What Grizzly Man Tells Us About Creating Our Own Meaning
Is Timothy Treadwell, as presented in Werner Herzog's documentary, a role model or a cautionary tale? In fact, he's both at the same time.
Much of what makes Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man so compelling and challenging is that we can take from it two central observations, statements which would seem to directly conflict with each other and yet which are both obviously true given the material the film shows us. The first: that in his years camping out among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness, Timothy Treadwell found a deep, powerful source of meaning and joy for himself, and lived his life with as much exuberance and satisfaction as any human being could reasonably hope for. The second: that Timothy Treadwell was a much-disturbed individual guided by false notions about nature who turned his personal vendettas into a dangerous and irresponsible lifestyle.
The primary focus of the film is not really on the Alaskan bears to which Treadwell dedicated his life, nor on any broader environmentalist, conservationist movement surrounding Treadwell’s activities. It is squarely focused on Treadwell himself, attempting to unravel what might prompt a man to live among some of the most dangerous mammals in the world and figure out what we are to make of all of it. The central question of the film is one of assigning worth to Treadwell and his project: was this mission of living among, studying, and documenting the grizzly bears in the way he did worthwhile? Or, more bluntly, did Timothy Treadwell live a good life?
Here is where our two conflicting observations come into play and make answering this question quite difficult. By most any objective measure, we can only conclude that Treadwell was deluded. Yet from his perspective, he could hardly have lived a better life, and he would certainly not have chosen to live it any other way. As such, Grizzly Man ends up being a particularly effective case study in the tension between created meaning and objective reality, between how we frame the world in order to live in it and how the world really is. Treadwell represents an extreme case of reframing the world to one’s own liking, but its difference with the reframing we all do in our ordinary lives is only one of degree.
