Review of Grizzly Man (2005) by Josh B — 30 Jan 2012

I get the feeling he had tired with the "people world" and wanted to become something else, in the end a bear, just like the film says. His sense of purpose, his sense that the bears needed him for protection, may have been more just his way of doing that, which makes these videos, intentionally or not, an insight into the mind of a bear in the bear community, rather than a man living alone among the bears. As a bear in this community, his human body gave him a uniqueness that provided him an evident purpose, but that purpose was secondary to his own purpose as a living being, namely the need for community. Who cares if his presence in Grizzly Maze really did much to protect the animals there? His real purpose was to become a bear and live in communion with the bears, which he magnificently accomplished. His constant declarations of his great mission to save the bears, I see this as a window into the mind of a bear; the way the bears live, they all seem like self-appointed protectors of the community, all with an enormous sense of place and self-assertion in their environment, but then they kill their own children so they might have sex more, or they fight over mates and disrupt the unity of the herd. This sense of purpose and mission that he so endlessly professes is necessary for his acceptance into the bear community; just like he said in the opening of the film, had he not stood his ground and asserted himself like a bear they would have attacked him long before they did. His sense of purpose was a side effect of his transformation into a bear.

I feel like the thesis statement for this film is Treadwell's screaming at god for rain and then joy at the rain when it comes. You can see in his smile a sense of self-congratulations, as if he played some role in providing the rain for his herd. He is in a situation where he is helpless; nothing he could do or offer would help; he is useless, purposeless, meaningless, so he, intentionally or not, creates a meaning for himself in his own mind, by doing something anyway and convincing himself it has meaning.

This bear community is just the niche it seems he found that he fit into, but in his ravings we find the heart of the problem in the human condition, which is purposelessness, our inability to see any reason for our existence. It seems he was able to escape this problem by becoming a bear, but his rantings give us a window into the mind of a bear, and in that mind, since we are observing objectively from outside, we look at the big picture and see this same problem. The solution to meaninglessness, as this film seems to suggest, is only to pretend one so desperately that you convince yourself you have one. Treadwell at one point says they are "playing like children, but it's very serious." In one scene he talks about the danger of what he is doing, "The government's given me all the have, so far. I've stood up to it. I've had danger in the boat; I've almost died; I've almost fallen off a cliff, yeah." That's the important part of the purpose: the danger and persisting through that danger. That at least affirms the person's value and worth, even if it achieves nothing valuable beyond that affirmation. Treadwell wasn't about protecting the bears; he was about becoming a bear and surviving as a bear, and in the end he died as a bear, eaten during a period where food was scarce, just like the bears had eaten their own children before during the drought. Did he actually help the bears? Maybe, the film does not seem to care very much, but in the end he succeeded in becoming a bear, and that makes him a hero whether he really helped or not.