American scenes in his 1977 picture, Stroszek, which begins in Berlin but mostly takes place in rural Wisconsin. I haven't seen the film lately but if I remember correctly it was built around Bruno S., another real-life character as wacky and hapless in his way as Treadwell. Herzog must have been amused by some wholly naive major American reviews of this bizarre fable ("Explosively funny!" "A sheer delight!") with its surreal ending which had the effect of a camera left running (this time with the lens cap off) while the movie merrily rolled along like some absurd machine set in motion by a demonic practical joker: a dancing chicken, a rooster that plays the piano, a rabbit in a fire engine, and a chair-lift that goes up and up to nowhere like an infernal parody of heavenly ascension.
It's not all that great a jump from the end of Stroszek to Herzog's visit to Treadwell's parents, who are sitting stiffly together with a pair of plastic animals in the foreground and, of course, Timmy's Teddy bear perched on his mother's lap. There is an element of the grotesque in the scene that trumps even this wily European's old world imagination.
A Valuable DVD Extra
The DVD version of Grizzly Man gives you what you really need to round out the experience. It also gives you a chance to catch McCarter-favorite Richard Thompson in the act of composing the score. Watching "In the Edges" you meet Herzog face to face as he directs the musicians during an intense two days recording the music. The title comes from Thompson's phrase for the particular musical effect he wanted: something raw and edgy that would express both the beauty of the landscape and the animals and the shadow of menace and mayhem. As for Herzog, who looks strangely like the aged rocker Pete Townsend, he clearly knows what he wants and at one point early in the session when Thompson is working out the main theme, Herzog tells him, "Too melodious." He wants that edge.
Another reason to be grateful for this special DVD feature is that it makes even clearer the contrast between the worldly, methodical German filmmaker and the flighty, manic American innocent. This contrast is a constant in the film itself because Herzog is narrating it in a chastened, sober, wise, and sympathetic voice: the voice of a Holocaust-haunted German born during World War II who has stared into Treadwell's killer's eyes and will never forget what he heard on that tape.