Timothy Treadwell is one of those strange people it is truly impossible to pin down. He is all over the map. In the end, we take out of him what we first put into him: “I”.
GRIZZLY MAN
A film by Werner Herzog
[b]Herzog: All these majestic creatures were filmed by Timothy Treadwell who lived among wild grizzlies for summers. He went to remote areas of the Alaskan peninsula believing that he was needed there to protect these animals and educate the public. During his last five years out there, he took along a video camera and shot over hours of footage. What Treadwell intended was to show these bears in their natural habitat. Having myself filmed in the wilderness of jungles, I found that beyond the wildlife film, in his material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth. I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil. As if there was a desire in him to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears, Treadwell reached out, seeking a primordial encounter. But in doing so, he crossed an invisible borderline.
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Pilot: Right up top of the hill here is where we found what was left of Tim’s body… his head and a little bit of backbone. And we found a hand, arm, wristwatch still on the arm. I remember the watch. Shoot, I can remember the watch. And here’s a guy that used to dive in the lake down here naked to scare the airplanes away. And here I’m finding his watch and arm on top of the hill. And here’s about all that’s left of the bear that killed him. A few pieces of rib bone. This bear was shot, and drug off and eaten by other bears here, right in this area. The tough thing out of all this is Tim would have never wanted to see any bears killed. Even if they had killed him, he would’ve… He would’ve been happy if nobody found him.
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Helicopter pilot: I’m Sam Egli. I was called out as a helicopter pilot to assist on the cleanup after the Treadwell tragedy of last winter. I was in there the morning the Fish and Game officers were there examining the bear that had done the killing. The bear was all cut open. It was full of people. It was full of clothing. It was… We hauled away four garbage bags of people out of that bear. Treadwell was, I think, meaning well, trying to do things to help the resource of the bears. But to me he was acting like… like he was working with people wearing bear costumes out there instead of wild animals. Those bears are big and ferocious, and they come equipped to kill ya and eat ya. And that’s just what Treadwell was asking for. He got what he was asking for. He got what he deserved, in my opinion. The tragedy of it was taking the girl with him. I think the only reason that Treadwell lasted as long in the game as he did was that the bears probably thought there was something wrong with him. Like he was mentally retarded or something. That bear, I think, that day decided that he had either had enough of Tim Treadwell, or that something clicked in that bear’s head that he thought, “Hey, you know, he might be good to eat.” My opinion, I think Treadwell thought these bears were big, scary looking, harmless creatures that he could go up and pet and sing to, - and they would bond - Look it there! As children of the universe or some odd. I think he had lost sight of what was really going on.
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Herzog: Amie Huguenard remains a great unknown of this film. Her family declined to appear on camera, and Amie herself remains hidden in Treadwell’s footage. In nearly hours of his video, she appears exactly two times. Here disembarking from the plane in the year of her death. We never see her face. Here it is obscured by her hands and her hair. Greetings, children of America. The second shot that we have doesn’t show her face either. She remains a mystery, veiled by a mosquito net, obscured, unknown. Only through Treadwell’s diaries do we know that she was frightened of bears. The only other hint we have of her presence is this shot here of Treadwell. It is handheld, and we can only deduct it must have been Amie operating the camera.
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Herzog: During the fatal attack, there was no time to remove the lens cap. Jewel Palovak allowed me to listen to the audio. I hear rain, and I hear Amie, “Get away! Get away! Go away!” Can you turn it off? Jewel, you must never listen to this.
Jewel [a close friend of Treadwell’s] I know, Werner. I’m never going to.
Herzog: And you must never look at the photos I’ve seen at the coroner’s office.
Jewel: I will never look at them. - Yeah. They said it was bad. Now you know why no one’s gonna hear it.
HerzogI think you, you should not keep it. You should destroy it. - Yeah. - I think that’s what you should do.
Jewel: Okay.
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Treadwell’s father [discussing his son]: I know he got on Love Connection with Chuck Woolery. I think he got on another show. There were promises made that never came true. And he tested with the actors to get the bartender job on Cheers. And allegedly he came in second to Woody Harrelson. How close a second? I don’t know. But that is what really destroyed him. That he did not get that job on Cheers. He spiraled down.
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Treadwell: This is a bumblebee who expired as it was working at doing the pollen thing on this Alaskan fireweed. And it just is… Just has really touched me to no end. It was doing its duty, it was flying around. Working busy as a bee, and it died right there. It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s tragic. I love that bee.
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Treadwell: There’s Wendy’s poop. It just came out of her butt. I can feel it. I can feel the poop. It’s warm. It just came from her butt. This was just inside of her. My girl. I’m touching it. It’s her poop. It’s Wendy’s poop. I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop, but it was inside of her. It’s what… It’s her life! It’s her! And she’s so precious to me.
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Treadwell: Everything about them is perfect. Perfection belonged to the bears.
Herzog: But once in a while, Treadwell came face-to-face with the harsh reality of wild nature. This did not fit into his sentimentalized view that everything out there was good, and the universe in balance and in harmony. Male bears sometimes kill cubs to stop the females from lactating, and thus have them ready again for fornication.
Treadwell [finding a fox killed by wolves]: Oh, God! I love you. I love you and I don’t understand. It’s a painful world.
Herzog: Here I differ with Treadwell. He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.
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Treadwell [reacting to a prolonged drought that has brought the bears to cannibalism—no salmon run] This does not make me very, very happy. I want rain. I want, if there’s a God, to kick some ass down here. Let’s have some water! Jesus, boy! Let’s have some water! Christ man or Allah or Hindu floaty thing, let’s have some fucking water for these animals!
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Herzog: Now Treadwell crosses a line with the Park Service which we will not cross. He attacks the individuals with whom he worked for years.
Treadwell: I beat your fucking asses! I protected the animals! I did it! Fuck you! Animals rule. Timothy conquered. Fuck you, Park Service! Okay.
Herzog: It is clear to me that the Park Service is not Treadwell’s real enemy. There’s a larger, more implacable adversary out there: The people’s world and civilization.
Treadwell: “Oh, Timothy, I’m getting a bad feeling about you.”
Herzog: He only has mockery and contempt for it. His rage is almost incandescent, artistic. The actor in his film has taken over from the filmmaker. I have seen this madness before on a film set. But Treadwell is not an actor in opposition to a director or a producer. He’s fighting civilization itself. It is the same civilization that cast Thoreau out of Walden and John Muir into the wild.
Treadwell: Animals rule. All right. That’s my happy stuff. Let’s do a couple of nice takes now. Oh, man, did I get angry! Fuck them, right? They do not watch these animals. They don’t care about these animals. All they wanna do is screw people like me around. It’s amazing. “Let the fishermen fucking shoot the animals. Let the fucking poachers come in here and fuck 'em. Let the fucking commercial people fuck them around with their fucking cameras and the tourists. But we’re gonna go screw with Timothy Treadwell because he loves animals and teaches kids for free. Let’s go. Let’s do that. That’s what we’re gonna do.” Well, fuck them. Fuck them. I beat you, motherfuckers. I beat you. Beat ya, so fuck you. I beat ya. I beat ya. I’m the champion. I’m the fucking champion. I beat you. I beat your fucking asses. Fucking losers! Fucking nobodies! Fuck! Fucking fucks!
…
Herzog: This is Timothy Treadwell’s and Amie Huguenard’s route to the site of their death. There was a certain absurdity in their end. As usual, the expedition was over by the end of September, and both had returned to Kodiak on their way back to California. Treadwell writes in his diary that at the airport he had an altercation with an obese airline agent over the validity of his ticket. "How much I hate the people’s world, " he writes. And disgusted, he decides right then to return to this spot and his bears. Once back in the Grizzly Maze, Amie had mixed feelings. She was afraid of the bears and had a deadline to return for a new job and spoke openly about leaving him for good. According to one of the last entries in Treadwell’s diary, Amie called him hell-bent on destruction. And yet, inexplicably, she remained with him here in the Maze. Normally Treadwell would not be here this late in the year. And upon their return, he discovered that many of his bear friends had gone into hibernation. And scary, unknown and wilder bears from the interior had moved in.
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Treadwell [a few days before he dies]: Let me tell you. Honestly, camping in grizzly country is dangerous. People who camp in grizzly country should camp out in the open to let the bears know where the tent is. My camp is unseen. It is the most dangerous camping, the most dangerous living in the history of the world by any human being. I have lived longer with wild brown grizzly bears, without weapons, and that’s the key, without weapons, in modern history than any human on earth, any human. And I have remained safe. But every second of every day that I move through this jungle, or even at the tent, I am right on the precipice of great bodily harm or even death. And I am so thankful for every minute of every day that I found the bears and this place, the Grizzly Maze. But let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen. There is no, no, no other place in the world that is more dangerous, more exciting than the Grizzly Maze. Come here and camp here. Come here and try to do what I do. You will die. You will die here. You will frickin’ die here.
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Herzog: Very late in the process of editing this film, we were given access to Treadwell’s last videotape. Here he may have filmed his murderer. The killer bear we know was a male whom years earlier the Park Service had anesthetized. They extracted a tooth which established him as being at the time of the attack. Quite old for a bear. They also tagged him via a tattoo on his inner lip. They had given him a number only, Bear 141 . That’s all we know of him. And here. Could this one be Bear 141? What looks playful could be desperation. So late in the season, the bear is diving deep for one of the few remaining salmon carcasses at the bottom of the lake. Treadwell keeps filming the bear with a strange persistence. And all of a sudden, this. Is Amie trying to get out of the shot? Did Treadwell wait till his last tape to put her in his film? And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior. Amie Huguenard was screaming.
Doctor: All of a sudden, the intensity of Amie’s screaming reached a new height and became very, very loud. And she really now was screaming at the top of her lungs. These horrifying screams were punctuated by Timothy saying, “Go away. Leave me. Go away. Run! Get out of here.” In other words, Timothy is trying now to save Amie’s life because Timothy realizes, at this point in time during this attack, Timothy knows he’s gonna die. He knows that. My sense of listening to this tape is that the bear let go, probably let go of the top of his head where I found massive lacerations. That is tears of the scalp away from his head. Suddenly, though, the bear, after letting go, grabbed Timothy somewhere in the high leg area. And Timothy, appropriately in my opinion, as a human being, decided now is the time to save one life anyway. If his life was going away, if his life was fading away, now was the time for Amie to get out.
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Herzog: Treadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance into a fog. What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear. That it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature. And that, for me, beyond his mission, gives meaning to his life and to his death.[/b]