Iris and Grizzly Man: Two Films That Seem Completely Unconnected, But Which Become Melded As One In My Fevered Psyche

Yes, it appears that all the deep thinking I conduct while driving to the YMCA for F's swimming lessons with the radio on full blast has finally borne fruit. I knew there was something that Iris and Grizzly Man had in common, I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Before I discuss my astonishing insight (ahem), it must be said that on the surface it would appear that a documentary about an eccentric bear activist in Alaska would have absolutely no shared territory with a melodrama about Iris Murdoch and Alzheimer's. Before watching both films, I had no knowledge of either of the subjects.

I've never read a Murdoch novel, in fact, I've rather strenuously avoided them on the basis of the prejudice I have against books that come from that milieu - there's something about stories of the privileged Oxbridge 1950s set that makes me shiver with distaste. (This comes from someone who married a Cambridge graduate. I love contemporary Cambridge. However, I've only ever been to Oxford via Inspector Morse). Perhaps one day I'll get over it, as I'm sure I'm missing a lot of really fabulous material.

Likewise, I've never been to Alaska, despite my rather extensive history of armchair mountaineering. I love the vicarious thrill of the exploits of people who risk life and limb on their adventuring; I've just finished the tale of Beck Weathers survival on Everest, and in a particularly exhilarating passage he describes his awful experiences on Denali. My experience with bears in the wild is confined to bursting into tears of terror while camping in Yosemite because I could hear people - very far away - trying to scare away a black bear (the grizzly's common, and by all accounts, less fierce, relative) from their cooler.

As I watched Dame Judi Dench portray Iris Murdoch "sailing into darkness", I was more drawn to the story of John Bayley, her husband. The film was based on a book he wrote, before Murdoch was even dead. Although the film is so exclusively about their relationship other characters are all but incidental, I felt he was more of a void than a real flesh and blood person. In fact, I was so unsettled, that I sought his book, Elegy For Iris. The film portrayed him as a kind of fumbling, bumbling, absent-minded academic; a peripheral satellite to the wondrous Iris. The only hint of a real personality was when he was shown entering the waves of Southwold fully clothed complete with a vest, snorkel and face-mask; eccentric and a bit potty. I felt cheated. It seemed as if the film-makers needed to dehumanize him in order to make his wife shine all the brighter. I think this sort of characterisation in a film about a disease that often entails the stripping away of the self was rather odd.

It was only because I felt that he had be wronged in some way, that I looked into the story more deeply. His book (part of a trilogy, which was somewhat controversial for various reasons)reveals him to be a fascinating, successful person - such a contrast to the way he was portrayed on film. Apparently, he approved of his portrayal on film, which made it seem even stranger to me. Here was someone who made me read his book and hang on every word, yet he was pleased to be a less than complete character in a film. Looking at his response to the film in the NYT article, I found a clue as to how this could be so. He talks about the film as being a work of "art". Perhaps when one sees oneself on screen, the only way to appreciate it is if it's treated as some kind of dynamic mirror, truly a moving image with no substance.

On to Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man. He was a man who credited encounters in the wild with grizzly bears as his salvation from a life of spiraling drug abuse. He became a media figure in his crusade to protect the grizzlies of Alaska from human harm. He survived thirteen summers in the wilderness before dying with his girlfriend in a bear attack.

Werner Herzog uses Treadwell's own video footage to admire his skills as a film-maker, and tell his story. However, there is a strange part of the video where Herzog narrates that some of the best footage was unintentional; when the camera keeps rolling and Treadwell ceases his breathless, almost unhinged narration. To praise Treadwell's skills, then to single out moments that he did not intend to be seen as particularly skillful seems like a back-handed compliment at best.

My fascination wasn't with the factual ins and outs of the story. What interested me was the obvious gap between Treadwell's public 'face' which was that of a rather amateurish, paranoid film-maker, and his quite remarkable private skill of living in grizzly territory. If I were to attempt to camp out in bear country in the same kind of circumstances as he lived in, I would with absolute certainty come to a horrible end very, very quickly. I wonder how he would have felt about these incongruencies, or whether he had enough self-awareness to recognise them.


His films show someone earnest, who anthropomorphises the bears and seems to worry about their safety as if they were his children. He appears to talk to the camera in such a markedly unselfconscious way, that I wonder whether he would have wanted this footage to be broadcast or whether he was treating his camera as an extension of his psyche.


We all have private selves and public selves which reveal themselves in various contexts. Different people are comfortable with different degrees of overlap and awareness of the differences. Some people are happy to lay all things bare in writing, and to accept it when they are transformed by others into a hollow image, a mask. If I had written Bayley's book, and seen it turned into the film Iris, I would have been furious - perhaps because I feel my public self and private self are not so different, and to see them so defiled would have destroyed me. I also wonder how Timothy Treadwell would react to his public self as it is now. I wonder if he would revel in his fame (or infamy) or whether it would horrify him to have been turned into an almost-caricature; the naturalist consumed by nature. I think that's why I could never be a writer or artist - that and the extreme lack of any talent.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact conducting is it; my rambling, incoherent thoughts on two films I saw recently. And that is why I stick to knitting.