For Conservative Movie Lovers: Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and ‘Grizzly Man’ Part 4

“Have mercy on the souls in purgatory, and especially on those that are most forsaken. Do Thou deliver them from the dire torments they endure. Call them, and admit them to Thy most sweet embrace in paradise.”

Devout Catholics might recognize this as a prayer for those lost souls who, as penance for the sins committed in life, have not yet ascended to heaven. Others might view it as just another silly superstition in desperate need of squashing by the enlightened mythbusters of our time.

As stated earlier, in his teen years Herzog had a deeply affecting flirtation with Catholicism that has echoed down throughout his life. “I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” he says. “The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels. . . They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance.” Herzog maintains, and I agree, that when the history of his career is written Grizzly Man “will be a centerpiece” of his canon. But it was only after many viewings that it occurred to me (a veteran of eight years of Catholic grade school) that one of Grizzly Man’s chief virtues is that it’s a supremely decent film, acting as a kind of extended novena for the lost soul of Timothy Treadwell.

Treadwell came into Herzog’s sights only ten months after his death, by such chance that non-superstitious readers may be excused for judging it dumb luck. As Herzog tells it:

I stumbled across his story in the office of a producer who’s been very kind with me, helping me with another film. I had my car keys misplaced, looked at his table, at his messy table, and he believed I was looking at something in particular and shoves an article across and says, “We are doing a fantastic story.”

And I read it, rushed back in his office and I asked him, “Who is directing it?” And he said, “I’m kind of directing it.”

Kind of directing it.

And I looked him in the eye, and I saw some sort of hesitation. And with my German accent I said to him, “No, I vill direct dis moovie!”

Grizzly Man was made lightning fast: only fourteen shooting days and a mere nine days of editing — less than a month from commitment to final cut. “I just took over,” Herzog says. “I was totally convinced I was in the right place. No one else sometimes will have this kind of religious certainty.” He quickly went out and shot Treadwell’s friends, parents, and Alaskan haunts, even before seeing any of the dead man’s own footage. Instead, assistants back in Los Angeles sifted through the one-hundred hours of tapes, following specific instructions on things to look for.

When Herzog returned to LA and finally began scrutinizing the cream of the crop, he was, “completely astonished by what I found there: the depth of his story and the turmoil and the demons that haunted him and all his ecstasies. I was really blessed.”

It quickly grew apparent that this would be a film primarily about human nature. Herzog saw “something volatile, something broken, something dark, something inexplicably wild” in Treadwell’s eyes. “There are moments where he’s paranoid, moments where he’s grandiose, moments where he’s kind of defeated, where he’s star-like. He is quintessentially human, with all the defects of a human being, like all of us.” He was also amazed at the “grandiose beauty” of the Alaskan landscapes Treadwell had captured on his prosumer video camera.

As the editing progressed like wildfire, Herzog frantically wrote and recorded his narration, giving us an almost stream-of-consciousness look into what he was thinking and feeling upon viewing the footage for the first time. All the while, he manipulated material to his own purposes without fear. “You shouldn’t be a fly on the wall,” he says about making documentaries. “Be the hornet that moves in and that stings. . . Take charge of a situation, stylize it, create something, fantasize about it.”

That philosophy granted him the vision to unearth crucial shots from Treadwell’s videos, brief vignettes that rank among the most memorable in the film. “Sometimes I do discover footage that is amazing,” Herzog says, “and nobody sees the deep poetry in it.” In one wonderful clip, a fox puts its paws on the outside of a tent, and from within Treadwell playfully scratches its soles. “[The camera] is so bouncy that it was never considered by those who assisted me,” Herzog says, “and I think it is the most beautiful of any footage I’ve ever seen, so I used it. I think Treadwell would have overlooked it in the same way.”

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen HD

In another shot, Herzog noticed the haunting beauty of reeds swaying in the wind after Treadwell left the frame, and took the opportunity to dwell on the powerful yet subtle forces that course through the natural world, things Treadwell missed entirely in his rush to be the star of the show.

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen HD

The final film ended up evenly split between Treadwell’s footage and Herzog’s own, with the director’s calm, rational sensibility and eagle-eye proving a perfect match for Treadwell’s eclectic assortment of images and emotions.

As the movie came together a grand argument manifested itself, pitting Treadwell’s naïve adoration of nature (and equally naïve hatred of humanity’s intrusions into the wild) against Herzog’s gloomy pessimism built up over forty years of exploring jungles and wild lands. To the well-traveled director, Treadwell epitomized, “the Disney-ization of wild nature, which I really resent.” In Alaska, Herzog sought out the famed Grizzly Maze. “I was filming at the spot where [the tragedy] happened,” he says. “I even met some of the bears. I don’t find them fluffy, I don’t find them lovable.”

Meanwhile, throughout Treadwell’s own footage Herzog saw things that made him cringe. “It is not the right thing to walk up to a very big bear and touch his nose with your finger. . . It is questionable how much you protect a 1,200 pound grizzly bear by standing three feet away from him. . . There’s over and over and over moments where he steps right in the middle of the bears at arm’s length and sings to them and tells them how much he loves them. And I think that is wrong. You should not love the bears; you should respect them. Keep your distance and respect them.”

But even Herzog’s most stinging critiques are tinged with kindness. “It is not a nasty argument,” he stressed in interviews about the film. “It is in the same way that I argue with my brother who I love. . . I think I did have an instant rapport with Treadwell and an understanding to a certain depth of his person and character.”

There are two Herzogs at war in this film, as in all of his others: the hard-bitten realist versus the man who walked five-hundred miles in the daft hope that God might spare the life of his friend and mentor. In perhaps the most-quoted line of Grizzly Man, Herzog opines that the overwhelming nature of the universe is “chaos, hostility, and murder.” But look again at the shots in the picture that emit small flashes of “ecstatic truth.” They are not primarily ones that highlight “chaos, hostility, and murder,” but rather their exact opposites: order, serenity, life.

This is Herzog the spiritualist talking to us, someone who appreciates the capacity of human beings — even misguided, doomed ones — to in their own way stave off the darkness of the unfeeling universe, and attempt to carve out something good and noble amongst the vast sea of chaos, hostility, and murder that surrounds us. It is this aspect of the director that gets lost in the rush to declare him a megalomaniacal gloom-and-doomer. A few years ago, following a screening of one of his films, he was asked a pointed question: if he thinks the universe is made up of “chaos and hostility and murder,” how is it that one finds so much beauty in his work? Herzog’s cheeky answer? “Well, I stem the tide.”

In his first days making Grizzly Man, all the involved parties — production company, distributor, and TV Network — informed Herzog that they wanted his film to feature snatches of the surviving audio recording of Treadwell and Huguenard’s deaths, in the hope that the resulting sensationalism would pump up box-office receipts and TV ratings. But for Herzog — a director who often says “the poet must never avert his eyes” — there were deeper considerations. “I have a sensitivity towards audiences,” he says. “I do not like violence, graphic violence on the screen, in particular when it is violence against the defenseless. So I do not want to see in graphic detail the murder of a child. I do not want to see in graphic detail the rape of a woman.”

When he first listened to the tape of Treadwell’s brutal end, he judged it “horrifying. . . beyond all description. I’ve never heard anything like this.” Later he viewed the coroner’s photos and found them even worse. “It was instantly clear,” he said later, “Number one, I’m not going to do a snuff movie. Number two, there is such a thing as dignity and privacy of an individual’s death. So you just do not show it, you just do not do it. And I said, ‘Only over my dead body is this going to end up in the film’.”

His solution to the ethical problem posed by the death tape was inspired. In Grizzly Man, he offers the audience only a shot of himself, his back to the camera, listening to the tape on headphones. The sound is for his ears alone, but facing us in the same frame is Treadwell’s close friend Jewel Palovak. “She’s trying to read my face,” Herzog says, explaining that she becomes to the audience “like almost a mirror image of my face. . . It has great intensity and great anguish.” As Herzog recoils at what he hears, the emotions playing across her features tell us all we need to know about the horrors we (and she) are spared. It’s a deeply humane way of handling the issue. In this day and age, how many directors would resist using the easy shock value of recorded death-screams to juice up their film?

So many documentarians, both in books and on screen, are little more than rats who live on a mixture of sensationalism and bias. They demonize their subjects, ruthlessly cut interviews out of context, and slime innocent people under a pretense of objectivity. It’s fairly astounding that — given his profound disagreements with Treadwell’s philosophy — Herzog time and again treats his protagonists fairly, and finds numerous ways to leave the grieving survivors better than when he found them. By the time Grizzly Man stages an ashes-scattering ceremony for Treadwell’s friends, Herzog is no longer just telling a story or making profound points about Life and Nature: he’s marshaling his talents to the task of healing wounds. This is Godly work, and it is good to see.

Of course, the most grievous wounds of all belonged to Treadwell himself. A less fertile mind than Herzog’s might have deemed the dead man far beyond any sort of help. But as you watch the end of Grizzly Man, consider again that Catholic prayer for the dead I quoted above.

In an old 1984 TV documentary called The Dark Glow of the Mountains, Herzog relates a strangely beautiful fantasy he’s long held: a desire to one day head off toward the distant horizon, just walking and walking until the world ends. “I like the idea of just disappearing,” he said later when questioned about this dream. “Walking away, turning down the path and just carrying on until there is no more path to follow. I would like to have Huskies with leather saddlebags and just walk and walk until there is no road left.”

That is, of course, exactly the fate he bestows upon poor Timothy Treadwell in the last shots of Grizzly Man. Using the dead man’s own footage, Herzog sends Treadwell’s ghost off into the gorgeous Alaskan wilderness, followed first by his fox friends and later by a pair of genial bears, seemingly free of all the horrors and indignities that he brought upon himself and his causes in life. By melding these poignant videos to his own long-held fantasy of what would constitute a beautiful death, the director uses the poetic powers of cinema to suggest absolution and forgiveness. It’s as if Herzog has plucked a doomed soul out of an ocean of chaos and darkness and pointed it toward heaven.

Have mercy on the souls in purgatory, and especially on those that are most forsaken. Do Thou deliver them from the dire torments they endure. Call them, and admit them to Thy most sweet embrace in paradise.

What shall we call this Elysium we see on-screen as Grizzly Man fades to black, this magnificent Alaskan wilderness where Treadwell’s shade is allowed to escape its earthly torments, finding a heavenly peace among his beloved bears?

You have my leave to argue, but I’d just as soon call it God’s Country.

This concludes our look at Werner Herzog and his sublime masterpiece Grizzly Man. Come back next Saturday as For Conservative Movie Lovers begins studying an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Grizzly Man is an easy movie to find, so there’s no excuse not to do your solemn FCML duty and watch it. You can buy it as low as $8.99 at Amazon, or for $3-$5 used at any number of places. If renting is your game, head on over to Netflix and pop it into your queue. Whatever you do, get ahold of it and give it a whirl. If money is no object, there’s a Blu-ray version available for a ridiculous $45.99. Have fun.