Growing up in a suburban utopia outside of Houston, I wanted for little. Ours was a community of deeply religious, hardworking oil-and-gas men and women, beautiful families with manicured lawns, gas-guzzling SUVs, Little League, country clubs, marching band, and Outback Steakhouse. But things seemed a bit too perfect. What deeper truths were lurking? I wondered. Absent real answers, I turned to the otherworldly and the supernatural, obsessing over inexplicable phenomena, conspiracy theories, calamitous predictions of doom via civilization-ending comet or pandemic. The Betty and Barney Hill abduction, D.B. Cooper’s lost briefcase, the JFK assassination, the Mothman, the Antichrist’s imminent arrival. By the third grade, I had become a chubby, big-haired, walking encyclopedia of the catastrophic and the unknown.
Reading The Future of Truth, German filmmaker and author Werner Herzog’s new book, I recalled my childhood fixations on the inexplicable. I had been inducted into, as Herzog puts it, a “field of collective paranoia,” replete with “conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions … in all shapes and sizes,” including the Abominable Snowman, the brontosauruses of the Congo (“or at least fresh traces of them”), and Area 51. Looking back now, it seems I wanted to be deceived, to retreat to a fictive reality to discover truer truths than those around me that I couldn’t trust. Pretty cool.
Even after directing dozens of films, including the visionary classics Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Fitzcarraldo; and documentaries such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly and Grizzly Man, the 83-year-old Herzog continues to chronicle madness, violence, and obsession as if the task were assigned to him by God himself. In this new book, a hyperlinked hodgepodge of fixations, vivid memoir, and Wikipedia-esque snapshots, Herzog delves into the true, the mostly true, the apocryphal, and the conspiratorial, expanding on themes and experiences that also appear in Every Man for Himself and God Against All, his 2023 memoir. With an all-consuming grandiosity befitting an Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, he reckons with a world in which accepted truths are no longer sacrosanct, one scrambled by deepfakes, online avatarism, fake news, and artificial intelligence.
Herzog comes off as somewhat at peace with the demise of the conventional notion of truth as a fixed point in time and space—largely because he opposes “the foolish belief that equates truth with facts.” In fairness, he’s largely lived that truth, “scything through the jungle, trudging up remote mountains or narrowly evading arrest in one of the war-torn countries where he stubbornly persists in filming, no matter the dangers, in a quest to secure the perfect shot,” often barely escaping with his life—or so he says, as Becca Rothfeld wrote in a review of his memoir. War, suffering, insanity, loss—it all must be seen or experienced to become true. “For Mr. Herzog, authenticity doesn’t have to do with props or costumes but with everybody’s putting his life on the line to realize one artist’s private vision,” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote upon the release of Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s harrowing documentary about the filming of Fitzcarraldo, one of Herzog’s masterpieces.
It is as if we’re ready for this brave new world of techno-deception, paradoxically, because our imaginations have been primed for it by the ubiquitous duplicity that surrounds us.
In Herzog’s own words, truth is “an uncertain journey … into the unknown, into a vast twilight forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose,” a pursuit that “distinguishes us from the beasts in the field.” (Unsurprisingly, he is no great admirer of cinema verité, the observational documentary style that he rejects as the “accountant’s truth.”) In the new book he examines various histories, some contemporary, many ancient: the Emperor Nero and his imposters, the origins of the Vatican, the creation of the Potemkin villages, the death of Princess Diana, Enron’s bizarre Hail Mary attempt to create the appearance of “going gangbusters” by building a fake trading floor (complete with banks of phones and computers), the factually dubious but undeniably gripping work of Ryszard Kapuściński, among other examples. To fully articulate his case, he revisits his own work, arguing that manipulation and a bit of deceit in filmmaking are essential to uncovering deeper truth.
Perhaps it’s only natural, then, that artificial intelligence appears to fill him with both dread and a terrible sense of wonder. AI, Herzog writes, “sees its occasional errors, and arrives at strategies and decisions that were not programmed in it by humans,” operating “with a little pinch of chaos and imprecision, as is also embedded in human nature.” Exponential improvements in biochemistry, robotics, quantum physics—AI is coming for all of it. “It can offer us ideas and suggestions that never occurred to us. And more: We are going to experience a reinterpretation of our role in reality, and of the understanding of this reality.” How, then, are we to be in this world?
In Herzog’s eyes, we are far more open to and accommodating of fakery than we might realize. It is as if we’re ready for this brave new world of techno-deception, paradoxically, because our imaginations have been primed for it by the ubiquitous duplicity that surrounds us. Victims of pyramid schemes, aficionados of professional wrestling and opera alike, alleged alien abductees: All have elected, on some level, to participate in their own deception. (Of alleged abductees, he is “gentle”: “The fact that someone claims to have been snatched by aliens doesn’t make it true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the snatched person is lying either.” )
Herzog recounts an experience he had while portraying a Catholic priest in a film. Costumed appropriately, he was approached by a young man who, thinking Herzog a priest, asked if he could hear his confession, apparently for “at least five” acts of adultery. Even after Herzog pointed out that he was merely playing a role, the man insisted. And so Herzog suggested filming his confession and the man agreed. “I granted him absolution in Latin,” Herzog writes. “He was thrilled, and would take no payment. His filmed confession to an actor playing a priest felt so much better, was much more liberating, than the real thing.”
Did this really happen? Is it merely allegory? Moments like this, told with an absurd, Germanic detachment and inscrutability, are a regular feature in Herzog’s writing. But, in truth, this is all beside the point in a way that recalls Orson Welles’s mischievous explorations of fact and fiction. For Herzog, the experience confirmed his ability as an artist to manipulate reality and generate a new, concrete truth in the process.
According to Herzog, our gullibility can be traced back to our efforts to console ourselves about death’s ever-quickening approach by imagining an afterlife—in his mind, the ultimate lie: “We comfort ourselves with a prospect of everlasting life in paradise. A willingness to deceive ourselves seems to be an essential part of our makeup.” While religions have “taken advantage of our predicament,” they’ve also had a “stabilizing” effect on humans, he acknowledges. To Herzog, this proclivity of ours is a virtue. We yearn for something beyond that which we can see, quantify, or empirically confirm. To borrow from Fox Mulder, we want to believe.
So too does Herzog. He venerates “stylization, invention, poetry, and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth, one that can access a distant echo of something that can illuminate us, far beyond the reach of fact.” In practice, he has come to call this “ecstatic truth,” or a “stepping-out-of-yourself,” an experience taken up by “certain late medieval mystics,” as well as Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
We’re constantly remapping the facts as presented into something truer to us, more profound or meaningful, arriving at our own ecstatic truths. In Herzog’s mind, this is as it should be.
Just as with the faked confession, little acts of manipulation are core to delivering these ecstatic truths. Lessons of Darkness, his 1992 film about Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War, opens with an apocalyptic quote attributed to French thinker Blaise Pascal (“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like reaction—in grandiose splendor”) that, in fact, Herzog made up, a deception intended to allow his audience to greet “the film at a high elevation,” from which they will not descend.
In Family Romance, LLC, an exploration of Japan’s “rent-a-family” phenomenon (in which a performer is paid to stand in for an absent loved one), Herzog withholds from the audience the knowledge that they’re watching actors playing actors, playing out a melodrama. “Everything in the film is a lie,” he writes. And yet in “all those lies, the feelings are always authentic.” Herzog insists he always makes public his inventions, and trusts the audience’s ability to discern the truth.
All this may seem like a lot of heady nonsense. Yet there’s something moving about how Herzog conceives of the euphoria of film watching, of how we create a parallel story to the one we’re seeing:
It’s easiest to explain with reference to romantic comedies, where one obstacle after another is thrown in the way of the young lovers, until finally they are parted altogether. At this point, we viewers often leave the film entirely in our minds.… How can the lovers be brought back together, what does it need for that to happen? We co-evolve the film. And then the film catches up to us, and draws us back in. Moments of heightening, moments of ek-stasis give us an opportunity to evolve this second film in ourselves. It’s at this point that cinema really begins.
In essence, we’re constantly remapping the facts as presented into something truer to us, more profound or meaningful, arriving at our own ecstatic truths. In Herzog’s mind, this is as it should be.
Herzog is bullish: Even if the technologies have grown more sophisticated, we are more than equipped to see our way through to reality. We’re holding the line against Holocaust deniers and have confronted at least some of the lies that led to the Iraq War. We’ve made it this far—surely with a few adjustments, we’ll soldier on now too? Yet his prescriptions to save us from a potential post-truth world fall a bit flat: To hone our skepticism, he suggests we reinvigorate our critical thinking skills by reading more, tweeting less, roughing it out in the natural world rather than simply absorbing it passively through a screen. We will adapt to the internet in the same way that we’ve done with radio and television. Though we don’t have much time.
By the end of the book, you do come to feel Herzog has already arrived at a sort of accommodation with rejuvenating filters on TikTok, ChatGPT-authored term papers, fake geolocating, fake photos, fake news, deepfake porn, AI doubles of beloved actors like Bruce Willis, AI-generated voice mimics. “You can find me (or ‘me’) reading children’s books aloud, or offering pearls of wisdom to confused individuals,” he writes, and you can almost hear him chuckle, in German. He cannot bring himself to a place of terror or dread: It’s both here, and it’s coming.