It’s an irony of our present moment that we have access to more information than any other civilization in history, yet we often can’t seem to be able to sift consensual truth out of this infinite morass. This is partially attributable to the decline of traditional news media and the rise of the internet, in which everything seems to carry equal weight, as well as the ideological and cultural biases of our radically individualistic world, where “my truth” could supersede settled fact.
Werner Herzog has been thinking a lot about all of this lately. The filmmaker considers his career, which now stretches beyond seven decades, to be a kind of artistic quest for truth. “Entire societies have been organized around falsehoods,” Herzog says on a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home. “We also see it in politics, when you look at fake news and all the mythmaking that goes on. Of course, this is nothing new, but I felt it was a good time to sum up my encounters with truth.”
Herzog’s new book, “The Future of Truth,” is an analysis of our present “post-truth” landscape, a loose-jointed memoir in which Herzog shares anecdotes about his life and career, as well as historical snapshots of the role of truth versus myth in art. It is a typically Herzogian enterprise, highly idiosyncratic and at times frustratingly oblique. Still, the point is made: Truth is a malleable thing, prone to erasure and distortion, yet we need it more than ever.
“The quest for truth is something that has never left me,” says Herzog. “It is almost unreachable. Philosophers will all give you different answers as to what constitutes truth. There is something in human nature that has planted this quest for truth in us. It has been a daily presence in my life as a filmmaker and writer. Yet we should not overlook the fact that we also have a yearning for being misled, for being brought into something which suspends our disbelief.”
Herzog’s films have often explored the intersection of myth and truth. In his 1972 feature “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” conquistadors risk their lives in search of the mythological El Dorado, the city of gold which was itself a legend conjured by Spanish colonists in the Americas (call it 16th century fake news). In his 2016 documentary “Into the Inferno,” Herzog explores the folk legends that have grown around active volcanoes and how entire cultures have organized their societies around stories in which volcanoes are vengeful deities that must be appeased.
But fanciful stories aren’t just shared by communities; we can use them in our personal lives as a way to eliminate the messiness of truth and provide a measure of comfort. In his book, Herzog relates one strange incident that occurred on the set of Harmony Korine’s 2007 film, “Mister Lonely,” in which Herzog played a missionary named Father Umbrillo. While shooting the film at an airport off the east coast of Panama, Herzog, in costume, spotted a man on the other side of a high fence holding a sprig of flowers in his hand.
“He fascinated me somehow and I began speaking with him,” says Herzog. “He told me his wife had left him and taken the children, and he came to the airport every day with flowers, hoping she would return. I was still wearing my priest costume and he asked me if I would take his confession. I told him I was acting in a film but he didn’t care. He confessed. He wanted an environment that wasn’t true. It was very strange and beautiful.”
In the public sphere, there are countless variations on similar mediated versions of the truth, stories that provide a measure of emotional catharsis. Herzog cites professional wrestling as an example of a spectacle in which the audience members and performers collude in a narrative that is patently false, yet has all the elements of legitimate competition. “Everyone knows it’s made up, yet they collectively participate because it gives space for collective emotions to be expressed,” he says. “I call it an axiom of emotions. No matter how artificial something might be, the emotions are always true.”
This kind of “ecstatic truth,” as Herzog calls it, is a compact between giver and receiver, but Herzog is wary of the top-down version of putative truth that the media disseminates — especially now, when the internet has become the primary messenger of news and it is increasingly harder to discern fact from fiction. Herzog rejects the notion that propaganda of the kind that the former Soviet Union’s media outlets fobbed off as the truth is much different from the way liberal democracies present and digest the news now.
“I know quite well what happened in the Soviet Union because my wife is from Siberia,” says Herzog. “In the former Soviet Union, everyone knew that what they were reading was lies. In our system, we do not ask these questions so deeply. And I do believe that the media create a bubble of narratives that is very lopsided. Not outright lies, but lies of omission.”
Given Herzog’s rather acerbic attitude toward the news media, it is surprising to find him approaching the coming hegemony of artificial intelligence with a measure of wait-and-see reserve. In his book, he tells of three writers who recently approached him to read an audiobook version of poems that had been created using ChatGPT. Herzog was amazed at the quality of the poems, calling them “better than almost anything I’ve read in terms of poetry in the last 20 or 30 years.”
“It would be wrong to look at AI in terms of optimism or pessimism,” he says. “We know the dangers. Some AI is already actively used in warfare. But it will also dominate pharmaceuticals, for example. It will dominate human health. It is more a question of, ‘How much are we willing to delegate to AI? Do we want to delegate our dreams?’ My answer is no because I’m a storyteller. As a filmmaker, I know AI will never make anything half as good as my films.”
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