saw werner herzog’s grizzly man yesterday at the local art house theater. it was a great film. no question. if you have not heard it already here is lions gate’s synopsis: Timothy Treadwell’s death was as sensational as his life: Having presumed he could live safely among the grizzly bears of the Alaskan wilderness, the outdoorsman and author—along with his partner, Amie Huguenard—was eventually killed and devoured by one of the very animals to whom he had devoted years of study. in point of fact treadwell was more than anything a lunatic. that is not meant as a negative judgement, nor as some kind of “xtreme lingo” praise. i say it matter-of-factly because i believe we all are.

if i took away anything from herzog’s film it was an even clearer vision of all humans as lunatics.

this is not a film review. the film should be seen and that’s all i’ll say on that score. nor am i particularly concerned with timothy treadwell. in his case the obvious lunacy can be pinned to the singular belief that he was protecting bears. he was doing nothing of the sort. he was like a child on a 13 year camping trip. the belief that he was doing anything other than escaping humanity while pretending to be a naturalist is the most obvious lunacy the film presents. (if the bear who ate treadwell had not been shot and killed, the act of giving the hungry bear a meal would have been the most real help he ever offered.) but that particular sort of lunacy aside there is another to be gleaned from grizzly man.

in that the film was cobbled together largely out of treadwell’s own footage what you see overwhelmingly on the screen is a single man surrounded by the wilderness. a single human surrounded by the natural world. watching a human talk to the camera, complain to the camera, confess to the camera, presenting all his worries, dreams, concerns, and goals, against a backdrop of the natural processes of the alaskan wilderness is telling. the message could not be clearer: human concerns, when set against the counterpoint of the natural world, the “real” world, are absurd.

we have built our world on top of the real one. we like to believe we have seceded from the natural world, but of course, as a hurricane, or tsunami, or earthquake, or pandemic, or draught, or ice age reminds us, we have done no such thing. watching a human speak while behind him the mechanizations of nature chug confidently along makes that human seem above all else a lunatic. exchanging pieces of printed paper for other pieces of printed paper which grant the right to sit in a dark room and watch a 20 foot high artificial image of this same human speak, while stars explode and icebergs crumble into the sea, is lunacy as well. isn’t it?

while every other living thing does exactly what it instinctually knows it must, we hobble through life riddled with anxiety, stress, doubt, anger, paranoia, fear, and misery. we have created a world for ourselves which we can not seem to run effectively, the purpose and meaning of which we can not agree on. we are the most successful species the natural world ever unleashed and this success has earned us office jobs and audits and obesity and “reality” tv and prisons and governments.

this present state of our evolution does not in and of itself make us lunatics. it is natural. it is the way we have come. the place we are at. could not be any other way i suppose. but we are lunatics all the same. what makes us lunatics is the fact we use our skill to do little more than build our flimsy house of cards higher. we use our natural advantage, our high intelligence, to ponder not much besides the minutia of our house of cards. we are lunatics because having outpaced all our predators we prey on ourselves in order to own a larger piece of our house of cards. we are lunatics because so much trivial meaningless bullshit define our lives and we perpetuate it. we are lunatics because we not only perpetuate it but glory in it.

treadwell’s particular outer layer of lunacy, that fantasy of the bear protector, was not out of place in nature but the deeper lunacy, that of the cultured civilized modern human being, of course, was. we are all delusional about ourselves and about our place in the universe. watching the film i could not shake the feeling that the sight of any human being placed with his work and worries in the wilderness, would seem equally as absurd. in the modern world a human removed from the construct of civilization is rendered instantly oddly useless. isn’t he?

the image which springs to mind is this one:






“and now for something completely different” it’s absurd! we all agree and laugh. hahaha! but doesn’t that image sum up, in a way, what we humans really are here on planet earth in the year 2005?

lunatics one and all i say.