"The overwhelming indifference of nature."

[onager]

Now playing on the Sundance Channel - Werner Herzog's great 2005 documentary "Grizzly Man."

It should be shown as a double feature with "Into The Wild," in a Nature Versus Dumbasses marathon.

For those who haven't seen it - "Grizzly Man" is the story of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor and former drug addict who decided he had a sPeerIchul Konekshun with the Alaskan brown bear.

That's the bear that stands about 11 feet tall, weighs 1000 lbs. and is equipped by nature with copious amounts of teeth and claws.

He loved the bears and imagined they loved him back. He gave the bears pet names like "Mr. Chocolate" and "Melissa." He flitted around these magnificent creatures yelling "I love you!" (In a grating baby-talk whine that almost made me do an Elvis on my TV. I'm surprised the bears didn't kill him just for being so damned annoying.) And in his tent, which he didn't know how to construct to keep it from blowing down on his head in a storm, he slept every night with...a teddy bear.

Treadwell persisted in his Disney delusions, even after he literally tripped over evidence that his lovable bears killed and ate their own young.

He got away with this nonsense for 13 years. As one of the real bear experts says - "He was very lucky."

Until he wasn't, but you can watch and see what happened to him. You do have to sit thru a lot of drivel from his friends and fellow bear-woos, and I'm convinced Herzong scripted some of those interviews. Nobody could be that dim-witted...oh, wait...

The Subject line comes from Herzog himself, during a close-up looking right into a grizzly's eyes. Herzog talks about Treadwell's pseudo-mystical ramblings on the animal's "feelings" when he looks into the eyes of a bear. Herzog says the only thing he can see in those eyes is "the overwhelming indifference of nature."

Exactly.

[laconicsax]

1. Hmm...

Well, since wiki says in the section on his death, "Treadwell's disfigured head, partial backbone, and right forearm/hand still wearing his wrist watch were recovered at the scene," I'd say that I did a pretty good job of guessing what happened to him.

[charlie]

2. I don't think I've ever been amused, horrified, and disgusted at the same time

as I was with Grizzly Man. It was a travesty nobody headslapped Treadwell for his weeping certainty he was the only reason bears weren't extinct.

The most dismaying thing about watching him was that it was clear he was just an obsessive nerd who played out his fantasies in Alaska instead of Mordor or Tatooine. 13 consecutive years of field experience would be invaluable to someone serious. Not for Treadwell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icUq7Hghsgc
(46 sec)

[semillama]

3. What's worse is that it wasn't just Treadwell who got et.

He dragged his girlfriend along too, and she suffered the same fate.

[onager]

5. And possibly even worse yet...

22 pounds of Treadwell's body were recovered, and 28 pounds of girlfriend Amy Huguenard's.

One of the best interviews in the movie is the non-woo, no-shit helicopter pilot who had to go in and help bring out their remains. Which, he notes, were hauled out "in 4 plastic garbage bags."

That pilot also utters, IMO, the best epitaph for Treadwell - he says Treadwell seemed to think he was dealing with "people in bear costumes."

For anyone interested, here's the Ned Zeman article in Vanity Fair that led Herzog to make the documentary:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2004/05/timothy-treadwell200405

[Warpy]

4. I've also noted the seeming lack of the capacity of

nature's other creatures to succumb to self pity, even when they're in the process of being killed and eaten. That applies even to animals like cats and dogs who live in close enough proximity to us to pick up some of our bad habits.