Despite some early bumps, Treadwell started off as an average sort. After an injury put an end to an athletic scholarship, he moved to (where else?) Southern California. There he did the usual bumming around, but his life soured and, according to his book, Among Grizzlies, written with Jewel Palovak, he suffered a near-fatal drug overdose. Scared straight, he gradually reinvented himself, and by the early 1990's was summering in Katmai, home to about 2,000 grizzlies. Herzog lays out this history in voice-over, illustrating Treadwell's ups and downs through the spectacular videos the amateur naturalist shot and interviews with the dead man's family and friends. The filmmaker also taps the medical examiner who performed the autopsies on Treadwell and Huguenard, Franc Fallico, a character around whom an entire reality show could be built.
Fallico pops up a couple of times in Grizzly Man, but the most potent use of his testimony occurs when he expounds at length in an autopsy room, a scene that illustrates Herzog's sense of drama beautifully. Sporting a blue smock and a fixed gaze, Fallico recounts his version of the attack, a description based on his examination of the bodies and the six-minute audio record found on one of Treadwell's video cameras. (The lens cap was on the camera.) The account is graphic, gruesome and thoroughly riveting, partly because morbid tales always tug at the imagination, but also because Fallico turns out to be an incredible storyteller. For Herzog, it's clear that the truth of this story isn't located just in the facts that the doctor strings together with florid gestures and pregnant pauses, but in a performance that is as artful as it is true.
Treadwell's adventures among his beloved grizzlies were also a kind of performance, built on lies and truth and played out on the stage of celebrity. Even though his choices were dangerous and finally fatal, he traveled a familiar American path shaped by boundless optimism and an almost religious belief in the self. He lived among grizzlies because he believed that he could. Given this, the cheap shots that followed his death, including the appalling snarkiness that crept into newspaper headlines ("Grizzly bear that killed pair attacked at lunchtime"), are revelatory. For some, Treadwell's death confirmed that animal activists and environmentalists are dangerous wackos; for others, though, his unhappy end may have suggested something equally disturbing: sometimes a smile and American goodwill aren't enough.
Throughout Grizzly Man, men and women pay testament to Treadwell's niceness and naivete. Some are kind; others less so. Each testifier seems to capture some authentic quality of Treadwell, who from the evidence of his videos and Herzog's sympathetic inquiry, seemed equally nice and naive, brave and foolish. At some point that foolishness mushroomed into a welter of delusions about his power to survive the wilderness in which he so recklessly tried to find himself. His death, as inevitable as it was preventable, could mean that he may have been more lost than found. Herzog remains generous to a fault on this particular point, perhaps because he recognizes that for someone like Treadwell, there is nothing more terrifying than being ordinary, even the claws of a grizzly.
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