Bears and Bulges
In the opening scene of Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell finds himself in a field of wildflowers in Katami National Park, 40 feet from a couple of grizzly bears, kneeling by a tripod. “Most times I am a kind warrior, out here,” he growls, “but sometimes the kind warrior must become so formidable, so fearless of death, so strong, that he will win.” He looks like Darth Vader meets Christian Slater in Heathers, in a dark trench coat and blackout Cobain shades, fists held tightly together. The documentary is predominantly composed of recovered footage that Treadwell shot on his tripod in the 13 summers he lived among grizzly bears — before one of them mauled him to death. By the end of the film, Treadwell’s status as a metaphor for the human condition, a man alienated by modern life and seeking refuge in nature, is clear.
Weiner, a 2016 film by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg about Anthony Weiner’s 2013 campaign for Mayor of New York, opens on a similar shot: the man alone, facing the camera. “Shiiiiiiiit,” Weiner breathes into a phone, “this is the worst. I’m doing a documentary of my scandal.” What unfolds is an hour-and-a-half exploration of Weiner as narcissist, family man, and sexter. His rage and capacity to alienate those around him are depicted so brutally that, in the last minutes of the film, Kreigman is disposed to ask, “Why have you let us film this?” But rather than leaving the audience estranged from Weiner and his campaign, the intimacy of the documentary provokes a depth of empathy in the viewer that extends even in his most depraved moments.
Grizzly Man and Weiner at once pathologize and valorize the men they depict. Treadwell and Weiner are very obviously unhinged, which neither film attempts to hide. Each man’s personal pathology is used as illustration of disillusionment. They are spectacles, morals of stories about whatever Herzog, Kriegman, and Steinberg consider to be the conditions of modern life. Treadwell is perhaps both product of and solution to the chaos and discomfort of life in urban United States, while Weiner is a horror story of surveillance and public scrutiny in the contemporary political system. Together, they are props for the telling of stories that eclipse them.
Though Treadwell and Weiner become props for these kinds of social analysis, they enjoy the characteristically white privilege of personalization. The interviews with former lovers and their loving mothers allow them to escape the simplification that so often comes with troubled subjects. Herzog goes so far as to pull archival footage of Treadwell’s college diving team routines in order to humanize him. Neither of them seem to belong to a wider category of “white men unhinged” because they each escape the pressure to stand in for anything besides their particular, bewildering selves. Consider the garden-variety white mass shooter, whose behavior gets blamed on a history of personal turmoil rather than on extremism or domestic terrorism. Treadwell and Weiner enjoy this same freedom from generalization.
What makes Grizzly Man and Weiner so distressing is the ease with which a viewer can identify with their obviously troubled protagonists and the difficulty we have as an audience in understanding them as part of the same trend. Through a valorization of their masculinity and their whiteness, Treadwell and Weiner escape the disenfranchisement that many documentary films inflict on their troubled or bewildering subjects. The generosity extended to them is vast: their rage is made rational, their torment is legitimized, and the viewer is on their side, even as they inflict harm on those around them.
