The world’s fallen in love (or in hate) with Joe Exotic. And fans who are pining for more will find themselves equally taken with Timothy Treadwell.
A couple of episodes into Netflix’s latest docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, it was clear that Joe Exotic was uniquely aware of his public persona. His eccentricity, his dress-style, his country music, the twinge of his country accent. The persona of Joe Exotic surrounded every action the convicted tiger-trafficker made, especially through his passion for filming his zoo.
Filming his own show to be distributed online, Joe Exotic’s occupation with the vehicle of cinema as a way to showcase his persona of a tiger-owning outlaw resonated with me. Watching the Oklahoma-based breeder strut around his zoo with a costume and a character, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favourite documentaries, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.
Made way back in 2005, Grizzly Man was directed by acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, director of classic films like Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, where Herzog’s contentious relationship with his films’ lead actor – Klaus Kinski- became legendary. Grizzly Man documents the life of conservationist and grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, a 46-year-old born in Long Island, New York. Treadwell spent thirteen summers amongst the grizzlies of Katmai National Park in Alaska, before he died from a horrific bear attack alongside girlfriend Amie Huguenard.
But the similarities don’t confine themselves to a story about men with a love for exotic and dangerous animals who eventually meet with inevitable fate for attempting to tame nature. No, their most striking similarities are in their mutual love of filmmaking. Treadwell, Herzog notes through narration, was an avid filmmaker, documenting the lives of the bears with a screen persona similar to Steve Irwin. Treadwell names and personifies the bears, describing himself as a kind warrior that must become a samurai under challenge, and as a renegade outlaw who stands up for the bears against government conservation.
Like Joe Exotic, Timothy Treadwell is a controversial figure to those in conservation and wildlife protection. Most considered him an idiot, someone who played with fire and eventually got what was coming to him. Those who knew him personally saw the reasons why Treadwell lived in exile, defending the bears. The children that Treadwell visited in school were immersed in his stories of the bears and encouraged them to support conservation. News channels broadcasted Treadwell consistently, elevating him to the role of national celebrity, whereby Treadwell could send his message across the country. Despite opinion, Treadwell educated people with his eccentric life.
There’s a remarkable tension to Grizzly Man. The opening shot of Timothy Treadwell doubles as a tombstone, as Treadwell warns his viewers of the brutal ferocity of the grizzly bear, unaware that his years of birth and death linger beneath him. Unlike Tiger King, where Joe Exotic is safe from his tigers (until he decides to get in the enclosures to shoot a video), Treadwell has no safety barrier between himself and the grizzly bears. Together, they occupy one space in the Alaskan wilderness where the bears simply tolerate his presence.
He cannot cuddle and play with the bears as Joe Exotic does with his tiger cubs, however much Treadwell would like too. His passion for the bears seems to push him inexorably towards his own destruction though, getting in as close as possible to film the bears. Oftentimes, the bears harass him, just as often they simply observe him. All the while, as the spectator, you watch and know that one day he’ll go too far and be killed.
So, after you watch Tiger King, watch another documentary about an eccentric blond man with a love for animals. While it doesn’t have the compelling cast of tiger-owning rednecks, Grizzly Man does give us a deeply introspective portrait of the human condition and our relationship to danger, identity, and the natural world. And you won’t have to spend much time looking for it either. You can find the full documentary on YouTube for free.
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