Last summer, while you and I were sleeping, Werner Herzog went to America and made a David Lynch film. Those are the salient facts of the matter. When he finished the film, he decided to call it My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? which for my money is one of the best movie titles of all time.
The film looks and smells like a David Lynch film. It follows the story of Brad who, killing his mother, hides out in her flamingo pink bungalow, while, behind him, his history is unfolded by his sexy fiancee and his acting coach. Something is rotten in middle America.
Now, the grinches and night-creatures will say that a faded Herzog is trying to cling to the fading tails of David Lynch’s faded tailcoat. They are incorrect. This is what Herzog has done his whole career. My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done? is not pastiche David Lynch, it is a movie about David Lynch, about David Lynch movies. That’s what makes this rather high-pitched melodrama so fascinating to watch, so crazy on so many levels.
This is a movie about the madness of Lynch. It functions in the same way that Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo function as movies about the chaos of Klaus Kinski’s personality, or Grizzly Man is about the madness of Timothy Treadwell, or Nosferatu is a movie about the vaudevillian craze of F.W. Murnau movies. Certainly Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo, and My Son, My Son are movies about madness, but they function more effectively, more interestingly, as movies about movies about madness.
“It’s Crazy! Crazy on so many levels!” That’s what you’re sposed to say after watching a Herzog movie.
When the New German Cinema started, the Cahiers de Cinema boffins swiftly identified this trend and ascribed it to a German reaction against the auterism of the previous, and French, generation. They saw the chaotic centerpieces of the Herzog enterprise as the contrary of the auterist position. These are movies in which the director relinquishes control and consciously dissapears into the sprawl and lunacy of their own creations.
Thats all very well. But the thing which undercuts all of this is that Herzog himself is mad. I mean of course he’s fucking mad! How could any sane person seek out the company of Klaus Kinski and Lynch and Treadwell, just to watch them, to be abused by them? Even in taking a bit part in Mister Lonely, you get the idea that he just wanted an opportunity to watch comedy smackhead Harmony Korine. In other words, as much as the Amazon movies are about Kinski, or My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is about Lynch, they are all movies about Werner Herzog.
You might think that Herzog is too aware of madness to be mad. In making autobiographical movies like Was ich bin, sind meine filme, and Mein Liebster Fiend, Herzog refers to the chaos of his own existence. He talks at length about his own facination with madness.
But this doesn’t prove a thing. It is precisely this which makes, in particular, Kinski and Herzog’s relationship so satisfying. It is the Laurel and Hardy dynamic. Stan is stupid. Ollie tells Stan he is stupid. Ollie is stupid. It makes Herzog’s madness all the more complex, all the more fascinating. It reminds you of sickly, little Robert Stevenson, putting on funny hats and changing his name to Louis. He was good enough at pirates anyway!
You know those movies where a Rod Taylor/Charlton Heston character finds himself in like another world and, surrounded by blank-faced, automaton villains and he panics and shrieks something like “You’re all crazy! I’m the only sane man here!!” I’d love to see Werner Herzog do a remake of one of those. Man, that movie would be crazy on so many levels!
