When everyone had arrived, the security duo led us through a house unable to decide whether it was a hunting lodge or a five-star hotel. Behind a pair of double doors waited a theater in miniature, with five rows of six plush seats. I would’ve been happy to see Todestriebe crowded around a laptop monitor, but the screen took up an entire wall, with speakers for seven-channel surround.
Lydia tipped her head against mine, her torrent of gray hair brushing my cheek. “This is what I need. Expand into the space next door and host movie nights,” she said flatly. “That’ll save the business for sure.”
“Put me down for season tickets.”
She snorted. “Dream on. I couldn’t afford to build a jerk-off booth in a smut shop.”
Once we were seated, a man I hadn’t noticed with us outside took his place between the seats and the screen. Casual dress, but he fought the springtime chill with a pullover sweater that reeked of a staggering price tag. He was well into his middle years, and maybe older than he looked, with the kind of rejuvenated skin stem cell treatments could buy.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, and opened his arms in welcome. “Thank you for answering the call.”
Intriguing way to put it. Already he wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
He introduced himself as Tobias Woodbury, and assured us he didn’t expect anyone to recognize it now, or remember it in the future. Captain of industry? Media mogul? Third-generation wealth? Did it matter?
He took a self-conscious glance around. “I know how this is going to sound here…but after enough time, money ceases to be anything other than the most superficial way of keeping a meaningless score.”
I felt Lydia squirm beside me, her bullshit detector on high alert, maybe hearing It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey: “Comes in pretty handy down here, bub.”
We had a quote for everything. I wondered how many of our thoughts were embeds left by generations of screenwriters.
Woodbury went on. “These last years of my life have been devoted to coming to terms with this. There should still be things that can’t be bought for any price. There should be thresholds accessible to only those who are open to finding their own way across them. It’s a self-selecting, self-anointing, group…and you’re here.
“Like most of you, probably, I first heard of Todestriebe years ago. Like many of you may have reacted, the more I tried to learn, the less I believed it was anything but a baseless rumor.”
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the two dozen of us in his audience.
“Now that I’ve seen it—tonight will be the seventy-third time—I have come to believe it is a film entirely unlike any other in existence. It’s a film that insisted on being made. Although it carries familiar fingerprints left by its creator, it is not truly his creation. He was simply chosen.”
As Woodbury let this sink in, Lydia again squirmed beside me, a different feeling to it this time, as she leaned forward in rapt attention.
“How many times have we heard our beloved artists—painters, sculptors, authors, composers, and yes, filmmakers, too—claim a work they’ve finished seemed to exist already, and they were only the conduit it passed through? This has never been more true than with the film you’re about to see. Todestriebe has always existed. Werner Herzog was merely chosen to bring it into the world. Its central figure was chosen. Its events were chosen. All by the film itself. Todestriebe willed itself into being as a statement of principle.”
I felt another ripple through the audience, an urge to ask, A principle of what?, but no one wanting to be first.
“There is only one copy in existence. I’m not its owner,” Woodbury said. “All I have been is its custodian for a while. And its student. The only difference between me and you is how I’m now in the fortunate position to share.”
Because…that’s what the film wanted? Just following his version of logic.
As Woodbury took his seat in the front row, to watch for the seventy-third time, the lights dimmed and a digital projector behind the back wall came to life. The screen lit up and my decade of searching arrived at its zenith.
Todestriebe.
In English, if you must, Death Drives. The title sounds scarier in German.
Most things do.
* * *
It opens on an endless expanse of white, stark against distant mountains, with no sign of the polar sea. A bird’s-eye view, from a helicopter or drone. We’ve been here before. Maybe Herzog came back. Maybe he never left, and it’s from the same trip.
“Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?”
He’s occasionally recycled when revisiting his past, but it’s a surprise for the redux to come so soon. The link to Encounters at the End of the World is immediate, even before the camera drifts toward a tiny figure trudging across the most pitiless landscape on earth. The same penguin? A different penguin? It can never matter.
“I don’t mean that a penguin might believe he or she is Lenin, Napoleon Bonaparte…” Against the soundtrack of a mournful choir, Herzog’s voice is hollow, reverberant, a faraway echo from the past. “But could they just go crazy, because they’ve had enough of their colony?”
The penguin slows, stops. When it moves again, it shuffles erratically, as if trying to find the tenacity to continue, until there’s nothing left to draw on. It topples forward into the snow and doesn’t move again.
“These questions have never left me,” says Herzog, now fully in the present. Or someone who sounds just like him. He’s a popular one to mimic. But I want to believe. “I accept that survival is the first impulse that drives all living creatures, even those whose eyes show little more than overwhelming stupidity. But I also believe survival is capable of being overruled by a force which may be even more powerful. Todestrieb…the drive toward death.”
Lydia leans in to whisper in my ear. “He sounds like the scariest grandfather imaginable. This soothing voice telling you terrible things.”
Not even the brush of her lips can break me from the spell. As the camera moves in to linger and the choir blends with the Antarctic wind, it takes several moments for me to grasp what I’m seeing. I see, but don’t comprehend. I can’t comprehend because what I’m seeing makes no sense.
A fixed, ground-level camera captures a time-lapse view of the penguin. A carcass shouldn’t decay here. The cold, dry air should create a natural mummy. Even so, over time, the penguin comes apart. It doesn’t rot. It…dissolves, becoming as crystalline as the snow. How many passings of the midnight sun watch this happen? Unknown. Irrelevant. Time has no meaning here.
“Nothing grows in this place but despair. There is nothing for death to nourish.” Herzog sounds as perplexed as he did when asking why penguins head for the interior in the first place. “And yet, even here, beneath the blankness of this ancient ice, an unsatisfied hunger seems to roar.”
The penguin vanishes a granule at a time, until the view pulls back on the barren wastes. In their colossal silence, it may be my imagination that they seem temporarily sated…even by the fate of so small and seemingly insignificant a creature lost beneath the vault of heaven.
A title sequence comes next, more of the somber choral music he likes so much, beneath a montage of clips shot by seasoned pros and panicked amateurs.
Animals first. A pod of whales lolls beached and dying along a shoreline. A flock of birds circles overhead, then plunges to smash itself against the stone of a campus bell tower.
Now human beings enter the picture, to challenge the animal kingdom. A man leaps from a retaining wall into a zoo enclosure, taunting the nearest tiger until it takes him down. An ecstatic preacher jitter-dances at the front of his church, until he staggers after being bitten in the face by the snakes he waves in each hand.
Finally it’s just us, Homo sapiens left to our own suicidal devices. An oblivious driver on a cell pho
ne preens at her dashcam at the precise moment her car is T-boned and her head snaps toward the impact. A scab-pocked young woman spikes a syringe into her thigh; the abscesses in her lower leg are so deep, bone is visible. On a religious pilgrimage, thousands begin to stampede, trampling the hundreds who can’t keep up.
By the time the montage ends, I’m already feeling exhausted.
Then all is quiet, except for a chorus of evening insects. The camera lingers on a man half obscured by shadows that fall over him like cage bars.
“It isn’t true, what they always end up saying about me.” His accent is German, his English impeccable. “But none of it is true. I never have hunted anybody. I never needed to.”
From close off-screen, that unmistakable voice: “Is it possible this is because of your name, and there is no way to avoid it? Is this your destiny?”
A caption gives his name as Rolf Jaeger. Ah. I get it now. I’ve seen Pacific Rim. I know jaeger is German for hunter.
“My name, yes. Jaeger would be my name, wouldn’t it? It’s the little joke played on me before I even was conceived.”
“Who would play such a joke on an unconceived child?”
“Who has the most to gain from me? Who can take the longest view?”
Jaeger dawdles in the shadows, waiting for an answer, but Herzog isn’t biting. This early, he still thinks it’s his movie. He doesn’t want to say he has no idea.
Maybe Jaeger smiles. It’s so hard to tell. “My maker.”
“And who is it you consider your maker?”
No, he’s not in a cage, even if maybe he should be. When Jaeger moves out of the shadows of the branches and into the light—my god, he looks like Klaus Kinski. Not from one angle, not in the right light, no, he really looks like the five-film collaborator Herzog was nearly driven to kill. The blond hair, the high cheekbones, the sensual mouth, the blue eyes so easily given to disdain, the air of arrogance and cruelty…they’re all there. Whatever small differences there may be are overpowered by the rest.
How irresistible it must’ve been once Herzog learned of this man. A career spent searching for ecstatic truth in a universe of chaos, hostility, and murder, and one day this is what it brings him: a doppelgänger of the man he’d called his best fiend.
What else could that be but harmony?
“Who is my maker? Who is the maker of teeth?” Jaeger seems annoyed. “I am a sentient tooth in the jaw of the cosmos.”
Backstory, yes, and not a moment too soon.
Shades of Into the Abyss, Herzog’s documentary on crime and punishment, and the generational legacy of violence in violent families. Rolf Jaeger may be a notorious figure in Germany, but no one has heard of him here. He is, I’m not surprised to learn, a person of interest in the disappearances of thirty-seven people across Germany and Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. He’s the one thing they all have in common. He’s rumored to be some sort of cult figure to them.
He exists and they find him, it’s as simple as that. Then some are never seen again. He doesn’t bother denying it. But there are no bodies, ever. Bones, in a few cases, but bones often tell frustratingly incomplete tales. These show no tool marks to reveal how they came to be bereft of flesh.
Arrests, he’s been through many of those, yielding a rogue’s gallery of mug shots. Interrogations, too. They always end in his release. When pressed to explain how such a thing could be, he’s scornful of simply proclaiming his innocence.
“The maker of teeth prefers to see me free,” he says.
“I have heard authorities claim you draw people to you as some kind of guru, even though I myself dislike the word. Is this true, as you see it?”
Jaeger appears amused. “No. I don’t like the word either. All I am is a superficial yogi.”
“What does this mean, in practice?”
“It means I am stuck.” Haughtiness overcomes him as he seizes the chance to lecture. “An ancient Vedic text of the Upanishads gives us five dimensions, five layers, of being. The highest of these is bliss. Then comes wisdom. Then the dimensions of mind and energy. The lowest…the outermost…is the physical. They called it the food layer.” When Jaeger smiles, even his teeth are Kinski’s, strong and even and white. “I am stuck, but I’m happy here. It is a happiness of purpose. This is where I belong.”
Herzog is playing with fire here. He has to know it. Has to be as curious as the rest of us why Rolf Jaeger isn’t behind actual bars. He has to be wondering what this man will do in front of him, perhaps even to him, because Jaeger is convinced he can do it with impunity.
We’re none of us safe—that’s what Herzog appears to be saying here. For each of us, it’s out there: some beacon, some irresistible lure, pulling us toward it whether we realize it or not. It waits, and in its service we will choose to do things we’ll regret, things we might never be able to turn away from, things that may end us entirely.
And he’s as susceptible as any of us.
If it’s even really him. I don’t know anymore. If this universe of chaos, hostility, and murder could deliver up another Kinski, might it not manifest a second Herzog?
* * *
Years I spent, looking for this thing. Not constantly, but every so often I would resume the hunt for any newer evidence to settle its legitimacy. All that ever awaited was more frustration.
It wasn’t hard to find the occasional Todestriebe thread on obscure film forums. Someone was always claiming to have seen it, but vague on details and defensive when pressed. Know-it-all skeptics, too, presenting their theories: “Actually, this is no more than an inept attempt at creating viral interest in an upcoming commercial project, by someone who doesn’t understand viral marketing. Quite pathetic, really.”
Only one post, from years ago, stuck with me. I don’t know why. There were no details, no reason to give the author the benefit of the doubt. There was just something about it that felt…credible.
“If you ever get the chance to see it, pass. Don’t. Just don’t. It will take you an hour and forty-three minutes to see it, and the rest of your life trying to unsee it.”
When has a warning like that ever worked?
* * *
For a thematic side trip to hell, Herzog—if this is truly his doing—folds in the sordid case of Armin Meiwes. I remember hearing about him, the Rotenberg cannibal who found, first, an online fetish forum to advertise for a well-built man who wished to be killed and eaten, and then, just such a man.
Herzog employs archival footage from a prison interview and snippets of the four-hour video Meiwes shot that long, gruesome night at his farmhouse.
“I decorated the table with nice candles,” he says while seated at a different table. He looks so ordinary in his blue shirt and thinning hair. “I took out my best dinner service and fried a piece of rump steak…a piece from his back…made what I call princess potatoes and sprouts. After I prepared my meal, I ate it.”
The visuals don’t stay long with Meiwes himself. His voice continues over scenes from his home movie.
“The first bite was, of course, very strange. It was a feeling I can’t really describe. I’d spent over forty years longing for it, dreaming about it. And now I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh.”
I’m astonished by how much Herzog chooses to show. Some might see prurient provocation, but I don’t think that’s it. Maybe he was annoyed by the criticism he got for the scene in Grizzly Man during which he listens to Timothy Treadwell’s death over headphones: Why should he get to hear it and we don’t? There was no need—the coroner had already given a play-by-play account. The voyeurs still wanted more. They wanted to hear raw mortality.
Fine, he seems to be saying in response. You wish to see? Then look and see. See this emasculated man bleeding in a bathtub with a look of gratitude in his eyes. See his bise
cted carcass hanging from its ankles in a makeshift butcher shed. Seen enough yet? No? Look closer, then, see the curve of his ribs inside his gutted-out body cavity.
See, and know this is love.
All around me, people gasp and groan. That shit does damage, remember.
Who could want such a thing? It’s easier to understand the cannibal—there can be no greater act of domination. But who could yearn to be on the wrong end of the knife and fork? That’s his real interest here.
They’re out there…and dear god, he finds them.
“I’ve always lost myself in other people,” says a nervous young woman in an empty room with peeling windowsills. “It’s never enough. Why not carry it all the way?”
A middle-aged man on a park bench leers into the camera, something lascivious in his gaze, as if he’s filming for a dating profile. He squeezes his thigh. “I’m thick. I’m meaty. Juicy. Who wouldn’t want me?”
A couple, too. The man looks smaller than the Amazonian woman to begin with, the contrast exaggerated by the way he hunches on the floor beside her wrought iron chair. He strokes the leather of her knee-high boots. She stokes his hair the way she would a favored pet.
“I want to be in her belly,” he whispers. “I want to pass through her. I want to become a part of her. Then neither of us will ever have to be lonely again.”
Herzog sounds surprisingly gentle: “You find the prospect of death preferable to loneliness, even though death is the only state certain to be permanent?”
The man continues to fawn at the woman’s knee. Behind big, dark bug-shades, she smiles. Her voice is throaty. “Our kind of togetherness is permanent, too.”
“Are you not afraid of speaking your intentions so candidly, when your own words could be used against you?”
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