Matthew Cheney – Page 2 – Press Play Video Blog

They Know Not What They Do: BURN AFTER READING

When Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton) descends into her husband’s basement office and copies financial records off of his computer, we get a glimpse of a book on the desk, a book that looks to be George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment: 1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence. This should not surprise us. We have previously heard Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), while struggling to dictate his memoirs, declare: “The principles of George Kennan—a personal hero of mine—were what animated us. In fact they were what had originally inspired me to enter government service.”

Burn After Reading is a film about containment and knowledge, or, to put it another way, a tale of wars against chaos. Necessarily, it is a farce.

The Coen brothers’ films are sometimes criticized as nihilistic. They are only nihilistic, though, in the sense that Buddhism is nihilistic. The films are full of characters who quest for meaning and purpose, but they quest badly. They seek eternal verities in a universe that only provides constant change, shifting perspectives, cultural relativisms, random sets, infinite fractals, and distant enlightenment. These are not nothing. Knowledge, meaning, and even, perhaps, purpose can be found in them. In A Serious Man, the movie the Coens made directly after Burn After Reading, and which serves as a kind of cousin to it in many ways, Rabbi Marshak is the wisest of all the characters because he knows enough to pay attention to a pop song: “When the truth is found. To be lies. And all the hope. Within you dies. Then what?” One command: “Be a good boy.” And, left unspoken but vividly present: “Find somebody to love.”

Spy thrillers appeal to the pleasures of secret knowledge, the idea of knowledge as power. God is Truth, and Truth is always hidden, available only to the worthy, jealously protected and obfuscated by the clerics. Conspiracy theories are theologies, but they are also power fantasies. One legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, who successfully petitioned (or bullied) Hollywood into taking the side of his knowledge-seeking G-men, is that the most common representation of government agents in American films is of technically skilled poobahs of the panopticon. This is especially true of conspiracy thrillers, whose verneer of subversive or cynical intent is usually itself subverted, because there is nothing more flattering to government agencies than to portray them as dangerously powerful. (It is better to be feared than loved.) Popular chronicles of conspiracy, whether tales of heroes or martyrs, give us lone wolves hunted by all-seeing feds or monolithic, hyper-competent corporations. Such stories leave no room for the everyday mess of bureaucracy, for institutionalized incompetence, for the slips and serendipities of inevitable human error, for technical glitches, for stupidity, for ignorance, for chaos. Power-flattering representations serve the acronymed agencies well, providing them with an aura of omniscience, authority, infallibility.

Burn After Reading counters this with a portrayal of bureaucracies that possess extraordinary powers of surveillance, but not knowledge. Outside the bureaucracy, in the random chaos of the world (and the precisely-structured chaos of the film’s narrative), we see individuals whose confidence in their own knowledge is misplaced. The smartest people in any room turn out to be the CIA bureaucrats who know what they don’t know, and are perfectly capable of working with that. Their goal is simply containment. But Harry (George Clooney), Linda (Frances McDormand), and Chad (Brad Pitt)—and to a certain extent Osborne and Katie—suffer epistemological hubris. Again and again, they call each other stupid, or morons, or idiots, as they vie for position in the hierarchy of, in every sense of the word, intelligence. But intelligence is overrated. Bureaucracy teaches the pragmatic lesson that containment doesn’t require omniscience. In Burn After Reading, it’s a lesson most of the individuals outside the bureaucracy don’t learn in time to save themselves.

Their yearning for complex explanations and Hollywood thrills blinds the characters to the unexciting, unflattering truths in front of them. We see this right from the beginning: Osborne protests his demotion and scorns the idea that he has a drinking problem, insisting, “This is political! Don’t tell me it’s not!” He storms out of the office and we cut to him at home, making a drink. Again and again, the film will show us that Osborne is a man with a violent temper who drinks a lot. The reason the CIA decided to demote him may be, in fact, exactly what they said. Osborne Cox believes that a man of his stature could not be relieved of
his duties for mundane reasons, but must have been felled by the hand of
nefarious conspirators. Osborne wants for his life to have been important in some way, as do we all—to have been more than just the life of a run-of-the-mill man, an ordinary guy. Like so many people who think their lives will achieve immortality by being printed and bound into narrative, he decides to write his memoirs (and even to gild the word with a fine French twist, memwaaa).

But the only people who care about his memoirs are Linda and Chad, who assume Osborne is important—and so, though he can’t see it, he has found the ideal audience for his life’s story. (Their only competition being Osborne’s catatonic father, who may, for all we know, think his son is as unimportant and annoying as everybody else does.) Osborne, Linda, and Chad are ideologically matched: they believe in the legends of the CIA, the Hollywood stories of derring-do and secrets that must be preserved at all costs. The CIA itself does not believe this—Osborne Cox had a security clearance level of 3, which elicits barely a shrug when the agency superiors learn there has been a leak. The Russians, once they look at the memoir material, deem it to be drivel. The only people in the world who think Oswald’s work was so important as to be worth lots of money, major conspiracies, and maybe a Hollywood deal are Linda and Chad.

A superficial interpretation of the film would propose that the Coens think all these characters are stupid and that we should laugh at their follies—that we should, in fact, revel in our superiority to these schmucks. Hence the occasional (or more than occasional, depending on where you look) criticism of the Coens for mocking their characters, for holding them in contempt. I cannot speak for the Coens, who may, in fact, be sneering smartypants bathed in fumes of schadenfreude, but the feelings ultimately produced in my experience of their movies are not ones of superiority for the characters so much as sympathetic solidarity. Not for all the characters, of course. Inevitably, there are bullies and tyrants whose sufferings are sweetly just deserts, but look, for instance, at a character like Linda. We (or I, at least) start out laughing at her, at her oblivious self-absorption, her bumptiousness. Ohhh, look at this silly woman getting all marked up by the plastic surgeon, this woman who thinks her health insurance company will pay for her expensive nips and tucks. Ha ha ha, isn’t she hilarious, isn’t she ridiculous, isn’t she just—

But for me this contempt doesn’t last. And this is one of the great powers of the Coens’ films, and part of those films’ great artistry and value. In the Coens’ world, people who begin as caricatures become, somehow, more human than characters in even the grittiest of verité social realism.

In Burn After Reading, I can mark the precise moment where this happens for me: a POV shot twenty-one minutes into the film, a shot through the windows in the office of Linda’s boss, Ted (Richard Jenkins), as Ted watches Linda hold her head and weep after the conversation with the agent at the health insurance company. The effect stems from Frances McDormand’s performance, the terror in her eyes while she talks on the phone, the terror that lurks behind her mask of determination, and the moment where she can’t keep the mask from slipping. Having seen that, we don’t need to see her from the front right away. We know what she feels, we know why she weeps, and if we have any tinge of decency in our hearts, we feel chagrin. Because earlier, we saw her just as her plastic surgeon saw her: as silly meat. We judged her just as she judged the men whose profiles she so quickly flipped through on the dating website: “Loser, loser, loser.” We know now that this is her own fear, the fear she hopes, however realistically or unrealistically, to conquer by reinventing her physical self.

Loser, loser, loser. Haven’t you ever shared that fear? Haven’t you ever—foolishly, humanly—invested all your hopes in one path, and had that path shattered in an instant? (By a bureaucrat, perhaps, an agent . . .) Ted certainly has. His puppydog kindness toward Linda is a kindness I think we’re encouraged to share at that moment. Ted is the most decent guy in the film, a man who has come to accept life as it is, even to find pleasure in it. Once, he was a man of God, but it didn’t really work out. Now, he helps people get stronger, to get in better shape. Linda can’t see what Ted has to offer, his loving ordinariness, because her mask and her expectations blind her to Ted’s obvious infatuation. It’s too bad for Ted, but we’ve been him, too: a bit too puppydog, a bit too ordinary. For all his differences from Linda and from Osborne Cox, his fears are the same. All the main characters’ fears are the same. They don’t want to be a loser like the other losers. There’s contempt there, sure, but it’s not raw contempt so much as it’s a contempt masking fear. It’s a contempt we’re complicit in, but the Coens show us that we can escape our complicity by escaping our fears and embracing, accepting, and even delighting in our loserdom. Linda is one of the few characters to survive in the end, and the only character to truly get what she wanted from the beginning. Her triumph is one I celebrate, and I cherish the experience of starting from contempt for her when she first appears and evolving to cheer on her success at the end. The surgeries serve as the film’s primary MacGuffin, but as MacGuffins go it’s a complex one, because the gift of the movie is the gift of reinvention: for Linda and for us.

None of the other main characters find the same success. Most of them end up killed off by the chaos. Perhaps their failures are random, but that means some success will be random too, and that’s okay. We can live with that. Linda’s greed and vanity get her into the mess she gets into, but at least her greed is not the sort of dishonest, dissembling, gluttonous greed of George Clooney’s Harry. Linda just wants to find somebody to love. Like her, Harry is full of vanity, particularly as it relates to his gun (which he and everybody else always knows is a penis substitute), and he, too, is seeking love. But he’s a bad boy and his fate is to end up in a paranoid vortex of his own construction. His final scene with Linda in the park is a masterpiece of comic set-up, because various separate bits of information, precisely placed throughout the film, all converge to convince him that everybody is out to get him. The truth is exactly the opposite, but the effect of his delusion is congenial to everyone: he escapes to Venezuela. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t really want you to go away.

More, of course, could be said about all the connections and coincidences, the incorrect assumptions, misheard remarks, mistaken identities: the beautiful structures and balances of the film. But saying much more is too much like explaining a great joke. Jokes and movies shouldn’t mean, but be.

Nonetheless, I feel obliged at least to note one other level on which the film is working: that of metafiction. This is a movie that knows it’s a movie, and is all the better for it. First, it relishes our genre knowledge, the knowledge that produces expectations, those things that lead us astray. The title credit sequence could be that of a spy thriller: we zoom in from space as if from a surveillance satellite (topic for another time: compare the CIA in Burn After Reading to God in A Serious Man), the music is determinedly dramatic, the credits splay across the screen accompanied by the techno-tinkle sound associated (why?) with computer text, and we cut to serious feet walking seriously through the serious, antiseptic corridors of CIA headquarters. The music will be the key to the seriousness throughout—it cues big revelations, moments of drama, rising tensions. The comedy comes from the music’s misjudgment: the relevations are, more often than not, mundane, the drama banal, the tension easily diffused. (It’s music more appropriate to, for instance, the previous movie George Clooney and Tilda Swinton made, Michael Clayton.) The film has been scored to meet the characters’ expectations for the kind of story they want to be in. Little do they know that they’re in an entirely different film from the one they desire.

And then there’s Coming Up Daisy, the Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney movie-within-the-movie that Linda always takes her dates to. It is, apparently, a fluffy romance, a sappy fantasy of eternal love and perfect happiness and beautiful people. (The sort of fantasy that makes a woman like Linda hate herself and her life, the sort of fantasy that keeps many cosmetic surgeons in business.) Linda goes to the movie twice, once on a bad date (with Alan) and once on a date that seems to come out of just such a movie (with Harry). This is not the end of this reference, though. When Harry’s wife, Sandy, goes on a TV show in Seattle, one of the later guests is Dermot Mulroney. Harry is oblivious to his wife’s faithlessness, her ability to deceive him even more effectively than he thinks he is deceiving her—oblivious, in other words, to her agency. After Harry shoots Chad, he tries to make a salad for Katie, but only ends up chopping an enormous pile of carrots. In Seattle, though, Sandy kisses her boyfriend in the dressing room of the TV show while a segment about the “Sultan of Salad” plays above them. Sandy, it turns out, is the one character who lives in a world where fantasies of perfection are not quite so fantastical.

The casting of Burn After Reading also contributes to some of its metamovie touches: not just with the reuniting of Clooney and Swinton, but also, more slyly, with the appearance of David Rasche as a serious CIA man. Rasche is probably best known, at least to connoisseurs, for his starring role in the mid-’80s TV comedy Sledge Hammer!, a spoof of the Dirty Harry films in which Sledge’s solution to every problem is to shoot it with his giant gun. Sledge Hammer! makes even the broadest comedy in Burn After Reading look like a marvel of subtlety, but I know I can’t be the only viewer who, upon first seeing Rasche, immediately thought of his earlier character’s motto: “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” Many of the characters in Burn After Reading think the same thing, with similar results.

(Tangentially, I expect I’m also not the only viewer who, on seeing the name of the gym where Linda, Chad, and Ted work, thought of Susan Jeffords’ brilliant book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Of Harry Callahan, Jeffords writes: “Harry’s heroism has a nihilistic edge to it that cannot reassure audiences that any of his actions have mattered or have changed the social order in any way.”)

Burn After Reading ends with The Fugs’ song “CIA Man,” and so the ending is, like everything else in the movie, perfect in its multiplicities of meaning:

Who’s the agency well-known to God?
The one that copped his staff and copped his rod?
Fucking-a man! CIA Man!

Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He teaches English, Women’s Studies, and Communications & Media Studies at Plymouth State University.

VIDEO ESSAY: The End of Violence: The Conclusions of Clint Eastwood

It took me years to learn how to watch a Clint Eastwood movie. For one thing, I tended to watch them far apart and to rely on memory of earlier films to prepare myself for current ones. But given the gaps in time between viewings, I should have been more suspicious of how I remembered them. I saw Unforgiven when it first came out on videotape, but I was in my late teens then. It seemed plodding and clunky, and, to my jaded young eyes, old. That original impression solidified in my mind, tarnishing my general impression of Eastwood as a director. (Plodding, clunky, old.) I skipped the Eastwood movies that seemed skippable, the ones that didn’t get much attention. Eastwood was a creature from another era, and I was sure he was just a dumb cowboy at heart. Sure, he’d won Oscars, but that just cemented the idea of Eastwood as the embodiment of middlebrow mediocrity. “Most of the good directors,” I’d say to anyone who would listen, “don’t win that award.”

It’s easy to underestimate Eastwood, even if you’re not relying on vague memories and snobbery. His image as the embodiment of vigilante conservatism slithers through the collective cultural consciousness. He’s Dirty Harry, he’s the Man with No Name. Our assumptions deliver him to us as what we expect him to be. The tough guy, the grizzled guy, the man’s man, the white savior, the relic.

Thus, it wasn’t until Gran Torino that I could say I really watched an Eastwood movie. The ones I’d seen before were films I looked at as the films I’d expected them to be. But Gran Torino shocked me into seeing it. I’d seen reviews belittling the movie, and I expected it to be a not-quite-vaguely racist heap of claptrap. I don’t remember even when I decided to watch it, or why. But I did.

I didn’t know what to make of Gran Torino on that first viewing, because it sneaked into my amygdala and splattered feelings in all directions. The overwrought Christ imagery at the end was a bit much, but still … the images after that, of Thao driving off into his own, inherited America, pulled true tears from my eyes. This was not claptrap. Eastwood was up to something. And the film was, in its own way, and on its own terms, more subversive than most Hollywood films ever dare to be. (I’ve explored my response to Gran Torino more fully in a previous video essay.)

I watched Gran Torino again and again, seeking the meaning that lodged in the bit of free space between my assumptions, the meaning that had come from being so unexpectedly moved by a movie I’d expected to detest.

With the fervor of a convert, I binged my way through Eastwood’s oeuvre. Again and again I saw what had so fascinated me in Gran Torino: the way Eastwood used his own iconicity against itself, the way he presented masculinity and violence as intoxicating elixirs of destruction, the way he danced (sometimes awkwardly) on a tightrope between exploiting our basest desires and blowing them all to hell.

Drucilla Cornell’s Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity provided me with ways of working through what Eastwood’s films can mean. I think Cornell sometimes gives the films a bit too much credit, because sometimes these movies are as symptomatic of the world into which they were released as they are critical of it. (But we need to see symptoms. Or, rather, we need symptoms to be made visible. How do you diagnose a disease without them?) Nonetheless, her central point convinced me: if we want to think about the force of American masculinity, the films of Clint Eastwood are a rich and vivid source.

Consider violence, a feature common to most of Eastwood’s films. These are not pacifist manifestos—violence is shown to be sometimes necessary, sometimes useful. But usually it is also destructive and corrupting. It gets people what they want in the short term, or it saves their lives, but the cost is great, and their lives are shrunken and shattered. This is true even in the Dirty Harry films, where we may join the fantasy of wearing the wisecracking, bureaucracy-hating vigilante’s mask of bravado, but would we want to live as Harry lives, to become what he became? As Faust could tell you, fantasies come with a hefty price.

We need to pay close attention to the conclusions of Eastwood’s movies, particularly the ones he directs and stars in, because these films allow him to configure and reconfigure his iconicity. From Play Misty for Me to Gran Torino, he has played jazz riffs on the idea of “Clint Eastwood,” repeating and revising the figure he embodies. Nowhere are the riffs more poignantly played than in The Outlaw Josey Wales (the subject of a previous video essay of mine), one of Eastwood’s most complex and subtle studies of the avenging male hero. The ending is where the meanings swirl old gestures together into something new—the violent hero, ruined by war, exhausted by anger, turns away from killing and rides off into a sunset. He’s quietly wounded, likely bleeding to death. Like so many Eastwood characters, he has saved a ragtag community that now has no space for him. He is the demon that must be expelled. In that, he is less Faust than Mephisto.

Again and again, Eastwood’s characters end up going off into ambiguity. What are we to make, for instance, of the conclusion of Million Dollar Baby? It ends with a sort of triumph and grace, yes, but what are we, the observers, left with at this moment? The film’s story positions us to sympathize with Frankie, to feel the dilemma he feels, but should we conclude from our sympathy that Frankie did the right thing? That death is better than handicapped life? I can fully believe a character like Maggie would, in those circumstances and at that point in her treatment, want what Frankie gave her—that she did, indeed, see it as triumph. But I don’t know if we’re required to agree. The film wraps us in its emotions, but then steps back and at the end leaves us with images of a lost man, a lonely man, an exiled angel of death. Here, Eastwood’s violent character isn’t exiled or exorcised from a community he saved and that will, presumably, prosper without him. Here, he is simply exiled. What meaning we make of that is our own.

The Mystery of Werner Herzog: Two Video Essays and One Text Essay

DOES MR. JONATHAN SMITH CRY IN HIS PILLOW AT NIGHT?: THE UNIRONIC WORLDS OF WERNER HERZOG

One of the most revealing statements in the book Herzog on Herzog appears early on, when Werner Herzog tells interviewer Paul Cronin that from the time he was a young child he has suffered a particular "communication defect": he has no sense of irony.

Whether Herzog the actual human being does or doesn't have a sense of irony is itself a minor point, a bit of autobiographical gossip. But there is a useful truth in extrapolating the insight to his work: Understanding and appreciating Herzog's films means giving up on the pleasures of irony. (It is difficult to imagine a satire written and directed by Werner Herzog.) What is entertaining and meaningful in Herzog's movies and his public persona is a peculiar earnestness — the earnestness of the straight man in comedy routines, but less oblivious, more mystical. Various labels can and have been applied to his work: Romantic, Expressionist, Existentialist. But they are inevitably incomplete and unsatisfying because their orientation is toward analysis, systematization, precepts, and principles—where Herzog's philosophy is more like a garden of intuitions, or a collection of koans written on scraps of paper and scattered across the floor of an abandoned monastery atop some far-off mountain where the wind never settles down.

The title of Nelson Carvajal's new video essay, "Werner Herzog Looks at Man's Futility," is full of tricks and traps. What is Werner Herzog: the filmmaker, his films, the actual human being for whom that is a byline, the public figure we know from interviews and guest appearances and YouTube videos? Looks: How? With eyes or camera? Are we looking with him, through him? Man's Futility: "Man" as a macho revanchist term for "humanity"? Or literally of men: the futility of men, the futility of masculinity, men adjusting their lives to the fact of futility . . . (The video's first image, from Stroszek, is of a woman being beaten by men.)

Carvajal's work can speak for itself; its juxtapositions are rich with possibility and ambiguity. The choice of the word futility is what most strikes me. A quick glance at Herzog's oeuvre might cause an inattentive viewer to see it as nihilistic, as celebrating or at least embracing the futility of living: human life is inconsequential, nature is great and unknowable, death and failure are ever-present, hopes and dreams are naïve. But that is not it at all. Instead, Herzog encourages us toward the sublime, toward awe and humility when faced with great mystery—toward, indeed, the seeking and celebration of such mystery. Toward an epistemology that is not irrational but sur-rational, that thrives between the lines of all we could ever know. It is not that we live in a meaningless universe, but rather that our intellectual tools for measuring the meaning of the universe are about as well developed as those of a mosquito contemplating how Manhattan came to be so tall.

Existence is its own meaning. Thus, the need for pushing existence toward its limits and extremes, for exploration and adventure. Every worthwhile encounter happens at the end of some world. Facts are not truth, and truth is not a product of careful measurement and objective observation, but of ecstasy, and ecstasy requires the knowledge of the senses, the trust of intuition, the cultivation of mystery. Teleology leads to ruin, but knowledge and enlightment come from the fact of life's force: Aguirre, on a monkey-covered raft at the end of his adventures, doomed and clearly mad because still he dreams of conquest; Fitzcarraldo failing at what he set out for and achieving much he did not; Dieter Dengler clinging to existence with the same strength as the premature baby grips the doctor's hand in Stroszek. Life's force and the power of chance determine the aesthetic, with shots and scenes included not for reasons of cause and effect, not for obvious or metaphorical association, but because they feel right. Animals and objects take on mercurial meaning: the albino crocodiles in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the fiery oil fields of Lessons of Darkness, the basketball in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, the chickens in everything. Chance and chaos rule over all: the volcano in La Soufrière might explode at any moment, the actors in Heart of Glass are hypnotized and thus strange and unpredictable, the squirrels in the story told in Into the Abyss could have been killed if not for good brakes on a golf cart.

Herzog's truths emanate from estrangement. The worlds and peoples he portrays are always exotic, and so there is a consistent unity to his work from its earliest days—each film displays a contempt for nothing except dominant normality. No person or place is exotic to itself, but we do not have access to these selves. Few, if any, of Herzog's characters are "knowable" in the sense familiar from the genre of psychological realism. Psychologizing is futile. Worse than futile: boring. The camera's fascination adheres to anyone and anything that confounds simple analysis, that lives outside predictable boundaries, that does not look like commercial, homogenized culture. We discover (through cracks, crevices, abandoned pathways, extremes of distance, altitude, weather) the panoply of ways of living.

"I want the audience with me in wild fantasies in something that illuminates them," Herzog said in an appearance on The Colbert Report in June of 2011. Wild fantasies illuminate. Wild fantasies bring us beyond the banal, commodified dreams that haunt our days of sleepwalking. "You see if I were only fact based—you see, the book of books in literature then would be the Manhattan phone directory: four million entries, everything correct. But it dusts out of my ears and I do not know: do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night?" Knowledge requires imagination, empathy, curiosity. Anything else is at best facts, and, as David Byrne once sang, "Facts are living turned inside out."

Herzog makes a point of differentiating his lack of a sense of irony from a lack of a sense of humor. Irony and humor, he says, are very different things. This is a truth borne out by Herzog's films, which are often filled with sly and absurd humor. By desaturating his work and words of irony, Herzog adds another layer of ambiguity to his films, provoking laughter at moments where we might not know why we are laughing, or what we are laughing at, and complicating those moments with other emotions.

I recognized this effect most forcefully when, on a lark, I re-edited the trailer for Baz Luhrman's upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby to be, instead, a preview for a Herzog movie. My intentions were entirely silly. But once I started editing the video, I realized that by inserting Herzog into the glitzy stylistics of the movie, and positing him as a director of the hollow shell of a character that is Gatsby (the opposite of the obsessed dreamers he often films, for Gatsby, though obsessed, lacks their gravitas, their mysticism, their madness), that the silliness of the premise was undercut.

Even when Herzog is at his most humorous and least meaningful, his affect is one of absolute sincerity, which heightens his humor but also adds other layers. When he reads Go the Fuck to Sleep, for instance, there is no fear that he will ever break into giggles, no chance that he will laugh along with us, no suspicion that he is even inviting us to laugh (imagine the contrast if an irony-besotted comedian like Stephen Colbert read it). Irony insists that we know there is a joke, that we see the opposite meanings, that we smirk inside because we get it. It can be a lot of fun, and even quite meaningful. But it's never what Herzog is up to.

A mien of sincerity can be as shallow and tiresome as an endless array of ironies—who wants to live in a world of anchorites, pamphleteers, and true believers? Gnomic pronouncements get old fast when all you want to know is whether you should eat at the restaurant on the corner. But ours is a culture of winks and spins, of campaign slogans, billboards for Jesus, self-help politics, and an endlessly Googled Earth. Every imaginable court bursts with jesters. We need a few people with no sense of irony to see through it all. We need enigmatic images to steal our dreams back from their corporate mergers.

Men are futile, yes, in every sense, and Herzog, whose movie worlds are mostly made of men, knows this as well as anybody. "Get over it," he seems to say. What does our futility matter if we can share our wild fantasies? Give up on the wonders of your gender, stop venerating your species. Are we so different from radioactive albino crocodiles? In the movie, they're just as real as we are. — Matthew Cheney

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW which boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A Prehistoric Value System."
You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

Matthew Cheney's work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He teaches English, Women's Studies, and Communications & Media Studies at Plymouth State University.