Grizzly Men (for Cody)

Jump to Comments

The best Halloween costume idea I’ve heard for this year is dressing as Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter (this runs a close second to going as a bag of spinach). A friend of mine has already bought a giant stuffed sting ray off ebay for the occasion (and no, I don’t know whether he managed to find one with a barb). I think the costume was a subconscious inspiration for a recent video selection (I had been meaning to watch it all year but it’s always checked out), Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Herzog’s off-camera voice may be the most entertaining aspect of the film, throwing in comments like “here is where i diffar from treadwell, where treadwell sees the beauty of nature, I see chaos and murdar.” Herzog’s film consists primarily of footage Timothy Treadwell (the “grizzly man”) took of bears but mostly of himself over ten summers in the Alaskan wilderness. This footage bears (no pun intended) such a striking resemblance to Steve Irwin’s crocodile adventures that I could not help thinking that perhaps Irwin had been an aesthetic inspiration for Treadwell’s cinematic craft (and it is his craft that most interests Herzog). For both film-makers, experiencing the “extremes” of nature, or, as Herzog puts it “crossing the line of our human limitations,” has to be performed. The paradoxical desire to go beyond the world of human beings while having this transgression legitimated by the witnessing of that very world seems to me the saddest aspect of watching their footage.

Irwin, it must be argued, especially after the baby-dangling Michael Jacksonesque spectacle, was invested in celebrity while Timothy Treadwell was virtually unknown until Herzog’s film. But Treadwell’s vanity, his insistence upon intervening himself in footage of the bears or acting as their rational narrative voice, is reflective of the life of a failed starlet, a life into which Herzog’s film gives us some insight and this life is not so far fetched, I would argue, from the attention-ravenous Irwin. I juxtapose these characters and their endeavors because they have managed to strike me not only as similar to one another but, taken one by one and especially together, as symptomatic of a strange predicament for masculinity. Of course, there is that “need” for recognition, there are biographical and psychological reasons for those, as Herzog’s film willingly points out for us, but there is also something very true beyond those reasons which makes Herzog’s film as compelling as Irwin’s character. That truth involves the need these men entertain to mediate through film a fundamentally self-centered endeavor. That self, when it is taken to the periphery of human existence, that periphery which only “the wild” can afford, cannot stand to leave behind its image. It could be observed that Treadwell and Irwin are not talking to “us,” or to any specific audience, but to themselves as they are taken by the human world, a world whose determination of masculinity is as inescapable as its encroachment upon these “deadly” animals. The significance of Treadwell and Irwin dying at the hands of those animals who permitted them so many flirtations with death in life, may be precisely the protest it seems. Footage of them and by them is a constant fleshing out not only, in a primitive sense, of a human paradox (we are so small but our intelligence makes us feel so big), but in a sense that is easy to recognize, of what it means to be a man (confronting death in order to dominate it). To die to an animal in an age that invests in the resilience of human life to natural forces of destruction is to die having rejected the apparatus by which that age dictates the purpose, the intention of the individual, especially to men.

My friend Cody, the closest thing I have to the grizzly man, has recently asked me “when the *f* am I coming to town” - if he reads this he’ll know that I’m spending New Years on his couch.

3 Comments

Filed under Blogroll, film