(Three Line) Formula for all Werner Herzog films

(for Andrew Montin, and Anamnesia How as they sojourn in far-away lands. And to all our ursine friends out there in the jungle trying to build an opera house.)

*Warning: this post will not make any sense at all, unless you have seen at least two Werner Herzog films. Worse: if you have only seen two, “Grizzly Man” must be one of the two.

Dearest and Fairest,

I have three words for you:

Stop.the.press.

Well, actually, it’s not strictly necessary that you do this. I mean, I’ve already done it (interrupted the post that I was just about to complete for this one) or I wouldn’t be writing this. Also, yes, the blogosphere isn’t contingent on anything like a press, but I just wanted a suitably dramatic introduction to today’s revelations.

I’ve just interrupted an almost complete post called ‘Blogging and Redemption’ – itself a kind of base camp en route to my promised: “What is a Platonic Form? But while I was in the middle of my musings about blogging (which I promise will constitute the very next post) I suddenly saw something that reminded me that I had in my possession a jewel that might very well (like the one Kierkegaard talks about in the “Present Age”) serve as an allegory for each and every object of desire known to humanity.

I have just realized I had been sitting on (not literally: that would be vulgar) the thing for months and that I had – very rudely – not shared with my loyal brothers and sisters at the Notorious D.I.V.

I am talking, of course, of the greatest discovery of my compulsively under-achieving life so far. I’m talking about: the formula for all Werner Herzog films. A discovery that will do more to change our world than…hmm…I really don’t have the hyperbole for it, the uncovering of the genome, the discovery of Penicillin, space-travel and (that tawdry monstrosity) “Facebook” combined.

It’s like E=mc² – only with more indelible nerdy chic. Put it on a T-shirt and go to an adolescent frat. party near you. If you are one of my Australian readers – this will involve you travelling quite far, but nonetheless: get on a plane NOW and head to UCLA Berkley wearing my Herzog-formula T-shirt/aphrodisiac. In instants: you will be the funkiest Phi Beta Kappa on campus and all your past lonely nights will turn into 1001 nights of endless jelly-wrestling or my name isn’t Dave “Extremely Cool” Mccool.

Excited? Literally, breathless with anticipation such that I am in serious danger of a manslaughter charges if you asphyxiate?!? Hmm. Best, if you breathe now, actually. At least a bit. Prison clothes are likely to be something of a solecism in the midst of my otherwise impeccable sartorial statements.

But you are right to be suffused with life-threatening excitement. Sweat and so on.
Oh, this is too much!

It really, at least, requires a drumroll. No, really, it does. Trrrrrrrrrrrr..da-dum.

No. Sorry. I don’t think I can do it. I mean, you think you’re ready for it, but you’re really not. Who could be ready for something like this?

You doubt me. You’re asking yourself: how could a director so visionary, so gloriously insane that he makes you think of what might have happened if Thomas Mann’s Settembrini had merged with his Naphta and the resulting gestalt-entity conceived a child with Thomas de Quincey: how could such a director -- a Kafka who has invented his predecessors (Borges)-- be reduced to a simple formula, or most preposterously of all to a SYLLOGISM.

Okay, so the formula's not TECHNICALLY syllogism.

It’s not – alas! -- even an enthymeme (as Aristotle says: a “rhetor” – orator -- will hardly ever EXPRESS a minor premise when it could remain implicit. It seem so gauche after all.) But you asked for it and -- like the proverbial postman -- I DELIVER:

The formula for all Werner Herzog films is:

P1: Subjectivity is hubris.

P2: …But Nature is chaos…

C: (Ergo) Everyone.Gets.Eaten…..By a Bear.

That’s it. Fin. C’est fini.

Yes. You are right to be awed at the beauty and majesty of the thing. It’s breathtaking, no?

It kills me and I’m used to being this clever. 

I can’t help waxing all Zarathustrian, now: I can’t look at the formula without feeling the ocean spray hit the austere rocks on which I stand frock-coated, looking down on mortal things, all Caspar David Friedrich-like with middle-period German Romanticism defiance. Protected from my vantage amidst the rocks, I feel the force of the waves and thus endure what Kant called the ‘dynamical’ sublime. Each premise of the formula is a tightrope connecting man to Übermensch: fist camel, then lion, lastly, child.

But (sigh) you’re impatient. This is like Fowler’s thing all over again. You don’t see it, do you? Really??! Not even if you stand back and imagine Herzog's moustache?!

Okay, fine, then.

For your patience in the past, I will venture -- albeit with some resentment -- an EXPOSITION of the formula, even though (to express an inveterate frustration of Heidegger – as well as my good friend “Bower”) to do so would obviously be to detract from the crystalline perfection of the original.

Comment on Premise 1: “Subjectivity is Hubris”

Every Werner Herzog film, and I challenge anyone to show many any example where this is not the case, from “Werner Herzog eats his shoe” through to “Wozzeck” operates under the assumption that -- to quote Cornelius Castoriadis: “Man is not a rational animal, but a MAD animal…a creature radically unfit for life.”

One of Castoriaids’s favourite lines in the history of philosophy (and affiliate enterprises) is from a letter of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, in which Freud says to Fliess something not entirely unlike this: “y’know what, dude, the more I investigate this whole psyche thing, the less it seems like a machine designed to help us go out and get food, and the more it seems like something that – sufficient to screw-up all merely FUNCTIONAL accounts of the human being – is designed to HALLUCINATE a sandwich.”

The human being – and on this point many, many philosopher of diverse ages and traditions agree – constitutes by her very existence a break with mere ‘function’: with the simple imperatives of survival and reproduction. The existence, in particular of the psyche, the imagination, and the diverse symbolic-universes that are human societies throughout history are all testimony to a human capacity to transcend our ‘environment’ – so as to at once reconstitute it and leave it behind in the form of what phenomenologist's call a 'world'. And this transcendence is not a once off -- an initial fundamental break -- like the Fall of Genesis -- it is instead something perpetual, something constant. Our experience is a play a play of immanence and transcendence – such that when I see the waterfall, I can be thinking about Rilke, about the dream I had last night, about why no-one can make decent tea anymore. And all these musings can themselves be broken off, by another reverie, by the image of a tiger on the horizon, by the waterfall which until this moment stood forgotten. Consciousness flies in all directions and is brought back: a pang of hunger, a stab of desire, a flare of shame, a burst of laughter. Language. Memory. Images break down under analysis and a re-constituted in the forge of thought.

Castoriadis' project is to find an ontology of the imagination. He takes the fact of the imagination, the existence of such a thing as not only the fundamental fact about the psyche, but as having import as to the nature of reality, which for him, is not exhaustible by what he describes as "sets of determinate entities." For the classically-minded amongst you, this is the problem of the One and the Many: the oldest problem of ontology, of epistemology and cosmology: the one that we find at the edge of the newest physics and the oldest metaphysics.

It as if, everything that is can be expressed in terms of (groups of) unified things identical to themselves: the universe of chairs, quarks, unicorns, gods -- we can debate which things there are, but not the fact that there are distinct things. And yet, there is something in our epxerience that suggsts to us that all differences collapse (c.f. Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Hegel) into higher identities, that all identities break apart into differences that were as if suspended by being-taken-as-One. Castoriadis, precisely, against an argument to mistake problem – for statements about reality (i.e. taking vagueness as the categories): to an ontology: the possibility of the oddest thing in the universe: the human psyche and the human society. This is the strangest thing there is: more odd even than those deep sea fish that seem to have come out of our nightmares and which swim the depths of the ocean looking for all the world like they were dreamed up by the 15 year old horror film fans.

And so Herzog thinks: everything we do -- this being touched by imagination -- who can live in imagined worlds -- is the work of an animal that hasn’t just GONE completely batty (by having lost touch with its telos) but that it is shot through with battiness so comprehensively and irrevocably that this battiness must be understood as a CONSTITUITIVE battiness. It is fons et origio. It is – as Heidegger would say -- our ‘ownmost’ battiness. And this battiness is to the shipwreck of humanity, rock, ship, ocean and lighthouse all in one.

(N.B. think of Facebook, again, if you are getting distracted by the fact that we occasionally do sane things, like building shelters for the winter and reading Plato. Think secessions over the letter “iota”. Think of the Macarena craze of the mid- 90s.)

Also on this point: a common misunderstanding of, say Camus, is that it isn’t that human life in a godless universe is absurd because of some palpable lack of meaning in said universe. On the contrary: said universe is absurd because precisely because there is such a gratuitous, super-abundance of meaning. Thus, incidentally – as Michel Houellebecq rightly points out – in his wonderfully titled Contre Le Monde, Contre La Vie; the incomparable genius of H.P. Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories where monsters like Cthulhu and Lovecraft's "Elder Gods" are far too alien to have anything like an intelligble purpose. Their horror lies in their distance from all human ends, but this is not meaningless it is layers upon layers of meaning: sound and fury that threatens, at its worst, to signify something and never stop.

Worse, there’s no switchboard allowing us to -- press ‘1’ if we find the disparity between the infinite universes of symbols, affects and imaginings which we inhabit EVEN WHILE WE BOIL A KETTLE; and the silence of the cosmos a tad mystifying.

And Herzog, thinks that this is who we are -- the creators and the inhabitants of this superabundance of meaning that is an extra (and in a way unforseen element in his universe.) Thus, in his films he comes again, and again to extremes in human behaviour (both in fiction, or through his documentaries) through real subjects.

Thus, we find in his films: mad TV evangelists ranting without pausing for breath until the sweat pours from their noses and veins threaten to pop from their skulls; a ski-jumper who – not content with jumping -- wants to FLY off mountains at enormous risk to life, limb and success at ski-jumping competitions; mountain climbers like the legendary (and indeed NOTORIOUS) Reinhold Messner who want – like Sir Edmund Hillary – not only to climb various INSANELY HIGH MOUNTAINS OF THE WORLD BECAUSE THEY'RE THERE, but to do so without tents, without oxygen masks, without anything that makes survival, let alone success, in anyway likely. (This would, after all, take away fun, i.e. the total, total madness of stretching man beyond the limits of all propriety.) We have a conquistador trying to found a new race of perfect beings, begat from himself.

For Herzog, as for Carl Schmitt (albeit not as I said in ‘In praise of hypocrisy -- those of good taste and sound judgment) the extremes reveal something entirely present in, but obscured by normal, sane, bourgeois existence. But the extremes show the truth most starkly: tey show us that in a way, all human striving is an attempt to build an OPERA HOUSE IN THE AMAZON (Fitzcarraldo); it’s like sailing around the world to find legendary Lost Cities of Gold (Aguirre); it’s the whole nature of our EROTIC (think Herzog's remake of Murnau's Nosferatu) THYMOTIC souls.

The first of these adjectives refers to the fact that we are a being that is suffused by/called by/oriented towards/broken by transcendence, moved by love, turned towards the other person (who as Emmanuel Levinas in one of his more admirably Platonic moods says) will not ‘let me be alone/content with myself’, will not allow me to be enclosed in the autism of my own meaning – but is (to now evoke like Eric Voegelin) a pull on my soul as if by a string.

Human existence is constituted by, suffused with eros and as such we are oriented towards transcendence, particularly in the form of desire. And every desire, every object of desire carries within it an image of not only Diotima’s ‘ladder of love’, but of Alcibiades’ final Dionysian dissolution.

We are all mad, but not in the “please stop me if I’m TOO crazy” way of the run of congentially dull people at parties, but full-throttle, no-holes-barred, no beg y’pardons, Klaus Kinski mad which is -- in anyone's book -- MAD, MAD or – once more and without hyperbole -- God rest his crazy German soul MAD.

And this is why, any which way you look at it:

We.all.get.(in Herzog's world) eaten.by.bears. "Grizzly Man" is just an author's DVD commentary on past works.

More exposition: Hans Blumenberg has a glorious little book called “Shipwreck with Spectator” in which he chooses an epigraph from Pascal: “You are [already] embarked.” In it, he mentions that sea-travel, was, for the Greeks one of the paradigms for hubris. Human beings were not – or so thought the wise amongst the Hellenes -- MEANT after all to traverse the ocean in little wooden vessels and, if there was any doubt about this, we have as the Odyssey shows us, amongst other things, Poseidon is capricious and cruel – a resentful second brother to “He with his Thunder.” (Milton).

To the ancients, Blumenberg says, the shipwreck, is a consequence of the (in many ways unavoidable) hubris of human actions, which the wise man, the person of theoria, chooses to look upon – shaking his head at the silliness of it all. Or to put this another way, we could take up Hans-Georg Gadamer’s etymology of the word “theoria” and see "theory/vision" deriving from “theoros” – a word signifying a herald sent from one city to another who was hosting the Olympic games.

Gadamer wants to point out that the theoros – is not a ‘mere’ spectator, in the pejorative sense in which we today use it to imply zombie-like PASSIVITY – but an essential witness to the arrival of the God, the triumph of destiny and so on: the revelation that attends all endings and all beginnings.

In any case, Blumenberg submits the idea of theoria involves contemplating the shipwreck of life, from the vantage point of the eternal, or of being, or from the divine. But modern man is defined, by contrast, by the attempt to conquer fate, to master nature at even its most intemperate which means for Blumenberg precisely that theory, in modern times, no longer has the OPTION to remain standing on the beach shaking its head at the madness of human voyaging. Instead, the gaze of the theorist is already part of the voyage – every observer is a passenger, every observation involves standing on the deck feeling the rolling motion of the waves until we are nauseous, or until we find our sea legs and take the constnat motion as the land to which our legs were born to walk upon.

For Herzog as for Blumenberg: we’re already embarked. And everything about the voyage – thus, everything about humanity is hubris: we are a transgression in nature, possessed of a consciousness that bores – to use Sartre’s expression-- a “hole in the real”.

Which brings us to the second premise: nature is chaos.

If ‘subjectivity’ – if the essence of what it means to be a human -- is hubris’, if we are each of us an ‘I’ and a ‘me’, in the presence of a ‘thou’, where “I” and
“thou” both meet each other enfolded into a ‘we’:

If consciousness – human reality -- all of that human ‘dwelling’ in a house built of meanings, values, desires is hubris (such that acts that of gratuitous lunacy reveal a fundamental truth about the nature of humanity) than maybe we might find a way to tone down the madness by ‘returning to nature’ – coming back to the solid ground and warm sand from which we – in our folly -- set sail.

But Herzog has what we could in the technical sense call a Cynical view of nature – a view of nature as that which persists underneath and beyond the products of the human mind without including them.

And this suggests to him that any attempt to TAKE BACK the step half-outside of nature that humanity takes QUA humanity, would not only be impossible, but would involve a human-all-too-human return to a madness as great as humanity's own constituitve break with its origins. Madness of departure/madness of return: we are embarked.

Attempts, to “return to nature” – to come back to some primordial womb from before the Fall, are, for Herzog, not only impossible, but undesirable. And this is because there is, for Herzog, no order in nature – no cosmos (a word for order that cannot but imply an idea of beauty). No infinite celestial serenity that can be seen if we only peer through the veil of Maya or the principium individuationis to see the harmony subsisting amidst the apparent chaos of the manifold.

No, to see what Herzog thinks of nature we need to see “My best Fiend”. There, in one of many classic, moving, hilarious scenes, Herzog starts talking about how much Kinski hated the jungle – about how few times he ever ventured past the door of his tent (while they were shooting Fitzcarraldo). Kinski being Kinski, however, changed his tune as soon as there was a photographer about. When some journalists wanted to interview him about the experience of living amidst nature, Kinski started -- Herzog tells us-- running excitedly around the forest, allowing himself to be photographed and talking about how erotic he found all the teeming life within this budding grove. Against Kinski, Herzog says that he has never been able to find nature erotic, or beautiful, or sublime. Instead, he says that the space of a nature is a space of UNIVERSAL MURDER: dog eats dog, worm eats dog, bird eats worm and so on, man irritatingly uses worm to catch fish (which is INSANE) and so on.

Hence, the conclusion of my formula:

For Herzog: any attempt to go beyond the hubris of our subjectivity and return to nature, necessarily FAILS, or in other words (to invoke "Grizzly Man") ENDS WITH US GETTING EATEN BY BEARS.

However, the attempt to avoid this fate -- our persistence with the accoutrements of humanity or our continuing dissociation from “nature” in the sense of the animal world that we have left behind does not allow us to escape our fate.

On the contrary, the fact that all human things tend towards a break with nature that is precisely mad, does not mean that we ever actually escape from nature. On the contrary. We are condemned, in our hubris, to the same fate, as if we had never started to shape our environments into worlds with symbols, with language and imaginings: as if we had never -- like people who wanted to turn their ski-jumps into FLIGHT – turned into the kind of being whose Being is a problem for it. (Martin "Heide" Heidegger at the outset of "Being and Time")

And what this means, is that in the end, as humans scorning nature or returning to it: the bears still eat us: our escape from nature is our return to it, just as our return to it has all the hallmarks of our usual thwarted escape

This means, that for Herzog, every path through human existence, any existence in any epoch -- subject to whatever vagaries always over-steps the line. We, natural beings that we are, break with the natural in our very being. And this means that every life is an invitation to nature as nemesis to swallow us like angry bears who we have sought to protect from the madness of our fellow men.

Ergo: “Grizzly Man” is just Herzog’s way of giving everyone the ‘clef’ to his ‘roman’. And this particular 'roman' is quite a novel.

In the end, of course, I don’t exactly share what I take to be Herzog’s philosophical vision: but it leads him to seek out the depths and the heights of humanity. And the result of this is an oeuvre so extraordinary, it’s almost – but obviously quite -- irreducible to the most brilliant of syllogisms. Even mine.

Until next time/’Til Human voices wake us,

Eros and agape,

-Mal.