The film by Warren Herzog, Grizzly Man, reminds me of the Peter Shaffer play, Equus, with an important difference: when I watched Equus, I was aware I was watching a 1970s Wilhelm Reich-popularized dramatization of reality; when I watched Grizzly Man, I was observing the psychological underpinnings of Timothy Treadwell’s spiritual search epitomized by his descent into self-identification with grizzly bears. At some level, Treadwell remained separate, human, and unhappy about it, whereas in the psychodramatic Equus, the character lost all contact with his human reality and suffered from too much horse. That play was more about the doubts of the horse-man shrink than it was about the pain and suffering of human beingness, and Grizzly Man is mostly about that.
Some part of me wants to stop there, with the cross-textual analysis, exposing historical and sociological trends in both texts, as if the play and the film were equals. But I find the phrase “reality TV” coming to mind, the new tune-into-real-life, art-dream-form that has emerged in the twenty-first century, and all of a sudden, I am compelled to find myself in a much simpler, less intellectual framework. When I watch Grizzly Man, I can take Treadwell’s suffering, and Herzog’s own emotional response to that suffering, at face value, and I can begin talking about them as characters within my own dream. There is a blending effect of this kind of voyeuristic art, a sense of the empathetic and the vaguely tribal that compels me.
Finally, I fall into a pseudo-spiritual interpretation, feeling my way through Treadwell’s suffering the way Herzog intends, I think, for me to. I can identify with Treadwell’s alienation and his wish to find a frontier where he is deliciously alone. And once he is there, I can find myself in his pain when he discusses the strange feelings he confronts as the plane takes off and leaves him there utterly alone. Yet his sense of his mission to protect the grizzlies continues to draw him into this wilderness, away from people; meanwhile, there is some deep sense of his own escapism, too, a topic at least as vast as all of Alaska. After all, we are all indicted in the crime of escapism. Escapism is the great new consumer market, from Starbucks’ grande soy chai tea to beaches in Thailand to RoundUp weedkiller and the best lawnmower money can buy. I am trying to think of one consumer product on my desk right now that isn’t a prayerful ritual object in the religion of escapism: aromatherapy oils, a digital camera, this laptop, a photograph of my child. Perhaps my packet of Kleenex tissues, intended just to wipe my nose, can stand here in this paragraph upon its own merits.
Good thing the scenes are long, and Treadwell goes on and on. During that time, I have plenty of opportunity to watch him squirm inside these tensions. During that time, I have the opportunity to squirm myself, or to simply reject him as another wacko. The trouble with that is, I am totally taken in by the little black feet on top of his tent, the beauty of his sidekick, the red fox who comes when he is called. Irresistibly, I find myself wishing for such a wonderful companion. I could live without the grizzlies, but every time they approach the camera and Treadwell speaks to them, I find I am spellbound in my chair, DVD remote in hand, tuning up the volume. I cannot get enough.
The attractive sensibility of merging with nature, disappearing from the world of humanity, comes over me, and I am thinking about a visit to Alaska. This wish comes over me even in the scenes that swarm with mosquitoes in the foreground. I’m thinking, Look at all those frigging mosquitoes, and I want to touch them. So it is that I like Treadwell, even though I know he goes too far.
I have myself spent weeks in the wilderness letting bugs bite me, contemplating manzanita and ground squirrels, losing touch with the need for humanity. During those times, what arises in my mind is not all that pure and sweet. As a meditator, I have been trained in the art of sitting and watching my mind, and I know it’s not all love and roses in there. If it were, or when it is, I shall not need the manzanita or the bugs. The goal is not to merge with them, to self-identify with them and love them, however. The goal is to rout out all of that negativity in the mind, the desire to be right, to destroy the need to identify with the self-concept, to overcome my slavery to ideas. By contrast, Treadwell, in his missionary zeal, tries to self-identify with grizzliness and the desire for grizzliness to be rightness, and he in fact succeeds.
While Treadwell approaches his grizzly project with religious zeal, he makes the mistakes of religious zealots, becoming engrossed by the identification with a self-imposed tableau of rules and regulations and emerging as a grizzly fundamentalist. His refuge becomes the way of the grizzly, the departure from self into self-identification with grizzly, and he suffers because his refuge is limited to grizzly. For the grizzly follows his animal desires, gets what he wants or kills for it, and Treadwell seems to follow along in stride, growing largely more animalistic about females and more territorial about government agencies.
He undoes himself with love for these ideas, unraveling before our very eyes.
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