Action, Avatar, Ecology, and Empire: Databases, Digitality, Death, and Gaming in Werner Herzog's Arctic

Figure 1.

The sublime, unchanging Arctic in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (Lionsgate Films, 2005).

At about the midpoint of Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man (2005), a camera circles an unnamed glacier from above, surveying a dramatic landscape of vast expanses of ice, striated by crevices. This scene constitutes an emblematic shot in Arctic filmmaking, part of a cinematic regimen for documenting the polar regions for nearly a century. Scenes like this one occur in films from the 1920s made by Roald Amundsen, who sought to reach the North Pole via airplane, and in recent climate change documentaries, such as Jeff Orlowski's award-winning Chasing Ice (2012). Herzog's shot promotes still-dominant visual tropes of the Arctic as not only a desolate endpoint of the world to be conquered by a (white male) explorer but also a blank canvas or empty screen passively awaiting imagination and projection.¹ Grizzly Man is not typically characterized as an "Arctic" film, though it is set in Alaska and builds on many of the tropes of danger and challenge associated with filmmaking in the Far North. Climate, the environment, wildlife, and the emotional toll on a human subjecting himself to isolation and deprivation are among the challenges. This genre of filmmaking is decisively male and masculinist, as there are only a handful of women Arctic filmmaker explorers in the history of film.²

Grizzly Man's subject is Timothy Treadwell (1957–2003), an animal rights activist who lived among grizzly bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park for many summers and was subsequently killed and eaten by one of them.³ But, like many of Herzog's films, Grizzly Man is also about the director himself. As the camera circles a quintessential Arctic cinematic landscape (Figure 1), Herzog's "voice of God" proclaims, "Wild primordial nature was where he truly felt at home … [this] landscape in turmoil is a metaphor of his soul." Treadwell's internal landscape, and by extension Herzog's, is one of "battling demons," a statement in stark contrast to the blanket of ice pictured as the aerial shot hovers over a glacier. This short sequence neatly sums up what many critics have argued to be the dichotomous core of Grizzly Man: its interest in juxtaposing inner and outer worlds, and subject and object, while aligning Treadwell with a view of nature as wild, primordial, unmediated, and mythological rather than with constructions of "civilization" as the white, rational, and enculturated embodiment of Herzog's privileged prerogative.⁴ Similarly, critics have remarked on a set of related juxtapositions in the film: human versus animal,⁵ director versus Treadwell,⁶ and the relationship between German romanticism and ideologies of the sublime.⁷

But Herzog's film is far more than an investigation into Treadwell's tragic character flaw—his disrespect for Western epistemology's demarcation between subject and object or human and animal. Unable and unwilling to play the role of a traditional male Arctic wilderness explorer tasked with documenting and dominating nature, both Treadwell himself and his digital video camera are literally consumed by wildlife. Herzog's visualization of ice and his voice-over about Treadwell and the landscape position these entities as not only conjoined but also simultaneously subject and object. Grizzly Man thereby functions as an inquiry into representational modes emblematic of contemporary digitality as embedded within epistemological paradigms endemic to twenty-first-century modernity: algorithmic culture, digital databases, and digital gaming theory.

SUBJECT, OBJECT, AND THE ARCTIC

William Uricchio argues that algorithmic culture allows for the emergence of "cracks in the façade of the subject-object relationship characteristic of the modern era."⁸ Algorithmic culture facilitates the reconsideration of ontological subject positions with respect to digital images that can be multinodal and multiauthored. A reconsideration of a subject–object position also forces an inquiry into established understandings of the Cartesian perspective for representing landscape and for encyclopedic collections of knowledge. These are both central to...