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Timothy Treadwell's empathy
Sunday, September 4 2005
I managed to extend the solar project's pipes up into the laboratory today, en route to a rendezvous with the solar deck. This sort of plumbing work is very easy and there were no complications, although I was distracted by things like a housecall and various houseguest-related activities.
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The of us four had dinner and a movie in Rosendale, the most dinner-and-a-movie-friendly village in the area. We ate at the Rosendale Cement Company. It's hard not to marvel at the waitresses that end up working there, though tonight most of them seemed flawed in some fundamental way, whether it was the grotesquely thin heroinechiquista or the pasty white girl or the one whose cheeks were troubled by what looked like the nascent stage of nasty acne attack. Three out of the four of us ordered the Julian, the Cement Company's over-the-top take on a cæsar salad. It features split heads of romaine lettuce and crutons nearly equal in size, all blasted with sauce and parmesan cheese. It has considerable crossover appeal; I'm not much of a salad person but I love it.
At some point near the end of dinner, the Tillsons showed up (because Gretchen had told them where we'd be - though we randomly encounter them much more often than statistics would anticipate). Gretchen had ordered an $8 rum drink the size of a small wash basin and the three drinkers at the table were having trouble drinking it all, so it fell to Mr. Tillson to finish it off. But then the four of us disappeared into the Rosendale Theatre, leaving the Tillsons behind. They'd already seen Grizzly Man.
It isn't a great movie, Grizzly Man, but it is definitely unique. It chronicles Timothy Treadwell, a burnout beach bum who decides to put down the bottle and the drugs and single-mindedly dedicate himself to a cause: understanding, protecting, idealizing, and (most importantly) living with Grizzly Bears in the Katmai Peninsula of Alaska. Treadwell never was a scientist and his quest was more romantic and personal than it was rigorous. Still, he fancied himself a "protector" of the bears and he regarded the story of his life among them as worthy of some sort of documentary, and so he filmed hundreds of hours of his life in the wilds of the Alaskan Peninsula. Ultimately he and his girlfriend were eaten by a bear, but it was only after 13 summers living with and, I dare say, coming to a mutual understanding with the world's largest carnivores. His knowledge might not have been scientific, but Treadwell obviously came to know a thing or two about bears.
I get the feeling, though, that there was something of extreme athleticism in Treadwell's interest in bears. Their notoriety with regard to man-eating seemed to push him closer and closer to the precipice of danger until finally he was living in the most dangerous circumstances among unfamiliar starving bears unusually late in the season. Only then did he cross the threshold from observer to prey.
Along the way, though, the movie is mostly about Treadwell, not the bears. In some scenes he seems like a raving lunatic, in others he's sort of a drama queen (though grudgingly heterosexual nonetheless) and in still others he is reduced to a puddle of heart-breaking empathy: here for a bee that died in the midst of gathering pollen, there for baby fox killed the night before by wolves. "I love you," he tells these beings with utmost sincerity. In these moments he reminds me of no one so much as Gretchen, who is herself often incapacitated by empathy.
More than any of his other mental issues, I was struck by Treadwell's paranoia. He'd look at pile of stones left by some tourists and develop in his mind an elaborate creepy plot to get him. Paranoia is the result of two things: egomania (people care enough about you to want to "get" you) and detachment. When one severs connections to society, one loses the channels of information that provide background to the things you observe. After a couple months with no information about what society is up to, it's possible to see every effect and artifact of society as malevolent and, perhaps, on to you.
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The best wildlife scenes in the movie involved foxes, not bears. The foxes had considerably more spunk, humor, and awareness than the bears. They hung out with Treadwell as his only reliable companions and might have contributed to whatever sanity allowed him to survive among the bears. As for the bears themselves, in the movie they came across as unfriendly but also unengaged. Their faces really did seem as cold and morally agnostic as the narrator/film maker claimed they did. (Mostly, though, I wanted the narrator to stop with his narration; his views contributed nothing and his attitude repelled me with its sanctimoniousness and the constant condescension towards Treadwell.)
It's interesting how a complex character study like this one of Timothy Treadwell can affect intelligent people in completely different ways. I first observed this phenomenon with the things people would say about the characters of Six Feet Under. They'd have profoundly positive or negative views about certain characters that hadn't provoked similar reactions with me. On the drive home Lynn was saying that she wanted to take Treadwell "and shake him," which was a rather different reaction from the one Gretchen and I had. Gretchen and I thought of him more as a sad little crazy dog in need of comfort (and perhaps some lithium).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?050904 feedback
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