Reactions to "Grizzly Man"

As this semester comes to a close (and many of us are less than five days away from graduation), I found myself looking back on everything that we've read over the course of this, well, course, in hopes of finding some common theme, some through-line that would help to connect every text together to make a cohesive whole. And, ultimately, that's exactly what I did. Upon reflection, I feel that one of this course's largest themes was the idea of authorial control, what the writer decides to include, to leave out, or to fabricate from thin air. Before reading the books for this class, I had always assumed that taking any form of creative license with a work of non-fiction was darn near sacrilegious. Boy, was I wrong. With Truman Capote's game-changing "In Cold Blood," all that we have of the Clutters' final hours is entirely from the mind of Mr. Capote himself. He created entire scenes between characters, both living and dead, in an attempt to create characters whose deaths we would mourn while also giving us a sense of dread as the Clutters' killers get closer and closer to the farmhouse. In Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley," we discovered that, while the author did have a dog named Charley, he certainly didn't take him on the road-trip with him, and that the trip might not have ever occurred at all. In Hunter S. Thompson's infamous "Fear and Loathing," the narrator describes acid trips so bizarre that they jump off the page. But, what a surprise, they never happened. I think, to some extent, this theme stretches all the way to Werner Herzog's documentary "Grizzly Man." Clearly, Herzog did his homework, digging through over 100 hours of Tim Treadwell's footage to splice together less than an hour-and-a-half of footage that he felt represented not necessarily the man himself, but the narrative that Herzog had decided to create. One of my least favorite aspects of Herzog's doc, meanwhile, felt (and probably were) entirely staged. At one point near the middle of the film, a coroner presents Timothy's ex-girlfriend with the watch that he was wearing upon his death. The camera gets up close and personal, and the coroner speaks to the woman as though everything coming out of his mouth were predetermined and rehearsed. The scene lacks such authenticity that it took me out of the moment, and I was left feeling cold towards the film for the next ten minutes. Another scene in the film involves the same ex-girlfriend sharing the audio tape of Tim's death with Herzog. Herzog listens to the audio, removes the headset and tells the woman to destroy the tape. If Herzog's voice-over felt scripted, just wait until you listen to him warning the young lady to "never listen to this tape." It plays like a poorly-acted web series. These rehearsed scenes, however, are the closest the film comes to fabrication, thankfully. Much of the footage of Timothy Treadwell is ten times stronger than anything that Herzog himself might've created from thin air. One does have to wonder what is in those other 98 hours of footage, though. Did Tim ever fall deeper into the dark side, for lack of a better phrase? Was Tim ever attacked by bears previous to the encounter that killed him? Were there other hints of foreshadowing that Herzog-as-filmmaker decided to ignore? We might never know. But it is interesting to think about.