Ghost in the Wire

My partner and I watched the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man the other night. A brief summary for those unaware of the film: a man (Tim Treadwell) decides to live among giant, brown grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska, and does so for 13 summers, imagining himself as protector of and friend to the bears; during the last five summers he begins to video his encounters with the bears (and foxes), becoming increasingly cinematic in his efforts and developing a new, on-film persona; eventually, he and his girlfriend are attacked and eaten by a particularly aggressive and hungry bear.

Herzog, with his pronounced need for profundity, treats everything in the story with a heavy hand, directing interviews with those who knew Treadwell with all the delicacy of a broadsword. Speaking to a friend and former girlfriend (from years back), he asks: "Do you feel like Tim's widow?" Shocked by the question, but enjoying the camera, she pauses a bit before answering in the affirmative. The coroner narrates his findings as if the entire thing has been scripted and rehearsed twenty times, and Herzog even lets the camera roll a little longer, catching the scripted "unscripted" moment when the coroner lapses into thought. And then there's the horribly awkward moment when Tim's still-ticking watch, which is found on his severed arm (the rest of it having been eaten, clothing and all, by said bear), is passed on to Tim's promptedly self-proclaimed widow.

But nothing quite prepares one for the moment when Herzog himself enters the open frame of the camera, head turned away from the lens and towards Tim's "widow," who sits with a video camera in her lap, out of which snakes an audio cord that works its way up to headphones covering Herzog's ears. Herzog is listening to the audio of Tim's (and his actual girlfriend's) final moments, with the two of them moaning and screaming as the bear rips flesh from bone. Herzog is nice enough to narrate: "I hear Tim moaning. He's telling her, run away, run away." I'm sure the tape is nauseatingly traumatic. I'm sure everyone can imagine just how nauseating and traumatic it is. But Herzog apparently thinks that he needs to beat us over the head with it, telling the widow: "You must never listen to this tape. Never." Even better, he tells her she must destroy it, or else it will be the "white elephant" in her room (I think he just meant "elephant" in the room, but whatever.)

This is exactly the sort of thing that bugs me about Herzog's films, this almost compulsive desire he has to maximize the aura of whatever the object in question - an audio tape or an image. It is as if every film is an attempt to urinate on Benjamin's famous account of aura's death, and to film that urination with unbearable scrutiny, preferably on the top of a mountain never before climbed, while as of yet unclassified animals watch silently in the backdrop. Destroy the audio and the audio's trauma remains untouchable by the audience, and thus unpassable, the ultimate apotheosis of its cinematic debut. It is there without being there, and as such the audience can only experience its horror as Herzog's horror, thus transferring the power of the object of the film to the film itself.

This leads me to my other gripe with the film. Herzog believes that Treadwell's death comes about in part because of Treadwell's desire to escape the chaos of the human world for the simplicity of the animal world. This won't work, Herzog informs us with all the gentleness and nuance of a dropped piano, because the world isn't structured by simplicity and order but rather by chaos, complexity, and murder. Binary thinking notwithstanding, there is a pretty fundamental flaw in Herzog's interpretation of Treadwell's films and diaries, namely: if the man wants to escape the human world so badly, why is he transcribing his thoughts and experiences in ink and in film? Why is he so concerned with reproducing his experiences with the assumptions that others will read or view his reproductions? This is a different question, but it's a question that's far more interesting than the ones Herzog is trying to get to with the film. But it's a question that would also have forced Herzog to ask what in the world he gets out of his film, this film in particular. Maybe had he pursued an answer to this question, he wouldn't need to beat his audience over the head repeatedly with the supposed profundities of his other queries.

All that being said, it's worth watching the movie. Not because of Herzog and the eye-rolling that will accompany much of his commentary, but because of the utterly fascinating movies left behind by Treadwell (over 100 hours of film), which Herzog does supply in good measure, and which will provide much - please forgive this - to chew on.