I picked up an old New Yorker with an article about a pair of archaeologists who were attempting to settle the question of whether the Donner Party had, in fact, really cannibalized itself, but when I opened it up my eye was drawn first to a profile of the filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, I had just finished*.* Thus inspired, I watched The White Diamond, which Herzog claims is his best, as well as Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's making-of doc about Herzog’s most famous film—at least to me: Fitzcarraldo.
I first saw Fitzcarraldo as a kid, in a little art house theater on a hill above Albany, New York. It was one of my father's favorite films—I think he had already seen it, but he wanted my sister and me to see it, too. This was 1982; I was 10.
Even then I understood that the movie represented something my father wanted my sister and me to know about him. Back then he was stern, preoccupied, work-obsessed; a teeth-grinder. Our mother was light-handed, adventurous, and given to convening wild, absurd dinner parties, the greatest of which crescendoed in a spitting-for-distance contest. My mother's boyfriend of the moment, a muscle-bound children's book author named Michael, took first place by surprising everyone with a giant pink goober that sailed across the room like a tropical bird. (Newspaper had been laid down.) His secret, he revealed, was a bottle of Pepto Bismol he'd found in the back of our medicine cabinet. Ancient, and probably once my father's.
My father did not participate in spitting contests, but he did take us to Fitzcarraldo, the story of an Irishman in Peru in the early 20th century, played by Klaus Kinski, who dreams of bringing opera to the jungle and to that end decides he must haul a steamship over a mountain in order to make a killing in the rubber trade—money he will use to bring Caruso to the wilderness. My father admired such flamboyant, poetic gestures, and wanted us to know he admired them. He was not trying to tell us that he was Fitzcarraldo, only that even as one buckles down to the work of life, one must remember the sound of opera in the jungle.
Maybe so. But in Fitzcarraldo, particularly as interpreted through the making-of documentary, Burden of Dreams, Herzog seems less interested in the sound of opera than in the sound of the jungle itself. He hears the screech and the scream, the terror-filled howls he says the trees would make if they had mouths. Herzog clearly admires lunatics and dreamers who defy nature: the madman conquistador antihero of his feature Aguirre, Wrath of God; the real-life holy fool Timothy Treadwell, consumed, literally, by his obsession in Grizzly Man; the balloonist-subject of The White Diamond who invents a new balloon to permit him peer more closely at the jungle's canopy. And yet the common denominator of such films is not the flamboyant gesture but what Herzog encounters as the monstrosity of nature.
This became clear to me reading the old New Yorker profile, by Daniel Zalewski. It centers on Herzog's production of Rescue Dawn, a 2006 re-make of a documentary he’d made years previous called Little Dieter Wants to Fly. Dieter was an American pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and who then escaped through the jungle. In Rescue Dawn, Christian Bale plays Dieter and Steve Zahn plays his wounded buddy. Herzog spends a day dragging them through the jungle, looking for just the right spot to film an epiphany: "Bale and Zahn, after clambering up a steep hill, get their first glimpse of a wider view. The vista below them, partially obscured by branches, is an Edenic blanket of green, but the effect is deflating: this prison cannot be escaped."
Rescue Dawn focused the attention of Herzog interpreters on Herzog's ambivalent relationship to fact, as conventionally defined. One might argue that documentary is defined by the tension between "truth" and facts. Facts don't necessarily add up to truth, so documentarians must sift through them, identifying patterns, discovering connections, and, yes, constructing arguments. Truth is an argument that the documentarian finds irrefutable.
Herzog doesn't go in for such shaky definitions. To him, Truth is Truth. He seems confused and annoyed by further questioning on the matter. He seems, in fact, to be rather dimwitted on the subject. Perhaps the apparent artlessness of his films is not a ruse? Perhaps he is an idiot savant? Or maybe he is a trickster, who knows that the question of truth, seemingly as central to his films as the grand, operatic gesture of Fitzcarraldo, is really a cover for other pursuits—just as the operatic gesture may be a cover for his exploration of the inherent terror of nature.
I've met people who hated Herzog's appropriation of the late "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell's video footage from his many summers spent living amongst the grizzlies of Alaska. What bothers these critics the most is the certainty with which Herzog interprets Treadwell's story in his voiceover. Herzog declares Treadwell naive, blind, in a sense, to the blank "murderousness" in the grizzly bears' eyes.
Herzog's detractors may or may not agree with this diagnosis, but they loathe Herzog's assertion of it as fact. Such sentiments reveal a faith in facts, a belief that they add up to truth. Herzog holds no such convictions. He is more interested in authority: his own authority, his own discovery of truth, his own right and ability to tell a story unbound by qualifications and disclaimers. That is, his chance to respond to the randomness of nature by becoming a force within it, asserting narrative authority not based on facts but on his own literally wild vision—the facts of a jungle vista as a prison, of murder in a bear's eyes, of the trees slashed by Fitzcarraldo in his attempt to haul his steamboat over a mountain screaming in a vengeful fury that Fitzcarraldo can't hear because his head is full of Caruso.
Like Fitzcarraldo and the balloonist of White Diamond and Timothy Treadwell filming his own heroics and ultimate end among the grizzlies, Herzog is a narcissist. But whereas his characters seek to escape into interior visions, Herzog wants to project his dreams outward. That’s his operatic gesture, his commentary on Truth.