Living with Deadly Animals

Grizzly Man (2005) is a documentary film that focuses on Timothy Treadwell, who was an amateur grizzly bear expert. For thirteen consecutive summers, Timothy would move out to Katmai, which is located in the Alaskan Peninsula, to study the grizzly bear. Timothy loved the bears and he acted as though he was a part of their family, giving them names and studying their personality traits. He claimed to be studying the bears so that he could protect them and learn from them. In the summer of 2003, Timothy and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were spending the summer studying and living amongst the bears. However, this summer proved to be fatal for Timothy and Amie when they were surprised, attacked, and killed by a bear. The narrator of the film, Werner Herzog, was able to find over one hundred hours of footage filmed by Timothy, which he turned into the documentary Grizzly Man. The documentary shows the complicated life and relationship that Timothy shared with the endangered bears.

In the reading by Werner Herzog, who narrated and directed the film Grizzly Man, he explains what he thinks documentary films should present to the audience.

“I elevate the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.”

This quote by Herzog explains how he intends to portray his documentaries. It is an interesting quote because I’m not sure if I felt the way he described. As I watched Grizzly Man I did not transport to a subliminal state or become elevated to a “high level.” Although I can’t deny that I did feel compassion and other emotions while watching the films, I don’t think I was transported to any higher level.

            The idea of ecstatic truth is a fascinating idea in relation to documentaries. I am not sure that the audience needs to be in a sublime state in order to understand or see the kind of ecstatic truth Herzog describes. I think that ecstatic truth can be achieved through an emotional connection to the documentary film. Beyond the explanation of factual truths that documentary films present, the emotional attachment and closeness that the audience can feel, is what I find an ecstatic truth.

            In Grizzly Man, I think that the sympathy and the worry that I felt for Timothy was a version of the “subliminal state” that Herzog wanted the audience to reach. When Herzog talks about Treadwell in the film.

“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior.”

This quote makes the audience have condolences for Timothy and Amie because Timothy thought he was connected with the bears. If Timothy wasn’t actually connected with the bears, it would make us wonder if he lost his life for nothing to dwell amongst the endangered grizzly bears. Do you think that Grizzly Man achieves the ecstatic truth? Do you think that Herzog accurately describes what ecstatic truth is in documentaries? If Grizzly Man doesn’t achieve an ecstatic truth, what do you think it is and what documentaries do you think display it accurately?