I saw the newest Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man a few weeks ago, and I've sort of been incubating my reaction to it ever since. It's a film about the life of Timothy Treadwell, told through footage he shot of himself and interviews with people who were close to him. I've had a difficult time getting a handle on how I feel about it.

It was a superb documentary (I'm a big fan of Herzog), but Treadwell was a puzzling person, judging from the footage in this film. He'd moved out to California to become an actor, but didn't find much success. Somehow he become very interested in grizzly bears and began spending his summers in Alaska, camping in national parks and filming himself interacting with them (often dangerously closely). As he films, he delivers long, often rambling monologues about the bears' habits, his activities to "protect" them, and occasionally delves into very introspective ruminations on his sanity and sexuality. He seems at times like a very macho egomaniac with a seriously over-blown idea about what he's doing (he claims to the camera as he's about to leave the park for the winter that he's just finished another season of protecting the bears, but it's unclear who he's protecting them from or how him camping in the park constitutes protecting them), but at other times like a selfless, slightly misanthropic but caring person who deeply loves animals, despite his misguided methods.

It seems to me that he'd found a niche with what he was doing--spending part of the year with the animals he loved, and then using that experience to make a modest enough living to keep it up. Probably the refuge from the modern world was comforting at first, then became a bit of an obsession: he filmed rude tourists in the park and expressed his contempt for them on film, and he grew viciously angry with the National Park Service, at one point filming an obscenity-soaked rant against them. During this diatribe he said something that resonated with me, despite the pure hatred and anger displayed on his tape. He shouted, "animals rule!" and it's been in the back of my mind ever since, because he's right. Lately it seems like everywhere I turn, I see evidence of how we're screwing up the planet: producing mountains of trash, guzzling energy at un-sustainable rates, mowing down habitats and destroying ecosystems. Animals do rule, and we totally suck.

So I'm left with weird mixed feelings about Treadwell. He was delusional, unreasonable, and probably not doing the bears any favors, but he was also a guy with a lot of love for animals. He died because he got too close, too late in the season, and pushed it too far. I don't think his way was the right way, but I can't help but think he was right about a few things.