grizzly man

Has anyone seen this movie? Wow. I rented it the other night and it kept me up until 3 in the morning and I can't even explain why. I didn't know much about this movie except that it was about a man who lived among grizzly bears in Alaska and who was eventually killed by a bear. From this, I assumed that Timothy Treadwell, the title character, was a scientist of some sort--a biologist or an ecologist. I didn't know that he was a novice, a lost boy, a manic Mr. Rogers with a bandana instead of a sweater and a neighborhood full of grizzlies. When I first started watching the movie, I thought I couldn't finish it because Treadwell was so saccharine, so absurd.

But I got caught up in the narrative, the strangeness of it all. I started rewatching it the next day, but I didn't think I could handle it all again. I think what kept me up was thinking about how confused we are about the natural world. Here's a man who feels so out of place in the world of people that he decides to retreat to the wild. But he doesn't fully understand what that wild, animal world is all about. He talked often about how the bears could maim and kill, but he didn't really seem to believe it. Or he seemed to believe that it wouldn't happen to him, that he was somehow different, that he was somehow a bear. One of the men who helped with the recovery effort for Treadwell's body said that Treadwell seemed to think that the bears were just people in bear's clothing. That seemed an accurate assessment. I understand his need to retreat into wild nature because we have removed ourselves inappropriately far from those wild places and creatures and I think in doing so, we lose something of ourselves. But in the removal, I think it's easy to forget that wild nature is, well, wild and grizzly bears aren't fuzzy friends that we can call Mr. Chocolate.