About six months ago, I sat in The Penny Farthing, a bar in the East Village of Manhattan, and four of us at the table waxed philosophical about what we would do should we encounter a wild animal, being that the abundance of squirrels, rats, and pigeons in Manhattan – and raccoons in deep Queens – suggests grizzly bears or sharks would soon infiltrate our borders. That said, the popular myth recited was to punch a shark in the nose if it were to bite you, which seems like solid advice given the probability of it occurring and the lower probability of surviving the attack to say, “when the shark adjusted its jaw to get a better grip on me, I ignored the salt burning its way through my retinas, wound up, and punched it square in the snout.”
After concurring that a swarm of gophers would probably just need a frenzy of swift kicks, we discussed the method of repelling a bear, to which one member of my party informed the rest of us that he had read we need only speak to the bear in a stern voice. For example, should a bear cross your path, you look it straight in the eyes, ignore the stench of your own feces that evacuated your bowels while the bear’s snarling mouth drips saliva on its soft made-for-rug fur, and simply raise your voice, shouting “No, bear! Go away, bear! Bad, bad, bear!” Seems simple enough, yes?
And, perhaps this fourth member of our party was correct. After all, it worked for Tim Treadwell, at least, it worked for thirteen summers. Unfortunately, the first Fall after thirteen summers, when food is scarce, lead to his demise as he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed by a rogue bear in the Grizzly Maze of Alaska.
The stigma surrounding Grizzly Man, a documentary directed by Werner Herzog about the life of Timothy Treadwell, is that Treadwell was a crazy guy who lived in the woods with a pack of bears that he became familiar and even friendly with. This is partially true. He in fact lived in the woods for thirteen consecutive summers with the same pack of grizzly bears. He also became familiar with them, enough so that he could film them, move in rather close proximity to them, and even touch them at times. The one stigma I will argue with is that he was crazy. Overly brainwashed by his own ideology? Sure. Disconnected from reality? Definitely during his rants against the parks department. But crazy, not really.
If nothing else, Treadwell was a soul who found the idea of fame appealing in the abstract, so long as it never garnered negative connotations. An actor, Treadwell held a decent amount of small-time roles, but could never secure a lead to propel him to stardom. As his family suggests within the film, this is what fostered his disenchantment with society and his delve into alcohol and drug abuse. Like a number of other people, Treadwell was unable to live up to what he saw as his own potential, and like a number of people, he made a niche for himself to mask the pain of rejection.
Granted, a number of people who come to the terms of their own limitations will switch jobs or cities to rationalize their shortcomings. Treadwell did the same thing; however, his escape took the form of addiction, to which he also had to abandon, so he went to Alaska and grizzly country, a place that he felt held serene community, an element he felt he was unable to find in an ultra-competitive society.
Does this make him weak? Perhaps in our constructed view of society, but he still formed a bond of some sort and survived in an environment with wild animals for thirteen summers. Dian Fossey survived for the better part of eighteen years before she was murdered, so Treadwell – although not a zoologist – didn’t do too bad for himself.
So, crazy? No. Narcissistic and ignorant? Yep. However, it seems that he formulated an ideology around the bear community that obviated the fact that these bears are animals, and while it’s nice to believe that we can live in harmony in this world, “harmony” does not make the world go round. Reciprocity does. One being dies for the survival of another being. That being will in turn die to fertilize something or to feed another creature. As humans, we have done our best to take ourselves out of this equation, but somehow Treadwell elided this element by immersing himself in grizzly culture. What I mean to suggest is that – in his attempt to escape from a constructed society – he brought a prime element of that very society with him into a dangerous situation. And, while he survived for thirteen summers, he neglected to acknowledge “that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, [there was] no kinship, no understanding, no mercy […] only the overwhelming indifference of nature,” as Herzog notes in his narration. Therefore, his decision to return to Alaska in that Fall did not factor in the colder season and scarcer food sources.
This, it seems, is the underlying theme to Grizzly Man, that in our search for the ideal, we often lose sight of the rules, convincing ourselves that harmony is the lynchpin of existence. There are a number of clear, sadly illustrated moments where the chiaroscuro of Treadwell’s ideology is exposed, particularly when he shows us his relationship with the foxes. In a number of scenes, the foxes are familiar enough with Treadwell that they come up to his lap and he pets them, which illustrates the charming personality that he has over these animals. At the same time, he seems to forget that they are animals, hunting and scavenging for what they feel offers the best mode of survival, even if this mode takes the form of Treadwell’s favorite hat, to which he has a bit of a neurotic conniption, threatening the fox that “if that hat’s in the den, I’m gonna fucking explode.”
Here, Treadwell has immersed himself so deeply in a culture of animals that he will “die for,” that he has obviated their indifference to anything else but survival and replaced it with the constructed social laws of the society he has forsaken as if disappointed that the fox is unfamiliar with the notion that theft of property can lead to jail, or at least a moderate fine.
So, at the end of Grizzly Man, I reflected on my conversation from the Penny Farthing and a comment that foils the rhetoric of bear repelling: The book that you’ve read these tips in, do you think the bear has read it as well?
