The Aguirre of the Aquarian Age

"Grizzly Man" is a powerful movie by Werner Herzog, a movie about the life of Timothy Treadwell, who hardly needs a closer introduction. Treadwell lived around brown bears in Katmai (a national park in Alaska) for thirteen seasons in a row, somehow getting the wild bears to tolerate his presence. He became a national celebrity in the United States, claiming to defend the bears from poachers and other threats. In 2003, tragedy struck: Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by brown bears as they were camping in an area Treadwell called the Grizzly Maze.

Herzog's movie paints Treadwell as a loner who gradually looses grip on reality and rejects Western civilization as he becomes more and more obsessed with the bears. Treadwell wants to bond with Mother Nature, unable to realize that nature is chaos and brutality rather than love and harmony. Eventually, he looses it completely, and develops a veritable death wish. "Grizzly Man" implies that the death of Treadwell at the hands of a bear might actually have been a form of suicide. To Herzog, Treadwell is an idealist who crosses the line between beast and man, and gets punished for it. His destruction is seen as inevitable. In a sense, Timothy Treadwell becomes the New Age version of Aguirre.

I don't deny that the movie is captivating and the message powerfully delivered. But is it true? Probably not. Here and there, another possible explanation for Treadwell's behaviour emerges: he had a celebrity complex and wanted to shoot a sensational film, with himself as the lead actor. Judging by Mike Lapinski's book "Death in the Grizzly Maze", this comes closer to the truth. Frankly, I suspect Treadwell was something of a con artist. Where Herzog saw a man slowly descending into madness, I see an actor playing out a part. The man may have been "nuts" in the everyday sense of that term, not to mention reckless and irresponsible, but I can't find any evidence of a death wish in Lapinski's book. Still, even Lapinski is willing to concede that Treadwell might have suffered from a clinical condition, bipolar disorder.

Ultimately, of course, everyone must make up his or her own mind about Timothy Treadwell. "Grizzly Man" is a good place to start. Then, read Mike Lapinski's "Death in the Grizzly Maze", Nick Jans' "The Grizzly Maze" and Treadwell's own book "Among Grizzlies".