Reader's Digest: December 9, 2023
I’ve been reading Werner Herzog’s newly published memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. I admire the Herzog films I’ve seen—Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Aguirre, the Wrath of God—but, like many, I’m captivated more by the man himself than his creations. Herzog’s literal and metaphoric voice cries out for parody—the comedian Paul F. Tompkins is especially good at this, as Herzog would admit—and he sometimes seems to heed the cry himself. As Mark O’Connell writes, in a very good essay in the NYRB, “there is no doubt that his real masterpiece is the character known as Werner Herzog.”
On the other hand, the sheer intensity of Herzog’s life can be intimidating: “As I turned the pages of Herzog’s book, and was shunted from one insane episode to the next,” O’Connell writes, “I was gripped by the tightening conviction that my own life was, by comparison, barely a life at all.”
I was not born into a country at war with the world. I have never been shot, or stabbed my own brother. I have never worked as an arena clown riding bullocks at a Mexican rodeo. I have never journeyed from Berlin to Paris on foot as a kind of magical-realist intervention to forestall the death of a beloved mentor. I have never cooked and eaten my own boot in fulfillment of a lost wager. I have never hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Amazon rainforest. I have never fallen into a crevasse while mountain climbing in Pakistan. I have never taken a trip to Plainfield, Wisconsin, with the intention of digging up the corpse of Ed Gein’s mother. I have never been bitten on the face by a rat while delirious with dysentery in a garden shed in Egypt. I have never swapped my only good shoes for a bathtub filled with fish in order to feed a film crew in the Peruvian jungle. I have never even met—let alone threatened to murder as a means of extracting a powerful cinematic performance from—the dangerous madman Klaus Kinski.
Herzog’s relationship with Kinski—his tolerance of the actor’s abusive behaviour, and worse—becomes a theme of David Trotter’s anti-hagiography, published in the LRB. Trotter offers a detached account of an obsession one could relate to Herzog’s feet of clay:
The flame to be kept alive is the doctrine of ‘ecstatic truth’ that Herzog first fully articulated at the end of the 1990s as an attempt to explain his extreme dissatisfaction with cinema vérité. Film—fiction or documentary—should not concern itself with the facts of ordinary existence, which are the province of the journalist, the bureaucrat and the accountant. ‘Facts don’t illuminate,’ Herzog explained… ‘Only truth illuminates. By making a clear distinction between “fact” and “truth”, I penetrate a deeper stratum that most films don’t even know exists.’ Herzog’s primary characteristic as a filmmaker is his willingness to scan the horizon for the faintest sign of a filmable event. This unquenchable intellectual curiosity is, however, accompanied by an almost complete incuriosity about what it is in our equipment as human beings that enables some of us, at least, to recognise an ecstatic truth when we see one.
Herzog’s lack of curiosity about the hidden proclivities of the human psyche is not a blindspot or chance omission. It is deliberate, and self-directed, as O’Connell notes, pointing to a key passage: “I’d rather die than go to an analyst,” Herzog groans, “because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there.”
If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible.
You have to imagine this read in Herzog’s self-parodic intonation, or in Tompkins’ tribute version, in order to get the full effect. Or, for self-opacity in action, watch Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s film about a man who hauls a steamship over a mountain, on which the director has his own, definitive take:
It’s a great metaphor. For what, I don’t know to this day. But it’s a great metaphor.