"Grizzly Man" Reconsidered
This great documentary is one I watch frequently, and it never stops finding new meanings
You don’t usually get an artist’s explicit statement of beliefs within their artwork. In fact, that’s exceedingly rare.
However, about 70% of the way through Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, Herzog drops this bomb on us, through his classic voiceover narration:
“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but [is instead] chaos, hostility, and murder.”
Oh boy, don’t start your morning off with that mantra.
Nevertheless, I give it to Herzog: he always seems to be honest.
That quote comes in a fascinating moment in which Herzog’s subject, the grizzly-bear activist Timothy Treadwell, is lamenting the recently-dead carcass of a baby fox. “I love you and I love you,” Treadwell repeats, “and I just don’t understand [your death].”
So here’s our first observation about Grizzly Man: it features the tussle between Treadwell’s hope in peace and harmony in nature, against Herzog’s commentary on Treadwell’s views.
This is Philosophy 101 stuff, and it’s great fonder for thoughtful artwork. Where I’m from, we might say it’s Worldview 101.
Herzog’s documentary features Treadwell’s exploits in the Alaskan bush, circa 1993-2003, when Treadwell for ten straight summers lived in grizzly-bear country among the bears. As Treadwell himself testified, he’s probably the only person ever to live weaponless among the bears for so long. He was also filming himself for nobody knows what reason—a hundred hours of nature footage in which he self-stylized as a lone “warrior” fighting human encroachment in bear territory, his own bizarre kind of single-man environmental activism.
Nearly none of that footage was ever seen until Herzog reassembled and edited it for Grizzly Man. The documentary ends up being Herzog’s vision of Treadwell’s vision.
And of course — most people would say “of course” to the following — Treadwell ultimately died in 2003, having been eaten by a bear. (That’s not a spoiler; we’re told that early in the film.)
Here’s another doozy from Herzog, as he interacts with Treadwell’s view on life.
“And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”
As that’s said, we see an extreme close-shot of a bear’s face, filmed by Treadwell, and it’s likely the bear that ate Treadwell.
Herzog Contra Environmentalism
On this viewing of the film, probably my eighth, I finally noticed how blistering Grizzly Man could be seen as being regarding environmental activisim of any kind.
Why I hadn’t noticed how explicit that is before, I don’t know. The film is about a thousand things at once. In one of my brief letterboxd writeups on the film, I tried to list the topics I found profoundly discussed within:
isolation from modern civilization
loneliness and the attempt to find strange new friends
environmentalism and stewardship
filmmaking and why filmmakers do it
reality TV, Youtube, and filming yourself (becoming "a star of your own invention")
the rising popularity of "primal" living
the question of the relationships between animals and humans
Alaska as a novel space (civilization vs. wilderness)
the romantic Sublime and its attractions and repulsions
what is insanity vs. eccentricity vs. genius
Nature as a therapeutic
the human drive to domestic wild animals
male stylizations in art vs. their portrayal of females
the line in art between showing, telling, and not showing or telling at all
Right now, I’m focusing on that third bullet point — environmentalism and stewardship. And I am suspicious that Herzog is deeply suspicious of almost any sort of environmentalism.
Not that I am saying he’s against the Green movement or anything. Probably just the opposite.
I just mean that, philosophically, his line of attack is downright predatory itself.
Dare I say: as the filmmaker and commentator, he’s the bear who is swallowing up Treadwell. I don’t want to take that metaphor too far — his movie honors Treadwell as an excellent amateur filmmaker and somewhat of an inspired genius of his own.
But his counter to Treadwell and any of his beliefs is brutal.
One thing, though, that his film waves away is stupid political rancor that denounces environmentalism as a left-wing agenda. It may or may not be that, but Herzog has no truck with Rush-Limbaugh talking points. He’s got something much more devastating to say about Treadwell’s nature-loving.
Treadwell seemed to believe, we are shown in the film repeatedly, that Nature is pristine and only stained by humans. He calls the bears “perfect.” He names them and repeatedly tells them that he loves them. In shots I can’t believe, he tries to pet them.
In Alaska, he seemed to live out a Disneyfied existence, with Animals on the good side and Hunters and the Park Service on the villain side. Pretty easy dynamic to comprehend if you’re a simpleton, and Treadwell does seem to be making a kids’ show involving animals, ala Steve Irwin. Often, he looks like Snow White or Mowgli, moving among the animals with ease, a friend of them all.
Except it was real, not animated and no CGI involved. Which makes it incredible.
He played, then, a savior figure for the bears—in his own mind at least. He was the “kind warrior” who was on an “expedition,” a word he frequently used to describe his stays in bear country, the chief goal of which was to keep the bears safe. As the film shows, a whole lot of Alaskans, including the Inuit, thought he was kooky.
But Herzog gives Treadwell credit, and that’s something invaluable to do if you’re going to end up negatively criticizing somebody. First show how remarkable they are at what they did.
Treadwell had a knack for filmmaking, as weird as it was. And Herzog locates a myserious genius within Treadwell. After all, who could survive for five minutes near the bears, let alone ten years?
In my own thinking, I see Treadwell as a kind of lion-tamer or horse-breaker. He’s just doing that for an animal that nobody sees as credible for interaction with. His bear-contact is easily dismissed by most viewers, but why? If he were breaking wild horses or swimming with dolphins, he might’ve been seen as a remarkable guy.
Granted, Treadwell wasn’t domesticating bears, unlike humans eons ago who domesticated wolves and wild cows and wild horses. (We are still working on cats!)
Yet he does domesticate foxes. And that alone is rather unbelievable to most viewers I’ve shown the movie to.
But what’s Herzog’s devasting critique of Treadwell?
It’s that any optimistic environmentalism fails because “the common denominator of the universe … is chaos, hostility, and murder.”
So for Herzog, there’s no natural utopia, then, now, or later. Meanwhile, Treadwell’s entire mission in life is to bring about that utopia.
If you go out there, to Alaska at least, the natural state of affairs is things eating things. And also things will die, usually terribly.
And that’s the best you can say about Nature — so let’s not mention the male bears killing cubs to stop female bears from lactating in order to have more sex with them. (Herzog uses that zinger while we watch Treadwell coddle a detached bearcub paw.)
Why bother saving the bears then?
Herzog never asks that question directly, yet it sits in every frame of the movie. You could extend that question to any environmentalist cause. “Why bother because Nature is at best indifferent to you and also will usually try to kill you whenever it can?”
The answer to that dark quesiton has to be in, as my most moralistic grad-school profs would admit, a “constructed morality.” I am trying to speak from Herzog’s POV, though I don’t necessarily agree with it. (I do find it much more realistic than Treadwell’s.)
To assert that we must save the bears—Treadwell’s view—would be an ethic that humans invent for some purpose, but not some natural law that would have to be obeyed or else.
Regarding that ethic, frankly, the bears don’t care. They didn’t care about Treadwell. A bear that Treadwell was trying to save literally ate his mind.
If we were to hold an environmentalist ethic of any kind, that ethic would be constructed on top of a baseline philosophy which is its opposite — Herzog’s “common denominator of the universe” which again is “chaos, hostility, and murder.”
And so that ethical construction would be a kind of noble lie. That’s Herzog’s environmentalist twist on Plato’s dark political insight. He’s just telling you his truth. Now you are free to believe any environmentalist lie, I mean ethic, that you wish. You just have to remember the Herzogian mantra: “chaos, hostility, murder, oh my!”
I think Herzog suggests that Treadwell harbored a necessary delusion. He needed to believe in nature’s goodness partly because it helped save his life. His Alaska missions negated his alcohol abuse and gave him true purpose for himself. He became an ardent believer in something. He found his calling, which he alone invented. He is one of the most religiously devoted people to a cause ever to be put on film. To wit, he was poor, he suffered, and died doing “what he loved” and believed in.
Was that all just a delusion to help prop himself up, a way of surviving?
I ask that based on Herzog’s presentation of his own views. The thing about that presentation is that it is a blanket view that asks whether any environmentally-motivated moral crusade has any standing, given the “common denominator” of the universe.
For Herzog, who stares at a bear’s face and sees a cold, hungry predator, the “overwhelming indifference of the universe” stares at all environmentalists. You might rescue nature, in whatever way or whatever locality you like, yet it’s just waiting to eat you anyway.
And no matter what, you will end up a rotting carcass, like Treadwell’s fox and everything else everywhere.
I don’t see any hard, actionable conclusions from this view, though. It’s not as if the logical conclusion to it is necessarily to pollute or to do nothing about environmental problems.
It’s just Herzog’s observation of the general state of things, something Treadwell could not or would not comprehend.
Herzog’s view is, of course, necessarily religious. It’s unprovable, filled with assumptions taken on faith, and a meaning derived from and placed onto his subject, which is the entire universe.
Grizzly Man asks you to ponder these views, Treadwell’s and Herzog’s, so that you can consider your own. Since I’ve found that most people have unexamined views on that entire bulleted list in the middle of this essay, I find this movie worthy of attention. If nothing else happens from this Substack, at the least, you should be prompted to examine your own views and why you hold them.
I’ve watched Grizzly Man eight times at least, and I still can’t believe how much potency it has.
To get in the movie’s mode, you just have to agree with Herzog.
I don’t mean on his statement about the universe being fundamentally a murderous place, but on his belief that Treadwell deserves to be considered and studied, as an extraordinary person who ultimately is as unknowable and mysterious as the grizzly bears themselves.