There is a moment late into Grizzly Man, a documentary about the tragic tale of an environmentalist filmmaker, where director Werner Herzog is shown listening to an audio tape of the filmmaker's death as he was mauled and eaten by a wild grizzly bear. The audience cannot hear the tape, nor can the woman who owns the tape, a close personal friend of the filmmaker's. She has never listened to it before. Herzog, strapped with bulky headphones, is still at first. Deadly still. Then he begins to shake a little. Though we hear nothing and do not see Herzog's face, the moment is heart-wrenching. Then, in a wavering voice, Herzog says, "Turn it off." Then, looking to the woman: "You must never listen to this. Burn it. It will be a white elephant in your room for the rest of your life." One can only imagine what the tape must've sounded like, and that instance is but one of the many astonishing and moving moments of Herzog's beautiful, profound film.
Grizzly Man follows the life of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who was driven to alcoholism after losing out a part on Cheers to Woody Harrelson. He tried everything he could to stop drinking: Every class, every book, every twelve-step program you can think of. In the end, the only thing that got him to quit drinking was a bear. When he went out into the wilderness and saw how others were mistreating the animals--bears, foxes, birds, anything--he was moved to the point of tears. Treadwell vowed that he would never again drink in order to righfully protect the animals. So, for thirteen summers, he stayed in an Alaskan wilderness park with the animals and finally found something that made him happy. Some, however, felt that Treadwell was the one showing disrespect toward the animals. One Alaskan native, a curator at a museum, says that Alaskans have had an unspoken agreement with the bears for over 7,000 years that they would never overstep their boundaries. The pilot of the helicopter that came to take the remains of Treadwell and girlfriend Amie Huguenard states simply that Treadwell got what he deserved, and that the real tragedy of the matter is that he thought to bring the girl along with him.
And therein lies the fascination of Grizzly Man. Not everyone that Herzog interviews particularly liked Treadwell or respected his work. Even Treadwell's parents seem somewhat dismayed at the fact that their son would do something so dangerous for so long only to have it come back and bite him...literally. The film is not simply about Treadwell's quest in the wild or the amazing footage that he shot for the last five summers of his life. It is about Treadwell himself, who emerges as a fascinatingly enigmatic character, using a larger-than-life personality hiding his true self. He fashions himself as the bears' mythical savior in his footage. According to one of his actor friends, Treadwell led him to believe that he was from Australia, and that Treadwell even concocted a bogus Australian accent to sell the story. The man never knew until after Treadwell's death that Treadwell was not Australian. Did anyone really know who Timothy Treadwell was?
The answer is most likely not. Many pieces of his footage suggest that even Treadwell did not know who he truly was. He has many rambling monologues addressed to the camera, his sole companion in the wild. He screams profanities at the government, spouts fear toward poachers and how often they endanger the bears (Treadwell only came into potentially dangerous contact with poachers once during his thirteen years of expeditioning), questions his life, and yells at God to make the rain stop. It would be easy to label Treadwell as a "bleeding-heart liberal" or a "treehugger" or a "hippie radical." It certainly is true that he often overlooked the logical aspects of the government in favor of his emotional responses to the animals and what he perceived to be their situation. He was a confused man, and whether or not what he was doing was right is not the primary function of the film. It is to show that, above all else, Treadwell loved the animals and found in the bears' eyes kindred spirits, where Herzog only sees "the half-bored interest in food."
No one can really say if Timothy Treadwell understood the animals, but he definitely had an understanding with them. He humanized and sentimentalized the bears not because he viewed them as pets, but because he wanted them to be people. He was closer to the bears than he ever was to another person. He oftentimes shunned civilization, and refused to accept payment for any of the teachings he did in classrooms around the country. He himself wanted to be a bear, and treasured everything that the animals did. According to friends, Treadwell would often imitate a bear around others. Above all else, though, he had a heart brimming with love for these animals. And it is that love, no matter the politics or the morals of the situation, that makes the film so tragic. He may not have been altogether there, especially near the end of his life when he became increasingly terse with other humans, but he was loving, kind, gentle, and caring around animals. In fact, quite possibly the only reason he was attacked by one of the grizzlies was because he had a spat with an airline attendant on the way home and decided that re-entering civilzation was not for him, and took his girlfriend with him back to the wild later than he had ever been. Most of the bears he knew were already in hibernation, and the unfamiliar bears were meaner and more dangerous. In embracing what he loved, he was destroyed by it.
But he did love, and he captured many miraculous moments of the animals on film, which Herzog rightfully describes as the "magic of cinema." Grizzly Man overflows with the spectacular beauty that only a man so devoted to and with so much love for his subjects could have caught. As Treadwell says on one of his video tapes, "If a bear attacks me, I will not hurt it to save my life, and I wouldn't want it to be killed."
According to the airplane pilot that regularly dropped by to check in on Treadwell and Huguenard, the saddest thing about the situation is that though Treadwell never wanted any harm to come to his animals, when the authorities dropped by at the scene of the attack, they shot the bear full of bullets, striking him in the head, the chest, the legs, the paws.
