August 24, 2005, 8:39 a.m.
Grizzly Love
A devoured man and a movement.

By Louis Wittig

When Timothy Treadwell, a boyish-looking minor eco-celebrity, went on Letterman in 2001 to tell the world how he spent a substantial portion of his time living in the Alaskan wild, an arm's length from foraging grizzly bears, Dave asked the obvious question. "Is it possible we'll open the paper one day and see you've been eaten by these bears?"

The audience roared. Treadwell looked genuinely taken aback by the suggestion.

"No," he stammered.

At the end of his 13th summer among the bears, federal park rangers found the majority of Treadwell, and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, in the gastrointestinal tract of a male grizzly.

Werner Herzog's new documentary Grizzly Man begins here and works backward, trying to untangle the fanatic strings that tied Treadwell to the bears. By the end, viewers are still left with the same knot they started out with. This hardly matters though: What Herzog lets slip away in posed interviews and schmaltzy, mournful music, Treadwell himself more than makes up for. Slightly unearthly and acutely manic, Herzog's subject is too out there to be bored with. The truly remarkable thing is how Treadwell's startling divorce from reality neatly parallels the gut appeal of all the organizations that ask us to save the [insert animal here].

Grizzly Man confirms the adage that it's better to be lucky than smart. Herzog struck gold: For the last five summers of his career, Treadwell took a video camera with him, capturing hundreds of hours of tape, right up to the last minute. The camera was rolling as the bear attacked, only the lens cap was still on — leaving haunting audio. (Herzog skillfully tempts his audience with the recording throughout.) Treadwell's footage carries the film and never tires. For audiences weaned on blue screens, what Treadwell is doing never quite feels as real as it does unsettling. He crouches in the bushes as two behemoths tear each other apart, then creeps up on the loser, within easy range of a paw swat, and gives it his post-fight analysis. He crawls within whispering distance of the bears, calls them by their names — Mr. Chocolate, Aunt Melissa, Sergeant Brown — and tells them how much he loves them. In some of his scenes he's desolately alone, musing on how hard it is to meet women and how he'd die to protect his bears. (Treadwell fervently believed his presence was shielding the bears from poachers; experts say they were never in any danger.)

In snippets, one can see very clearly how Treadwell came to feel absurdly comfortable in his ursutopia. He camped between fox dens; we see the docile pups perpetually pawing at his tent and running away with his hat. When the bears start sniffing at him he gently pushes them and growls. They lumber away. In one shot Treadwell shouts, "Timmy is the king of the bears and foxes!" and it's actually kind of plausible.

What was responsible for this behavior remains an open question. As a kid growing up in Long Island, New York, he had a pet squirrel. Later he tried to make it in Hollywood, but seemed to give up after coming in second to Woody Harrelson for the bartender role on Cheers (perhaps tellingly, it doesn't take much to imagine that, had the universe tilted another way, Harrelson would've ended up among the bears — or raising free-range emus in Borneo, or something like that). He drank and did drugs and got in a little trouble. Then, while visiting Alaska, Treadwell saw a bear and had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.

Grizzly Man pokes as far as it can into its protagonist's past but doesn't find anything dark or mysterious enough to make Treadwell comprehensible. So the film stumbles; Herzog doesn't know what to make of his subject, he doesn't even have a firm idea. In his largely excessive voiceovers the director halfheartedly compares him to Thoreau and John Muir. Michael Jackson is the better parallel: an otherwise intelligent person so terrified by adult life that he digs out an epic childhood for himself — be it Neverland or the Country Bear's Jamboree — and crawls. Even this isn't the complete story. Without any defining mystery, or clear tension, Grizzly Man doesn't move forward; it wanders in its own wilderness until, abruptly, it ends.

The upside to this is that, put together with all the intimate self-footage, this drift allows the audience to discover Treadwell for themselves, as best they can, and come away feeling sharper for having started the puzzle.

Treadwell intended to use the video he shot to fundraise for his grizzly charity. He would have been very successful doing so, for his images show animals just as they please people most, infantile and almost human: The foxes are precocious and attention loving; the bears are powerful and noble, and only potentially dangerous. The amazing thing isn't that nature eventually turned on Treadwell. It was that for so long it played along, allowing Treadwell to love it and allowing him to think it loved, respected, needed, or even was aware of him. It's perhaps more amazing that knowing what happened to him, and probably knowing how rabies spreads, those who watch Grizzly Man don't think twice about cooing at the baby foxes.

The biggest and most respectable environmental organizations bank on this same species-level narcissism. The World Wildlife Fund's logo is a bear — a panda — not the homely, equally endangered Ozark big-eared bat. It's easy to dismiss knee-jerk environmentalists as dopey because of this — as easy as it is to laugh at Timothy Treadwell, or hold him in contempt, as many did. It's less easy to contemplate the possibility that your doting little Terrier, the one you make kissy sounds at every day, would eat you if it got hungry enough.

— Louis Wittig is a writer living in New York City.