Sunshine Recorder

Herzog’s films portray humans as frail creatures caught in the gap between an indifferent nature and a punishing God. Ahead of the UK release of As Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, which Herzog executive produced, Michael Newton celebrates a unique world view.

For a man whose “social network” is his kitchen table, Werner Herzog’s image is very present on the internet. You can see him (deceptively edited) discoursing in doom-laden tones concerning the “enormity of the stupidity” of hipsters or Republicans. (Originally he was discussing chickens.) He’s there (or rather someone impersonating him is) intoning about the dark intensities of “Where’s Waldo”. (The clip has had more than a million hits on YouTube.) And, most notably, he can be seen in Les Blank’s short film (this time for real) eating his shoe to celebrate the successful completion of Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978). While the shoe boils, Herzog remarks that the movie industry makes clowns of its artists, as happened to Orson Welles, and even, he claims, François Truffaut. And it can seem that the media has indeed turned Herzog into a clown an archetypal Deadly Serious German, a mockable, foolish “Ahrtist”.

It’s as though the apparent gloom of his world view prompts us to giggle at him. Herzog can be found online being shot by a sniper with an air-rifle during an interview with Mark Kermode. Somehow it is hard to imagine such a thing happening to any other famous director, and even harder to imagine that they would respond with the unconcerned, pessimistic sang-froid of Herzog. (He remarks: “It doesn’t surprise me to be shot at.”) Just before that air-rifle sniper shoots him, Herzog remarks: “InGermany … Nobody cares about my films.” Elsewhere they certainly do, though not perhaps as much as they ought; for the clown of those YouTube clips is also the maker of some of the most inspiring and disturbing movies of the last 50 years.

In Grizzly Man (2005), partly as a counterpoint to the saccharine, Disneyesque view of nature held by that movie’s bear-loving hero, Herzog glumly declares: “I believe that the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” It’s no surprise that one of the last things Ian Curtis of Joy Division did before hanging himself was to watch Herzog’s Stroszeck (1977). Given the opportunity to shoot in the Antarctic, another director might have succumbed to the temptation to reproduce the anthropomorphic cuteness of Oscar-winning March of the Penguins. Encounters at the End of the World (2007) steers clear of the cuddly for as long as possible, and when it finally succumbs to the bird’s allure, Herzog focuses on “penguin prostitution” and the suicidal impulses of penguins, who for no discernible reason suddenly depart the colony, and head inland, waddling forlornly across the ice towards the distant south pole and inevitable death.

In overview, his movies can look like a series of Graham Greene novels rewritten by DH Lawrence. Just as Greene had Greeneland, Herzog has Herzogland, and the two realms, at the very least, share a border. Like Greene, Herzog would presumably assert that the place of his films is no invented country, but simply the world as in fact it is. The variety of locales and milieux in his films is astonishing: from the Peruvian jungle in the stunning Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) to the Biedermeier Germany of Nosferatu and Woyzeck (both from 1979); from the dusty pre-tourist Lanzarote of Even Dwarfs Started Small (1969) to the science-fiction landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fires after the first Iraq war in Lessons of Darkness (1992). The richness of his interests is amazing: ecstatically devout pilgrims; prehistoric cave paintings; fast-talking American auctioneers; ski‑jumpers; TV evangelists; Siberian trappers; the blind, deaf and dumb. He has made more than 60 films, both fiction and documentaries, and, in total, they look like the life’s work of several directors, yet all maintain the spirit of one man’s view of this disparate planet. With their eye for the strangeness in the world, the unaccountable in human beings, these films can haunt you.

[…] There are few film-makers less interested in the everyday world of supermarkets, mortgage payments and Sky Sports. Herzog does not despise the “ordinary person”, for it is hard to picture him believing in such a rare creature and to imagine him despising anyone. Yet in the background of his films lingers a sorrowing contempt for the blithe, banal member of “the public” – that hypothetical person who accepts society as it is, who believes bread will always come ready-packaged, and who is too busy updating their Facebook page to notice how at any moment nature might sweep us all off the Earth. Thankfully, this putative character rarely appears in person in his films.

For all Herzog’s people – as much in the documentaries as in the feature films – are instead shown in relation to a moral or existential abyss. Hence his recent interest in the murderers on death row. In the most disturbing Herzog films, human life is a beleaguered property, a flicker of consciousness sustained within an equally flimsy civilisation. The experience of being a child of the ruins in Germany after the second world war perhaps injected him with this sense, living as he did in the moral and physical collapse of a culture.

His God is nature – but not a gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild tree-hugger’s nature, but a terrifying, unappeasable Old Testament Jehovah. Perhaps with Terrence Malick, he is one of the last film-makers to have a feeling for the sublime. His moral landscape emerges from this space – frail, plucky humanity holding the gap between an indifferent nature and a punishing God. There his people endeavour to make meaning in their lives. In the process he presents unimaginable people – as in Fata Morgana’s (1970) desert characters: the piano-playing madam and drum-playing begoggled pimp playing cabaret music in the Lanzarote brothel; the shellshocked Foreign Legion deserter clinging to a ragged letter from his mother; the lizard-loving German. One actor in particular will be associated with Herzog for ever – Klaus Kinski, who appeared in five Herzog films. To channel Kinksi’s rage and arrogance productively on to the screen was a huge achievement. However, a far greater one was to elicit Kinski’s tenderness, his joy, and even his reserve.

Herzog’s love is kept for whatever it is in human beings that strives for connection, for meaning – even when the form those strivings take seem weird, misplaced and mad. It’s there in Dieter Dengler’s passion for flying, an obsession for safety and freedom in the skies that began when, as a small boy, he gazed on as an American plane strafed his Bavarian village.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a film of oppositions and dualisms. Mirrors and reflected images (re)appear in numerous frames; we are introduced to twins, of a literal and metaphorical nature; and all of the characters are involved in bipolar relations each to the other, framed by Kubrick as interdependent husband and wife, mother and child, hunter and hunted, hero and monster.

The film’s double nature was famously recast by Bill Blakemore, in his 1987 article The Family of Man,  as an allegory that re-stages and subtly denounces the extermination of the Native Americans by Western colonial powers. Blakemore’s study suggests that most of the relations in this film (familial, spatial, spiritual) can be re-projected as a relation between these two historical agents. The Overlook Hotel becomes a metaphor for the society built by an imperial West over virgin territory, and the blood that floods its corridors symbolizes the murders and atrocities that rest below its foundations, buried but never effectively repressed.

Blakemore’s article is probably the most original and influential reading of Kubrick’s effort in the horror genre to date; the allegory of genocide has certainly become a standard referent for critical studies of the film (even when they don’t completely agree with it). Even so, I would argue that the ‘genocide’ interpretation, while valid and highly suggestive in its own right, fails to account for some symbolic layers of The Shining, which are potentially just as fertile.

Perhaps the most notable absence in Blakemore’s nuanced analysis are the occasional ‘whispers of immortality’ (to borrow TS Eliot’s expression) that are voiced by the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel. When the spirits of the twin little sisters (whose murder at the hands of their father provides the back-plot for the events taking place in the film), appear to the little boy Danny (Danny Lloyd), the words they tell him are: ‘Come play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever.’ Lines like these are not immediately traceable to the genocide interpretation – they may refer to a cyclical reading of history, in which the massacres repeat themselves ad infinitum, but that certainly extends the thematic scope of the film beyond the colonization of North America.

Even more incongruent are the words pronounced by Grady, the ghost of the murderer who appears to Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). As he confronts Jack in the bathroom, he states: ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.’ If Jack represents the imperialistic invader, then it’s plainly contradictory that he (or Grady) should always have been there. Blakemore’s original reading only holds in this instance if we assume that Grady is lying; Jack would then commit murder under his own delusions of legitimate conquest, believing that he is entitled to a possession that in reality does not belong to him.

What I propose is a reading in which Grady is not lying, and in which his enigmatic words can be seen as a key towards the film’s more subterranean layers of meaning (rather than as an elaborate delusion). The ‘forever and ever and ever’ of the twins points to death as the timeless condition on and from which the ghosts operate, of course; but it also refers to a dimension on which the film itself is working – the domain of myth, mythology and mythopoesis—which transcends the specific historical contingency of the Native American massacre and which accurately links The Shining to the thematic preoccupations drawn by Kubrick in his other films.

…. As one of many recent Western European and North American films to imagine the end of the world, Melancholia is a product of the “structure of feeling” that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. This is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). We have all internalized Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “There Is No Alternative” to the reign of the so-called “free market.” Anything and everything that we can imagine is immediately recuperated by the system. It is turned into a brand, and “monetized” through financial speculation. “All that is solid melts into PR” (39). We are faced with continual novelty and innovation; and yet nothing ever really changes. Somehow, the future has been exhausted: as Fisher puts it, “the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation… nothing new can ever happen” (3). Under such conditions, Fisher says — paraphrasing both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek — “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (2).

The allure of disaster movies, in an age of capitalist realism, is that they seem to offer us a way out — indeed, the only conceivable way out. Over the past few decades, endless rounds of privatization and austerity, not to mention widespread environmental degradation, have already deprived us of a future. The world of our hopes and dreams has in fact already ended: our day-to-day existence just needs to catch up with this fact. And so our only chance for release from the continuing soft disaster of our lives is for this disaster to become truly universal. If the world ends, then at least we will be freed from the rapacity of financial institutions, and from our ever-increasing burdens of debt. The cinematic spectacle of disaster is in itself intensely gratifying, as well: we see destroyed, before our very eyes, that “immense collection of commodities” after which we have always striven, upon which we have focused all our desires, and which has always ended up disappointing us.

Melancholia inverts this scenario; it gives us the other side of capitalist realism. The film withholds spectacle and refuses sublimity. It broods, rather than screams. It presents us with a deflationary, disillusioned account, both of the existing world, and of its disappearance. Disaster no longer gives us any sense of release. In von Trier’s dysphoric vision, we get as little satisfaction from the annihilation of things as we did from their existence in the first place. Instead, set as it is among the One Percent — the white, affluent few — Melancholia affords us a truly depressing realization. It shows us that these well-to-do people would rather see the whole world come to an end, than give up even the tiniest fraction of their wealth, power, and privilege.

Von Trier’s twist on the disaster scenario of capitalist realism is to take it entirely at face value. Heliteralizes the catastrophic deadlock of a society from which all futurity has been drained away, and from whose possibilities the many have been excluded, just so that the few may carry on with their privileged ways. From a strictly social point of view, the end of the world is a metaphor: an image of all our hopes and fears, and of our inability to imagine anything better. But by taking the prospect of disaster entirely literally, von Trier drags it beyond its social limits, and gives it a fully cosmological import. Melancholia pushes us to come to grips with what the philosopher Ray Brassier calls “the truth of extinction” (Brassier 2007, 205ff).

… Put together, I’m convinced, these two conditions—finality and inevitability—make for the most ideal apocalypse stories. They mirror the way the universe really works, at least as far as secular, scientific people such as myself are concerned. Someday, for whatever reason—entropy, a meteor, that giant volcano under Yellowstone—life on earth will end, and when it ends, it will end for good. Eventually, the human world will simply vanish, leaving behind only the affectless emptiness of space, which will continue on, unconsciously, without us. It’s not just that we’ll die, but that our values, and value, will end. There will be no one left to admire the nebulae through the Hubble; no one left to look at human life and consider it beautiful. No one will care about the things we care about—not even us.

An apocalypse of this kind doesn’t even have to be an event. It can—will?—simply happen as part of the natural aging of the world. A movie like “Threads” is committed to the human reality of the end of the world, and, like the Bible, or, for that matter, like “Dawn of the Dead,” it offers us a moral vision of the apocalypse as a day of judgment: on some level, we deserve the terrible ending. But apocalypses just as readily emerge out of the naturalist tradition, which is basically modern; they can be vast, abstract, and scientific. In “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells sends his time traveller far into the future to witness such an apocalypse. He parks his time machine on a beach, and, as he moves into the future, he sees the waves slow, then stop. A line of salt builds up on the shore. The sky grows dark; the sun grows large, red, and dim. The world, Wells writes, “was silent…. It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.” In its place, there is only an “awful twilight.” Softly, on the shadowy beach, some dark, tentacled thing flops about. The world itself has wound down and died of old age, probably long after some now-unknown, human-scale apocalypse. There is no stopping this kind of ending, Wells seems to say, and there is no life after it. It is final and inevitable, waiting there in the future, visible to anyone who wants to look for it.

These sorts of visions are thrilling to contemplate in a purely aesthetic way. And they aren’t, necessarily, despairing visions; in a way, they’re fortifying. They put me, at least, in a broadly existentialist frame of mind. If the things we care about—goodness, love, beauty, intelligence, friendship, humanity, and so forth—exist only for a little while, and only for us, then that’s a reason to take them even more seriously than usual. If our lives are islands of meaning amidst a rising ocean of meaninglessness, then we ought to mean as much as possible to ourselves, and to one another.

An ideal apocalypse, it seems to me, must acknowledge this geological point of view. And yet, this way of looking at things is also a temptation and, on some level, a lie. Taken too far, the abstracted, naturalist apocalypse starts to ring false in its detachment. If the universe is soulless, then shouldn’t the end of our ensouled world bother us more? Aren’t we living beings the best part of that universe; isn’t it a mistake to shift our focus to the rocks and dust, the fields and vibrations? If our world matters to us, then our own demise, and whatever suffering that demise entails, matters a lot, too. It may be that it matters more than anything else.

At any rate, you can’t, in the end, make yourself at home in the naturalist view of things. Heidegger thought that part of what it is to be a person is to care about things—about your own projects and commitments, but also about yourself and what you mean and are. You can’t escape the caring. (Even if you want to, that just means that, for some reason, you care about escaping it.) Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher who studies consciousness, explains the problem this way in his book “Being No One”: “The universe may be a good place for evolution, but not such a good place for individuals.” It is, in any case, a place for both sorts of thing. The ideal apocalypse has to balance those two facts. It must acknowledge the competing claims both of the universe and of the individuals it contains.

This is very hard to do, obviously. Beckett does it well, in “Waiting for Godot”; he even does it apocalyptically, in short stories like “The Lost Ones” and “Imagination Dead Imagine.” Still, I’ve come to feel that the best writer on the apocalypse is Cormac McCarthy. In part, that’s because he is realistic and historical in his apocalyptic visions.

One of the insights in McCarthy’s work is that, in a sense, there have been many apocalypses. Many cultures have perished from the earth, and, to a person alive within one of those cultures, those ends were final. (Today’s so-called “Mayan Apocalypse” is, for this reason, a strange idea: there already was a Mayan apocalypse, and it happened in the ninth century, and perhaps again in the sixteenth.) “Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s novel about a gang of scalp hunters in the mid-nineteenth-century American West, is based, loosely on historical fact, and it understands the extermination of the Native Americans as an apocalypse, at least from the inside. The world as a whole didn’t end, of course, and there are still Native Americans today, just as there are still people of Mayan descent whose culture is influenced by their history. Even so: if your people were being hunted down and murdered in the Mexican desert in 1845, you couldn’t take that long view; the threads of your civilization, ravaged by disease and harried by invaders, had been unravelling for more than a century. (In “1491,” a history of the Americas and their contact with Columbus, Charles Mann offers a startling image from inside this apocalypse: in 1784, a Lakota winter count—a kind of pictorial history that memorialized the year—depicted “a pox-scarred man, alone in a tipi, shooting himself.” As soon as I read that, I thought of McCarthy.)