Dear readers,
In response to your questions: My exams are scheduled for the end of May.
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This is inspired by uncomplicatedly’s wonderful new post on Georges Bataille and Simone Weil, which ends with a consideration of the Werner Herzog film Grizzly Man.
I have reservations about Grizzly Man that have everything to do with Herzog. Perhaps the greatest virtue of the film lies in its ability to wrestle with the apparent authority of the narrator. Certainly, Herzog indicts Treadwell with an unscrupulous and delusional appropriation of the bears; at the same time, Herzog appropriates Treadwell to be the latest (and real-est) in a series of Don Quixotes (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo). His own appropriation of Treadwell reaches the point where he describes the Alaskan tundra as a “jungle,” which is patently ridiculous unless you’re a film director who always sets his tales of quixotic desire in jungles.
Of course, the way that Herzog demonstrates that he is not exploiting Treadwell is that he never plays for us the audio tape of Treadwell’s death by bear attack. This is not restraint; it is paternal authority expressed via taboo, a fact that only becomes clearer when Herzog also forbids one of Treadwell’s closest friends to listen to the tape. Herzog’s absolute interdiction is concealed by an ironic gesture of concern.
Herzog says:
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. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.
It is hard to imagine a denser cluster of performative contradictions. Herzog clearly intends to sever us from the animal world, and to inspire a condescending pity for Treadwell’s delusions. But there is salvation in the ambiguity of his telling us what “haunts” him — it is not clear whether he is haunted by the spectre of madness, or by his own equally constructed absence of feeling. Note Herzog’s own subsequent romanticization of a complex mammal as something which not only is driven exclusively by hunger, but which also feels a certain Baudelairean ennui as it contemplates a long life of fresh salmon and cold snows: “a half-bored interest in food.”
Leaving aside, for a moment, people who own pets, any research biologist will tell you that highly evolved mammals have numerous behaviors and social affects that exceed the satisfaction of hunger. Herzog discovers a total absence of kinship because, for him, Treadwell must always already be tilting at windmills. I see Treadwell’s life’s work a little differently: I see it as a highly enthusiastic and often suspect relationship with bears that successfully disrupted our intertwined attitudes of indifference and greed.
I am disturbed by the faint implication of heterosexism in the distance between Herzog’s masculinist rhetoric of jungle predation, and Treadwell’s overtly feminine “love” for his “animal friends,” which Herzog regards with patronizing concern.
Lastly, I am annoyed by the way the film bows and scrapes before the indigenous speaker who speaks of respecting the bear’s Otherness as the spiritual complement of maintaining a safe distance. Once again, I have to question whether this is any less fanciful than what Treadwell is doing; furthermore, from a rhetorical standpoint, you have to put the bear’s supposed sovereignty in the context of the real world of guns, tranquilizers, developers, poachers, and democracies. One of the things about Treadwell was that his warm, empathetic relationship to bears made him very good at communicating about them with children who had never seen bears, and may not even have had much exposure to the “raw” wild. At this point, a respect for the bear’s Otherness is problematic on several levels: first of all, because it risks holding onto a metaphysics of danger that can now only be experienced voluntarily, and is therefore fatally corroded by irony unless it is risked in the service of a myth, as it is by Treadwell; and second, because it presents no challenge at all to the mode of thinking that finally, inevitably, wants to ask whether human beings or grizzlies are more important — given an unbridgeable difference in world — in the service of illegal poaching, or development projects, or oil.
Pat will attest that I was praying aloud that Herzog would not play the tape for us. However, I share your discomfort at the taboo he instates by teasing us with descriptions of it. I was doubly creeped out that these descriptions were delivered by a deadpan mortician in who served basically no other function in the film than to render in clinical language the visceral horror of Treadwell and Huguenard’s deaths. The mortician stands for rational humanity; he shields us from the uncomfortable fact of Treadwell’s, and our own, mortal embodiedness — while still evoking it for our titillation.
Your point about the complexity of the bear is well-taken. The first time I read Agamben’s Man and Animal what bothered me the most was the monolithic conception of the animal world. Sure, a tick basically is a mechanism, but what of higher mammals, to say nothing of pets who are in fact exposed to human language and social networks all day long? My dog knows the names of all 4 of my family members and can go find whoever we tell him to, which complicates the thesis that animals are not aware of beings as such. I accept that my dog is not really self-aware, but I think he’s close to it in a way that bewilders him.
That said, Heidegger’s point that the animal world is a zone for human projection is clearly on-target, as my very hypotheses about my dog illustrate above. I like that you call Herzog out on these very grounds, since he tries hard to distance himself from what he sees as Treadwell’s projections. The idea of the animal as infinitely other will always be a human idea, with reference to a human “self” and on human terms.
I haven’t seen the film in a while, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that Herzog “bows and scrapes before” the museum curator’s opinion. All of the film’s non-Treadwell commentators, from the anti-Treadwell helicopter pilot to Treadwell’s friends and lovers, seem to get the same treatment: they get to speak their full piece without comment from Herzog. This is one of the reasons there are so many different reactions to the film, and the different speakers in it: there’s great freedom to draw one’s own conclusions.
Case in point: I admire the curator’s viewpoint, as you no doubt picked up from my comment on uncomplicatedly’s post. In response to your critiques, I think there’s a demonstrable difference between maintaining a distance from bears, or other dangerous elements of nature, and destroying them for one’s own purposes; I don’t think that there’s a slippery slope here, and I’m sure the Indian would have an answer to the question of protecting the bears from exploitation. After all, he runs a museum that educates people about the bears and their habitat, without habituating the bears to human contact as Treadwell does.
Also, let us not make the mistake of thinking that Treadwell lived exclusively in the world of real ecological dangers. While his motives are obviously pure, he is just as obviously reacting to his own paranoia, as evinced by both his conviction that the Park Service is targeting the bears and his illusions that he is being marked for death. In fact, his most immediate impact was to expose safe bears to humans and to danger, and to get one killed. I do admire Treadwell’s conviction and his ability to convince the general public, including children, of the importance of preserving the bears and their habitat. However, I also admire the museum curator’s perspective, because it provides a counter to the idea that one’s relationship to nature must be either adversary or partner, that “understanding” necessarily implies “becoming one with.”
First of all, it’s definitely the case that “bows and scrapes” was written out of passion, and exaggerates the facts of the scene, which are as you have described them. I take your point.
That said, it’s natural to think of the comment as a complement to what Herzog himself says about Treadwell, because Herzog’s point about the bear’s lack of sensibility is compatible in practice with the idea of maintaining a respectful distance and an awareness of otherness.
If I had the film, I would definitely also want to examine where that scene is inserted, from a rhetorical standpoint. I remember it being a very striking retort, which I’m willing to bet has something to do with how it’s framed.
I admire the film’s complexity, and I share your reservations about Treadwell’s paranoia, delusions, and recklessness (we should also keep in mind that he put another person, his girlfriend, in danger along with himself). Grizzly Man wouldn’t be half so great if it was conceived as merely an ode to Treadwell.
That said, I don’t think that Treadwell was somehow “patronizing” to the bears, for example. I don’t think the desire to be united with nature is some kind of imperialism; more to the point, I don’t understand Treadwell’s actions in those terms. Both the wary indigenous man, and Treadwell, have chosen ways of (in Heideggerian terms) being-with these animals, with different ends in mind. Neither one is more or less engaged with the animal; Heidegger writes brilliantly about the fact that if two people in a room are ignoring each other, then they are with each other in the mode of indifference, a point that is immediately obvious if you think of the difference between that state and actual solitude.
The respect for the bear’s Otherness bears the traces of unavoidable physical danger, which is very different from Treadwell’s willingness to put himself in danger. Along the lines of my earlier post on loss, Treadwell had to take that risk in order to prove that unsuspected kinds of sympathetic relations were possible between human beings and bears.
Does this trend towards domestication? Certainly it does, but we should keep in mind that our notion of “wild” versus “domestic” animals is historically conditioned. Animals have learned to avoid humans, and human beings have lost the art of living in wild environments: early European visitors to North America were amazed by the number and fearlessness of the animals. If we are going to tackle the problem of “wildness,” we have to reconcile our answers with the story of the dodo bird.
The curator is not on a slippery slope towards environmental exploitation; he’s doing something that does not conflict with his inherited beliefs about respectful distance. Still, curating a wildlife museum is only effective up to a point; Treadwell is the star of the film, and not just because of his madness and death.
My point is that the obligation to respect and preserve wildlife has to come from somewhere. For Treadwell, it comes from an immediate experience of communion, which remains valid as a possibility even though for him it was an unbalanced and fatal obsession. For the museum curator, the obligation appears have religious origins, as though we are obligated to preserve places on Earth where human beings do not go (at least through a respectful “restraining order” in one’s dealings with bears). This is a philosophically unsound argument, and one that stands up poorly against specifiable human interests.
“My point is that the obligation to respect and preserve wildlife has to come from somewhere.”
Definitely a good point, and one that justifies the existence of zoos, wildlife preserves, natural parks, and other areas that expose animals to low levels of risk and exploitation. Douglas Adams, in his book on endangered species (Last Chance to See), notes that Diane Fossey eventually realized that people wouldn’t care about the gorillas unless they got to see them and understand what about them was worth saving. Certainly I believe that people should be able to get within spitting distance (but please don’t spit on the bears): a zone of total separation would be strictly religious, and irrational as well as unproductive.
At the same time, the curator wasn’t asking for anything that wasn’t already present: the bears were protected by living in a wildlife preserve which people could visit as long as they agreed not to approach within a certain distance of the bears. Treadwell’s identity hinged on being a savior to the bears, even if there wasn’t anything that was endangering them.
(Adding: of course what Treadwell is doing is more than simple tourism, and more interesting and exciting. His actions get us thinking about our relationship to nature much more than simply going on a hike in Alaska would, and the film shows the limitations of the “go see the animals” approach when it depicts the camping party that goes to see the bears and throws rocks at them. At the same time, I don’t think we need another Treadwell. The Indian’s mode of engagement is more stable than Treadwell’s, with all the safety, longevity, and non-excitement that implies.)
Tim was a good man…
Dear A Tim friend,
Without wishing to impose upon your grief, we would be grateful if you chose to say more.
The film portrayed Tim in such a disparaging light. Knowing Herzog’s artistic views it was the only way someone of his disposition could have simplistically yet ironically characterized Tim. My understanding of “Hollywood” makes it a bit more reasonable for me to accept Tim in this light, however, the general public is not so well adapted to “behind the scenes” and take many films at face value. Not only did the film leave out huge chunks of the puzzle but it also perpetuated bears in a negative light. TV shows have been doing this for years on many species and don’t realize or don’t care (money) what the ramification of this kind of exposure leads to. While yes, bears are not pets, but neither are they snarling, snapping white hot balls of ursine terror.
“The Indian’s mode of engagement is more stable than Treadwell’s, with all the safety, longevity, and non-excitement that implies.)”
Tom: In 2004 two young “natives” poached 2 bears EACH in Katmai National Park. So the word stable is incorrect. Some tribes feel they have the right to do whatever they please as long as their ancestors in past committed the same “rituals.” It is still unknown, and probably will remain so, whether they were acting out in rebellion that Tim was no longer around. They were slapped on the wrist and sent away with guns in hand. This was not done in the areas that Tim camped in but in the park.
I have another friend who has lived among bears. The only instance in which bears avoid humans is when humans have blatantly shown hostility towards them. To go in an area where bears have little exposure to humans, bears do not spook. The bears that Tim “researched” were habituated bears. Many photographers, film crews and hikers traverse that area daily and the bears are very much at ease around humans for the most part. Mind you, there is hunting of bear in Katmai every year.
The bear who killed Tim and Amie was a research bear. It had been trapped, drugged, collared, tagged, tattooed, and then given an antidote. All very traumatic and possibly fatal to a bear. Not once but a few times. Of all the bears in that area, at that time of year, where Tim had camped many times before, that bear, had a completely different reaction to something Tim did on a daily basis when bears approached camp. Interesting. Bears that have been trapped as non aggressive individuals (first timers, for scientific purposes as opposed to “problem” bears), I will use Yellowstone bears for this example, have been well documented to later become “problem” bears. So, here we have a hypocritical event. Tim, who was non aggressive in dealing with bears while studying them has been chastised for:
habituating bears
anthropomorphizing bears
not having a PHD
not using precautions
killing two bears
having Amie at the park with him
using bears to become famous
etc…
scientists:
habituate bears
give bears numbers (some even name names) which a number in sense is a name.
research is research. So all college kids and high school kids are not really doing research and should not be doing research until they have acquired a PHD. Wow that should prove interesting.
Here is the one point I agree with, all he had to do was take bear spray
Every year several bears are killed by biologists while doing “research” in EACH eco setting
Amie should have taken bear spray, all of Tim’s girlfriends who visited with him in the park took bear spray. Tim had no beef with others using it. Just himself.
Tim did not go out to Katmai to become famous. For years he went out without any recognition, poor and inexperienced. The more he went out, the more people became intrigued, the more offers he got to get paid to do something he loved and he believed in. One can only hope to become successful at something you love to do. In the end he still wasn’t “rolling in the dough.”
Of all the above ridicule, the most important, the most preventative measure that Tim should have done was taken bear spray.
People have got to realize that we are a part of nature, not apart from her. I don’t condone others to do the same but there will always be people who feel more connected to nature than to their own species. Who is at fault for that? Or is there even a finger to point to in this situation?
Whomever wrote the first entry on this page has got a wonderful grasp on Herzog. I don’t dislike the man, understanding that a film of this nature would almost need to be outstanding to gain funds but there could have been a balance had someone else directed this film. There was plenty left out. The Park Service seems to be keeping things away from the public on purpose, so, you have to wonder why Herzog chose to leave things out of the film. Was it purposeful, to make Tim more interesting and controversial, making the film more money or was it because he was not permitted access to “certain” things? I may be grabbing at straws here but…
It is still amusing to me that the Park Service managed to escape criticism for allowing Tim to do this for so long while complaining audibly about it. The only outcome for this is exactly what was expected. Although Deb was supposedly “let go”, “retired” or whatever because of this instance, no one knows about it. No one talks about it and they continue to blame Tim for a situation they had total control of. Every year they would sit and talk with him, and every year he would do the same and every year they patted him on the ass as he boarded that float plane.
Just know that in the end Tim was becoming more and more nervous about what he was doing and his impact on bears and the year of his death was to be his last. He believed in what he was doing, truly, but his own well being from harassment and from obstacles that he could no longer deal with was making him far more paranoid and his time with the bears was becoming more stressful than fulfilling.
ATF, thank you so much for returning to write this essay. I found it very helpful as a supplement to Herzog’s film, and appreciate your kind compliments.
Because of my limited knowledge of the facts of Tim’s life, I cannot respond to the specifics, but find your argument about those facts credible. At the same time, I do give Herzog’s film credit for being expansive enough to allow me to disagree with his interpretations of Tim’s life — in this sense, it avoids being overly simplistic. The footage of the bears (much of which was, of course, Tim’s) inspired awe and sympathy in me, so that my final impression of the animals was far from negative.
One of the things I value most about blogging is that blog posts are open documents that give readers the opportunity to contribute. Thank you for contributing so passionately, and with such richness of detail.
Welcome. Anytime I can help a friend…