Timothy Treadwell and Werner Herzog

 
Grizzly Man is a great documentary.

It's not a documentary about bears. It's a documentary about a very complex human being.

The only problem with the documentary is Werner Herzog, the director himself. He should remember that he's an artist telling this story about human psychology. He knows how to do that, and he's very good at that. When he starts to talk about bears, it gets stupid.

Timothy Treadwell seems to have this childish idea of the natural world being a world of "harmony". Werner Herzog, on the other hand, disagrees and claims that the natural world is a world of "murder" and other mean things. That is equally childish. Enough with the teenage angst, Werner!

Treadwell and Herzog are both wrong. The natural world is not a paradise, but it's not "evil" either. It's full of things that we consider "bad" and full of things that we consider "good", but essentially it's neutral.

Timothy seems to think that the wild bears are basically humans. He doesn't realize that the bears don't love him like he loves them; he's an irrational romantic. Werner claims that the bears are some kind of emotionless robots mainly interested in food. Why? Because that's what he "sees" when he looks into their eyes; he's an irrational romantic.

Yes, bears are not humans. But it's a scientific, biological fact that they are social animals that share our capacity for feeling. The world of bears is often violent, but it's also full of things like play, joy and friendship. Herzog can't see that because bears don't communicate their emotions the same way that humans do. In other words, he's like a dog thinking that humans can't feel joy just because humans don't wag their tails. Ask Jonathan Balcombe, he knows this stuff.

Anyway, it's a beautiful documentary, and both Timothy and Werner seem like very decent human beings after all. Here's one unrelated bear playing with his human friend, both of them getting the joke: