Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man

Rating: ★★★★☆

Timothy Treadwell was a young, adventurous American who spent his summers recording wild grizzlies in Alaska—until he and his partner, Amie Huguenard, were killed by one of them in their tent.

Now, some 15 years later, in a time where many-some is looking for their 15 minutes of fame, To Be Eaten By a Bear is a tragic accomplishment. Tragic for Timothy, Amie and their loved ones, for sure! But tragic also, as after a single day on front covers of the the yellow press, the price paid is quickly forgotten. It needs a more sincere approach to leave something after a day’s worth of voyeuristic kerfuffle. Enter Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog, in his documentary Grizzly Man (MUBI, letterboxd), invites us to watch some of Treadwells footage and reflect on the meaning of his work. 15 years later, this alone is again a weird starting point. The original 100 hours of material seem mundane in a time where about 700.000 of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day. Was it not for his violent death, Treadwell could have been one of the many many people on YouTube trying to tell a story that no-one listens to. What saves his story is less that YouTube wasn’t a thing back then, but that he might not have been there, anyway, as he was working not for an audience, but for the bears. If there is still something fresh about Grizzly Man, I think it is this contrast, the way it makes Treadwell an outsider still today.

And all this makes Herzog the perfect director to address him. The Werner, who so often focuses on “ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature,” to quote Wikipedia’s pointed characterization. His approach is somewhat jovial, just as if a friend takes an hour to introduce you to their new weird YouTuber by scrolling through some videos, sharing their remarks on the side. It is a style perfect for the mavericks he so much loves, at it comes with little baggage and doesn’t risk to shoehorn them in whatever cultural framework happens to be en vogue at the time the documentary is created.

More important, this approach allows Herzog to dwell in the dark depths of his own existentialist German soul. For this, Treadwell is the perfect subject, his frustration with civilization, his playfulness, hubris, madness. When he is looking for the meaning in Treadwell’s work, 100 hours of video tapes that did not earn him any fame or money and had him killed in the end, Herzog does not take the idea of meaning lightly. “It seems to be that this landscape in turmoil is a metaphor for his soul.”

Treadwell’s message, so far as he recorded it himself, is rather simple. He loved his bears, the foxes in his valley, and all the other creatures. He loved spending time with them. And he would not know what else to do, even if it would get him killed. He was a romantic—unlike Herzog.

I differ with Treadwell. He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

Herzogians like this will not surprise anyone who is somewhat familiar with his work. Heck, even the short snippets that rank high on YouTube about him promise so much. And so his conclusion was somewhat clear from the start, not of Treadwell’s endeavor, but Herzog’s decision to sanctify it.

Treadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance into a fog. What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear. That it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature. And that, for me, beyond his mission, gives meaning to his life and to his death.

As a conclusion or insight this is ludicrous, as it’s less an outcome of Herzog’s analysis but what he was looking for to even start. It’s not a statement about Treadwell but about Herzog himself, his own approaches, his own search. Herzog tries to remind ourselves once more, that there is still mystery in us, wilderness. Peeling away what he sees to be a ridiculously thin layer of civilization, he wants to show us once more that we are still animals. The deaths of Treadwell and Huguenard are for him just one of many ruptures that might lay this insight bare. For Herzog, not the bear is the beast, but the ignorance that allows us to forget about it. It is this that makes Treadwell a hero for him: Despite being the romantic he was, he never forgot the bear might kill him.

While Herzog tells us to not forget The Wild quite explicitly, he probably doesn’t trust his words alone to pierce through our armor of cowardly intellectualism. And thus it is once more not these ‘conclusions’ his movies are about, but the path he showed us to get there. The weirdly staged interviews. The gravity in the look of the everyday people who search for some deep truth to share with the cameras of This Renowned Director. The ways he tries to escape the role of an archivist by intervening in the story he is trying to grasp, as in the moment where he asks a friend of Treadwell to destroy the tape that recorded the moment of his death.

Treadwell might have looked for the beasts in nature. Herzog is looking for those underneath our skin. The bones of Treadwell’s killer as well as the watch snatched from the corpse’s arm are just spears and slings he tries to wield to free those animals inside us. Am I exagerating for poetic reasons? Why then, you think, would he ask his actors to tow a ship over a hill? Especially if one of the is Klaus Kinski?