ANIMALS RULE! TIMOTHY CONQUERED!

Grizzly Man may be the greatest documentary film of all time. Not particularly just because Timothy Treadwell was crazy, but because it's a great portrait of a man. Timothy Treadwell was not just some nut-job, but a guy who had real problems that real everyday people have. He got into alcohol, then drugs for a bit and then reverted back to a child-like state mentally to kick his drug/alcohol abuse habit. When he was a child, his big thing was animals. So when his life totally went on the fritz, he just kind of resorted back to it like a mental auto-pilot.

But the part I love about Timmy Treadwell is that he actually tried to be an island. He left the confinements of human civilization to try to live with bear civilization. He thought that since he was rejected by humankind that he was just forsake it and live without people. In his mind, he developed this incredible mental fantasy that somehow bear social hierarchy was superior to human social hierarchy and that he was needed and loved by these bears and that he was their companion.

He also became their hero in his own mystical world. In real life, Timmy was nobody's hero. But out in the woods, he could be a hero to animals because they couldn't think or talk back to him, so he could just imagine their responses to his nonsense. They were just kind of puppets that acted in his psychological make-believe fantasy world. Puppets to make him believe that he was the hero, the alpha male, the samurai, the "kind warrior".