Just watched 'Grizzly Man' again, for the umpteenth time. It's such an odd and haunting film: fascinating but also skewed, fragmented, and excessively managed by Werner Herzog-who seems to dislike his subject, Timothy Dexter Treadwell. Critics are right to note the stagy awkwardness of Herzog's interviews with Treadwell's surviving friends. They're also correct in noting the film's lack of narrative flow. Nonetheless, enough truth shines through to get the sense that Treadwell was a deeply troubled individual, probably bipolar and-as manifested by his words, voice, mannerisms, and appearance-likely a repressed homosexual (not merely closeted, but repressed altogether). The pure product of a Fifties suburban blue-collar upbringing, Treadwell couldn't "come out" or even admit to himself that he was gay (or perhaps bisexual). Such self-repression took a heavy emotional toll in drinking and drug-taking: addictions that nearly killed Treadwell before he discovered the wild grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska and devoted the remainder of his life to their supposed defense and conservation. In point of fact, Alaska's 30,000+ grizzlies are not endangered at all and did not need Timothy Treadwell's help, protection, or advocacy. His self-appointed role as bear champion is better understood as a half-baked form of self-therapy. Here I invoke Karpman's Drama Triangle, a theory about interpersonal relation dynamics that posits the interesting notion that people (especially family members) in a dysfunctional situation revert to (and often cycle through) three common subject positions: persecutor, victim, and rescuer. Treadwell, who came to see himself as a victim of society and his own self-destructive urges, reverted to the role of rescuer (of the bears) as a means to recuperate and maintain self-esteem-but more fundamentally as an unconscious way to prolong drama and avoid any real psychological/existential self-confrontation. (Treadwell obviously shifted the victim role unto the bears and the persecutor role unto the Park Service, tourists, non-existent poachers, etc.) Sadly, the righteous rescuer guise ultimately got Treadwell (and his friend, Amie Huguenard) killed by a hungry bear (who evidently did not read the memo about Treadwell being his ally/rescuer). In a weird way, Karpman's theory can also be applied to Herzog-who seems not to know how to feel about Treadwell. Herzog rescues Treadwell's filmic legacy by making a film from Treadwell's surviving raw footage, but also becomes Treadwell's persecutor in showing his subject in a less than flattering light. The real victims? Treadwell's friend, Amie, and the bear who killed and ate Treadwell and Amie, killed by park rangers in the aftermath.
Review of Grizzly Man
