Penguins, parrots, bears, and humans
The bears
Grizzly Man
Directed by Werner Herzog
Lion's Gate Entertainment
Released 2005
103 minutes
I worried about anthropomorphism when I was writing about the penguins, and Mark Bittner begins the chapter "Consciousness Explained" with his concerns about anthropomorphizing the birds. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog's aptly titled Grizzly Man, identified so strongly with grizzly bears that I don't know if the question of whether he was anthropomorphizing them ever occurred to him. Treadwell spent 13 summers living with and filming the grizzly bears of the Alaskan peninsula until he and a companion were eaten by a grizzly bear in fall 2003. In Grizzly Man, Herzog talks to people who knew Treadwell and also includes plenty of Treadwell's own video footage of himself and the bears. The result is a disturbing, haunting film that raises questions well beyond that of our relationship to other animals.
Treadwell loved the bears. He repeated this fact over and over, to the camera and to the bears themselves. He also loved the foxes he met in Alaska. He gave the bears names: Mr. Chocolate, Sgt. Brown, Aunt Melissa, Mickey, Saturn, Grinch, Demon, Hatchet. He thought that he had a mission to protect the bears, although it was not obvious to me how he was protecting them, or from what. Most of the land Treadwell covered was federal land where the bears were already protected; it's not clear how much poaching was going on or how Treadwell thought he would fight it, or even whether his presence truly did the bears any good.
Herzog interviewed a native Alaskan, who said that the natives understood that the bears were different from people. Humans and bears each have a place in nature, and humans respect the bears by not crossing over into their turf. Treadwell, he said, breached a boundary that the natives had lived with for 7,000 years. Habituating bears to humans is generally not doing them a favor; it's better for bears to learn to avoid humans. (The bear that ate Treadwell and his companion was shot by park rangers.)
But Treadwell was plainly deeply dedicated to the task of understanding the bears and teaching the rest of the world about them. He survived for much longer among them than most other people could have. (When he died, he was in Alaska later in the year than he normally was, and he was attacked by a bear he did not know well, an older male who apparently was desperate to find food before it was time to hibernate.) When you listen to Treadwell talk about being a kind warrior and being stronger than the bear, or rhapsodizing over fresh bear droppings, it's easy to think that he was just plain crazy (and in fact I agree with a friend's opinion that the movie traces his descent into madness). But he did understand a great deal about the bears, and he managed to survive some very close encounters. It was amazing to see the bears coming up very close to the camera and hear Treadwell telling them to go away, and to see that they did indeed go away.
Treadwell spoke of the bears and the foxes as a parent might speak to or about a child. When a hunting party throws rocks at one of the bears, Treadwell, skulking in the brush, says indignantly but sotto voce to the camera that the man is throwing rocks at "my Quincy". When a fox starts playing with his hat, he sounds like a parent with a toddler: "What are you doing to that hat? Where's that hat going?" But when the fox runs off with the hat, Treadwell loses his temper and gives chase, swearing and berating the fox.
I don't know how he expected the fox to know how he wanted him to behave. For someone so in love with nature, he seemed remarkably resistant to some of nature's most basic facts. He wanted to see harmony and love, and he wanted the creatures he loved to be immune from the sometimes cruel workings of nature. When a fox died or a baby cub was killed by an adult male (which bears do sometimes; it makes the mother stop lactating and go into estrus again, so that the male can impregnate her), Treadwell alternately mourned and cursed. During a drought when the bears were hungry, he stormed heaven with outraged entreaties for rain for his animals. Herzog saw nature as chaos and murder; Treadwell seemed to expect the freedom and joy of the wilderness to be the whole story, and to be almost taken by surprise by the inevitable harshness and unpredictability of nature.
Herzog also said that while he saw no kinship in the faces of any of the bears that Treadwell filmed, Treadwell himself thought of them as friends. He had been an alcoholic before retreating from the human world into the world of the bears, and he thanked the bears for giving him a life. He said he had an agreement with them: he'd protect them, and they'd help him be a better person, which is really strange when you stop to think about it, because being with the bears seemed to make him almost not want to be a person at all. When Bittner said that he and the parrots all shared a part of a larger consciousness, he was still aware that they were not the same as humans and he was respectful of the differences. I think if humans and bears share any consciousness, it's at a much more elemental level than anything that humans share with birds. The bears seemed to understand, eventually, when Treadwell would tell them to go away, but they seemed totally indifferent to his declarations of love and loyalty (although the foxes would sometimes sit quietly and let him pet them). After he watched two males in a horrifying fight over a female, he talked to the winner, sounding almost like a reporter with a microphone talking to a victorious athlete. The bear seemed to be asleep, not even turning his head.
Technically, what am I?
My brother once told me a story about a bird called Koko that he looked after one weekend for a friend of his. Koko was talking about my brother like he was one of the birds, and Vinny had to explain that technically, he wasn't really a bird. Koko evidently liked the sound of that, because when she went home at the end of the weekend she startled Vinny's friend by announcing, "Technically, I am not a bird."
Technically, I am not a bear, but I tend to talk about myself and those closest to me as bears. Bears are in some sense my totem animal. Bears are often playful, smart, and curious, and I admire those qualities. I'm surrounded by various representations of bears: many photos, a couple of bear pendants that I wear sometimes, a small figure of a bear with a fish in his mouth, even a twonie, the Canadian two-dollar coin, which has polar bear on one side of it. But I know I'm really not a bear. I don't fish in a stream with my paws for salmon and eat it raw. I don't even fish with a line and eat it cooked. I haven't been very close to many real live bears. Any kinship I feel with them is based on a much more distant and abstract understanding of them than Treadwell had from living intimately among them as he did for so long.
So my understanding of bears is heavily filtered through my humanity, and not true to any direct experience of the animals themselves. I feel almost sheepish about it, after seeing someone who really truly did identify with bears in a way I never could. But for all his direct experience of the bears, Treadwell's concept of the ursine was filtered through his humanity too.
I think Herzog hit the nail on the head when he said that Treadwell's film of the bears was perhaps not so much a look into wild nature as a look into ourselves. Several of the people interviewed in the movie said that Treadwell wanted to be a bear, to become so connected that he merged with them. Herzog described him as wanting to leave the confines of his humanity. Treadwell did not like or enjoy or thrive in the world of people and of civilization. Judging from what I saw of him in his own videos, he was emotionally very volatile (he quit taking antidepressants because he felt the middle way was not for him; he needed the highs and lows) and he sought out danger and risk. He seemed to harbor a very Romantic notion of nature and of wild animals, going beyond even Rousseau, who at least thought that humans in their natural state were full of grace (the noble savage). It looked to me like Treadwell by and large had to seek outside the human race entirely to find a group of beings with whom he felt much affinity.
Treadwell's tragedy seems to be that he couldn't find a way to fit into the human world, and the world that he tried to enter instead wound up killing him. Before he left for his last summer with the bears, he told a friend that if he didn't come back, it was the way he wanted to go. Although I don't deny his right to choose how to live his life, it's hard for me to say how much that really mitigates the tragedy for the people he left behind. Certainly I value the human world far too much to ever turn my back on it the way he did. And while for most of us it's evidently not as hard as it was for him, we all do have to fit ourselves somehow into a world of flawed human beings. One of the most rewarding things about being here is the effort to continue to grow, to learn how to overcome your weaknesses and stretch yourself to incorporate some uncomfortable but necessary behaviors into who we are. But you can only stretch so far before you start to feel like you are betraying your true self, and for Treadwell that limit was much closer than it was for most of us.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, he was passionately true to himself, and I have to respect that genuineness and the courage it took him to follow his love for the bears wherever it led. On the other hand, not everything about ourselves is good. The process of deciding what to embrace about your own physical or emotional nature, and what to acknowledge but try to curb, is a difficult one. Negotiating a realistic balance between the demands of the outer world and the needs of your true self requires a firm grasp on reality, and an acceptance of the truths of nature and human nature as they are, not as you would like them to be.
When I was talking about the movie with a friend, he said that Treadwell obviously felt a deep love for the bears, no matter what kind of illusions he was harboring. But I wonder, how truly can you love nature or any part of it if you don't understand and respect the reality of what you love?
Coda
All three movies offered some visual treats, and all were worth seeing. Parrots was far and away my favorite, because it resonated most strongly with my own beliefs. Penguins and Parrots both are much gentler films than Grizzly Man, which is darker overall and contains much starker contrasts (between Herzog's and Treadwell's views). I think Parrots provides the most balanced view of our relationship to other animals, seeing both the similarities and the differences without getting too carried away in either direction. If you're going to see Grizzly Man, you might want to bring along a friend or two. The movie is sure to spark some vigrous discussion about questions of nature, wilderness, sanity, and identity.
