To Tame Is To Establish Ties

I originally wrote one blog post, but then I realized that I also wanted to write about something else… So, you’re kind of getting two blog posts from me (both late… I know). I tried to tie them together, but bear with me.

Among the things I found most striking within Grizzly Man was Treadwell’s treatment of the animals with whom he interacted as though they were tame? Perhaps it was his interaction with Timmy the fox, but I kept thinking of this one section within Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the little prince encounters a fox and has this interaction about what it means to be tamed:

"What does that mean--'tame'?"

"You do not live here," said the fox. "What is it that you are looking for?"

"I am looking for men," said the little prince. "What does that mean--'tame'?"

"Men," said the fox. "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?"

"No," said the little prince. "I am looking for friends. What does that mean--'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. It means to establish ties."

"'To establish ties'?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ."

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower . . . I think that she has tamed me . . ."

"It is possible," said the fox. "On the Earth one sees all sorts of things." (Chapter 21… I don’t have the book with me, but I found this online)

On some level, I think the issue with Treadwell’s interaction with the animals is that his relationship with the animals is only half of that described by the fox. To Timmy the fox and every bear with whom Treadwell interacts, he is just another man, but Treadwell believes himself to be friends with each animal- he can tell them apart, he has named them. Treadwell sees each bear as distinct, but more than that, he needs them. The bears and the foxes provide him a sense of caring and membership in a community that the human world doesn’t provide. At the same time, the animals don’t need him; they don’t care. Treadwell’s false idea of taming with the animals perhaps leads to greater misunderstanding on his part (as the fox says to the little prince "One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . ."). As Treadwell misinterprets the animals as his friends, he further misreads many of their actions, immersing himself in a world he can never understand.

That said, we all know nature doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t love us the way Timothy Treadwell convinced himself it loved him, but it doesn’t hate us either. It just doesn’t care. The indifference of nature was a theme in most of the things I read for my AP English class. It comes up everywhere, from King Lear to The Road and it comes up as a clear theme within Grizzly Man as well. Werner Herzog even articulates that among the most striking things in the story of Timothy Treadwell is nature’s indifference. Still, though we know nature doesn’t care, we still sentimentalize it. We look at nature as beautiful and sweet, while in truth it is cruel. Herzog does this too, most clearly through the song with which he closes his film. In class we talked about this as paradoxical, but I don’t know that I agree with that interpretation. We’re all as aware as Herzog is that nature doesn’t care, even as we regard it as uniquely lovely. I don’t see doing both as a contradiction. There’s a clear line between our (and Herzog’s) sentimentalization of nature and that in which Timothy participates. Herzog presents the nature with which Timothy interacts as both beautiful and majestic, but he never presents it as caring. Timothy’s “friends” always appear to as wild; Herzog doesn’t present them as tame, though Timothy seems to view him that way. Although Herzog may sentimentalize nature to an extent, I don’t see this as ever contradicting the idea that nature is indifferent. Instead, Herzog shows the difference between the sentimentalization of nature in which we all engage and sentimentalization taken to an extreme.