Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man

"Hi, I'm Timothy Treadwell and this is the Grinch
Oh Boy, is he grumpy!"

The above is spoken by a blonde man-boy distilled from that mysterious cartoon heartland of borderline America. Behind him on some bright green astro-turf looking tundra a threadbare brown bear roots around disconsolately in this unpromising landscape. There is nothing here of any consequence - for bears, for people or, I suspect, for film-makers.

No black binbags containing sanitary towels to drive the bear into an olfactory frenzy - not a discarded take-away or even a crisp packet in sight. Its wet, its cold, the brief summer has passed and with it the salmon, the elk, the roots and berries from which the bear derives its impetus to sleep fitfully through the winter. The only thing left is Treadwell, Timothy Treadwell.

The conclusion's kind of obvious, and so it was that within a few hours or minutes of that dreary shot 'The Grinch' had fully lived up to the requirements of etiquette expected in the world of Dr Seuss and torn both Timothy (who would not listen to his nurse) and Timothy's partner to pieces.

The bear's name, of course, wasn't really The Grinch, just as Timothy Treadwell wasn't the man's real name. It was an alias adopted to make him more alliteratively interesting - you be the judge.

Where do they come from this long lineage of peculiarly american fools? What triggers them and what decides them in their choice of career? For example,whether to play a ukelele surrounded by flowers while singing the worst dross of the jazz age in a preposterous trilling falsetto like Tiny Tim in the sixties - or befriend and murder young men and bury their dismembered bodies in a cellar in Texas? Shoot John Lennon or make an album with Frank Zappa (a double album at that - wild man fischer)? or go off into the wilderness of Alaska for 13 summers in a row 'saving the bears' from their imaginary oppressors without brief or invitation - like Timothy Treadwell...

(This guy looks physically and sounds emotionally like the product of some unthinkable dalliance between john denver, boris johnson and post sinatra/woody allen mia farrow).

The only relief comes when Herzog declares the universe as driven by "murder, chaos and blind chance" - a fierce antidote to "Timothy's sentimentalised" delusions.

(I can't even say Treadwell anthropomorphises his subjects as i'd lay myself open to accusations of humanising mine).

While Herzog is clearly irritated by his subject, trying desperately to find mythology in a hundred hours footage of unremitting stupidity, he is also compelled to continue the vain quixotic search for primal innocence he began in the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Beneath the scar tissue of cynicism beats the heart of a romantic who cannot avoid the realisation that once more he must settle for the artifice of film - like Lene Riefenstahl and her Masai.

Unlike Werner Herzog I have only impatience and revulsion for the follies of Timothy Treadwell. I agree with the helicopter pilot who said 'he got what was coming to him'. I'm unable to find compassion for him and am immediately disposed to pathologise and dismiss him as a borderline personality replete with all the familiar destructive traits of narcissism i.e. a tenuous grasp on the reality of others and an abiding sense of self-pity, selfishness and a total lack of empathy.

I felt sorry for the girl, the hardly seen assistant/girlfriend who was 'frightened of the bears, feared disaster, and wanted to go home' I wonder what her story was - what brought her to deliver herself into the hands of this self-absorbed, dangerously, permanently childlike fool?

In the words of T.S Eliot -'Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom remember us - if at all - not as lost violent souls but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men,
alas our voices are very small'

Oh yeah, and the bear shot down like maximillian in a righteous fusillade - mild regret for him.

PS. The more discerning readers may have noticed that the illustration is not a bear but is in fact a wooden tiger eating an equally wooden British officer. (Tipu's Tiger - as seen at the V and A, London). I make no apologies.