Herzogians

Fan is a new column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. This is the second column in the series. To read the first column, click here.

Samuel Rutter on the narrator of our time.

There’s a certain type of person, usually a man, but not always, for whom a Werner Herzog impression is irresistible. The mention of the Bavarian cineaste’s name might cause this man to list his favorite or most obscure Herzog film, or it might lead him directly to an impression of that film. Some fifteen years ago, this guy might have tried out an Obama impression at parties—he doesn’t do that anymore—but he’s aware that it’s still OK, for the time being, to imitate a Northern European accent.

This man might sound insufferable but he is legion: X (fka Twitter) is awash with parody accounts (e.g. Werner Herzog Realtor) and there’s a plethora of clips on YouTube in the genre of Werner Herzog does X ( e.g. Werner Herzog reads Where’s Waldo). More recent entries include John Mulaney’s Documentary Now treatment, wherein Alexander Skarsgård plays Rainer Wolz, a version of Herzog as depicted in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams. (Incidentally, if your impression isn’t very good, don’t worry: Skarsgård, a professional actor and a Swede, lands somewhere between Herzog and Schwarzenegger.) A personal favorite is “The Infinite Conversation,” an endless dialogue between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek that is completely AI generated, and will presumably outlast the both of them. Herzog even spoofs himself from time to time: here he is talking about chickens, and we mustn’t forget Zak Penn’s 2004 mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness.

Time for an embarrassing admission of my own: I hosted a dinner not long ago, where enough gin was consumed that someone picked up the galley of Werner Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, and began reading from it, in Herzog’s voice. The book was passed around the table. We all had a go, we all had fun. The thing about the memoir is that you can flip to any page and find a passage so deeply Herzogian it feels like a joke: he has two mysterious half-brothers named Markwart and Ortwin; his mother earned her doctorate researching the question of whether fish have hearing; he had hoped to make a film on the early Frankish kings with Mike Tyson, who is a bit of an expert.

Article continues below.

SPONSORED BY CODEWORD

You’re a good man, Charliecore

While it might sound like whatever they turned that giant glass pyramid into, “Corporate Memphis” is a design style full of impressionistic, polygonal figures, where characters look like streamlined, color-blocked snowmen. They’re people-as-vectors, and it’s a design language that has dominated corporate branding for decades.

But the time of the vector folk is over; the era of doodle folk is nigh. Out with the faceless tech mascots, in with something much more innocent. Enter: Charliecore.

Charliecore leans heavily on sketches and organic illustration styles similar to the Peanuts cartoon strip. There’s a nostalgic warmth in the way Charlie, Lucy, Linus, and the rest are drawn, and designers are embracing that sentimentality. Charliecore is the doodle in the margins of your notebook, something that conjures a comforting familiarity—a welcome change.

At Codeword, we’re always talking about what’s next for design, PR, marketing, brands, and all that good stuff. Check out our newsletter or say hi.

There is more, of course, to Herzog than memes for graduate students. The director of over sixty features and documentaries that range from the brilliant (Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, both starring his muse, the actor Klaus Kinski) to the bizarre (From One Second to the Next, a harrowing short film about texting and driving, sponsored by AT&T) the filmmaker has lately taken to acting, with roles alongside Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher, as “The Client” in Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and a cameo in Parks & Rec that must have been much more exciting for the show’s writers than its fans. Most recently, he has turned his attention to writing, publishing The Twilight World, a short novel about Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese WWII soldier who refused to surrender until 1974, this year’s memoir, and a forthcoming novel, The Future of Truth, purportedly about an aging rocker in the Austrian Alps who in his spare time must milk the cows.

In interviews, Herzog has acknowledged—without whining—that we are no longer in a historical moment where even a discerning public is willing to completely separate the art from the artist. But when it comes to Herzog, it is perhaps the conflation itself of art and artist that is an abiding source of appeal to his fans. Born in rural Bavaria in the midst of WWII, Herzog grew up in the kind of poverty that Germany has never known since. A late witness to perhaps the most extraordinary century of technological advancement in history, this is a man who can recall the very first time he saw a film, rode in a car, chewed gum, yet whose persona can now be replicated by a bot ad infinitum.

The publishing of this memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, is an attempt by the 81-year-old to set down in black and white the episodes, memories and principles that form the “ecstatic truth” of his life, before the actual truth is raked over by nebbish biographers. That’s not to imply that there are skeletons hidden in closets—Herzog is forthright about all manner of polemics, from his family’s Nazi past, his decision not to disown Kinski, despite publicly acknowledging the actor’s incestuous relationship with his daughter Pola, to his abiding love for Wagner’s music—but there are many well-honed anecdotes in this book that will be familiar to Herzog fans, in much the same way as Francis Bacon had David Sylvester help him convert a reputation for quick wit into a lasting legacy.

There’s a feeling, too, that his documentary approach—rather than a fly on the wall, he describes himself as a hornet—is in some ways an echo of the death rattle of European ascendancy. His films take place on every continent, and he has no qualms about making films about topics and cultures vastly removed from his lived experience, with himself at the center.

Herzog developed, over the span of some sixty years, a mostly consistent approach to making feature films, one that set him apart from many of his contemporaries. Éric Rohmer, deemed a naturalist for his decision to forgo constructed sets or non-diegetic sound, nonetheless placed his films in a moral universe that had everything to do with his Catholic values and increasingly less to do with the actual world around him; Herzog’s friend John Waters built a stylized cinematic universe where camp and “subversive” lifestyles formed the center of gravity in a world desperately trying to pretend that AIDS didn’t exist. The way Herzog swirled around religion and nature, and humanity’s almost hostile relationship to them, the way his scripts were closer to what today we’d call treatments, are indicative of a process where the world comes into being because of his artmaking, rather than reflecting it.

The case might be made then, for Werner Herzog, in documentaries and features and novels, as the narrator of our time, or at least of his time. You don’t have to take my word for it, though, you can listen to him narrate his own life, in his own impeccable accent, in the audiobook of his memoir.

The Dirt: Brush up your impression.