Other examples of Ligand Induced SH3 Oligomerization (LISO)

Herzog’s decision to withhold the audio of the bear attack perpetuates the silence of Amie Huguenard, who remains a voiceless and peripheral presence in Treadwell’s footage. The latter’s hyperbolic performance of masculine self-reliance on camera led him to minimize his collaboration with female colleagues and companions. (In addition to Huguenard and Palovak, Grizzly Man features an interview with Kathleen Parker, a friend who provided a base for Treadwell from which he flew with Fulton to the area of national park that he called the Grizzly Sanctuary.) In a voice-over, Herzog describes Huguenard as ‘a great unknown of this film’. Her family refused to be interviewed ‘and Amie herself remains hidden in Treadwell’s footage. In nearly 100 hours of his video she appears exactly two times … Only through Treadwell’s diaries do we know that she was frightened of bears.’

In Treadwell’s material, this deliberate evacuation of the human female is paired with an anthropomorphizing attitude towards the bears that mobilizes gender stereotypes in both naming them and describing their actions. For example, here is some of Treadwell’s ‘post-fight’ commentary on a clash between two male bears:

the fight between Sergeant Brown and Mickey for the right to court Saturn, the queen of the Grizzly Maze. We love that bear Mickey, we love him! We love him. But Mickey, I’ve been down that street, I’ve been down that street.

You don’t always get the chick you want, let me tell you.

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Thus far, Treadwell’s footage offers another instance of a well-established tradition of delivering gender clichés in wildlife documentaries. As Barbara Crowther (1995: 130) has noted, one consequence of anthropomorphism may be the effective naturaliza-tion of human gender norms via depicnaturaliza-tions of animal behaviours, particularly male rivalry, sex, reproduction and the ‘survival of the fittest’. But Treadwell then shifts from his investment in, and identification with Mickey to a playful declaration of romantic interest in Saturn, relayed to Mickey as if he were a friendly male rival:

And I’ll tell you something, if Saturn was a female human, I can just see how beautiful she is as a bear. Wow! I’ve always called her the Michelle Pfeiffer of bears out here … You lay there, I’m gonna go off with your girlfriend. Don’t beat me up over it! Things are bad with me and the human women, but not so bad that I have to be hitting on bears yet.

The figure of the elided female has returned in the flow of Treadwell’s monologue, which moves from the male bears to the object of their rivalry, to his own relations with women back in the human world.

A daydream

Grizzly Man can be seen to offer a commentary not just on Treadwell as a particular individual who employs both anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in his ‘work’, but also on wider cultural trends and strategies in the representation of human/

nature/animal relations. Jean Baudrillard has pointed to the ways in which the muteness of animals provides something like a tabula rasa on to which human desires, anxieties and expectations are readily projected. He writes:

They, the animals, do not speak. In a universe of increasing speech, of the constraint to confess and to speak, only they remain mute … they only furnish the responses one asks for. It is their way of sending the Human back to his [sic] circular codes, behind which their silence analyzes us.

(1994: 137–8) Baudrillard’s argument is pertinent to the representation of Treadwell in Grizzly Man insofar as the latter’s escape from what Herzog calls ‘the people’s world’ and his hopes for a transcendental bonding with nature and its wild creatures are so clearly and avowedly driven by his own particular experiences, disappointments and aspira-tions.²⁸ Moreover, Herzog presents some of Treadwell’s attitudes as symptomatic of the wider significance of human desires in shaping constructions of the natural world.

In his influential essay, ‘Why look at animals?’ John Berger writes:

Nature … acquires the meaning of what has grown organically, what was not created by man, in contrast to the artificial structures of human civilisation.

At the same time, it can be understood as that aspect of human inwardness which has remained natural, or at least tends or longs to become natural once more. According to this view of nature, the life of a wild animal 60 THOMAS AUSTIN

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becomes an ideal, an ideal internalised as a feeling surrounding a repressed desire. The image of a wild animal becomes the starting point of a daydream.

(1980, 1991: 17)²⁹ Berger proposes that the animal image, the starting-point of the daydream, is ‘a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned’. He illustrates this prevalent state of ‘confusion’ about wild animals with the following news story:

London housewife Barbara Carter won a ‘grant a wish’ charity contest, and said she wanted to kiss and cuddle a lion. Wednesday night she was in a hospital in shock and with throat wounds. Mrs Carter, 46, was taken to the lions’ compound of the safari park at Bewdley, Wednesday. As she bent forward to stroke the lioness, Suki, it pounced and dragged her to the ground. Wardens later said ‘We seem to have made a bad error of judgment.

We have always regarded the lioness as perfectly safe.’³⁰

The impulses, desires and situations behind this kind of ‘daydream’ – an idealization of nature that is often impractical and sometimes dangerous, but is widely promoted via some mediations of nature – need to be interrogated further, rather than being ridiculed or pathologized. This is precisely what Grizzly Man achieves. Herzog’s voice-over commentary repeatedly registers his disagreements with Treadwell’s atti-tude to nature. For example: ‘Here I differ with Treadwell. He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder’; ‘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.’ But the film as a whole never loses sympathy for Treadwell, or consigns him entirely to the realm of the Other. Instead, it proposes similarities between him and ‘us’, as well as points of difference. A different treatment of the story might have diagnosed Treadwell’s 13-year ‘daydream’ from a more comfortable distance, positioning him as the Other to be pitied, ridiculed or judged.

Herzog’s last voice-over, accompanying Treadwell’s footage of bears chasing along mud banks, asserts not difference but similarity, and constitutes an attempt to connect despite disagreement:

Treadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance, into a fog. What remains is his footage and while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear. That it is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature. And that, for me, beyond his mission, gives meaning to his life and to his death.

The last line of this commentary is run over a shot of Treadwell, followed by two foxes, walking away from the camera across a sunlit meadow. Then there is a cut to Willy Fulton in his plane, singing along to Don Edwards’ song ‘Coyotes’. The role of music here (and in earlier moments) is significant in inviting sympathy and empathy with Treadwell. This is made explicit in this valedictory sequence, where Treadwell’s friend sings along to the only vocal music track in the film, substituting Treadwell’s AUTHORIAL VOICE, DEATH, NATURE 61

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name at one point in the litany of loss: ‘Now the longhorns are gone and the drovers are gone and the Comanches are gone and the outlaws are gone …’. The lyrics continue ‘this is no place for an hombre like I am, in this new world of asphalt and steel’, as the last images of Treadwell show him walking along the side of a river, moving, apparently irretrievably, away from the camera, followed by two bears splashing in the shallows. In these sequences sound and image function together to both propose and acknowledge feelings of mourning and loss – including the loss of connections to ‘nature’, even if these are more imagined than real – not to dismiss them as (only) sentimental or absurd.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Grizzly Man constitutes an interrogation of both prevalent attitudes to nature in the west and the functions of documentary. Writing on documentary has long grappled with the relationship – often proposed as dichotomous – between evidentiality and aestheticization, accommodated in a much-debated balance in John Grierson’s famous phrase ‘the creative treatment of actuality’.³¹For instance, Siegfried Kracauer argued that aesthetic ‘beauty’ and evidential ‘truth’ stand in mutual opposition: ‘it is precisely the snapshot quality of [most newsreel and documentary]

pictures that makes them appear as authentic documents’.³² However, for Herzog, artifice in documentary does not stand in opposition to truth. On the contrary, it may indeed be necessary in order to arrive at a higher truth, beyond cinema-verité’s

‘merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants’.³³In ‘The Minnesota declaration:

truth and fact in documentary cinema’, Herzog wrote: ‘… there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.’³⁴ This is indeed what Treadwell – as re-presented by Herzog, that is – achieved, even in his ‘kind warrior’ posturings and naive sentimentality. Of course, the film also operates as a critique of such attitudes and their inculcation via the media.³⁵ But (unlike Berger) the critique presented in Grizzly Man never loses sight of the power and promise of the ‘daydream’ in its urge to judge it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Charlotte Adcock, James Montgomery, and Silke Panse.

Notes

1 Of course, such a move is not unproblematic, even as a rhetorical gesture.

This would have been as true of earlier moments in history as it is now, in what John Corner (2002: 257) has termed the era of ‘postdocumentary’

culture.

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2 For a wider-ranging consideration of ‘the preservative obsession’ (Schwarz 2004: 87), encompassing museums, theme parks, cinema, and the processes of historiography itself, see Rosen (2001).

3 For instance, although very different in form and content, both Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (France, 1985) and Errol Morris’ Mr. Death (US, 1999) stage self-reflexive considerations of time and space, history and evidence, in relation to the Holocaust, interrogating how landscape functions as a visible, filmable, but hugely insufficient index of this event.

4 Grizzly Man grossed $3 million in three months in the US. Source:

imbd.com. The film was produced by Discovery Docs for theatrical release and subsequent television screening on the Discovery Channel, and distrib-uted theatrically in the US by Lions Gate Films. To this extent, it was an early beneficiary of Lions Gate Entertainment’s move into documentary distribution following its successful involvement in the release of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (US, 2004). In March 2006, Grizzly Man was screened on the Discovery Channel. The film was followed by a 30-minute

‘companion special’ that considered ‘controversies such as claims of fictitious interviews in Grizzly Man’. Sources: www.grizzlyman.com.

production.html, http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/grizzlyman/about/

discoverydocs.html, both accessed September 2005, and www.discovery channel.ca/on_tv/releases/grizzly_man, accessed November 2006.

5 The rights to use Treadwell’s video footage were granted by Jewel Palovak, his business partner and co-founder of Grizzly People. Herzog asked to direct the film while the project was already in development for Discovery, which had produced a television special on Treadwell in 1999. Source:

www.wernerherzog.com, accessed July 2007.

6 The conventions of retreat and testing ground are of course commonly deployed tropes in western representations of nature, and in depictions of the difference and energizing danger provided by ‘other’ environments, societies and peoples.

7 Treadwell also visited schools to talk to children about his time with the bears, and showed some of his footage in these settings.

8 Crocodile Hunter became the most watched programme on the Animal Planet channel in the late 1990s (Cottle, 2004: 91–2). Irwin died in 2006 while filming a bull stingray, when it spiked him in the chest with its barbed tail. For an analysis of Irwin’s self-promotion and some of his shows, written prior to his death, see Berrettini (2005).

9 For other auteurist readings of Grizzly Man, see several of the reviews listed at imdb.com.

10 On the degrees of autonomy that auteurism as a discourse and consumer practice can have from film texts brought under this heading, see Corrigan (1991) and Grant (2000).

11 Steven Connor (2000: 3) provides a useful reminder of the corporeal source of the voice, and its effect in producing the speaking subject when he notes:

My voice comes from me first of all in a bodily sense. It is produced by means of my vocal apparatus – breath, larynx, teeth, tongue, palate, and lips. It is the voice I hear resonating in my head, amplified and AUTHORIAL VOICE, DEATH, NATURE 63

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modified by the bones of my skull, at the same time as I see and hear its effects upon the world … giving voice is the process which simultane-ously produces articulate sound, and produces myself, as a self-producing being.

12 A recent New Yorker feature on Herzog paid most attention to his physical exploits, but did note in passing ‘his sonorous voice, which, in his heavily accented English, suggests a Teutonic Vincent Price’ (Zalewski 2006: 126).

Thanks to Garth Twa for providing me with a copy of this article.

13 These associations are markedly different to that of perhaps the most famous directorial body in Anglophone cinema, ‘Alfred Hitchcock’. This body was commodified and exploited as something of a trademark via the director’s signature self-portrait sketch and cameo appearances in all his films for 50 years following The Lodger in 1926, yet also became readable as an immobilizing bulk that placed him on a par with certain of his voyeuristic characters. On Hitchcock’s cameo appearances and the signature sketch, see Kapsis (1992: 20).

14 See Herzog’s discussion of both these events in Cronin (2002: 278–82).

15 Blank’s subsequent documentary Burden of Dreams (US, 1982), on the making of Fitzcarraldo, extended Herzog’s reputation for risk-taking. Shot in the Peruvian rainforest, Fitzcarraldo (Peru, West Germany 1982) tells the story of a white rubber baron who has an enormous boat dragged across a mountain from one river to another. Herzog has said ‘Though the film is set in an invented geography, I knew from the start that in telling this story we would have to pull a real boat over a real mountain.’ He commented on Blank’s film:

I do like Burden of Dreams, though it did cause some problems for me.

For example, at one point in the film I talk of how people have lost their lives, but Les did not include my explanation of the circumstances in his film. He just cut it out, and so all of a sudden it sounds as if I had risked lives for the sake of a film. This stench followed me for a whole decade.

(Cronin 2002: 172, 185)

For a detailed discussion of the controversy caused by the film, and Herzog’s response to a range of accusations, including megalomania and self-promotion, see Cronin 2002: 169–90).

16 The Culture Show, presented by Verity Sharp, BBC2, 2 February 2006.

17 Vaughan (1981, 1990: 65) writes: ‘The movements of photographed people were accepted without demur because they were perceived as performance, as simply a new mode of self-projection, but that the inanimate should participate in self-projection was astonishing.’

18 For an account of the difficulties encountered in making this, Herzog’s ‘first Hollywood-funded feature’, see Zalewski (2006).

19 On Rescue 911 and its imitators, see Bondebjerg (1996). On Touching the Void, see Austin (2007).

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20 An exception to this tendency for happy endings is Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a first-hand account of a disastrous attempt to climb Everest in which eight people died, adapted as a television movie in 1997. Thanks to Peter Kramer for this reference. Another instance is the sailing documentary Deep Water (UK, 2006), where the breakdown and suicide of Donald Crowhurst stand in contrast to the survivability of the male adventurer figure in Touching the Void.

21 Barthes is writing about a photograph of Lewis Payne, awaiting his own hanging in 1865.

22 Ultimately, the film makes clear that Treadwell was killed by a bear that was unknown to him, and hence unnamed. Herzog refers to it as number 141, based on the tag that park staff had placed on it when it was younger.

23 On his website, Herzog states: ‘Once I heard [the tape], I didn’t waste five seconds to know: this will not be published, not in my film. Period. Even if Jewel had given me the permission and had asked me to include it, I wouldn’t have done it.’ Source: www.wernerherzog.com, accessed 9 July 2007.

24 In his own enactment of the audio recording, it is largely Fallico’s move beyond the role of detached (male) professional that renders him grotesque.

25 Nunn also quotes Vivian Sobchack’s observation that ‘while death is generally experienced in fiction films as representable and often excessively visible, in documentary films it is experienced as confounding representa-tion, as exceeding visibility’. Nunn, quoting Sobchack, cited in Nichols (1994: 48).

26 The (unheard) audiotape recording of the deaths of Treadwell and Hugue-nard is played just over halfway through the film. The remaining screen time is devoted to interviews with Treadwell’s family and friends, and more of his footage, before the film doubles back on itself via a video that Treadwell shot two days before his death, where, Herzog suggests, ‘he seems to hesitate in leaving the last frame of his own film’.

27 Note the latter is subordinated to the former throughout the film.

28 In the film, Treadwell, his family and friends mention his disappointment at a failed acting career, his use of drugs, and heavy drinking, from which, Treadwell suggests, he was saved by a new enthusiasm for the natural world. To this extent, Grizzly Man can be seen to provide a more overtly confessional version of the psychological tendency which Bazin located in post-war exploration films, whereby ‘the behaviour of the members of the

28 In the film, Treadwell, his family and friends mention his disappointment at a failed acting career, his use of drugs, and heavy drinking, from which, Treadwell suggests, he was saved by a new enthusiasm for the natural world. To this extent, Grizzly Man can be seen to provide a more overtly confessional version of the psychological tendency which Bazin located in post-war exploration films, whereby ‘the behaviour of the members of the