Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man presents two very different viewpoints on the world of humans and the world of animals. For Timothy Treadwell, humans should accommodate animals. It is the job of human beings to protect nature, and since it is us who encroached on their territory, it is up to us to learn how the animals live, and mimic that way of life. For Werner Herzog, nature and humans should not interact except for humans to meet their own needs.
Herzog views nature as being cruel and violent. It is an entity that human beings can never reconcile with because it is unpredictable and in conflict with humans. To Herzog, that conflict with nature is, in part, what makes us human. It is people who are civilized, rational, and should ultimately be in control. Nature is unruly, chaotic and antagonistic. In the eyes of Herzog, the natural world is a reminder of the base level we came from, and a warning not to return to that state of being.
Timothy Treadwell sees the human world as treacherous and in direct conflict with everything that is good about nature. To him, it is not the natural world that is cruel and violent, but the so-called civilized world. Humans take the most innocent and precious aspects of life and abuse them. Treadwell felt very mistrustful of people and wanted to escape to the world of grizzly bears. While it might be easy to pass of Treadwell's actions as "dysfunctional" or "crazy," I think that it's important to realize that he didn't think living with bears was without risk. Treadwell recognized that the natural world can be harsh and dangerous; however, unlike the civilized world, the motivations of nature are not cruel, they are pure and for the purpose of survival. Human beings do not need an excuse to bring harm to other living organisms, nature on the other hand does not do anything needlessly. Treadwell recognized the difference between these two worlds and chose to live in a world he felt was more pure. As a quote from an unknown author says: "the human spirit needs places where nature has not been re-arranged by the hand of man." Perhaps the bi-polar tendencies that Treadwell experienced where a product of the way we live in our modern society, a reaction to the re-arranging that humans have done to nature, and his response to leave and live with bears, was more sane than what he is given credit for.
Ultimately human beings need nature. Be it violent as Herzog perceived, or ideal and simplistic as Treadwell saw it, the human world cannot survive without the natural world. While the human and animal world have been divided, Treadwell saw the importance of meshing the two once again.
Jenny,
ReplyDeleteI find your support of Treadwell's views to be an interesting new perspective on the two characters. I can agree with how you believe Treadwell picked the world he considered more pure, and how Treadwell and Herzog viewed human interaction with the natural world from opposite ends of the spectrum. I feel compelled to question why, since Treadwell knew of the dangers in nature and the struggle for survival, he shed such tears over the death of the fox and the baby bear and reacted so violently. His rejection of human heritage through embracing human attachment and emotional reaction offers an interesting enigma. I adamantly agree with your closing point of how human beings need nature, though I would very much like to know why you came to that particular conclusion. Good work!