I watched Grizzly Man last night.  This documentary about Tim Treadway, who spent thirteen years harassing the grizzly bears of Kodiak Island until one finally had enough and ate him, came across like a Saturday Night Live skit.  I kept veering between helpless laughter at this poor benighted boob who just wanted to be important and feeling really sad that he managed to get some poor girl eaten along with him.  The funniest scenes in it were the ones in which Treadway got really agitated and yelled expletives at his camera about the park services department and how no one was trying to "protect" these bears  except him.  What exactly he thought he was protecting them from was unclear, as more than one ecologist and wild life expert on the island is quoted saying that they had very little poaching problems and the best thing to do with the grizzlies is to respect them by staying out of their way.  In hundreds of hours of footage, the closest Treadway gets to "poachers" is a group of fishermen who's guide throws rocks at a bear to scare it off.  It doesn't help that the director, Werner Herzog, sounds exactly like Arnold Schwarzneggar and I kept expecting him to say he wanted to Pump! me up.
In the end, I just felt kind of sad for this guy who couldn't really connect in the human world,  went looking for his place among wild animals.  And they ate him.
Score one for Darwin.

 

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