Watching Theology: Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)
Watching Theology



A few summers ago, while most of us were out camping or having a bar-b-q, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were being killed and eaten by a starving grizzly bear in Alaska. One of our most significant working directors, Werner Herzog, picked up his video footage and compiled a documentary about the severity of nature and Treadwell's death. In this episode, we look at the tragic life of "the Grizzly Man" as interpreted and remembered by Herzog and his cynicism. Is nature neutral, sinister or - as Treadwell believed - the Disney-like world of compassion and sentiment?

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Ed Howard: The Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans

The Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans
by Ed Howard
Only the Cinema



It's been literally decades since Werner Herzog has made a truly satisfying fictional film. It seems obvious that, since at least the late 1980s, the director's interest has increasingly turned towards documentary and pseudo-documentary, while his fiction features have become less and less frequent, and more and more uneven. The Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans is, then, an unexpected revitalization of Herzog's instincts for fiction, a non-remake of the sex-drugs-and-violence-packed 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant. Herzog's supposed remake, made with absolutely no knowledge of Ferrara's original and with only the most tenuous of connections — there's a lieutenant! and he's bad! — takes the basic premise of a corrupt cop and spins it out into a ludicrous (a)morality tale about the delicate balance between good and evil that exists within this addled New Orleans cop. Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is dirty in nearly every way. He's a drug addict who steals and snorts prodigious amounts of drugs, balancing heroin and coke and prescription painkillers. He sleeps with (and provides drugs to) the prostitute Frankie (Eva Mendes) and intimidates and rips off her clients whenever he encounters them. He stalks drunken and drugged-up kids coming out of clubs, holding them up for their stashes. He's an outrageous and lunatic figure, representing a wackier and goofier variation on Harvey Keitel's drugged-up psychopath in Ferrara's original film.

Herzog's first ingenious move was casting Nicolas Cage in this part and fully exploiting the actor's tendency towards over-the-top melodramatics. Cage's performance is something truly strange and unique, the work of an actor pouring all of his seemingly worst qualities into a character and really making him come alive. McDonagh's collapse, his moral degradation, is eloquently conveyed in every aspect of Cage's performance, from his permanent crooked slouch (evidence of the on-the-job injury that set him off on his painkiller addiction) to his twitchy mannerisms to the tortured cadences of his speech, shifting from drawled mumbling to coked-up hyperactivity with a moment's notice. For such a bizarre, purposefully overblown performance, Cage never forsakes the subtleties that suggest his character as fully as the more obvious gestures do. It'd be tempting to call this a "bad" performance, and it often seems like one in its superficial aspects. But Cage's oddball speech rhythms and over-emphasized facial tics only contribute to the unease generated by the character of McDonagh, by his unpredictable vacillations between hero cop, drug dropout and borderline psycho. It is, in its weird way, a disarmingly subtle performance.

Of course, the obvious gestures get most of the attention here, and with good reason. The film rolls out one nutty premise after another, right from the opening in which — after a few moody, blood-red-lit shots of a snake winding through a flooded jail cell — McDonagh and his partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) take bets about how long it will take for the rising water to drown a trapped prisoner. This comes only a few minutes after an onscreen title announces that the film takes place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; the cops' irreverent attitude towards their responsibilities thus suggests a satirical perspective on the response of various US institutions and authorities to this tragedy. Of course, such social consciousness is not common in Herzog, and the remainder of the film addresses such issues only obliquely, in the form of the not-so-subtle markers of race and class that are constantly defining and limiting these characters. The incident that triggers the plot is the murder of a family of Senegalese immigrants, apparently a drug crime, and one of the film's looniest contrivances — and that's really saying something — is the fact that the police immediately make this crime a high priority. Herzog underlines the absurdity of it all, announcing the film's undeniable status as fantasy: the police captain tells his men that this crime will be their big concern and that any amount of overtime is justified, as if the police always dedicate such attention to the murders of black illegal immigrants who were tangentially involved in the drug trade.

Race is continually an unsettling presence in this film, particularly in a scene where McDonagh is confronted by a relative of the murdered family, who delivers a completely unfettered expression of grief that's nearly embarrassing in its nakedness and uncontrolled despair. Her performance is as unhinged as Cage's, and the meeting between them is a vortex for all of the film's ungainly and often ugly emotions: a black woman's grief and a white cop's frazzled guilt and half-functioning desire to do good. The caricaturing of this women makes the scene especially uncomfortable, but at the same time her pain and anger are palpable; like many things in this film, it's a potent combination of the awkwardly stylized and the startlingly real.

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Benjamin Noys: Antiphusis -- Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man

Antiphusis: Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man
by Benjamin Noys
Film-Philosophy

The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.

----Werner Herzog

At the heart of the cinema of Werner Herzog lies the vision of discordant and chaotic
nature – the vision of anti-nature. Throughout his work we can trace a constant fascination with the violence of nature and its indifference, or even hostility, to human desires and ambitions. For example, in his early film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) we have the recurrent image of a crippled chicken continually pecked by its companions. Here the violence of nature provides a sly prelude to the anarchic carnival violence of the dwarfs’ revolt against their oppressive institution. This fascination is particularly evident in his documentary filmmaking, although Herzog himself deconstructs this generic category. In the ‘Minnesota Declaration’ (1999)3 on ‘truth and fact in documentary cinema’ he radically distinguishes between ‘fact’, linked to norms and the limits of Cinéma Vérité, and ‘truth’ as ecstatic illumination, which ‘can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization’ (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 301). In particular he identifies nature as the site of this ecstatic illumination – in which we find ‘Lessons of Darkness’ – but only through the lack of any ‘voice’ of nature. While Herzog constantly films nature he films it as hell or as utterly alien. This is not a nature simply corrupted by humanity but a nature inherently ‘corrupt’ in itself; Herzog’s vision of nature is a kind of anti-vitalism, a horror at the promiscuous vitality of nature.

Such a vision is evident in Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2005), in which it is
articulated by explicitly raising the question of how a filmmaker should capture
images of nature. The film is structured as an inquiry into the fate of the ‘grizzly man’ – Timothy Treadwell, an amateur bear expert and filmmaker who lived amongst these creatures in the Alaskan wilderness for ten years. Herzog engages in a kind of cinematic ‘duel’ with what he regards as Treadwell’s sentimentalised view of nature. Alongside the film I place the later work of Lacan, in which nature is theorised as ‘antiphusis’ (anti-nature) or counternature. In the 1970s Lacan elaborated a strikingly similar conception of nature to Herzog’s, as ‘internally plagued by “rottenness” [pourriture], by a decay or defect out of which culture (as antiphusis) bubbles forth [boulliner]’ (in Johnston 2006, 36). This is not a simple matter of imposing Lacan’s work as the key to Herzog’s. Herzog vehemently objects to any thematic, academic or critical reading of his films, arguing that ‘[f]ilm should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.’ (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 70). This antiintellectualism may well be problematic but it does raise a warning to any critic tempted to impose a psychoanalytic master-code. Instead I choose a more modest approach in identifying a convergence between Lacan and Herzog in their thinking of nature, and also in a certain political scepticism that resonates between them concerning the post-1968 revolutionary movements. In very different forms and styles they both indicate how the deadlock of a mute and corrupt nature also links to a political deadlock around the naturalism of desire and revolution in the 1970s. If ‘mother nature doesn’t call’ then we have to re-formulate any politics of nature, which is, if anything, a more pressing concern
today.

In October 2003 Treadwell and his companion Amie Huguenard were brutally attacked and killed by a wild grizzly bear. It is a macabre fact that Treadwell’s camera was
running at the time of the attack but the lens cap had been left on, leaving an audio
recording of the deaths (which Herzog listens to in one of the most disturbing scenes in the film). Treadwell had collected over one hundred hours of footage over five years at the time of his death. As Herzog states in the film’s Production Notes, when he and his editor Joe Bini came to view this material, much of it never seen:

We could not believe it. It couldn’t have been our wildest fantasy to find something like this, … We had to stop and walk out of the building. Both of
us had quit smoking, and yet we had to smoke a cigarette to take what was coming next. It was one of the great experiences I’ve ever had with film footage. It was so beautiful.

Herzog’s film makes use of his selection from this material, alongside interviews with Treadwell’s friends and family, as well as other more critical parties. Particularly important in structuring Herzog’s film is his own commentary, which makes explicit his interpretation of both Treadwell’s life and actions, as well as the images that we see.

These elements are organised together to structure the film as a demythologisation
of Treadwell, casting him as a self-conscious styler of his own image, a
failed actor who had transformed himself into a new role as the protector of the bears. Herzog makes clear his belief that the bears did not require Treadwell’s protection and that other motives were at work – such as Treadwell’s desire to escape the world of human civilisation and to enter into a ‘primal bond’ with the bears. Of course we have no true access to Treadwell’s point of view, except the chosen statements Herzog has placed on screen. This is therefore an uneven contest and we can view the film as one of antagonism and rivalry between the two filmmakers, one living and one dead, over the conception of nature and their own obsessions. David Thomson’s comment on why Herzog is not the ideal documentarian seems particularly apposite: ‘You feel he has his mind made up about so many things – and so you do not always want to trust what you are seeing’ (2003, 397). Previously Herzog has defended the protagonists of his films as neither marginal nor
eccentric, but as belonging to the same ‘family’ of desperate and solitary rebels against a mad society (in Cronin (ed.) 2002, 68-9). In the case of Treadwell Herzog appears to lack this sympathetic identification. Instead, the structure of rivalry recalls something of Herzog’s relationship with his alter-ego the actor Klaus Kinski – ‘my best fiend’ to recall the title of Herzog’s film on the subject. Coincidentally that relationship was also characterised by conflict over nature.

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