Grizzly Man (2005)

Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain. Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.

-Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams

The same sentiment of contempt that was expressed in Les Blank’s 1982 documentary is carried through in Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). The film is a character study on Timothy Treadwell, self-proclaimed “kind warrior” and self-appointed defender of the bear habitat in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. To those familiar with Treadwell’s story, it would seem as if the film was meant to ridicule. The film introduces Treadwell as a sort of absurd figure, and undoubtedly his statements are meant to rouse laughter. However, Herzog reveals much more about Timothy Treadwell and ultimately points to the barbarity and irrationality of nature, as it brutally ended the life of its own protector.


Common amongst the Green movement is a rather conscious or unconscious spiritualism. While virulently condemning anthropocentrism, many in the Green movement base their politics on anthropomorphizing nature. As if the earth had a spirit or an agenda. As if the earth had a consciousness or some sort of quality that could be "liberated." As if animals were conscious of their own extinction and that their mortality presented them with an existential dilemma. The universe is indifferent to life and the survival of this planet. Our sun will eventually obliterate the earth in its own self destruction. To say that the earth has an intrinsic interest that humanity is getting in the way of, is a spiritual one. Treadwell was a part of that romantic spiritualism, dedicating his life to protect a group of bears that only in the simplest sense knew of his presence, let alone of his agenda. At first, the verdict can only be that Treadwell was crazy, but the tragedy that Herzog’s documentary is able to reveal is why was so attracted to that particular life. Not all of Treadwell’s footage were meant to be seen. Alone in the forest, Treadwell began to use the camera as a personal testimonial: letting out his loneliness, his anger, his paranoia, and his past. We find out that Treadwell was a recovering addict, and that his newfound love of the bears was what saved him. Treadwell jumped from one addiction to another, projecting his redemption onto beings that could not speak, and therefore could never reject him. To get out of the hole he dug for himself, he needed to live for something beyond him. He needed his cause and he found it. This is a particularly human trait, one that the rest of nature is unaware of and indifferent to. After Treadwell’s death, Herzog shows two bears attacking each other. Unmercifully violent, the two bears go at each other so fiercely they defecate all over themselves. This is nature, Herzog wants to remind us. Treadwell on the other hand, goes to scene of the fight and can’t understand it. He talks to the bear as if it should’ve known better. Herzog’s documentary is both effective at providing insight to Timothy Treadwell, beyond the surface antics, while also being polemic against spiritualistic nature-worshipping.