My Favorite Scene: Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog isn’t a man who is easily fazed. He makes films out of sport, rather than lasting creative impact. For him, eating a shoe, dragging a boat across a mountain, threatening to kill a lead actor, climbing an about-to-erupt volcano, filming on every continent – it’s all for the thrill of the chase. As in, Herzog seems to chase whatever idea he gets in his head, and bring it to life by any means necessary. Whether that involves dressing an actor up as Dracula, or documenting the oldest cave paintings known to civilization, if Herzog aims to tell a story, then the story will be told, hardships be damned.

I mention this as evidence to the fact that Werner Herzog has put himself through a lot. And I’ve seen most all of it. I’ve watched nearly every film Herzog has made and read every prose detailing his process. And never once have I seen him flinch. Hell, the dude got shot while being interviewed by BBC and didn’t even bat en eye. “It’s not a significant bullet,” he earnestly quipped, before finishing the interview. 

The point of all this is that while Herzog is unquestionably a man venturing on his own, he is never the slightest bit dismayed by the cruelty that life can bestow. That is, of course, save the brief scene in Grizzly Man, when Herzog appears shaken, deflated, and speechless (three traits Herzog never exudes), all at the same time.

Grizzly Man documents the many summers Timothy Treadwell spent in the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where he was eventually killed by one of the grizzly bears he so adored. What remained of Treadwell’s legacy was more than 100 hours of film he shot while living with the bears, and Herzog took it upon himself to cut Treadwell’s footage into a cohesive documentary.

Although Herzog narrates Grizzly Man (because, when you have one of the greatest voices in the history of human voices, how can you not narrate your own films) he is only seen on camera once. Instead, he lets Treadwell tell his own tale via home video, while Treadwell’s close friends and family members attempt to fill in the gaps. If Herzog graces the screen in one of his own documentaries, it’s for damn good reason, which is certainly the case of his brief time on screen in Grizzly Man.

Midway through the film, Herzog sits before one of Treadwell’s best friends as Herzog listens to an audio recording of Treadwell being mauled to death. The woman in the scene is Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s longtime friend who legally owned all of the footage Treadwell recorded in Alaska, including the audio of his demise. Palovak has never listened to the recording of her friend dying, but she let’s Herzog listen to it, perhaps as a way for the filmmaker to gain perspective.

While Herzog listens to the audio via headphones, the camera slowly pans in on Palovak, as her face becomes more contorted with fear and curiosity. The lens gently pans to the left to reveal Herzog listening to the recording. He brings his hand to his face and rubs the bridge of his nose. He stares at the ground and quietly asks Palovak to turn the recording off. He takes the headphones off and, clearly unnerved and speechless, stares at Palovak who let’s out a nervous laugh that quickly turns to a cry (which itself is truly devastating). And then Herzog says one sentence that epitomizes who he is as a man and as a filmmaker:

“Jewel, you must never listen to this.”

One day during a History of the Documentary course I took in college, my professor entered the room and said he wanted to show us something. For whatever reason, we didn’t have time to watch the entire film, so the professor verbally established the scene with context, and we all watched Werner Herzog listen to Timothy Treadwell die. This scene was my introduction to the unique world of Werner Herzog, and my cinematic life hasn’t been the same since.

There’s an obvious, but no less serious, moral dilemma at the heart of this scene: does Herzog share the horrific audio with us, or let us simply imagine? It’s a tough choice, one that has positive and negative aspects either way. And I don’t use the word positive lightly here. But take, for instance, Spike Lee’s insistence on showing several pictures and video clips of dead bodies in his flawless Hurricane Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke. I’m glad Lee included those shots, because it helps paint a full picture of pointless government inaction. But for the sake of Grizzly Man, we all owe Herzog our gratitude for exercising the sound of silence.

I think a few people have heard Timothy Treadwell die. Treadwell, his girlfriend who was killed along with him, a coroner for scientific reasons, and Herzog himself. That’s a small group, and Herzog kept it that way for a reason. I personally can’t imagine carrying the intimate sound of death around in my head. Herzog has been through a lot in his years as a rogue filmmaker, but I venture to guess that listening to the final moments of Timothy Treadwell’s life ranks among the most unsettling.

Previous installments of My Favorite Scene include:

8 Mile
Babel
Brokeback Mountain
Crash
Deliverance
The Departed
Fargo
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
GoodFellas
He Got Game
House of Games
Hustle & Flow
Inception
Inglourious Basterds
Insomnia
Jackie Brown
Leaving Las Vegas
Philadelphia
Platoon
Pulp Fiction
Raging Bull
Redbelt
The Rules of Attraction
Se7en
Sleepers
Three Kings
the Films of Tony Scott

Traffic
Warrior