I just got out of Grizzly Man with olly_x, and I think we both agreed that it was sort of fascinating just how unflattering Herzog allows himself to get with regards to representing his subject and still manage to do them some sort of odd justice, in this case the tragic and yet sort of pathetic death of a man (and a poor anonymous girl he lugged along with him, undoubtedly to run the video cameras) who thought he had figured out the key to living with grizzly bears, not even ethnographically but societally, and wound up saying in their habitat too late in the season, not realizing (or even recognizing, befitting his status as an autodidact) the desperation of the aged bear circling his campsite.
Probably the most potent example of Herzog’s blessed, brutal honesty is when he presents a series of takes of self-made X-Treme environmentalist Timmy Treadwell wrapping up one of his summer expeditions to Kodiak Alaska with what is supposed to be an act of closure, a pert little epilogue for his travel videos that he can then trot around the contiguous states and the elementary school lyceums he orates pro bono. (And did Herzog just choose not to include any of the footage that wouldn’t scare little kids shitless? the stuff that doesn’t involve Treadwell either grimacing to his own camera “I’m going to DIE out here! These bears reSPECT me or else they deCAPitate me!” or cooing as he waxes infantile over the bear dung, mooshing it with his hand?) But each take of the sunset-lit homily is perpetually sidelined by Treadwell’s uncontrollable, explosively profane tirades against not just the poachers and game hunters that defile his oasis of “perfect harmony in nature,” but even the park rangers and the Government and even his own friends and allies who he mocks with simpering imitations of their reservations over his commitment. “Ooh, I think you might be going a little bit overboard here, Timmy. Fuck you!” This is, if I recall, the only point in the film where Herzog the narrator interrupts and silences Treadwell’s gab, seemingly somewhat ambivalent about his uncut display of paranoia and rage (and, as he suggests, because the rant is peppered with the names of real people who don’t deserve to be immortalized through being scandalized) but also so he can slip in a coy joke about how he’s “seen madness like this before on a movie set,” a sly reference to Klaus Kinski that also improbably turned the seemingly wide-open persona of Treadwell, at least the Treadwell who told his parents that he came in second for the part of Woody on Cheers, into something more elusive than the self-rightous dip he seems to be for the first half of the film, a man whose quest to live among the bears seems to be driven not, as he says, to protect the bears but to validate his own sense of self-worth. His monologue about wishing he were gay because women must loathe his passiveness — “gays got it made; they just go to rest stops, bathrooms and, boom, perform sex and that’s it” — is particularly amusing. And it’s interesting to compare the flamboyance and ridiculousness of his solution with the mundaneness and complete human normalcy of what, for instance, his parents feel was his chief problem: alcoholism.
This moment which instantly cast Treadwell in a new light also triggered one of the most reckless realizations I made about myself (and, if you’ll permit me, human nature in general — especially in the context of a film that studies the consequences of transgressing beyond the generalizations one can make even regarding one’s own tribe) through my relationship (as a viewer) to Treadwell, not as a Herzog subject but merely as a purportedly veracious human presence: namely how in the film’s first hour or so, when Herzog presents Treadwell as mankind’s righteous, tragic jester, I regarded him as a dip and was embarrassed for him and his extremely squirm-worthy jouissance. His pleasure was, to me, profane and illicit and intolerable. But once he became a tortured, unhappy victim, I suddenly found it possible to empathize and take vicarious pleasure in his plight. How damning is that? How succinct a justification for Treadwell’s paranoiac withdrawal from the human race? I don’t imagine Herzog orchestrated this revelation, and it would probably make more sense if it applied to a narrative film instead of a character study, but it’s still perfect.
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