Saint Paul, 1 July 2007
What does Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man tell us?
For thirteen Summers on the Katmai coast of Alaska
an emotionally disturbed dreamer named Timothy Treadwell
comes to lovingly know bears as Rowdy and Mr. Chocolate
Werner Herzog invites us to the unforgiving harmony of nature
lures us with primordial innocence then paw-slaps us back into
the impractical abyss of Timothy Treadwell’s anguished mind
A coroner’s interview is overdubbed on to frantic footage
of Treadwell screaming to his girlfriend to GO AWAY
seconds before a bear decapitates him
In what should have been the final scene - the mauling is botched
film is rolling, but the lens cap is on so we don’t see the corpus delicti
of Tim’s head, partial backbone, and wrist watch bearing arm
There is no moral to this story, except to say that some of us
fancy ourselves escaping the confinements of humanness
in particular, those of us feeling shunned by the pack