If there’s one headline we love more than any other it is some variation of “Human Fucks Around With Nature—Finds Out.” About 21 years ago, Werner Herzog released the groundbreaking documentary Grizzly Man. It is the story of Timothy Treadwell, a man who, despite all evidence to the contrary, felt he was exempt from the laws of nature and was brutally disabused of that notion. By now you know the broad strokes of the story: Treadwell spent his summers in Katmai National Park (home of Fat Bear Week) believing he was friends with the bears, and then a bear ate him.
It reads less as tragedy and more like “Well, no shit.” Still, many viewers find the documentary incredibly hard to cope with. People alternately believe Herzog had too much or not enough empathy for Treadwell. One person called it “hilarious.” Some viewers leave the experience finding more sympathy for Treadwell than they thought possible; others, more angry than they thought possible. Grizzly Man manages to present several sides of Treadwell and the people he affected in a way that allows you to draw your own conclusions, or perhaps, project your own emotions onto.
If you’re the kind of person who likes New York Post headlines and dunking on “tree-huggers” you might think this was just your kind of film. I don’t know that you would be wrong, exactly, but Herzog takes the viewer on a much more complicated journey. He wades through the differing realities of who Treadwell was, what happened to him, and how the rock of hubris he flung into still waters rippled into suffering for everyone involved, including, perhaps most tragically, his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. Amie wanted to leave well before the season turned dangerous, but instead found herself literally fighting a bear while trying (and ultimately failing) to save Treadwell’s life before the bear killed her as well.
Herzog uses the hours of film Treadwell recorded during his last summer at Katmai National Park, interviews with experts, grieving loved ones, and those who were pulled into the disaster by proximity to tell the story of a man who many believed wanted to actually be a bear. We learn about his love for wildlife, the trail of women he left behind, his insistence he is a good boyfriend and good in bed. We see film he never intended anyone to see, and it shows us who Treadwell really is.
Treadwell is clearly, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
He is not a wildlife expert, nor does he listen to any. He is not a conservationist, in fact, he railed against the National Parks Service and regularly treated Katmai as though it belonged to him, personally. He did not “protect” the bears, as they were under no real threat. He behaved in a way that accustomed wildlife to human contact, putting them in direct danger, and when the bear who killed him was found, the bear was promptly euthanized.
So why is the documentary full of people who loved him? Herzog doesn’t ask this question. He doesn’t attempt to answer it for the viewer, either. Grizzly Man is not a documentary aimed at spoonfeeding the audience with answers. It is more an observation begging you to come to your own conclusions. And what I saw in the documentary painted a clear picture of a man who is a whole lot of fun at parties—until about one or two in the morning. Everyone loves him, and everyone forgives him for being full of shit because it isn’t really a lie if no one believes it.
And everyone, on some level, knows that eventually, something bad is going to happen.
In Treadwell’s case, like so many others, the bad thing didn’t just affect him. Grizzly Man is a cavalcade of grief and trauma. What struck me, over and over, was watching people deal with real, genuine trauma that they would have never experienced if not for Treadwell’s insistence on his latest persona. He tried many on for size, but landed on the soft spoken, non-threatening lover of animals. He reads as childlike and almost naïve. But Herzog shows us the outtakes of his film where he throws hissy fits, derides the NPS as his personal enemy, where he pretends he is alone with no company except the bears but we know that Amie is there with him. Herzog also lets us in on a strange secret: There is almost zero footage of Amie in all the film that Treadwell took.
At first pass, this might make sense. Treadwell wasn’t filming a personal diary or vacation reel. He intended to show this video to the world to “raise awareness” for the bears. But there is a certain shitty je ne sais quoi in realizing that the woman his hubris killed, who died trying to help him, features in about five seconds of hours of footage (by accident).
Even the coroner, left with a horror movie’s helping of gore and the job of explaining what happened, at first appears quirky and eccentric, a sort of dark Bill Nye playing to the camera as he explains his findings and theory. But then, Herzog leaves the camera on. We see the coroner in a moment where he doesn’t think he has to be “on” and the weight of the tragedy falls on him visibly. Sure, he’s the coroner. He has seen some shit. He will see more. But I hesitate to describe what he saw in the Treadwell case because it’s really that bad. Even for Dirge. The coroner, like Herzog, listened to the audio of Treadwell and Amie Huguenard’s death. We hear only the faintest bits of it, and see Herzog tell one of Treadwell’s exes (inheritor of his archives and life rights) to never listen to it, and then advises her to destroy it so there would be no temptation.
It’s really, really fucking bad.
And everyone who encountered even the smallest portion of Treadwell and Amie’s death was confronted with exactly how bad it was. None of them needed to be. The bear that killed them did not need to be euthanized. The people trying to cope with how their fun-if-full-of-shit buddy could have met such a violent end don’t need to be dealing with that clusterfuck of a puzzle.
Herzog seems to understand this. He views Treadwell as a filmmaker and an actor; a complicated man who clearly struggled. But he does not excuse the hubris or hide the suffering caused by Treadwell’s actions. And in the end, that’s why it is such a hard watch. It shows you … you. Because whatever you feel when you turn that documentary off is 100% yours.
