If only Timothy Treadwell had only focused on his relationship with red foxes, he probably would be alive today. I found his relationship with these very habituated foxes far more interesting than his bizarre anthropomorphism of Alaskan brown bears (which aren't grizzlies).
I don’t know if anyone has read a better review of Grizzly Man than this one, but I haven’t.
That one post gets me an astonishing number of hits for “Grizzly Man Mocumentary” and of course the gore seekers looking for the audio tape.
As I wrote over there on that blog, GRIZZLY MAN is not a documentary about bears any more than Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO is a documentary about building an opera house. The only difference is that Klaus Kinski is an “actor” and Timothy Tredwell is “not”.
It’s a mistake of animal lovers (and Animal Planet) to treat it as one.
Herzog is a European film director of a particular kind. People steeped in American films really don’t know how to watch his work.
BTW, I met Treadwell a zillion years ago on one of his fundraising tours and saw his footage with a bunch of bear biologist/conservationists. Afterwards, we all pretty much agreed that he was going to get killed one day.
He should have become the Red Fox Man.
That would have been a whole lot more interesting. Those foxes were cool. I suspect that our relationship with wolves was once like the relationship he had with those red foxes.
Yeah, being FoxMan better than being BearPoop.
But I enjoyed the film, even though I have doubts about how much of Timmy’s footage was staged.
I like the “who done it” theme in the film. Was it just that Timmy’s luck had run out? Was it that the bears were hungerier that year? Was it, like the film implies, that his habituated bears were all hibernating, and a wilder bear who had not fattened up found him?
Or was it not the bears at all? According to his diary, his girlfiend told him that night that she was leaving him when the plane picked them up in the morning. Timmy was an emotional person, and rash enough to run off to Alaska and live with bears.
Very sadly, he wouldn’t have been the first man to try to kill a woman who was ending a relationship. People can be weird. Some people can not deal with the ending of a relationship, the emotional upheavel is too much for their minds to control – they flip and their emotional self rules their actions. Of course, some people’s emotional self rules their actions all of the time, so, for them, no flipping has to occur.
Did Timmy flip out? Did he yell or cry? Did the noise attract the bear? Yelling and crying – pent up emotional release – are not part of a bear’s life. Predation is. To a bear, a break up could sound like a death battle and food in the making.
Or if it had been one of Timmy’s pet bears, it could have killed his girlfriend as a way of protecting Timmy – there are people whose dogs attacked one of the family members because they were being yelled out. Yell at your kid, the dog sides with you = bitten kid. Your spouse screams at you, dog sides with spouse without thinking that it is you the spouse is yelling at.
This happened among my dog pack, but only among the dogs, not with a person. Dogs in dog pack get political, they choose sides, and change sides often. It’s not about friendship or whose your mommy or whose your grown baby. It’s about cunning and fighting your way to the top of an imaginary heap.
Top Dog. Maybe all chewed up, but sitting on the top. Dogs don’t think of the stupidity of this sort of effort.
A dog might side with the top dog, but let the situation shift, where it looks like the top dog might loose if the challenger helps – 2 against 1, and some little dog will side with the 2nd dog and go up against a huge dog who he has always sided with before.
It was much easier to deal with the dogs when there got to be enough of them that a certain family member quit going out back with the pack, and just interacted with the dogs whose turn it was to be inside. But in short order it was neccessary to seperate them into smaller packs – I couldn’t be there 24/7 and it was too intense.
But in Timmy’s case, he didn’t take sides – he mentions (either in the film or one of the videos) a bear running to him expecting him to side with her to fight against a bear who was chasing her. Could sometimg like this have happened?
Or did Timmy’s position hold, but he struck his girlfriend because she was leaving him? Or could he have even planned and killed her, hurting of the break up too much for him to handle?
Maybe the thought that he couldn’t be up there with bears alone (too lonely for such an extrovert) and the idea of not being able to go live with the bears again the next summer just too much?
Timmy seemed to have a real weak point there. He flimed and wrote as if he were alone – but he wasn’t. He needed people to talk to, to be with, but he could not admit to this, even when it was weird not to.
What was on that tape. Really the sounds of their deaths? Or a staged ending? Some people just up and kill themselves, but other plan it out. What they want to wear when they die, what message to leave behind, who to take with them?
Could he have got her to act like a bear was attacking 9on tape), telling her that he would give up living with bears and would settle down with her, but that he wanted an ending to his movie? Maybe that was the ending, the message, he wanted to leave.
Maybe it was murder-suicide and a bear was only involved in that one came along in the morning and started eating their dead bodies?
But then again, they were probably killed by a bear. But why that night, just as they were to leave in the morning, the night she told him that when they got to the (bigger) airport, that she would be going a different way?
Generally, there are people who are security -depended and people love living risky life. It may be also called stupidity but such a kind the man is.
I am the Fox Lady type, not the risky Bear Lady type. Many people are not either, they are the Stay Out of the Forest type.