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The Wild Blue Yonder
You always know when you’re watching a film by Werner Herzog before his name ever appears on the opening credits. His traits are immediate: The ethereal music that seems to have its origins in a different dimension; the stark images of the natural world that are both hostile and beautiful. There is a pure, unsettling poetry that the music and the picture create when instantly combined, and this world either enchants you or makes you feel uneasy (often, it will do both), depending on how familiar you are with his work. The great director’s trademarks are so distinct, and by now so effortless, it seems that he hasn’t made a series of films, but one, long film that consistently places us into his bizarre alter-ego of reality—his thin sheet of ice that only faintly covers the deep ocean of humanity’s chaos. Before the credit sequences, as the trademark operatic score begins and the images of space fade into view, The Wild Blue Yonder identifies itself as “a science fiction fantasy.” The distribution company likens the film to the science fiction masterpieces Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey; in regards to this rather bold claim, only time will tell. More definite is The Wild Blue Yonder’s place as the third part of Herzog’s apocalyptic, science fiction trilogy that began with Fata Morgana (1970), which combined documentary footage of the Sahara Desert and a narration of the Mayan creation myth, and Lessons of Darkness (1992), a film that translated authentic footage of the devastating aftermaths of the Kuwait oil fields after Gulf War I as a parable of an alien planet’s self-destructive obsessions. Combining documentary footage with apocalyptic storylines must be a compelling idea to Herzog, because he does it again here, editing unrelated NASA footage of space travel and deep-sea voyages under Antarctica into a science fiction parable of a dying Earth and scientists’ quest for a new habitable planet. The film is narrated by Brad Dourif, who is credited as simply “the Alien.” He is certainly among the most compelling of Herzog’s creations, if for no other reason than the way he believably ties these images together in spite of his preposterously over-the-top scenario. Dourif is shot in front of junk yards and similar backgrounds featuring humanity’s most grotesque and barren inventions; his dialogue places these NASA images into Herzog’s science fiction context, which concerns his journey to Earth due to the death of his own planet. The alien landing in Roswell is tied in, and so is black-and-white footage that looks recycled from Herzog’s own Little Dieter Needs to Fly and The White Diamond, both which concerned man’s quest for flight. As it turns out, it was Dourif and his species’ journey to our planet that unleashed the disease that would eventually eradicate all life on Earth, thus explaining humanity’s need to find another hospitable planet. “Aliens—we suck,” Dourif explains almost apologetically. I imagine Herzog smiling mischievously to himself as he wrote that line, since he’s probably the only living director who could get away with it. The film is made up of four distinct and seemingly unrelated threads: Authentic images of astronauts floating quietly in their spacecrafts, later footage of the new planet where Earthlings are to relocate, called the “Wild Blue Yonder” (really the Antarctic Ocean), interviews with scientists explaining how space travel from galaxy to galaxy is mathematically feasible, and Dourif’s alien linking these documentary threads into its science fiction setting. Most of the film consists of the NASA footage, which are without dialogue and saturated with classical music scores, and the interviews/narrative sandwiched in between provide the storyline on which we meditate while we watch the extensive footage. The images we see are so clearly Earth-based—even the barren, Antarctic footage is familiar after last year’s March of the Penguins—that Herzog’s approach does not have a ghost of a change of working; nevertheless, the attempt remains as engrossing a poem as anything else he’s ever created, primarily because of the contrast between nature’s genuine desolation in the NASA footage and humanity’s synthetic replicas of that chaos as featured behind Dourif’s endless close-ups. Certainly Dourif also contributes to the film’s success, as he has a face that instantly seems foreign and alienated, which helps us buy into the scenario that he provides. It is tempting to compare his eccentric, often unnerving performance here to Klaus Kinski, but there is a sane clarity to his eyes that Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo could never claim. To allow the film to really work its spell, it is best not to view it literally but to rather embrace it as the next stage in Herzog’s typical mediations on nature. This is a continuation to his complex body of work, and it must be engaged on this term. Here he tackles two more wildernesses that he has not previously explored—outer space and the deep sea—and he again uses them to reveal how man is inescapable from the chaos and hostility that makes up the entire universe. Those of us who have followed Herzog’s filmography nod to ourselves when these motifs and ideas appear, yet unlike many of his bleakest bodies of work, The Wild Blue Yonder contains one of the most significant developments in Herzog’s universe: One of the interviewed scientists confesses that chaos is indeed the common denominator in the universe (an almost verbatim quote from Herzog’s Grizzly Man), but then he cheerfully points out (and I’m paraphrasing here sans the complicated science vocabulary used), “We are beginning to understand, though, that chaos is not a bad thing. It brings clarity. Eventually, as everything works together in chaos, harmony is created.” This crucial dialogue becomes the light at the end of Herzog’s tunnel; it is his most optimistic observation since the final, victorious moments of Fiztcarraldo, when the title character gives into his defeat and turns it into a sort of victory. The Wild Blue Yonder literalizes the same idea—just because “the common denominator of the universe is chaos, hostility, and murder” is not a reason to be defeated. The trick is to embrace our nature instead of trying to escape it, which is ultimately the sin of Herzog’s most infamous cast of characters, including Aguirre, Cobra Verde, the films of Bruno S., and obviously Timothy Treadwell. The Wild Blue Yonder reveals characters trapped in the same rut—scientists who try to escape their destruction instead of facing it—and it simultaneously provides a praise of chaos that comments on Herzog’s entire cinematic vision and offers an explanation of just why Herzog’s protagonists consistently fail. So how do we face our chaos and emerge victorious? Dourif’s Alien provides some clues in his narration, which often breaks out into cleverly-written rants that will sound familiar for anyone who’s read Herzog on Herzog, a book that showcased the director’s own tendency to digress into apocalypse ravings about our “embarrassed landscapes.” The Alien’s speculation of why humanity will finally destroy itself is based on our attempts to commercialize and cultivate the Earth; he specifically sites our Neolithic decision to raise pigs (“To raise cattle promotes sedentary living.”) and our “civilized” compulsion to climb mountains (“You rob the landscapes of their dignity!”). Such rants aren’t really diversions from Dourif’s narrative at all; rather, they fill in essential gaps that reveal the sort of mad, helpless vision that would propel man to find life on other planets in the first place. We want to control, not to participate: Even one of the interviewed scientists, who believes that humans will eventually inhabit other planets in such a large capacity that Earth will “turn into a vacation resort,” sounds like a half-mad rambler under the light of Dourif’s perspectives. It’s all part of the façade that we can maintain civility by dominating the planet. Perhaps that’s why Herzog calls the faraway planet that the astronauts seek to cultivate as “the wild blue yonder.” It is a scenario based completely in our fantasy; brilliant in its conception but laughably impossible. The Alien’s race is no better off in its ridiculous visions. There is a reason that he laments that “[they] suck.” Standing in front of a run-down building, Dourif sadly recalls that his race tried to build a “new White House” in the desert, but that it ultimately failed “because nobody came.” The vacant building now sits awkwardly like a wart on the desert’s surface. And of course, the aliens’ arrival is what brought the disease that threatened Earth in the first place. As in Lessons of Darkness, these aliens are really no different than humans, except that they’re a few steps ahead of us both technologically and in their recognition of their place in the universe’s chaos. In fact, I maintain as I did in my article on that film that perhaps the real alien here is Herzog himself, who feels ever more isolated from a humanity that is so entrenched in its own masquerade that it has lost the ability to remove its mask. His world is closer to Dourif’s pointed critique of civilization, while the rest of us inexplicably keep our heads turned towards our Wild Blue Yonder. But the scientist’s reflection of chaos leading to harmony provides us with a way to escape our fate: Instead of seeking utopia, why not allow chaos to work itself out around us? Instead of joining Aguirre on his trek to El Dorado, can we simply admit that El Dorado doesn’t exist and instead embrace the angry Amazon on its own terms? I don’t think Herzog is discouraging dreams; he simply says that there is a difference between dreams and fantasies. Dreams allow us to explore our world creatively and with goals; fantasies are unattainable and eventually lead to madness. And this difference is why, I think, the film finally becomes one of Herzog’s most compelling experiments. He has taken footage of dreams realized—the humbled exploration of nature’s beautiful jungles (in the closing credits, he appropriately thanks NASA “for their poetry”)—and has placed them in a fantastic scenario that forces us to see them through a lofty context instead of their intended purpose. We have to constantly remind ourselves that we are watching a “science fiction fantasy,” and Dourif helps us do so, since the long, wordless images that Herzog utilizes so often seem familiar to us. The effect is very disjointed and jarring; the images and the narrative do not belong together; we know it, and so does Herzog. So what does not work finally becomes the point: Let us not allow our fantasies to overcome our dreams—let us not embrace the vision of Earth as a vacation resort while we search for another wild blue yonder. Because ultimately, we know that the shots of this “wild blue yonder” are really just Earth, and the Alien is really just an actor, and the film makes more sense when we accept them on reality’s terms. And ah ha: so does the world. It’s a momentous moment in Herzog’s career: He finally, with his familiar motifs, finds a sort of solution for his view of the universe. It’s a strange sort of closure that only his type of eccentric, uncompromising genius could ever conceive. Cast: Subversive Cinema presents a film by Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. No M.P.A.A. rating, but contains no offensive material. Running time: 75 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: November 8, 2006. |
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