"Grizzly Man"
I saw "Grizzly Man" over the weekend. I can't remember seeing a documentary from edited footage where it was more obvious while watching how many differently-themed films could have been assembled from the same source material. We open on Treadwell explaining what a bear could--would--do to him (he believed) if he did not preserve his place in a dominance hierarchy. Apparently we are not to take this seriously as something he believed, for as the film progresses Treadwell is portrayed more and more as a naif, saddened in a childlike way by the death--of a bear cub, of a baby fox--that is inevitable in nature. Herzog cements this portrayal by pronouncing himself the anti-Treadwell, sounding very much like Topol as he intones "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder." Herzog's choice to comment on his subject matter directly reminds us that "Grizzly Man" is, like every film and every documentary, a work of authorship.
Many of the reviews observe, and the film sometimes suggests, that there was something wrong with Treadwell, mentally. Based on what we see in the film, I would place him in the rather broad and mostly non-pathological category of "goofball." He was an odd bird, to be sure, with some curious views and a way of carrying himself that would have fit well at Neverland Ranch, but I'm not convinced that any of this is important to what happened to him.
Every indication is that Treadwell had been a lost and addicted person before he got into the whole bear thing. Deluded or not, goofball or not, Treadwell seemed by all accounts--most prominently his own--to have been saved by "his" bears long before one unfamiliar old bear decided he and Huguenard were worth the effort. It sounds as though he might well have died an anonymous tragic death in L.A. years before from drugs or alcohol if he had not gone north. So I resist the narrative demand to see his end as tragedy. He seems to have died doing what he loved most. Indeed, he seems to have lived the last 13 years of his life doing what he loved most. He died a frightening death after too short a life, but how many of us won't?
Amie Huguenard gets obligatory reviewers' ink as the "real victim," etc., who "might not even have wanted to be there," etc. Apparently, she lacked free will and a mind of her own. No one really explains how this came about, the poor dear. It must have been after she got the degree in molecular biology and after she got the degree from the University of Alabama Medical School. At some point after that she lost the power to think for herself and thus couldn't evaluate the risks and rewards of hanging out near a bunch of large bears. Mysteriously deprived of her faculties, she was easy prey for Treadwell, a college dropout.
Bears and goofball boyfriend aside, Huguenard does seem to have been the victim of powerful narrative impulses. Almost nothing said or written about her respects the choices she made. Interesting, but not surprising.
posted at 11:42 AM
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