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John Castle

Grizzly Man Essay

Emre Koyuncu

4/2912

A Man’s New Best Friend

Once a stranger to Alaska’s wilderness, Timothy Treadwell had a dream of living

with the bears in their natural jungle. Born Timothy Dexter, Treadwell had a troubled

past. He was victim to addiction and felt somewhat disconnected from his family. This

showed in his ideas, his personal footage, and Werner Herzog’s Documentary, Grizzly

Man. Timothy Treadwell also had a fascination with bears and wanted to do something

about their death due to human intrusion. He loved the bears so much and wanted to fight

so badly for them that he made his own documentary and spent 13 summers with them.

Timothy went out into Alaska’s unknown valleys that he calls the maze with nothing but

a video camera and a barrel full of food. Treadwell did a great job of bringing the bears

problems into the public sphere. His work caught the media’s attention and made people

more aware of the plight of the Alaskan Grizzly Bears. However, this attention was not

all good. The media questioned Treadwell’s motives, saying he was just a child going

into the wild to play with the bears. What the media implied turned out to be the

underlying truth in the end. Timothy Treadwell set out to protect the grizzly bears from

poachers and the like by challenging government regulations and teaching children.

However, in reality Treadwell’s footage depicts a journey of personal pleasure instead of

one of selflessness like his words suggest.

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Timothy Treadwell sought to live with the bears and protect them motivated by

addiction and a troubled past instead of pure altruism. In one scene from Grizzly Man,

Treadwell exclaimed to a fox, “First, I tried everything to stop drinking. Then, I did

everything to continue drinking.” Although, he tried to fight his addiction and get over it,

Treadwell never fully recovered. He kept falling into the same trap, and he was

borderline broke. He could not seem to find a supporting job. Timothy Treadwell tried his

luck in the acting business but he couldn’t succeed. He did not seem to fit into human

society and as described by Ellen Brinks in her article, “Uncovering the Child in Timothy

Treadwell’s Feral Tale”, “He was a self-avowed substance abuser, lost in a series of

menial, unfulfilling jobs” (Brinks 308). Factoring in his mediocre life style and his overly

enthusiastic obsession with bears, Timothy’s decision to go into the wild does not seem

as insane as some of the media condemned it as. Timothy’s decision to live with and

protect the bears alone seems even less unusual when one looks at his family

relationships. Timothy had problems with his family, and for unknown reasons pretended

to be other people. These people, however, were in no way connected to his family. He

was from completely different backgrounds and even adopted an accent. Timothy

Treadwell claimed he was from Australia, an orphan, and to some people he said he was

from the streets of London. Not only did Timothy have problems with his family, he also

problems with personal relationships. He talks to the camera in one scene saying that he

had problems with girls and that it would be so much easier for him if he were gay. He

had some identity issues, obviously, and this had an impact on his ambition to get away

from human society and want to help the bears that did not condemn him. Timothy

seemed to connect way more with the bears, than he did with any human as in one scene

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he talks to Mickey, a grizzly bear Timothy loved, after a fight saying that he had ‘been

down that street’ and saying that ‘he’s had his troubles with the girls’. Timothy clearly

had more problems with humans that he did with animals. Timothy had sound motives to

go out into the wilderness and protect the bears. From looking at his background, one can

see that he is not as crazy as he may seem for leaving the human world and entering the

realm of the grizzly bears. He said he wanted to go spend time with the bears and protect

them, and that is exactly what he set out to do, and he wanted the entire world to know.

Timothy wanted nothing more than to live with the bears and not have to deal

with human society. He was able to do this because he was not crazy enough to go into

“the Grizzly Maze”, as Treadwell refers to it, unprepared. Timothy studied the bears

during his first summers, he knew their body language and from there, could learn how to

survive amongst them. In the article, “The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal

Obsession with Alaskan Bears.” Nick Jans adds, “Some attribute his survival among the

bears to his facility in understanding what the bears were communicating with their

bodies, and in knowing how to mimic that language himself in his interactions with

them” (Jans 166). For a while, Treadwell went to schools to teach children about his

findings and to show them the real nature of grizzly bears. After all, no one before

Treadwell had gotten so close to the bears and lived to tell it. He did this all for free. As

mentioned before, Treadwell was borderline broke, but still asked for no money for his

efforts. This commitment showed his real passion to study, protect, and teach about the

grizzly bears. However, Timothy seemed to love the grizzly bears too much.

Timothy’s motives were clear and sound for going into the wilderness alone with

the bears. However, as time progressed Treadwell lost sight of what his goal and purpose

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in the wilderness really was. Thirteen summers is an extremely long time, and people can

change immensely, especially with no human interaction during those long periods of

time. As the summers went on, Timothy started becoming more like a bear. Once a

person spends that much time so close to bears, it is hard not to adopt some of their

habits. Timothy changed his habits to more of acting like a bear and trying to be one

instead of trying to protect them. Brinks would agree, in her article, with the idea that

Treadwell was becoming a bear and instead of studying them:

Treadwell seems increasingly comfortable morphing into a bear,

making huffs, grunts, woofs, growls, and snapping noises, crawling on all

fours, avoiding eye contact, rearing up, and stomping, dressing in black and

rolling in the bears’ beds to look and smell more bear-like.” (312).

This quote shows how Treadwell almost lost all of his marbles in his summers with the

bears. He essentially became a bear advocating for bears rights. It is impossible to remain

unbiased while studying the bears if one starts mimicking bears. He said he was still

protecting the bears and studying them, however, Timothy was going to the Maze just to

be a bear. This is not what he said he was going to do. Timothy was going down to the

Maze for his own benefit of being a bear instead of helping the bears. This being said, it

is clear to see that Timothy is acting like a child.

Many children have imaginations and fantasies of being other animals. Timothy

could arguably be living his childhood fantasy of being a bear and living with the bears.

By looking at Treadwell’s footage towards the end of his summers, he did not have many

clips of him doing things about bears or being concerned with their poaching. Most of the

footage was shots of him with the animals just having fun with the animals by playing

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with them and acting as if they were the same species without any differences between

them. Treadwell said he was protecting the bears, but he doesn’t seem to be protecting

them at all when he spends all of his time gallivanting with the foxes. Acting like the

bears, on the other hand seems to hurt the bears’ reputation instead of help. Treadwell

was very hypocritical as Brink writes, “…Treadwell’s ‘retrogression’ to living a child’s

fantasy existence with Alaskan brown bears amounts to a refusal to accommodate himself

to the dead-end life that the adult world offers him, and not simply because that social

contract makes him a partner in his own destruction “ (308). As the quote says,

Treadwell was living his own childhood fantasy. He was living with the bears as if they

were huge harmless teddy bears, which ultimately led to his demise. Saying he was going

to protect the bears is one thing, but not fulfilling his words with actions is another.

Timothy was a scam who was writing off his own personal pleasures by saying he was

going to protect the bears from poachers and the like.

Timothy Treadwell was a man of ambition and passion. He had such a love for

grizzly bears that he wanted to live with them and become initiated into the bear society.

This is impossible because humans are not bears. However, Timothy did have reasonable

motives to go into the Grizzly Maze and live with animals. He did have extensive

knowledge that nobody else had and he was able to teach children in schools for free.

Timothy Treadwell was a good man, but he did not stay true to his word. His goal of

protecting the grizzly bears was not accomplished and was not his actual goal. He went to

live with the bears and he wanted to die with the bears. In the end, Timothy lived the life

he dreamed of as a child.

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Works Cited

Brinks, Ellen. “Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale.” The Lion and

the Unicorn 32.3(2008): 304-323. Project MUSE. Web 23 February 2012.

Grizzly Man. Director Werner Herzog. Lion’s Gate Films. 2005. DVD.

Jans, Nick. The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears.

New York: Plume, 2006.