OT- Grizzly Man

[inGobwetrust]

I just finished watching "Grizzly Man" on The Discovery Channel and just can't get over the insufferable arrogance of Timothy Treadwell. I came away with the feeling that he didn't have a death wish the way many people surmise but that he thought he was invincible and that he had svengali powers over the bears. His assertion that he was the lone protection of the bears was the ultimate example of his arrogance. If anything, he endangered the bears by acclimating them be being in close proximity to humans.

Sorry for the rant but this kind of self agrandizement really pi$$es me off. I just thought I'd see if my fellow forumites feel like I do or if you guys think I'm way off base.

[manet]

i'd send herzog $10 to melt all that wackos footage

[jerk]

word.

it took the jerk and mrs. jerk 10 minutes before we started cheering for the bears. couldn't think of a person who was more deserving of being bear lunch than that guy.

his arrogance was only exceeded by his stupidity. which is a trait far more infuriating to the jerk.

jerk

[manet]

.

[Lost Weekend]

bears probably got sick of his stupid little songs too

[manet]

.

[gasman]

I think it showed the depth of his mental illness.

[parallelfish]

A lost man in the wilderness...

[bcm119]

What gasman said. And-
I'm not so sure he was arrogant and stupid. He was just a screwed up dude. He had problems with alcohol/drugs and was obviously prone to self destructive behaviour. It all made sense when he described his past problems, and then how the bears gave him new reason to live without alcohol. He was addicted to the feeling of being in constant danger, and at the same time feeling as if he'd conquered that danger. Obviously a sick man, but also a passionate and interesting guy. He was a good guy who fell victim to a mental illness of sorts, and I wasn't happy to see him die. However, it couldn't have had a happy ending given the situation. It was a great movie because it showed the depth of this guy's sickness as well as showing some unbelievable footage of the bears and wilderness. Just sayin.

[inGobwetrust]

It should be noted that 2 bears were killed as a result of Treadwell's death. When law enforcement came to investigate the scene 2 bears were stalking them and behaved very aggressively. In the wild bears normally stear well clear of humans but he changed that in his own little "kingdom" where he made good and sure that bears had nothing to fear from humans. So much for protecting them!

[bcm119]

It should be noted that 2 bears were killed as a result of Treadwell's death. When law enforcement came to investigate the scene 2 bears were stalking them and behaved very aggressively. In the wild bears normally stear well clear of humans but he changed that in his own little "kingdom" where he made good and sure that bears had nothing to fear from humans. So much for protecting them!
True. That was the other half of the tragedy. The whole damn thing was a big unfortunate mess, all of it sad with multiple victims.

[classic1]

'Burp'. Pass me a toothpick Boo Boo

[William]

I haven't seen it yet, but did see a report on the story a number of months ago. Sad situation all around. For the bears, his girlfriend, and himself.

Sad? Yes.
Stupid? Yes.


William

[Tom]

I haven't seen this movie but I've seen a couple other Herzog movies and that guy is in my opinion one of the very best film makers around. Some day I'll get off my lazy *** and try to locate more of his work.

[keno]

classic1, excellent!

I liked the interview of his folks on the couch best in which father described the source of his son's decline. You couldn't make his father up.

How Herzog was able to spend so much time with GM without either killing him or himself I can't imagine.

keno

[Kevan]

what was with that girlfriend???

Regardless of his wackiness, there was remarkable footage of the bears and he with his pet fox. Must admit I just sat there watching the film wondering when it was dinner time.

[JohnS]

classic1, excellent!

How Herzog was able to spend so much time with GM without either killing him or himself I can't imagine.

keno
From what I read, those were all "home movies" shot by GM with a tripod and such.

[sc53]

Treadwell was one sick dude, and his ridiculous rants on saving the bears almost had me treating my nice TV like a pinata. The whole film seemed to me a portrait of mental illness. The girlfriend's choice to hang around, and actually RETURN with him for that final feast, after they had made it to the airport for the return flight home, was just infuriating! She was crazy too. A folie a deux that ended VERY badly.

[Skrawny]

I saw it as a sad example of untreated mental illness. He appears (from the couch psychiatrist point-of-view) to meet all criteria for manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder.

FYI, the aspects of a manic episode from the DSMIV include:

1) inflated self-esteem or grandiosity which may include thoughts of super-powers or abilities
2) decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep)
3) more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
4) flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
5) distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
6) increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation
7) excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, drugs, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments)

I think he thought bears thought like humans. He was not close to a naturalist/biologist; he was desperate, undertreated, and guilty of tragic anthropomorphous.

Herzog's comment about seeing in the bears eyes "only the overwhelming indifference of nature" was great and the "performance" of the coroner was classic...
Don't get me wrong, I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen too!
-s

[cpg]

I agree with most of what's been said but you have to admit that was a pretty good flick. I think the film maker did an excellant job of not picking sides too much. As someone that enjoys backpacking even in grizzly country, I'll stick to steering clear of grizzly confrontations.

Curt

[lnomalley]

as a shrink (yup) i have to say it was one of the best films i've seen about bipolar disorder... i thought the subtext about sentimentalizing nature versus herzog's more perhaps accurate view was brilliant.

as for saying that he got what he 'deserved'.. well.. we all die. what he got was some sort of meaning out of life to attach all his suffering to and what he ended up with was a death he was he felt was heroic. that's more than a lot of us will get out of our deaths.

perhaps we all race to judge things we don't understand beause they are so different from our subjective experiences. how many times i've heard that 'he deserved to die' from a non-cyclist reading an article in the paper about a cyclist hit and killed by a truck on pch.

of all the disorders i've seen i n my life... i've seen more death from bipolar disorder than any of the other ones combined. the bear might have tore him to bits... but mental illness certainly got him there. on simple terms he was a guy with more love to give than any person could receive. who knows. maybe that was a projection onto wilderness of his need to be love and accepted and seen as beautiful (something he was unable to get outof his own life) ... whatever the stuff he was working out.... i think by the time we trivialize any person's death on a cycling board we've lost our way.

they say the way to manage one's suffering is to attach meaning to it. some lives can only be endured if there is a reason for all the dysphoria.. and in that sense he certainly found a cause... one important enough to put aside all reason and to live in isolationand in the wild. it's easy to sit here and see the stupidity if only you hold his actions up to your rational veiwpoint. but it's also easy to look at his life and death and see the logic.
i tell my patients this one thing about bipolar disorder.... the reason to treat it is because it involves so many distortions of reality. and you can't live that far our of what is real before it kills you. the mania doean't kill you, the depression doesnt kill you.. it's the distortions (i'm oversimplifying to make a point).

i'd met him... he was bartender at a popular place down on main street in santa monica... and he does have one thing in common with all of us.. we all die.

so there you go.


on a more relavent note.... simoni and david millar were in town for TOC and will be doing wind tunnel stuff in san diego (whale vagina) tomorrow. so they showed up to stage 7 . did a warm up lap.. and rode up the beach path to venice and had coffee on main street. could you imagine being out with the fam for a sunday ride on the insanely rollerblade crowded bike path and se simoni and millar roll by? millar said no one recognized them. how cool is that? i guess all the bikeys were down at the race and so no one was around that would know who those to skinny dudes in yellow kit were. look for millar to be on form for the tdf prologue... he's putting 6 hour days alone in the saddle in the rain north of london. seems like a really chill guy.


(scuse the typos.. i jammed this out).

[manet]

as for saying that he got what he 'deserved'.. well.. we all die. what he got was some sort of meaning out of life to attach all his suffering to and what he ended up with was a death he was he felt was heroic. that's more than a lot of us will get out of our deaths.


is this the result of the illness, the desire to have a heroic death?

[inGobwetrust]

He may have seen his own death as heroic but what about the death of his girlfriend and the 2 bears? What about the lives of the people and bears who travel that part of Alaska now after he has directly effected the nature of normal interactions between the 2 species?

[lnomalley]

He may have seen his own death as heroic but what about the death of his girlfriend and the 2 bears? What about the lives of the people and bears who travel that part of Alaska now after he has directly effected the nature of normal interactions between the 2 species?


exactly. this is why distorting reality is a not so good thing.

[jeffg]

"The attack of the present on the rest of time" (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit -- unfortunately referred to as "The Blind Director" in English) is my favorite film from Wenders, Kluge, Herzog, Fassbinder, et al

Check it out sometime if you can find it in the US! Oh, Herzog's Nosferatu is cool, too :beer:

[Kevan]

It's one thing to race head-on into traffic and quite the other to ride along side it. The term heroic goes to folk like our fallen cycling colleagues who, through no fault of their own, get picked off doing what they know is dangerous, but play as best as they can by the rules.

The protagonist here was a victim to his delusion; there is no romance to his end, certainly no heroics. If there were, it died with him.

[Skrawny]

I think lnomalley's point was that at the very end of his life *in his delusional state* he THOUGHT he was dying heroically, and how many of us get to go out beliveing it is heroic (even if delusional)?

[JohnS]

If anyone is interested...here is the link to another site I frequent that deals with self defense and guns. Many had the same viewpoint that you do. Does that scare you? They are also alot politer than we are. http://www.stoppingpower.net/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10826

[lnomalley]

is this the result of the illness, the desire to have a heroic death?

my guess is that it's the result of him trying to find meaning. by the time folks are giving human needs to wild animals.. it has more to do with projecting their unfulfilled emtional needs onto something other than themselves. this guy seemed to have the desire to be loved and protected (becasue lord knows the bears don't need no protecting.. they seem pretty equiped to survive and as herzog sort of witnessed.. really weren't about emotional needs.. they were preoccupied wiuth their bear-ness).

boy is raised in an emotionally abusive environment and on top of that has a pretty crap mood disorder. man uses projection as away to manage feelings/defensive functioning.

man has deep need to be loved in a way that is incomprehensible and too painful and hopeless to experience as coming from himself.
man projects that need onto wild animal.

man experience need fulfilled by giving love an dprotection to animal as a vicarious way to experience it himself.

animal doesn't give a crap about holding man's projection of ultimate love. animal is hungry and wants to eat and shag other bears. animal eats man.

german filmaker bares witness to story and has a unsentimental view of nature which he is able to clearly articulate. notably herzog is also profundly grounded and sensible about dealing with the death.

guys on cycling board discuss and try to moralize about man. shrink on cycling board is outnumbered.... and so is gonna go ride in the rain and go to work and run naked with the wolves..

tehehehe.

but it is strange to have seen the guy in real life at a bar serving cocktails and realize that was him. in the end.. he was just a guy. take your lithium folks. therapy works!

[Skrawny]

enjoy the ride (and run)

[inGobwetrust]

Tilting at windmills......

[bcm119]

If anyone is interested...here is the link to another site I frequent that deals with self defense and guns. Many had the same viewpoint that you do. Does that scare you? They are also alot politer than we are. http://www.stoppingpower.net/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10826

Wow. Thats an eye opener. Very few of the posters understood the point of the documentary, and one even mistook his mental illness for him being a liberal! I hope that isn't a good representation of how the general populace perceived the movie, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[JohnS]

Wow. Thats an eye opener. Very few of the posters understood the point of the documentary, and one even mistook his mental illness for him being a liberal! I hope that isn't a good representation of how the general populace perceived the movie, but I wouldn't be surprised.Maybe since many are blue collar and not doctors, they didn't have the terminology down, but they all agreed that he was "crazy", shouldn't have been out there, got what was expected and too bad the bears had to be destroyed...all just like here.

[Skrawny]

Darn liberals (aka crazy people) are all out there trying to get people to think that bears are cute and cuddly... ;)

[JohnS]

I used to be a member of the Sierra Club and was surprised how few of the members that I met really knew anything about wildlife and wilderness. They liked seeing it form a distance, but knew little firsthand. They were Disney Bambi-ists. On the other hand, there are also many slob hunters who are also clueless.

[lnomalley]

Maybe since many are blue collar and not doctors, they didn't have the terminology down, but they all agreed that he was "crazy", shouldn't have been out there, got what was expected and too bad the bears had to be destroyed...all just like here.

sad but true.

[bcm119]

Maybe since many are blue collar and not doctors, they didn't have the terminology down, but they all agreed that he was "crazy", shouldn't have been out there, got what was expected and too bad the bears had to be destroyed...all just like here.

Substituting "liberal" for "crazy" is a bit more severe than not having the terminology down. He was certainly crazy, but his illness and resulting actions weren't associated with Disney, liberals, smoking pot, or the state of massachusetts.

I used to be a member of the Sierra Club and was surprised how few of the members that I met really knew anything about wildlife and wilderness. They liked seeing it form a distance, but knew little firsthand. They were Disney Bambi-ists. On the other hand, there are also many slob hunters who are also clueless.

If you showed these "disney-bambi-ists" how ferocious and indifferent wildlife can be, do you think they would change their mind and decide its okay to destroy their habitat? I think the idea that Sierra clubbers like bears because they're cuddly and cute is a myth. Most Sierra clubbers I know are avid outdoorsmen, and by that I mean they have the utmost respect for the dangers of traveling on foot in wilderness. Maybe its different in MI.

[manet]

that's more than a lot of us will get out of our deaths.


Inomalley, thanks for the reply on my previous query. and so what of this next statement of your's i've quoted here? is an heroic death yet one more thing i should be aspiring towards?

[lnomalley]

Inomalley, thanks for the reply on my previous query. and so what of this next statement of your's i've quoted here? is an heroic death yet one more thing i should be aspiring towards?

nah.. don't aspire towards death.. it will come whether invited or not. between you and me .. life is heroic enough.

[Allez!]

nah.. don't aspire towards death.. it will come whether invited or not. between you and me .. life is heroic enough.

Nicely put!

[Dr. Doofus]

ok...you guys pushed doof to a moment of semi-coherence:

one point no one has touched -- herzog's careful, almost clinical distance in the film. he takes pains to make it clear that he is primarily interested in treadwell as a filmmaker (and in this regard, it makes sense to see TT as yule gibbons-meets-henry dardger), and in how treadwell's mania and death revealed, and reemphasized, the dividing line between the human and the animal (even though we are, darn it, human animals).

herzog starts with the premise that treadwell is insane -- because his main interest lies somewhere else entirely, in what comes dangerously close to a coldly voyeuristic analysis of how treadwell used the camera and his own narrative imagination to create a "life" for himself, a "life" that could not have existed without the camera. what saves herzog from degenerating into "yogi eats timmy" pornography is his appreciation for the humanity -- insane as it may have been -- of his subject, and for those who cared for this unfortunate man (doof is thinking of the scene where herzog tells treadwell's former girlfriend that she needs to destroy the death tape and never listen to it).


anyway

doof is up for saturday...hard course with no real tactics involved unless you're in the pro/1/2 field...for everyone else its just keep riding up that stupid hill each lap until there are 20 guys left and you sprint. brain off, legs on.

[stuttgart6]

Dear Liebschen,

Yah, I know Werner Herzog personlly and he is qvite a guy and a brilaint director and he also looks great in liederhosen. I grew up near where he grew up and he wass a strange guy. They say he used to hang around near pet shops and harass the cats for fun.

Zat man in ze movie was cleerly demented but yet he knew he loved bears and basikally hated people.

He got what he deserffed. What gives him the right to live among ze bears and to collect potential royalties for all their work?

My friend Grindl back in Luxembourg hass tolt me zat ze parlament now is requirink all ze chefs-in-trainink to see this flick.

Doris