Timothy Treadwell: “Nature wants to eat you.”

Sars describes her response to Grizzly Man. Not to be missed.

One excerpt – but go read the whole thing – it made me want to see the movie again:

And then you’ve got Timothy Treadwell, giving the bears cutesy nicknames like “Mr. Chocolate” and “Wizard,” and touching them in the face, and capering around in the foreground with his back turned on the bears as big as New York one-bedrooms in the background, and repeating baby-voiced incantations of “I love you, I love you” at bears as they amble away from him before he turns back to the camera to characterize various bears as “grumpy” or “cranky,” and it’s just utter insanity to watch. I don’t camp, I don’t bird, I don’t raft, I don’t know anything about the outdoors except what I had to learn about a narrow stratum of New Jersey botany twenty-five years ago to get a Girl Scout merit badge — by design, because nature is dangerous. Nature is lovely, but you might have noticed that man as a species moved inside eventually, because nature is also scratchy, bitey, sting-y, scrapey, cold (and also hot), sandy, damp, and hungry. Nature can eat you. Nature wants to eat you.

And bears…don’t care if you give them little names like you think you live in the ursine version of Watership Down, or that you “love” them or are “in love with” them. Bears do not make allowances for the fact that you have some kind of disorder in relating to other human beings, to the point where, instead, you excessively anthropomorphize the bears, and also the foxes that live near your camp, and to the point where, when one of the foxes makes off with your baseball cap, you chase it for like ten minutes and yell at it, angrily, like it’s personal, like the fox is a sassy eight-year-old who is deliberately disobeying you, and you explain to it that you need that hat back and you’ll get really mad if it takes the hat to its den and hides it, which of course it is going to do, because it is a fox.

Yup. Great stuff. Go read.

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10 Responses to Timothy Treadwell: “Nature wants to eat you.”

  1. Dave E. says:

    Yeah, she nails it. The guy was not all there. I went out to Glacier to hike in 1979 and in the seventy years or so prior to that 3 people had been killed in the park by grizzlies. That year alone 4 had been killed and the entire park was what we called bearanoid. I’d hoped to see a grizzly when we were on the way out there. After the stern and very educational lecture we got from the Rangers I was glad we never did.

    BTW-Did you get my email on Grace O’Malley?

  2. red says:

    I did! I haven’t had a chance to email you back – way too busy. Sorry!

    The piece looks cool – The whole Grania/Elizabeth relationship is very interesting

    Apparently there’s a musical in the works about Grania as well (maybe it’s already happened – can’t remember – where is peteb when I need him???)

  3. John says:

    “ursine version of Watership Down” is the best latinate phrase I’ve seen all year, and in my line of work, I’m awash in them.

  4. Dave E. says:

    No problem, just wanted to make sure it didn’t get caught in a spam filter or something.

  5. Emily says:

    “@#$% YOU, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE!!!!!!!”

    Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. I feel better now.

  6. red says:

    “I am ASKING YOU … GOD … OR ALLAH … OR BUDDHA FLOATY GUY … SEND US SOME RAIN!”

  7. Emily says:

    “I am the Floaty Thing’s gopher-boy!”

  8. tracey says:

    I am obsessed with Timothy Treadwell’s obsession.

    “It’s her POO! It was just inside her body! And now it’s HERE! LOOOOK!!”

  9. Nightfly says:

    Yes – and last I checked, the Pope’s still Catholic, too.

  10. Emily says:

    Yeah, I think the fondling of the poop moment was the most jaw-dropping. Dude, calm down. It’s a pile of crap.

Comments are closed.