Everyone Acts A Little Weird

When the camera is on, everyone acts a little weird, maybe except the Ph.D guy. I’ll get to him soon. But for now I need to specifically fix my stand on the coroner.

The coroner was the only one that had his own special segment so far, a segment with distinctive camerawork and narrative style. Yes the pilot himself did have his moment in the spotlight. But what set the coroner’s sequence apart was the leaning in and out of the camera, plus the cohesive narration over jump cuts. The jump cuts were dead giveaway that this interview was definitely not candid, but it was the zooming in and out that was a little more problematic for me. I couldn’t accept the fact that I was forced to follow the camera to where Herzog wanted me to be. I didn’t want to be any more emotionally connected to the coroner than I needed to. But it was so clear that Herzog wanted the coroner to be more than just a bystanding interviewee - He wanted the coroner to appear like a story-teller in his own rights. Herzog had the chance to not have done what he did with this sequence, so I think there’s more to it than the superficial awkwardness and creepiness that come with the coroner.

Add that to the fact that the man’s artificial monologue is reminiscent of Spalding Gray in Swimming To Cambodia or even Alan Rickman in The Preacher. This made me hate the corroner even more because he was not a theatrical actor but his acting couldn’t be any less theatrical, in a bad way. He was overzealous and over the top, so good for him for not choosing to try his luck in the business like Timothy. But this then begs the question: was I seeing a part of Timothy in the coroner?

There are many narrators in this film. That I agree. But the one behind all this was Herzog. As the man in charge of the camera, Herzog was the one who decided what we the audience saw and how we saw it, much like Vonnegut or O’ Brien. He framed the way we saw the coroner, much like Vonnegut framed the way we saw Bokonon. And like Vonnegut or O’Brien, on the most superficial level, it was clear that Herzog inserted himself at least once into the movie and influenced the course of the narrative. Case in point: we saw him hear what can only be the audio recording of Treadwell’s final moments before death. Back against the camera, he advised the ex-girlfriend to destroy the tape. Her not so candid reaction notwithstanding, this sequence made me think of how much this film talked about Timothy Treadwell as much as it talked about talking about Timothy Treadwell. To paraphrase a character’s quote  from House of Cards, we were forced to hear the distorted voices of the people of Timothy’s lives in order to hear his (Thomas Yates to Claire Underwood, HOC season 3 - I’m sorry; I finished the whole thing on Sunday but still can’t get over it so I need to vent). My point is, to that effect, the voices of such people mirror in one way or another the voice of Timothy, so if we instantaneously think that the coroner was a creep, probably Tim was no less a weirdo. After all, the coroner did ask, half rhetorically, “Who are you Timothy?”. And through his horrid acting (but scripted by Herzog), he and ultimately the director gave us a partial answer. The rest remains to be seen. But we can be sure that the Ph.D guy would remain a beacon of legitimacy and logic (both in the context of the movie and in real life) against which Timothy is seen like a cheap knock-off.

For entertainment purpose, here's Alan Rickman in The Preacher and Spalding Gray in Swimming To Cambodia.