I knew a Jack Russell terrier whose anxious, darkly brooding face made him the spitting image of Martin Scorsese. One look at Otis and you thought, “That dog could host the hell out of “Turner Classic Movies!” This is, after all, the director’s main public persona for the past 25 years or so. When he isn’t releasing another door-stopper of a film whose runtime bludgeons critics into submission, today’s Scorsese is the beetle-browed Dean of Cinema, celluloid standard bearer, Marvel franchise scold — a onetime bad-boy turned eminence gris, busy assigning everyone else a grade.
I thought of all this in the context of another director the same age (a Bidenesque 81) who I’d place at the far opposite end of the pedagogical spectrum. Not a terrier-like aesthete who sees the right films, reads the right authors, and trains studiously in their disciplines, but a, what, polar bear-like artist who strode down from the Bavarian hills to become an auteur of pure life force. This would be Werner Herzog, whose immensely entertaining recent memoir, Every Man For Himself and God Against All, left me wondering if we don’t all need a bit more Werner and less Marty in our lives.
I won’t go through Herzog’s prodigious c.v. here, other than to say that, decades after his staggering Klaus Kinski jungle epics —Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Cobra Verde, and Fitzcarraldo — his jumps from topic to topic, his suspiciously ass-covering theory of “ecstatic truth” in documentary, and his growing cult of personality, I was often left wondering if Herzog’s real priorities weren’t somewhere outside the scope of making movies, if he weren’t a more poetic, Old World elder statesman of “Jackass” nation who undertakes projects as a dare.
Every Man for Himself complicates this idea by bringing us inside his obsessions, reveling in his failures as much as successes, and testifying, over and over, to the power of seeing, feeling, and doing things for yourself, without mediation. Something it achieves at the level of individual sentences.
Many years ago, a friend posed me the koan-like teaser: If you listened to an audiobook, have you truly read that book? At the time, I answered yes since I want to resist getting hung up on medium/message technicalities, but since I’ve yet to enjoy the audio version of any book I actually wanted to read, I now figure that it takes a generational vocal talent to effectively mediate the literary experience, negotiating those microscopic tonal shifts from narration to reported speech, to direct speech, to indirect speech etc without adding that thin extra layer of “Tell” atop the “Show.” All that said, I challenge you to read a single sentence in Every Man For Himself and God Against All and not hear it in the soft, airy, deliberate, Bavarian-accented voice of its singular author, who made a career of being slightly less insane than his subjects and collaborators.
Very nearly an audiobook in prose, Every Man For Himself is almost all literary persona — a huge selling point here. At one point, Herzog muses on why a producer of the television program “The Simpsons” has invited him to voice a cartoon character. After trying out a few funny voices, the director determines that “what [the producer] wanted was my own natural voice in English; that would create mirth enough.” Oh yes indeed it would.
In fact, you probably need this weirdly serious, earnest voice to put a few of these tall tales over. Like his films, Herzog’s book plays fast and loose with the conventions, if not actual requirements, of memoir or autobiography. Taken from 60 years of journal entries, the vaguely chronological narrative turns part picaresque, part magical-realist, and part Gulliver’s Travels, making nearly constant digressions into obscure historical figures, fringe scientific theories, or episodes that are almost certainly bullshit, if told exceptionally well. While it often reads as Behaviorism or anthropology more than a Bildungsroman, it describes each wonder, tragedy, or horror he encounters with an earnest, almost self-parodic air of a close, patient observer. It’s gonzo journalism of an empathetic clinician, with no verbal hype or drama, and probably impossible to imitate.
For instance, some of his seemingly unedited journal entries — like the ones from his arduous trek along the German border — produce an eerie haiku of sleep deprivation and hypothermia:
Lake Constance. People went well sated to bed. A swan crossed from here to there. In two world wars, Germany exposed all its secrets. I wished I could be in the company of monks at vespers, a godless guest.
A swan crossed from here to there: that line still cracks me up. And elsewhere, this man who grew up in an essentially medieval world often sounds very close to Brothers Grimm. Like when he details his own ecstasies of deprivation:
After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-maché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head. Rats scuffled around at night. Finally, I was left with no food.
…and so when I heard three billy goats come trotting across my bridge, I decided I’d trap them with three questions.
More often the genre is Boy’s Adventure Tale, with countless dear-death experiences like this one from shooting Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle:
One of our woodsmen was bitten by a snake, a shushupe, the most poisonous of all. He knew that his heart and lungs would be lamed within sixty seconds and that the camp with our doctor and the serum was twenty minutes away, so he picked up his chainsaw and cut off his foot. He survived.
If this episode feels at least somewhat tenable, many others test your skill at disbelief suspension. For instance, did Herzog really spend time with two identical twins who essentially shared the same brain, speaking the exact same words at the same time as if in some deleted scene from The Wizard of Oz?
Or, earlier in his life, did the young Klaus Kinski, a boarder in the same house as Herzog, really forgo all furniture in favor of filling his room up with dry leaves? Did he really spend a day and a half demolishing a small bathroom in the house they shared? And when he forgot the words of a monologue he was performing, did Kinski really roll himself up in a carpet and lay there onstage until they dropped the curtain? Halfway into this book, I realized I didn’t care and only wanted more.
How else to respond to sylvan idylls like the following from Herzog’s childhood?:
Once, in broad daylight — my brother is my witness — the whole slope behind the house was suddenly alive with weasels, all pouring downhill in the direction of the stream. I don’t think it was a dream, although it’s always a possibility.
Citing his brother as a witness for what might be a dream is a very Herzogovian move. And after years of trying really hard to produce entertaining non-fiction from actual facts, I’d ordinarily find such claims to “emotional truth” the province of charlatans, homebodies, fabulists, liars, and MFA candidates. But when Herzog goes a bit further in articulating and illustrating his own idea of “ecstatic truth” he can be convincing. Not so much when he cites, say, André Gide’s line about altering the facts so that they resemble the truth more than reality, but when he relays his own moments with this kind of ecstasy. Like with Michelangelo’s “La Pieta” in Rome:
The face of Jesus, just taken down from the cross, is the face of a thirty-three-year-old man, but the face of his mother is the face of a seventeen-year-old girl. Was Michelangelo lying to us? Did he wish to deceive us? … As an artist, he behaved straightforwardly by showing us the deepest truth of these two people.
If you’ve never seen this sculpture in person, I can tell you that this response is blazingly true. If I spent ten years parsing why that piece of marble destroyed me one afternoon in Rome, I doubt I could improve upon a simple description of the subjects’ relative ages and their relationship as a way to express its deeper truth. These moments, where art and reality start to exert some distorting magical force upon each other may be where Herzog has spent most of the past 70-odd years.
Every Man For Himself does include Herzog’s threshold moment as filmmaker, a vocation that he says he approached with a Catholic’s “certainty of salvation.” A prepubescent 15, little Werner shows up in person to pitch a film idea to two producers. They take one look at the girlish child and laugh. “I didn’t waste a second feeling sorry for myself,” he writes. “I just thought: These people are cretins and don’t have a clue about anything.”
I’d say that I want some of whatever 15-year-old Werner was smoking here if earlier chapters didn’t suggest that what he was smoking was grief, pain, and terror, that his superpower is having grown up in near starvation in remote Bavaria during WWII. While there’s no point aspiring to that kind of raw, animal endurance, you can derive a deeper, more humane wisdom from these wild-ass tales of slogs, brawls, and snakebites.
It’s that the artist’s insistence on a direct personal experience means not just risk, hardship, and suffering but immersion in humanity itself. It means risking profound emotional communion with near total strangers. Herzog illustrates this with his long, passionate friendship with English travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, to whom Herzog was (in his account), “perhaps the only person with whom he could readily talk about the sacred aspect of walking.”
Although Nietzche had similar beliefs about walking, this pair’s practice was far from mighty Ubermenschen bestriding the earth. It was more the Christ-like surrender of an authentic mystic: setting out for days-long expeditions on foot without gear or supplies, which, Herzog says, “force[d] us to seek shelter, to throw ourselves at the mercy of strangers because of our utter defenselessness.”
In the end, Herzog’s orientation as a director is far from conquistador, mandarin, or master of puppets, but as one of the great unwashed (and in this case, I bet that means really unwashed.) He’s not looking to receive or bestow an A-plus, or to burnish his films to perfection. He hasn’t consistently mined one great theme or milieu through his career — American mobsters, Northeastern tough guys, corporate corruption — but his own emotional responses: to this idea, that character, this art, that piece of music. Far from authoring a technically- and aesthetically-informed Great Films master syllabus, he says he can only learn from bad films. “The good ones I watch in the same spirit I watched them as a kid,” he says. “The great ones, even when I see them many times, are just an enigma.”
He has directed 23 operas and can’t read a note of music. He abhors film academies and his Rogue Film School taught budding directors how to pick locks, forge documents, fix cars, bluff cops, seek adventure, and blast through obstacles to their vision. He gave his book the brawling, proudly infelicitous title Every Man for Himself and God Against All and yet, when he visits an elderly former employee of his grandparents and learns that the man’s dog died the previous day, he reports that, “We sat together crying for a long time and said nothing.”
If art means looking into the abyss, that’s the kind of person you want at your side. If life is every man for himself, may we all have fellow combatants like Herzog.