Rowwwrrr! Rowwwwwrrrrr!

Well, I figure that's as good a place to start as any.

Saturday, Mr M and I watched a movie. Boy, was it. It was the documentary "Grizzly Man," written and directed by Werner Herzog, he of that 2-star classic "Aguirre, The Wrath of God," and the film "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe," which has no stars because I've never seen it, although I must admit I'd like to because it's a film wherein Werner Herzog eats his shoe. Boiled, if I'm not mistaken, but then again, I've never seen it.

"Grizzly Man" tells the story of one Timothy Treadwell, a man - I think - who made it his mission in life to save the Alaskan grizzly bears by going to live with them. And after 13 or so years of doing this, one eats him. And his girlfriend. And probably a lot of their equipment, too, but not their video camera, because it's on while the feast is taking place. The lenscap shields us from the action, but apparently there's sound galore of the eating.

Now, as I've said, I have no idea where to start in telling you the story of "Grizzly Man." I should probably start by telling you that Timothy Treadwell was, I think the psychological term for it is, fucking nuts. I mean, you'll get the idea as the story progresses that he was actually fucking nuts, but I figure I'll just cut to the chase and let you know right now. The man was fucking nuts.

The short history of our Timothy is that he was a weird kid who wanted to be an actor, went to California, rumor had it he was next in line behind Woody Harrelson for that job on "Cheers," he never recovered from not getting it, and so he drank himself into one breath shy of death. And when he woke up from his drunken stupor he had a vision that he must save the grizzly bears by going to Alaska and living with them and letting one of them eat him and his girlfriend. And it may sound like I'm joking on this one, but I don't think I am.

So, he starts going to Alaska every summer and living with grizzly bears. He takes his trusty video camera along, and films the bears. To a certain extent. Mainly what he films is himself. This man loves filming himself. He loves talking to himself. He may like doing other things to himself as well, but if he does, we don't see it on camera. But that's about all we don't see.

Timothy has blonde hair worn in a boyish style, way too boyish for his advanced years, a very feminine voice, and a manner not unlike that of Mr Rogers. Think of Mr Rogers' creepier son, the one he and Mrs Rogers never introduced at parties, and you might have a little of the Timothy Treadwell gist. And Timothy loves the bears. He does love those bears a great deal. We know this because, along with living with them and letting them eat him, he tells them he loves them. "I love you! I love you! Hello, pretty bear! I love you!" he is often heard to say.

He also loves the foxes who take up residence with him, and we know this because he tells them he loves them, too. "I love you! I love you! Hello, pretty foxes! I love you!" he is also often heard to say, at least until one of them steals his baseball cap and takes it into its den, and Timothy goes absolutely fucking ballistic. Which lets you know that the man could possibly be fucking nuts, although we already know way before the hat theft that this is so.

But I may be skipping ahead here. Let's see if I can go at all this from another angle. The movie. The movie is interesting, and is interesting in two ways. First of all, it's interesting because we watch Timothy in the wilds, touching grizzly bears and telling them he loves them, and we know the man is fucking nuts, and let's face it, sometimes watching a man who's fucking nuts is quite interesting. But then it's also interesting, because this story, about this man who by about 10 minutes into things we're already sick of and can't wait for him to get eaten, this story is filmed with such love and admiration by Werner Herzog it's, well, interesting. I have a hard time believing that Werner doesn't think Treadwell is fucking nuts, but even if he does, he seems to think Treadwell is still the greatest thing since sliced cheese. Individually wrapped. And so then we start worrying about the sanity of Mr Herzog, but then again, when a man eats his shoe you probably should have been worrying anyway.

See, I think the deal here is that Werner actually thinks that Treadwell has gone into the wilds to save the grizzly bears. And so we get clips of Treadwell supporters swearing oaths of love, and shots of Treadwell going into schools to tell kids about the grizzlies, and yes, shots of the bears themselves doing things like swimming, walking, looking around like they're waiting for a bus, and fighting. It's during one of these fighting scenes that we see a bear defecate with great gusto, and this excites Treadwell to no end. Because, as we find out, Treadwell seems to love bear poop. After the fight, he goes and sits in the bear poop. There's also a scene where he has a 10-minute on-camera orgasm over finding a pile of bear poop. "It was once inside the bear! It was just inside her, and now it's here!" he says, touching the poop. "Look at this poop - it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." Which I'm sure made his girlfriend feel wonderful. Well, I don't know - if she was there with this man, she was probably as nuts as he was.

But here's my theory on the whole Treadwell Going To Alaska Thing. The man was nuts! And also a raving egomaniac, and he latched onto a cause to try to fashion himself into some sort of superstar/martyr/conversation piece at cocktail parties and water coolers by doing what he did. He was also, being fucking nuts, of course, very paranoid, prone to emotional outbursts at the drop of a hat (or the theft of one), and he was also something of a friggin' liar, because the whole time he was there with his girlfriend, he did on-camera sililoquies about how hard it was to be in the wilds of Alaska all alone, feeling like he was the only man on earth. So in other words, it didn't matter at all about the grizzlies. It could have been the whales, where I guess he'd have eventually drowned, or some overseas political conflict, where he'd have been shot, or the plight of the old person, where he'd certainly have been caned to death, because, believe me, those old people wouldn't have put up with him for more than about fifteen minutes, thus making for a very short documentary indeed. In the end, the cause wasn't about anything at all except Treadwell himself.

And as he goes to Alaska, year after year, it becomes more and more about him, and we see his complete emotional breakdown, which wasn't that far of a fall, and there's no doubt in my mind that the bear didn't actually kill him so much as he killed himself. He wanted a bear to eventually eat him to promote him into the realms of lore, where people like Werner Herzog would put down their shoes to travel out and make a movie about him. And when His Time comes, the only thing sad about it, besides the fact that if he wasn't so fucking nuts he'd still be alive, is that he chose to drag some young, misguided snip of a girl along with him for the ride.

Throughout the movie we see interviews with Treadwell's ex-girlfriend and still closest ally, who by all rights should have been on the mountain with him instead of the other girl for dinner, who also thinks Treadwell was the greatest thing since individually wrapped sliced cheese, and owns the video camera on which the sound of the eating exists. She's never listened to it. But Herzog does. In a gripping - or is that griping - scene, we see Herzog, with headphones, listen for a while, then admonish the ex with, "You must never listen to this! Promise me you will never listen to this tape!" delivered in a style only a man who eats his shoe can deliver, and she promises she will in fact keep that promise to Werner, in a dramatic fashion. We also see the ex getting the last of Treadwell's effects, the watch he was wearing when his unattached arm was found at the campsite. She puts it on, smiling, marveling that it still works. Which, if that's not a commercial endorsement waiting to happen I don't know what is, but I found myself being amazed that the watch still worked too, because I kept thinking that after the police held it all that time, surely its battery must have run dead. But that's just how my mind works, I guess.

And speaking of dramatic fashions, the movie is well worth a rent, well, even if you don't find watching a man who is fucking nuts and sits in bear poop interesting, for the "performance" of the coroner who picked through what bits were left of Treadwell and the girl. A nicer description of a bear eating a man I'm not sure I've ever heard, and I know this man had to be the lead in every local theater production whatever town he lives in puts on every summer, because he delivers his autopsy reports with a flair not seen since Olivier. He emotes, he pauses, he moves his arms for effect. I can't wait till the next documentary where someone is befallen by a nasty fate - I hope right at the crime scene they have the body shipped to this man for investigation.

And then....

Well, and then there's that stuff I'm probably going to hell for.

OK, I mean, let's face it, any or all of the above could probably send me there, but I can't help it. Sometimes you have to laugh at a man who's fucking nuts and gets eaten by a bear. And I laughed. And Mr M laughed as well, probably even more than I did, because he's an atheist and therefore doesn't care if he goes to hell or not because he doesn't think there's one anyway. And it's bad enough to laugh at a man who got eaten by a bear, but you know, in the final analysis, since I truly believe he wanted to get eaten by a bear, I honestly don't feel that bad about it.

However, I do feel a little bad about the other things we laughed at. Mainly at the fact that Treadwell, who did a long sililoquy about how he's always being mistaken for gay but was sooo not gay, was obviously gayer than a Strauss waltz, played on the oboe in the middle of France. OK, so he had two women who claimed to be his girlfriend, well, one did, the other can't really account for herself because she was eaten for lunch. But if this man's not gay he's missed the world's greatest opportunity.

In fact, another thing we laughed at that will have us sipping sludgewater in hell was the fact that Treadwell was obviously an animal lover right from the get-go, as evidenced by the fact that when he was growing up his best friend was a squirrel he'd caught named Willie. And then, as Treadwell's mother (who I really did feel sorry for, no joking there) was holding the teddy bear Timothy carried around with him and took to Alaska with him and filmed himself having a conversation with, she told us all about his first job as a young teen. Working at Nick's Pansy Farm. Now, I know. I know, but I just couldn't help it.

Or maybe I could. I don't know. It's just so hard to have any sympathy for someone like Timothy Treadwell. And I guess I should, because I know the world of mental illness is not the happiest of places, but perhaps the saddest thing of all is that Mr M and I seemed to be the only people who even noticed the man was fucking nuts. I honestly don't recall a single interviewee, amongst Treadwell's friends or foes, saying, "Hey, I liked him, but the man needed some lithium." They all seemed to think he was either a hero or a man trying to be a hero who knew nothing about the grizzlies he was trying to save.

And you know, in the end, he didn't. He knew their names, because he'd named them, just like Willie the Squirrel, but he didn't know anything about them. He just looked at them. And he didn't do a bit of good for them. Except, I guess, keeping one from going hungry. And the final irony in the whole story is that not only did he go to live with these grizzly bears, one of whom would end up eating him, but that the one who did eat him was shot dead. And Treadwell and his girl were then fished out of the bear's stomach, barely digested.

So he didn't even get to become the bear poop he loved so much. But he got a movie made all about him, which would have made him infinitely happier in the long run.

(* A post-script to this - Mr M swears that somewhere in that movie, someone - perhaps the pilot they interviewed - did indeed say that Treadwell was fucking nuts. I still do not remember this, and am not willing to give in. And one thing's for sure - I'm not watching the whole movie again to find out. If any of you watch it, you can let me know.)

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Acrowinners, we have, well, almost acrowinners. Only two participants this week, I'll take it that the X scared everyone away, but if you're tired of acro, let me know. I don't have to do it, you know....
- Runner-up goes to Michelle, with her "Eager x-linked fissure metastisized abnormally." Wow - that was scientific!
- And this week's winner goes to LilyG, with her "Eek! Xerxes fondled my anatomy!" That's entirely possible.
- And by the way, Lilster, the Cipro is for the infection. The yellow pills are for the pain.
- Anyway, thanks to all who played. All two of you.