M: so this is the new year...
New Years Eve was good. A few bottles of real French champagne (one direct from Paris), some homemade ravioli and molten chocolate cakes (yes, we geologists love lava), and two good friends (one whom I just happen to be married to) - it makes for a fine evening. Mellow, but good. Just the way I like it. Thanks Mitch for hanging out with us! 
The Rose-Kim Kints blog reminded me of something I've been wanting to blog about recently: we watched the movie "Grizzly Man" over the weekend. It's a documentary about Timothy Treadwell who spent 13 seasons hanging out (or "protecting," as he puts it) with grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness, only to be killed by one. Slate has an excellent review here that pretty much sums up exactly what I thought about it. It is an absolutely fascinating look at a man who could not function in a human society and took his addictive personality to "saving" bears and wanted to become one. It's one of those movies where you're not sure if you should laugh or cry - it was so sad that this guy and his girlfriend ended up eaten, but he came across as such a nutjob and almost wanted to die at the hands of a bear. Parts of it were so absurd that B and I found ourselves wondering if it wasn't a mock-umentary, in the style of Waiting For Guffman. But it was all real, which made it all the more interesting. I was trying to knit while watching it, but I found that for most of the movie I just sat there, jaw dropped, astonished at what I was watching. Crazy crazy stuff.
5 comments:
I still can't believe it's not a mockumentary. It is truly stunning how out there some people are. This is truly an example of natural selection.
Wow, this was apparently the weekend activity... everyone's writing about it today. Do you recommend it, or is it just too creepy?
The http://www.thereignofellen.blogspot.com/ site had quite the bipolar discussion about this -- might be interesting to you, having seen it?
I would totally recommend it. Yes, it's a little creepy, but it's absolutely fascinating as well. And the footage of the bears is amazing.
And after reading Ellen's post about it, I'd have to partly agree with her. Although I think it was painfully obvious (at least to me) that there was something wrong with this guy mentally. I'm personally glad that the movie didn't focus on his bipolar disorder - that's not the movie that they wanted to make. Instead, they focused on his actions and left the viewer to sort it all out in our heads. Which is almost creepier. And it's also quite sad that he really thought he was "saving" the bears, but these bears didn't really need saving; he was almost doing more harm than good.
No it is not nearly so creepy to me as Ellen made it seem. Having known some people like Timmy, and having read book after book about men like this (Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, Thoreau, Jon Muir, The Last American Man, Jesus), I believe this guys disease was above and beyond bipolar disorder. There is something in some men, above and beyond the mental illness that pumps them up with grandiose visions and makes them walk around like a messiah. Some of them actually are called a messiah, and the rest get eaten by the bears.
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