After watching Werner Herzog’s intense and detailed film about the late bear-enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, I have decided I am now an expert on Treadwell. Treadwell, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, was eaten by a Katmai country grizzly in the fall of 2003.
I always thought Treadwell was a scientist on some kind of quixotic mission to save bears. But since the Herzog film is largely composed of Treadwell’s own footage of Treadwell talking to and about himself, it is pretty hard to escape the conclusion that Treadwell was not a scientist. He presents as a somewhat substance-damaged Malibu beach bum with a fake Australian accent—on some kind of quixotic mission to save bears. He parked his tent on grizzly main street every summer for 13 years.
Generously funded by persons who believe his furry clients in the mega square miles of Katmai wilderness on the Alaska Peninsula are endangered by hunters and poachers, Treadwell did not so much study bears as talk to them, touch them, and try to become a bear himself. He says so out loud over and over in his own self-produced footage. The fact that the bears declined to eat Treadwell for 13 seasons pleads very well for his claim that bears are misunderstood animals.
In the winters, Treadwell would travel the country showing his films to organizations and classrooms. This, too, seems remarkable, because his testimony about bears is devoid of content other than describing bears as nice, fuzzy humans. Also, Treadwell is such a potty mouth in the film that it is difficult to imagine anyone letting him talk to children.
By the end of his earthly sojourn, Treadwell got crossways of the Park Service for planting his camps in the same spots for months at a time. He got crossways with bear biologists for living so closely with bears that the scientists told him habituating bears to human smells and activity would actually put bears in more danger. And many people told him that a dead Treadwell would probably result in a few dead bears, which is what eventually happened.
The film was not graphic. Herzog didn’t share the now famous audio track of Treadwell and Hugenard being eaten alive, and we didn’t see any coroner’s photos, although the self-congratulation of the coroner, interviewed by Herzog, was nearly as strange as Treadwell’s own self-congratulation.
Herzog made annoying intrusions into the film to tell us Treadwell believed in the gentleness of the world while he, Herzog, believed the world is a place of struggle and indifferent darkness—red in tooth and claw. After posing this philosophical but posthumous disagreement with Treadwell, Herzog goes on to compare Treadwell with naturalists Thoreau and Muir. I doubt this resemblance very much, but maybe if there were video cams in 1845 we’d have footage of Thoreau trying to become a trout.
Treadwell doesn’t make a very good bear. In fact, Treadwell and the poachers he hates occupy the same ecological niche—plain old humans misusing nature as their own personal property, without respect for animals in their natural habitat or for human laws designed to build some respect into the niche-less biped.
It is fun and easy to be snide about Treadwell, as he chants and squeals his love to bears and foxes, laments his failed human love affairs. We watch him interpret a smiley face scratched onto a rock as a death threat to himself. What else could it be?
The film is intriguing because Timothy Treadwell was lucky and delusional enough to put himself in his own version of Eden, where he runs through the grass followed by his tame fox and talks to all the bears. From Timmy’s perspective, it’s a children’s’ story, and who wouldn’t want to be in it?
Well the bears for instance.
We know that many stories for children featuring talking animals aren’t really about animals at all but about humans trying to figure out how to entertain or teach their own young. In a world of shrinking forests, fields, and farms, maybe ordinary people don’t have much chance of understanding real animals, but we have Smokey and Yogi and Baloo to love and protect us.
In order to save bears from future Treadwells, we should probably start putting warning labels on a slew of appealing nature films: “Caution: This is all about us—not about animals” and add the disclaimer: “No animals were interviewed or even studied in order to produce this film.”