Werner Herzog and the Transnational-Appeal of the Mythic Hyperreal

Abstract

The work of Werner Herzog aspires toward the mythic, whether through his epic films or his documentaries, with their protagonists confronting mysterious, elemental forces. From Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Herzog 1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) to his documentary Grizzly Man (Herzog 2005), Herzog ascribes a fateful otherness to a nature that is agonistically externalized to the human subject. In his documentaries, this pervasive emphasis on the mysterious otherness of the world becomes pronounced through his auteurish self-imposition into the narrative via narration and his idiosyncratic interview style. With deadpan seriousness, he asks bizarre questions such as whether the internet dreams (Herzog, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, 2016); or he makes strange analogies between spectators of Neolithic cave art and albino crocodiles seeing their reflections in tanks of water (Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010). Such antics, may invite the question, is Werner Herzog for real? This chapter will argue that there is something hyperreal about Herzog’s auteur-provocations as his works become inseparable from his persona, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Hyperreal, coined by Baudrillard, gestures to a breakage within mythic coordinates as the concept of origin, so vital to the stories/myths that frame reality, become erased by simulation. Whether Herzog is for real, his reception denotes in a sense that the territory (in Baudrillardian terminology)—the films themselves—become subsistent upon the map—Herzog (Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, 2005, p. 3).