Damn you, Woody Harrelson. Had the Big Wood not beaten out Timothy Treadwell for a role on Cheers, Treadwell may not have rejected mankind and developed an unnatural feeling of kinship with the "soulless, godless, rampaging killing machines" known as grizzly bears, thus not attempting to live among them in the Alaskan wilderness and therefore not getting himself and his poor girlfriend eaten by one. Oh, Woody, why do you have to be so friggin' charismatic?
'Course, were it not for Harrelson getting cast over Treadwell, perhaps we would not have Grizzly Man. Like my favorite cinema-blogging Manhattanite Jordan Hoffman, despite my well-documented Werner Herzog fandom I never got around to watching this, the most famous of the director's documentaries, until last night. It is a story worthy of Herzog, whose greatest feature films -- Fitzcarraldo; Aguirre, the Wrath of God -- are about men driven mad by their obsessions and who himself is famous for pushing the boundaries of sanity for the sake of something he believes in.
And make no mistake, Treadwell was fucking insane. His problems went beyond his tenuous brotherhood with wild, carnivorous beasts: For starters, he had a raging messiah complex. If David Koresh looked (and sounded) like the blond guy from Queer Eye and professed to be Savior of the Bears rather than Liberator of the Jews, he would be Timothy Treadwell. In the movies he made documenting his time in the forest (which make up the bulk of the footage here) he talks constantly of protecting his furry flesh-ripping friends, although it's never clear what exactly he is protecting them from -- some vague threat of encroaching humanity, manifested only once in the film in the form of supposed poachers throwing rocks at an approaching grizzly. His human relationships were strangely cult-like as well: Amie Huguenard, who was mauled along with Treadwell, didn't even like bears, but for some reason agreed to accompany him into the woods, record his rants and never appear on camera. Now that must have been some A-level sweet-talking.
He also had, if not necessarily a death wish, a deep desire for martyrdom. You really start to believe he ultimately hoped to wind up inside a bear, one way or another (there is at least one tangent from Treadwell where he comes awfully close to implying he'd rather have sex with animals than women). In the famous scene where Herzog listens to the audio of Treadwell and Huguenard's killing, Herzog mentions Treadwell's "moaning," and by that point it's hard to be certain if it was in pain or ecstasy. Those who knew him hypothesize that he thought death-by-bear would somehow legitimize his cause, but at the end of the film, all he accomplished by being devoured was getting one of his beloved creatures shot.
Herzog handles the tragedy of all this delicately and without judgment. In Treadwell, he certainly saw a kindred spirit, a guy willing to live extremely in the pursuit of a vision -- however misguided that vision was -- but he's careful not to romanticize Treadwell's decisions too much. After all, experts agree Treadwell's close contact with the grizzlies likely did more harm than good, and an innocent person is dead because of him. At least when Herzog almost gets his actors killed, the end result is often a great piece of art. The only good thing Treadwell's madness produced is this film.
So, on second thought, thank you, Woody.
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