Archive | June, 2015

Camping in Nature with Grizzly Men: “Ecocriticim” through a Camp Sensibility – ENG 449

Treadwell reads as we read Treadwell

John Water’s camp classic Pink Flamingos ends with Divine eating a pile of dog feces. The story goes that Divine followed the dog around for hours, waiting for it poop, setting a stage for a performance and scene that would cement her title as “the filthiest person alive.” And similarly, in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell glorifies bears, their scat and filth, puts himself “at risk,” performs excessively to gain credibility as a naturalist. He is performing an identity that he himself may or may not understand but it is nonetheless—to borrow from Judith Butler—both deeply embodied and artificial. A character like Treadwell, who sincerely and bodily performed loving the bears unto his death, forces uneasiness within an audience that holds tremendous preconceived notions of nature and the natural and what constitutes an appropriate relationship towards them. Nature, the universe, the environment—the what we consider to be natural, wilderness, or interconnected—these very foundations of ecological language, are made more readily visible as constructed notions and artificial through Treadwell’s performance. Grizzly Man illustrates for its audience that these concepts rely upon their conceptualization through the human mind and are constantly molded by human stewardship and touch. And so, in terms of conservation, Grizzly Man questions our naturalized unreality by examining the more porous aspects of ecology and stewardship.

Grizzly Man, through Herzog’s and Treadwell’s mediated and contemporaneous performance and direction, take serious Treadwell’s actions but exhibit a serious failure of tone through the extravagant tension these competing narrators produce. And Grizzly Man becomes sensible, through the extravagant failure it performs, as “pure Camp,” which according to Susan Sontag requires an “essential element…a seriousness that fails…that has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve” (23). Treadwell takes himself seriously as an activist and lover of bears but still exhibits his actions and stewardship playfully and as a performance—his camera is present, to drink in and represent his enactments of friendship and protection. And Herzog appropriates these performances, interprets the composite of his footage, and inserts his direction and his own performance to inscribe a different language of consequence onto Treadwell’s actions, forcing a tense competition between the two subjects.

The narrative tension bred from this competition manifests throughout the film but is exemplified in an intense moment of tonal juxtaposition as Treadwell crouches over a half-eaten fox, quietly crying “I love you…I love you and I…don’t understand; it’s a painful world” (Herzog). In this passionate performance of tenderness, Treadwell mourns the loss of one of his “friends,” treating a “natural” creature as he would a deceased pet or relative. But in a narrative move that is best described as predatory, Herzog seizes an opportunity to interrupt, “Here I differ with Treadwell, I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder.” Herzog claims control of his audience’s perception with a rhetorical either-or dichotomy—harmony with or antagonism against the natural. As this is Herzog’s representation of Treadwell, the audience is meant to sympathize with the cold, Teutonic appraisal of the state of nature: something that cannot, will not, and is unable to reciprocate Treadwell’s and humanity’s wishes, desires, and devotions.

But Herzog’s performed dichotomy is false and predicated on terminology that he insists upon and provides which erodes his ability to control his dominance over the narrative through its overbearingness. Treadwell believes the world is painful but he doesn’t seek to explain it, and instead consoles himself by appealing his own lack of understanding to embrace of the melancholy his performance produces in this encounter with death. Herzog believes the world is painful and interprets Treadwell’s sorrow as a failure to react rationally to the irrational “reality” of nature; Herzog seeks to reify his narrative authority in this moment, forcing his moral upon the audience. In this flourish, Herzog handles Treadwell in a manner that parallels Susan Sontag’s relationship to Camp as she says she “is strongly drawn to [it], and almost strongly as offended by it” (1). Herzog’s unsympathetic evaluation attempts to produce a pleasurable and satisfying affect in its audience because it wantonly appeals to the audience’s fear and repulsion towards bears and the natural world while still attempting a concerned honesty towards Treadwell’s “naiveté.”

However, this stark tonal juxtaposition illustrates a moment of narrative fissure, opening up and magnifying the effervescent, extravagant artifice of Treadwell’s and Herzog’s posturing within Grizzly Man. These performed postures are so overwrought and excessive that they become sensible as Camp, which contains “a large element of artifice” (Sontag 7). Through their increasingly artificial performances, Treadwell and Herzog represent “instant characters” who embody “a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing” (33). Treadwell’s affected mannerisms and childlike behavior are a “triumph of the epicene style,” since his subject performance is always a mix of maternal tenderness and an aggressively paternal protection which make his gender unconventional and puzzling (11). Both men are “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater” (10). And so, these men exhibit many of the “notes” that Sontag uses to describe a Camp sensibility. Camp is a “mode of seduction – one which employs” but also latches onto “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible to double interpretation, [and] gestures full of duplicity” (17).

One of Herzog’s closing remarks insists that he sees no harmony, discovers “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy” in the eyes of a bear Treadwell films and sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature” but this statement appears duplicitous since he admits that it is a difference of perception between him and Treadwell. He invites the audience to reflect on the bear’s eyes in this gesture—and how the audience reflects is a projection of their own postures and sensibilities towards bears onto the “bear.” Camp provides an opportunity to interrupt Herzog’s machinations in this scene and seek meaning through alternative sensibilities.

Sontag’s portrayal of Camp is meant to be opaque and so it often appears that a work of Camp is performing the seduction of Camp as the reader is perceiving the duplicity of its performance and recognizing the Camp within it. It is described as a sensibility and its ability to be sensed, through a refinement of a taste or a capacity for sensation, help to inform the complex interaction between a thing performing Camp and audience perceiving Camp in a performance—which are often collapsible categories, further complicating what it means to be Campy. At some point, the complications become so immense that the argument for Camp must be simplified to “I know it when I see it” or put another way, “it simply is.” And Grizzly Man, through its excessive narrative performances and opulent theatricality simply is Camp to this audience member. Sensing Grizzly Man’s Campiness provides an opportunity to reevaluate its didacticism since Camp is “a solvent of morality” that “neutralizes moral indignation, [and] sponsors playfulness” (52). This allows the audience of Grizzly Man analytical distance and provides the ability to articulate the ways in which Treadwell embodies the exaggeratedly theatrical and excessive performance that Camp senses, values, and celebrates; Camp sees “artifice as an ideal, theatricality” and allows this theatricality to invest their thought in new ways of “being” in “nature” (43).

There is a lingering spectral presence that interrupts an elegantly Camp interpretation of death in Grizzly man: it is not Treadwell’s specter—or society’s—but Amie Huguenard’s. She is the only character who shirks the excess of performance in Grizzly man: liminal in appearance and representation, she remains a nonentity. And therefore, she the only failure that Camp cannot locate success within. She cautions the playfulness of Camp to not entrench itself so deeply into irreverence that it becomes cruel; Camp considers nothing sacred but cannot celebrate something that is not extravagant and is simply lamentable. Instead, Camp latches onto characters, like Treadwell and Herzog and “relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character”…identifies with what it is enjoying…Camp is a tender feeling” (56).

Treadwell, through many triumphs and awkward intensities of exaggerated performance, illustrates the ability to reimagine the “natural” into his own set of rules and regulations of appropriate touch, reverence, and stewardship. Camp is a sensibility and aesthetic, values performances, like Treadwell’s, that defamiliarize and make exaggerated, the constructions society assumes to be natural. In a moment of exaggerated unfamiliarity, Treadwell stoops over a pile of fresh scat, rejoicing in its warmth and excrement as a product of life, something produced by one of his bear friends, and it provides a moment of slippage for his audience where we are able to glimpse into the construction and constructedness of the natural. He whispers that he “can feel it,” that it was “just inside of her, my girl…it’s Wendy’s poop” (Herzog). He returns the camera to his face, addressing the audience and anticipating their disgust as he relays, “I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop but it was inside of her…it’s her life…it’s her…she’s so precious to me, she gave me Downy” (Herzog). This is one of his least dangerous interaction with the bears but it is also the most confusing and unsettling, as he infuses qualities of vitality and importance onto the waste product of these omnivorous alpha predator.

Through his touch and tender reverence, he remarkably defamiliarizes the audience’s relationship to poop and bears by his active redefinition of meaning and boundaries. There is a proliferation of new meaning in this interaction, bear becomes “my girl,” “my girl” becomes Wendy, her poop becomes an extension of Wendy, Wendy’s poop becomes Downy—her cub, an organism that gestated inside of her and was released into the world, full of vitality. It is a series of performative speech acts, producing new definitions of reality as he builds his utterance towards the conclusive, “everything about them is perfect” (Herzog). His appraisal of the scat descriptively not wrong and it is infused with appropriations of existing facts: it is indeed warm, fertile, and full of life—fecund for literal bacteria and figurative meaningfulness.

In “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag argues that Camp is “at least apolitical” but the redefinitions and newly produced meanings that Treadwell performs are inherently political since they bear consequences for Grizzly Man’s subjects, for the bears and their ecosystem, and for a society that actively asserts and produces definitional meaning as a means of controlling its subjects through discourse (2). Performative redefinitions happen throughout society, often contemporaneously; the societal reaction to the AIDS crisis mutated the rectum into a grave incubator of disease and death, and through this redefinition, mediated and informed a deepening societal revulsion to the anal and fecal (Bersani). But Treadwell interrupts this societal distaste to redefine the scatological as he shrewdly performs for his audience—as a trained actor does—balancing his performance and the audiences’ repellant perception of poop to negotiate his new understandings. Through his performance, he produces a new reality where touching poop becomes a gesture that touches bear, transforms poop into natal, and re-describes digestion as a celebratory, bountiful production of fresh life instead of a repulsive symbol of death, waste, and terminated consumption.

In a beautiful, off-screen turn of unintentional Camp, Treadwell is eaten and can finally become bear, through digestion, by becoming the poop he gleefully touched. Poop is the means through which Treadwell can transform into “bear,” if we follow his produced framework of definitional meaning. However, he is denied this (through a bitter reversal of his wish to never harm a bear) as he and his lover, Amy are exhumed from the bear’s stomach. Through this denial, he remains human and his composite parts are collected into a trash bag. What the coroner call “a trash bag of human parts” (Herzog). But he has been human trash for a while: a dejected, depressive ex-junkie and failed actor—he is already discarded and devalued by society. Camp allows the audience to sense that Treadwell was always already failing to become “bear” and his failed transformation into poop further exemplifies the inability to break free from human constructions and the power of discursively enforced relationships and boundaries. Camp can also sense the performance of societal power—as a display that reifies humanity’s status as the “alpha predator”—and in this moment, the audience can “sniff the stink and pride ourselves on our strong nerves” since this naked performance of power exhibits how deeply new definitions of relationality are resisted by society when they do not conform to a produced appropriateness or normality (Sontag 48).

Treadwell’s failure to become bear can be understood, through a Camp sensibility, to reveal the perpetual production of artificial meaning within the societal constructions of nature, the natural, and humanity’s enforced relationship to them. Grizzly Man presents Treadwell as naïve and strange since his desires are projected onto creatures—predators—associated with carnal needs, aggression, and death. Yet Herzog is didactic and extreme, so unabashedly predatory and hyperbolic in his direction, that when compared to Treadwell’s tender earnestness, both men seem comical and frivolous. The moral murkiness is buttressed by the profusion of discourse Herzog provides through interviews that work to moralize Treadwell’s passing; each new subject seeks to make meaning from his corpse, to turn Treadwell into a heroic figure, a parable, or cautionary tale. The absolute unnaturalness of these postures, and their naked desire to enforce narrative, force the audience to work through the ambiguities that become manifest in their performances. A Camp sensibility resists the compulsion to moralize and seeks to “find the success in certain passionate failures” (55). And in terms of Camp, Treadwell’s death was a glorious success since it is an imperfect triumph of his aesthetic; he became “bear” in a very momentary victory against the power of entrenched definitions and produced a new form of “being” through digestive transmutation. His success as “bear” is artificial and ultimately fails but is equal in its artificiality and failure to the language that seeks to enforce his status as “human”; as Sontag says “Camp sees everything in quotation marks” and those quotation marks denaturalize naturalized categories of being. And so “bear” never was Bear just as “human” never was Human; the categories were always already constructed and Grizzly Man makes them perform their artificiality by exaggerating them to their logical extremes.

This effervescent proliferation of artificiality allows the audience to feel the “sympathy modified by revulsion” in Grizzly Man which is an ambivalence that returns them to Camp as a “solvent of morality” and a sensibility that” neutralizes moral indignation” and “sponsors playfulness” (1, 52). A solvent dissolves substances into solutions and the solvency Camp provides is its ability to dissolve the solute of naturalized categories of being and identity. Equally intriguing is its ability to transform these categories into solutions through their dissolution. Grizzly Man’s proposed solution is illusory, imparted through Herzog’s objectivity as a documentary filmmaker but he inserts his narration into the film and—whether intentional or not—exposes the role he plays. Through his unabashed mediation, he reveals the artificiality of a “documentary” that proposes to “document” the life of another. Treadwell’s solution is less duplicitous through its naiveté. While both men are playful with artifice, Treadwell works to deconstruct the appropriate boundaries of identity, touch, and the natural to broaden possibility; whereas Herzog plays with artifice to foreclose the possibilities opened by Treadwell. The Camp solution celebrates the successes each man achieved through their failed experiments, understanding each to be inadequate and radiant, beautiful and repulsive. Sontag concludes, “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful…Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes” (58).

Certainly, we can say Grizzly Man is good because it’s awful; its subject matter is “grizzly” and the playful pun does not go unnoticed and informs the shades of grey between the extremes of the film that inspire awe within its audience. And so, if everything remains awfully grey and that greyness remains constructed, we are encouraged to play in the constructed greyness and to interrupt entrenched definitions of “natural” relationships. We see a sign that commands us “Do Not Wander from the Path” at Walden Pond and we can sense that this is antithetical to what Walden Pond represents and draws people to it. But we can also celebrate the contradiction while respecting its purpose. These boundaries and restrictions are artificial, readily subverted by Camp—playfully—with an irreverent respect towards what limits seek to protect. A Camp reading of Grizzly Man knows better than to suggest that people should touch the bears. But a Camp sensibility can joyfully respect and celebrate the desire and attempt to redefine what it means to touch, love, and protect through understanding that these artificial redefinitions are exactly where meaning is always already located.