“That’s all?”
She stretched back in her coach-class seat and kept her voice low. “By now, I’m pretty confident the film is authentic. Nobody seems to be making money off this. And you don’t bring people from all over and show them a hoax, not if you don’t want a roomful of angry strangers and don’t know how they’ll react. So whoever is behind this is probably an obsessive collector who somehow got his paws on this amaze-balls prize. And you know what they can be like.”
Not as well as Lydia, surely. You sit behind the counter of a shop like hers, you become a magnet for pasty-faced hoarders who can deliver enraptured monologues about their collections until your eyes glaze over.
“With some of them, the best part of having something no one else does is the chance to lord it over everybody else. It’s not enough to have it…they need you to see they have it. They feed off your envy.”
“So, scale of one to ten,” I said. “What are the odds—”
As Lydia grinned and cut me off, I felt a flash of the old mind meld you develop with someone you’ve known in so many different ways, over so many years.
“Nine,” she said, “that you could count the number of times this guy’s been laid on one hand or less.”
* * *
Antarctica again. Same film, different researcher, this one a polar biologist in a shack around the frigid waters of a diving hole blown through the sea ice. Until I saw this, I’d never considered evolution in quite such terrifying terms.
He speaks of the hideous ways to die in this deceptively tranquil aquatic world, if you were small enough. He tells of worms with mandibles designed to rend flesh. He describes becoming ensnared in the tendrils of predatory blobs, and how you would exhaust yourself as you struggled to escape, until the creature drew you in and began breaking you down into compliant, digestible bits.
It’s a horrible and violent place to be, to live, to grow, your existence defined as something else’s food. It is, the biologist observes, a world that developed eons earlier than human beings.
Herzog’s question is as long-ranging as it gets: “Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans, and crawled on solid land to get out of this?”
He does indeed. The biologist regards this as the primary impetus for our most ancient ancestors to flee to someplace where they could evolve into larger life-forms. To leave the horrors behind, he says.
It sounds good. For a few moments, it sounds reassuring.
Until I realized the conversation didn’t proceed to what seemed obvious: even if nothing was waiting for us on dry land, something would be, eventually. The principles had already been established, and life was destined to abide by them. Old predators might rejoin us on land, because they missed the taste of us and enjoyed the challenge of a new hunt. Some among us would evolve into hunters themselves, advanced and unprecedented.
The horrors would follow, their paths laid down in the light of a younger sun.
* * *
Out the plane’s window, flatlands had given way to the rough and rumpled chaos of mountain peaks and alpine valleys.
I realized this was the act of an obsessed fan, but I didn’t feel like one. True, I’d admired Werner Herzog’s work for decades. I found him fascinating as a creative force, someone who could be a madman in service to a mission, in search of what he called “ecstatic truth.” I couldn’t imagine the resolve it had taken to subject himself to such endeavors as supervising a crew dragging a 320-ton steamship over a jungle-covered mountain for Fitzcarraldo. I couldn’t fathom where he’d come up with the idea to film most of the cast of Heart of Glass under hypnosis.
And I could scarcely conceive of maintaining the kind of artistic partnership he’d had with Klaus Kinski, a madman of a different sort. “To see Kinski,” wrote critic Roger Ebert, was “to be convinced of his ruling angers and demons.” Over the course of five films, they brought out the best and worst in each other. Great art, but more than once, one had schemed to murder the other.
Eventually, though, it was Herzog the documentarian who came to fascinate me the most. I knew of no other filmmaker so intent on working both sides of the narrative divide. No other filmmaker who seemed so deeply humane, yet so dour about the universe humans inhabit. Plus I liked how much Herzog wasn’t one of those documentarians who believed the filmmaker’s presence should not intrude into the documentary. He was all over them. They couldn’t have come from anyone else.
And Lydia was into almost none of it. Herzog just wasn’t in her cult wheelhouse.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. The question had gnawed at me for days, but I’d been afraid to bring it up until now. Over the Rockies, it was too late for her to change her mind.
“I passed muster. I was invited. Lydia Appleton, plus one. You’re just my tagalong.”
“Seriously.”
“Oh. Seriously. Well, that’s different, then.” She slid her reading glasses down her nose and looked me eye to eye. “I seriously want you to have this. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I hadn’t made it happen. Plus I get bragging rights too, so those and good karma. Win-win.”
“And you’re okay with being away from the store for three days?”
Lydia rolled her eyes and sank back in her seat. “Oh, good god, you don’t think I need a little time off once every few years? The place cost me two husbands, you know. I don’t do well with ultimatums, but there are still mornings I walk in and look around and say to myself, ‘Really? All that, for this?’ So a break from each other does me and it some good.”
Again, the ache, as I wished it could have worked out between us, when we’d given it a try one tentative time, after I, too, learned what it was like for a marriage to implode. Lydia had been empathetic and understanding, and knew how to make great popcorn and buy ice cream and pour shots of tequila, and for sure she had a god-tier movie collection. It could’ve been a rom-com from the eighties: geeky late bloomer grows up and finally gets his chance with the dream girl who was out of his league when they met, because she was nine years his senior.
By the time we took our short-lived tumble, the age gap didn’t seem nearly as prominent, but the dynamic still wasn’t quite right, and maybe never could be. There was no shaking free of the worry over what Lydia saw when she looked at me. She would always remember the bruises, the confessions. She would always remember how back then my dad kept insisting he was only trying to knock the fag out of me, and I’d thank him someday. She would always remember why I got into schlocky videos in the first place: I thought if he came through and saw I was watching something with lots of boobs, he’d leave me alone. Only it didn’t work that way. The world is full of carnivores intent on devouring their young, and if one rationale gets invalidated, they find another.
Lydia would remember it all, along with my adolescent adoration and puppy-dog eyes. How could she ever look at me and respect one thing she saw?
But she was here, now, next to me, and we were over the mountains, and I couldn’t think of anyplace I’d rather be. There was that. There would always be that.
“So don’t worry, I’m doing this just as much for myself as for you,” she said. “I feel compelled to do this. I really do. I heard the call and I answered.”
* * *
Which brings us to Timothy Treadwell, maybe the most doomed figure in the history of documentaries. At some point early in his life, or along a cumulative series of points, something broke him, left him not entirely fit to exist in human society anymore. The case could be made this was a sane reaction. His unique response, not so much.
Because the man in the blond mop-top loved grizzly bears. For thirteen years he followed some call he heard, to go to Alaska to live each summer in proximity to them. He filmed the bears. He felt accepted by the bears. He scolded the bears when they acted up. While wi
ntering back in civilization, he advocated on their behalf.
He loved grizzly bears so much he got himself and his too-trusting girlfriend eaten by one. He’d spent years fatalistically forecasting the possibility of such an end, if not that he would take Amie Huguenard with him. Or condemn one of his beloved bears to execution and a gut pile.
“We hauled away four garbage bags of people out of that bear,” says the pilot who had to help with the aftermath.
In so many ways, Treadwell was a classic Herzog protagonist. That the story came with such a definitive end, a debate partner embracing a diametrically opposed view of nature, and over one hundred hours of footage already shot, must have been irresistible to the documentarian in him.
Treadwell may even have filmed his killer a few hours before the situation went bad. He definitely recorded the audio of his demise, the video camera switched on but with no time to remove the lens cap. We the viewers don’t get to hear the attack, but don’t have to wonder about its specifics, thanks to the coroner who accepted delivery of the garbage bags. He takes a queasily theatrical delight in recounting the details constructed from the recording and forensics.
As deaths go, these weren’t quick and they weren’t clean.
Treadwell spends several minutes very much alive and aware. He has time to yell for help. The man who, for years, was at peace with the idea of ending up as bear shit changes his mind, now that the moment has come and it’s no longer theoretical. Who wouldn’t? Spending a while with your head being gnawed on would realign anyone’s priorities. But by then you’ve already made all the decisions necessary to put your head in the jaws.
“What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature,” Herzog says in voice-over, while the likely perpetrator lifts his ursine muzzle, time for his close-up. “To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”
* * *
After touchdown at Vancouver International it was low-grade cloak-and-dagger stuff, as though we were playing a spy game for middle-aged adults who needed more excitement in their lives but didn’t want to put their necks on the line to get it. Lydia had already sent the showing’s organizer our flight data, and now she texted to inform him of our arrival.
We’d been given three lodging options: low-budget, midrange, and luxury hotel, and went with the cheapest, just like our Kia rental car, because that’s life. I’d stayed in worse motels, but the place still smelled of cleaners and musty carpets. We would be here only two nights. Until tomorrow: sit tight, enjoy the city, await further instructions.
If the Chicago we’d left behind was all lake-frozen winds, Vancouver was wet springtime chill, with swirls of rain drizzling from banks of black clouds that scraped over the coast with the ponderous density of tectonic plates. When we woke the next morning, Lydia yanked open the curtains and it was more of the same.
After a time, she seemed to be peering out the window too intently.
“What are you looking for?”
“Cameras,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be just what we deserve if this whole thing was a setup and we were the subject of the documentary?”
Deserve? Ouch. “That would be…cruel.”
“Haven’t you been paying attention, Troy? The Theater of Cruelty moved over to cameras a long time ago.” She gave the wet asphalt world outside our window a final inspection, then turned her back on it. “Find some pants, we need coffee.”
The whole day was like this—waiting, watching, not entirely sure for what. We’d flown 1,800 miles to sit around anticipating texts. This was who we were, really—small people with small lives letting someone else dictate our next move—and I hated the feel of it. We may have been on one of the most exclusive guest lists in the world tonight, but nothing about it felt privileged. We were still being operated by remote control.
While passing the time, Lydia and I debated which of us had believed less in the film’s reality. We both, for different reasons, always loved the idea that a lost Herzog documentary could be out there. But the biggest challenge to our faith wasn’t that the man himself disavowed Todestriebe’s existence. It was because such a thing no longer seemed possible.
Once, maybe, but not now.
Todestriebe had come along much too late to be another The Day the Clown Cried, whose few prints had been locked away since 1972, after Jerry Lewis reconsidered why he’d ever thought it was a good idea for the world to see him as a circus clown leading Jewish children into Hitler’s gas chambers.
I’d only been hearing rumors of Herzog’s lost documentary for the past ten or twelve years. Digital age, easily. If the thing had gotten sufficiently far along in editing and postproduction to be considered complete enough to be lost at all, then it should’ve leaked. It should have been available on pirate sites and through BitTorrent clients.
Can’t trust anybody these days. That’s what the system counts on now.
* * *
The final text came late in the afternoon, informing us showtime was in ninety minutes, with a link to a live map. Until now, we hadn’t had a clue where this was being held. By the look of it, a fair drive to the east—suburbs, or maybe beyond, where suburbs gave way to the old coastal forests. We merged with a rain-smeared red river of taillights on the other side of the glass.
“We’ve come full circle, you and me,” I said.
“I don’t think I follow.”
“You helped me bag my very first white whale. Remember?”
Lydia groped to recall it but finally shook her head no. “It had to be a lot of years ago. And there have been a lot of whales.”
“Nine Inch Nails. The Broken video.”
She groaned. “I probably shouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t, if I’d known.”
I was a kid back then, defenseless at home and with the bruises to prove it. For a time, when they were new to the world, Nine Inch Nails spoke to me like nothing else, giving voice to all the fear and loathing I couldn’t articulate.
Apparently front man, everything man, Trent Reznor had a few things to work through, too. More success than he’d wanted. Accusations of being a sellout, a poseur. Record company woes. Too much, too soon. So he recorded an EP, Broken, the angriest, ugliest thing he could conjure. It wasn’t enough. He made videos. It still wasn’t enough. The project needed something more. A framing device for the videos, maybe. So he hired a fellow musician and filmmaker to conceptualize and shoot it.
Then they stepped back and took a hard look at what they had: a twenty-minute snuff film. Grainy footage of a guy luring another guy off the street, then torturing him to death while forcing him to watch the videos.
The surprise consensus: Maybe we shouldn’t release this after all. Jerry Lewis, all over again. What have I made?
So they set it aside, never to be seen, except for a few videotape copies Reznor dubbed for friends. Which was how it escaped into the wild. Can’t trust anybody, remember? It was viral video, analog style, years before YouTube, until it landed on the bootleg black market. No context, just this thing…this raw, screaming, misbegotten thing.
In no time, people came to believe it was real. Every generation of copies downstream from the originals became that much grainier, more degraded, more authentic-looking. It was found footage before there was such a genre. You were never supposed to see this.
I had to, of course. Thirty bucks was a lot of money to a high school kid in the nineties. But totally worth it, because for a few weeks, I was the fucking man. I was the one with the unicorn, and the power to decide if you were worthy of seeing it.
So I thought I had a solid understanding of the kind of person we’d find at the end of this trip, while Lydia was still mulling over our ear
ly history. I probably shouldn’t have done that.
I’m glad she did, but what I never told her, and never would: that shit does damage. Back then, it wasn’t make-believe splatter. It was the real thing. There were kids I showed it to who on the surface were all enthusiasm—awesome, coolest thing they’d ever seen—then they didn’t sleep well for days, weeks. They turned jumpy, fearful they could be snatched off the street. Because it happened, they’d seen proof. They were so much closer to imagining what they looked like on the inside, and how their heads would look on a refrigerator shelf.
“Contributing to your delinquency even then,” Lydia said, seemingly joking, but she didn’t sound pleased with herself.
* * *
The map led us over civilization’s ragged rim, to the edge of the Northwest’s boreal forests. Evening came on all at once, the sky’s last light choked out by old growth pines and cypress lining the roads like shaggy towers.
Our route ended at a turnoff onto a long, wood-chipped drive that led to a house invisible from the road. Cedar and glass and stone, the estate had the look of a weekend getaway that was hardly ever used, bought because it was a good investment and the owner had to put his seven-figure salary somewhere.
We improvised a parking place on a semicircular asphalt pad along with eight other vehicles. Around us, the trees dripped heavy with rain. At the door, a couple of burly guys in suits screened our admittance by inspecting the data trail on our phones, then confiscated them and did a pat down to make sure we weren’t bringing in anything else we could use to pirate the showing. Can’t trust anybody, right.
Under a dimming skylight, we milled about the atrium with a dozen other guests and counting, as more continued to arrive. One pair had flown in from Japan. Two others had crossed Canada entirely, coming from eastern Quebec. We were free to help ourselves from a self-serve bar and snack platters set up on a narrow table topped with green glass. I wanted bourbon but stuck with sparkling water, doing a double take at the bottle. Penguin Ice—really? What, somebody’s idea of a morbid joke?
Final Cuts Page 19