Grizzly man

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Amelia K on the paracosm of an abusive relationship.

"I know the language of the bear." —Timothy Treadwell

At no point in Grizzly Man does Werner Herzog condone the actions of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur filmmaker who spent thirteen summers in Alaska with wild bears. Much is made of Herzog's curiosity but I think his true ability is not necessarily asking the right questions, but finding peace in never answering them. And there are a lot of questions to be asked on this subject, as Timothy's motive remains unclear; he alternately claimed to be “raising awareness,” that nebulous aim du jour, and giving protection from poachers, although his presence in Alaska arguably drove more traffic there.

Although this documentary was released in 2005, and much of the footage would have been from the decade leading up to it, Timothy would fit in easily today on TikTok, where pseudoscience, unprofessional wildlife handlers, and pop psychology thrives. He used to watch criminals get sentenced as a pastime. He loved filming his own reactions and thoughts, treating them as if they were all equally essential. At one point he gives a bear fighting advice with zero irony; at another he makes off-handed homophobic statements about gay men having it easier than him. When a drought causes the bears to eat their young, he attempts to create a salmon run, then theatrically asks god to bring rain.

He is perennially narrating a story about himself that is only partially true. He claims to be alone, all alone, which is demonstrably false, and even when he stayed there alone, it isn’t as if he made it to Alaska unaided. He is surrounded by a web of people who care but the web is invisible to him, so small against his carefully fabricated backdrop of himself as a rugged survivor.

I will die for these animals, he says repeatedly, because he doesn’t believe that he will. There will always be another take, another summer, another plane to take him home. That he lasted thirteen summers with wild bears owes very little to him, and almost everything to luck. His desire to be seen as the only hope for animals who can easily protect themselves—and whose protection, when needed, should be done under the consultation of Alaskan natives and wildlife professionals—can be thought of as a white savior desire writ large. He is sometimes labeled a preservationist, which is confusing; what exactly did he preserve? His presence in Alaska was a disruption, not because humans are inherently disruptive to the earth—humans are part of the earth—but because he misunderstood his own part, intentionally or not. He is most assuredly a gifted filmmaker, and an actor, or someone who is acting like one. He was unable to get roles so he simply created one.

Whether or not he bought into his own persona matters very little, although I do think that each successive summer he was not killed made him more confident in it. My own appreciation for Timothy’s story comes from the fact that watching it gave me a fresh pair of eyes. It gave me a new view of myself, as if I had walked past an unexpectedly mirrored surface: hey! That’s me! I did not enjoy what I saw, but I did, at least, recognize it. It was absolutely crucial to moving forward.

I was unable to think about the effect of my own death on my loved ones until I saw Timothy’s mother stroking the foot of his teddy bear; I remember thinking, that could have been your mom. Your Mama, who you love. Why would you do something like that? I was barely an adult when I attempted suicide, at the end of an abusive relationship that would begin again and last seven years, like some sort of biblical phenomenon. I hid it so successfully I myself did not know it was abuse. I spent so long thinking that everyone knew and nobody cared that I did not realize the inverse was true—nobody knew and everyone cared. It hurt to realize I was loved, in a way I’ve never been able to articulate. It meant the story I told myself was wrong. And if I didn't know the story of myself, what did I know?

The reality that you can love someone who sees you as nothing more than meat is so painful that a new reality must be created to endure it. In this reality, indifference does not exist. Everything is interpreted as love. I lived in this kind of paracosm, and Timothy did too; it became something of a sticking point for him, his singularity. Anyone else would be killed. I alone can walk among beasts unharmed. I alone can love and be loved by them in return. I told myself similar myths; namely, that I was not being abused, because I believed I was special for my own endurance, my own lack of complaint. I can stand by my man when lesser women can’t. I’m strong. Other people would cry about this, but not me. And the fact that I’m not crying means it isn’t abuse.

I told myself my relationship was complex, it was modern, it was work, but the good kind. Above all, it was real, in the way that reality television is real, meaning: it followed a script that we pretended not to see. Being abused is much like being cast in a role you never auditioned for, winning awards for the role, and eventually forgetting that you were ever acting. I asked my ex often why he did what he did, because I believed that there was an answer that would make it all make sense. I believed I could endure anything if it made for a good story. But the goalposts shifted with every asking: why do you do this to someone you love? I don’t love you. Why do you do this to someone? You’re no one. Why do you do this? I don’t. You imagined it.

I have two conflicting viewpoints on Timothy’s love for the bears. The first is that he didn’t love his subject enough to make himself secondary to it. Love steps back, when it needs to, because it knows its existence is enough. It was not enough for Timothy to simply love the bears, the foxes, Alaska, the world—he had to be seen doing it, had to do it under the guise of a cause, and a righteous one at that, that he invented; the bears were just improv actors in a script he wrote for them.

The second is that Timothy loved the bears so much he looked at them and couldn’t see anything except himself, but in a shape he could appreciate. Both are a kind of selective blindness, and I do not think true love is blind, although I find meaning in his attempt to love at all. What else do we carry with us, if not our attempts to love well, which is to see clearly? And to see clearly is to accept that a certain part of ourselves—and each other—is unknowable. That you can swim and swim and never reach the bottom of someone. That my ex could steal my phone, my spirit, my time, could follow me to the bathroom, even, but couldn't predict me leaving him, and neither could I.

I bet Timothy never forgot how it felt to see Alaska from the sky, coming closer. How the world goes farther than any eye could ever see, and we go with it, and nobody knows for how long. But the love is sweeter for what we don’t know, and this is the revelation that protected me from hurling myself, again, into violence. I am reminded of the time I took my son to see a Van Gogh, and how he was being unusually quiet; when I asked what was on his mind he turned to me and said, I will never see all the art in the world. The joy on his face was so acute it could have split me in two. He already understands what the grizzly man couldn’t.

The Dirt: Leave the bears alone.