Eating the Dinosaur

  In 2006 I delivered a lecture at Boston University, and a person in the audience wanted to know what I thought of the Weezer album Make Believe. This man, for whatever reason, was extremely upset about it. “Is Rivers trying to fuck with us?” he asked. “That album contains three of the worst songs ever recorded.” I mentioned there were at least three songs on the album I liked: “Beverly Hills,” “We Are All on Drugs,” and “Freak Me Out.” The man in the audience immediately lost his mind. “Those are the three songs I was referring to!” he exclaimed. “They’re terrible. It’s almost feels like he’s trying to make fun of me for buying his music.”

  This is a strangely common sentiment; since returning from a self-imposed musical exile in 2001, there has often been a sense that Cuomo is mocking the kind of utterly earnest person who loves Weezer the most. Weezer’s relationship to the emo movement is central to this problem: They’re not an “emo band” in any sonic respect, yet they’re the most important group the genre has ever produced. Weezer defines what emo music is supposed to do—if Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Seven” is the emo “Rock Around the Clock,” then Weezer’s 1996 sophomore effort Pinkerton is the emo Sgt. Pepper. The concept of a confessional male songwriter directly emoting to the audience about his own paralyzing insecurities is perfectly realized on Pinkerton, and that makes it the defining document of the idiom. But here’s the twist—traditionally, emo musicians draft a metaphorical contract with their fan base. The message is this: “I am telling you exactly how I feel, even if that feeling is problematic and embarrassing and temporary, because we are ultimately the same people. We have all the same feelings, even if some of those feelings aren’t real.” For hard-core Weezer fans, that experience happened when they listened to Pinkerton. What they failed to realize was that the connection was accidental. Cuomo did not write those words to connect with other people. He did not make a conscious attempt to help confused teenagers understand themselves. It just worked out that way. But the assumption was that Cuomo had constructed this level of empathy and that this construction must have been, to a certain degree, unreal. It had to have been—at least partially—a career move. No realistic human ever expects absolute authenticity from any musician; that expectation would feel naïve, and it contradicts everything we know about how art is presented in the postmodern world. So when someone actually does this— when someone doesn’t fabricate feeling for the sake of artistic purpose—we misread the motive. Rivers Cuomo is such a solipsistic writer that his fans cannot accept that he’s giving them exactly what they claim to want. Whenever he examines the process of being alive, he really isn’t thinking about anyone except himself. He is beyond emo, and he’s not lying about anything.

  This is what the question asker in Boston did not understand: He could not fathom that a person he believed to be working for him had never considered his needs at all. When he listened to a song about the desire to possess a swimming pool in Beverly Hills, it seemed to be the opposite of what he identified as his own desires. He thought it must be cheap sarcasm. When he listened to the song “We Are All on Drugs,” it seemed like Cuomo was making a joke that did not have a punch line. In truth, there isn’t even a joke. “We Are All on Drugs” is intended to be taken literally, except for the specific use of the word drugs. That was the only abstract aspect of the entire track.1 “Freak Me Out” struck him as the single stupidest moment on the album, particularly since the band had started claiming in interviews that the lyrics were about Rivers being frightened by a spider. To the question asker, this explanation made sense; of course it had to have an inherently facile meaning. Except that it clearly does not. Go on the Internet and read the lyrics—they are amazingly self-evident. It’s not about a spider. It’s a song about Cuomo walking down the street at night, only to have some random bozo jump in his face and say, “Hey! You’re the guy from Weezer! Your band kicks ass! But your albums disappoint me! Can I take your picture with my cell phone?” The song is called “Freak Me Out” because it’s about being freaked out (and then feeling guilty about your own reaction). The question asker from Boston hated “Freak Me Out” because it did not seem to match any feeling he’d ever had. This is because the inquisitor has absolutely nothing in common with the protagonist who wrote the song. He is not like Rivers Cuomo; he is more like the weirdo in the shadow.

  2A German film director Werner Herzog sometimes talks about truth being “elastic,” a modifier that should indicate his definition of honesty does not have much to do with being literal. His persona is built around fictionalized mythologies: He’s perceived as an egomaniac who supposedly pointed a loaded rifle at an actor in order to make him perform. While making the 1976 Bavarian glass-blowing epic Heart of Glass, Herzog hypnotized members of the cast to make them seem zombie-like on-screen. His singular cinematic achievement is 1982’s Fitzcarraldo, a movie where hundreds of Peruvian natives drag a 320-ton boat up the side of a mountain, entirely shot without the use of special effects. The dragging of the boat is a fictionalized version of a semi-historical event; in the late nineteenth century, a Peruvian rubber baron pulled a smaller steamship over a South American mountain, but even that craft was disassembled before it was moved. In other words, Herzog faked the reality of the event, but he did not fake the event itself: What happens in Fitzcarraldo is actually more unbelievable than the story it’s based upon. What was fabricated for the sake of the film was considerably more difficult than the factual achievement. To quote Herzog: “Facts create norms, but they do not create illumination.” He once said he would only touch truth “with a pair of pliers.” This sounds like a metaphor, but maybe it isn’t.

  So what does this mean? For one, it tells us that Germans are bizarre. But it also shows how truth is easier to accept when it’s stridently unclear. We can watch Fitzcarraldo and see its legitimacy precisely because Herzog is bending all sorts of lies for that final purpose. The situation is fake and the motives are fake, but the boat and the gravity are real. This makes us comfortable. It’s the way we’re now accustomed to consuming honesty in any film—tangential details are manipulated for the benefit of one Big Truth, which we are supposed to unspool upon retrospection (and also from the cognitive, preexisting understanding that this is a real fucking mountain and a real fucking boat, as no one who’s ever watched Fitzcarraldo was not aware of those facts before seeing it—very often, they’re the only things people know about this movie). In other words, this seemingly fanatical episode from Fitzcarraldo is among the most normal things Herzog has ever done as a filmmaker. He has constructed truth through standard (albeit complicated) cinematic means. But this is less interesting than when Herzog delivers truth without construction. That happens less often, but when it does, it’s way crazier. This is a man who once consumed his own leather shoe, simply because he promised Errol Morris that this is something he would do.2 Sometimes Herzog is literal in a manner so straightforward that almost no one pays attention.

  There’s a moment like this in Grizzly Man, Herzog’s fascinating 2005 documentary about bear fanatic (and eventual bear entrée) Timothy Treadwell. Mostly assembled from Treadwell’s own video footage, Grizzly Man is the story of an idiot (Treadwell) who—upon being rejected for the role of “Woody” on Cheers— decided to spend the next thirteen years of his life living with Alaskan grizzly bears, videotaping his experiences for a series of nature films. Treadwell views the bears as human peers and talks to them like children, constantly overstepping the (seemingly obvious) boundary between goof ball human and 1,200-pound killing machine. Eventually, Treadwell and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by a bear. But along the way, Herzog quietly (and fairly) dissects the psychology of Treadwell; he spends a stretch of the documentary showing how Treadwell would often reshoot scenes of himself in order to control his own perception. He also points out how Treadwell fundamentally lied about a core aspect of his public persona—his girlfriend would sometimes accompany him on these trips into bear country, but Treadwell always insisted (direc
tly into the camera) that he was alone. In many ways, Grizzly Man is about the very idea of truth. But that shifts when we get to a scene where Timothy discovers that a male grizzly has killed a few innocent bear cubs in order to have sex with their mother. Treadwell is shattered by this event and decries how the world is confusing and painful. But then the camera cuts directly to the face of a bear and the image freezes. And as we look into the frozen, empty eyes of a bear, Herzog’s voice-over says this:

  Here, I differ with Treadwell. He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder.

  Because this pronouncement is so dramatic (and—quite frankly— because Herzog’s voice and accent are so goddamn funny), it always makes viewers laugh. It’s impossible to watch the scene without laughing, especially since you’re staring into the face of a motionless bear who seems to be emoting those same sentiments through mind bullets. It’s not a moment most people remember from the film. Yet could there be a more unambiguous thesis for how Herzog views existence? There is no irony here. It is, in many ways, the core of his entire creative career. I can’t rephrase his sentences with any greater clarity than what already exists on the page. But this is funny to people. It makes us laugh, because it’s disturbing to take literal thoughts literally.

  “I am someone who takes everything very literally,” Herzog has said.3 “I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had since I was able to think independently.” That defect, however, is more an issue for his audiences than it is for the director himself. Most of us have the opposite defect: We only understand irony, even when it is not there to be understood.

  3A “I can spend all day listing the mistakes the Democrats made both before and during Florida, but I don’t care.” This is political writer Eric Alterman, speaking into the camera in the documentary An Unreasonable Man, analyzing the 2000 presidential election. “[Ralph] Nader professed to be standing for one thing when in fact he was deliberately causing another thing. The Democrats were just incompetent. Nader was dishonest … To me, he’s a very deluded man. He’s a psychologically troubled man.”

  The reason Alterman hates Ralph Nader is obvious and well documented: He feels that by running for the office of president and getting 2.7 percent of the vote, Nader cost the 2000 election for Al Gore and subjected the United States to the most reactionary presidential administration in recent history. Many Americans feel this way; had 10 percent of the 97,421 people who voted for Nader in Florida supported Gore by default, everything about this country would be (in some way) different. There is no mathematical way around this. Alterman’s essential point is true—in practice, Nader’s decision to run for the presidency was bad for America. But his perception of Nader as a person is completely wrong. To people like Alterman, Nader seems delusional and troubled and dishonest. But this is because people who follow politics closely cannot comprehend people who aren’t partially lying. They are intellectually paralyzed by literal messages.

  While running against Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2008 Democratic nomination, eventual U.S. president Barack Obama came under fire for his long-standing spiritual relationship with the Chicago Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a preacher who claimed the U.S. government created AIDS in order to destroy the black race. Wright had been the officiant at Obama’s marriage and baptized Obama’s children; when first pressed on the issue, Obama said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother.4 But the reverend refused to shut up; he kept making crazier and crazier statements. A few weeks later, Obama disowned him completely. This was seen as a totally rational, wholly acceptable move. I would have done the same thing. When Obama compared Wright to his grandmother, no one had really believed him; when he cut Wright loose, only the most partisan Republicans labeled him a hypocrite. What he did was normal, understandable, and nonliteral: It’s what makes Obama a reasonable man and a (potentially) good president. We immediately recognize that his literal comparison of Wright to his grandmother is different than his actual feelings. Yet this is precisely the kind of unwritten dichotomy Ralph Nader would never accept. Nader might be the most stridently literal man who has ever gained traction in the modern political arena. Werner Herzog says he cannot understand irony, but at least he can create it for other people; Nader is a perpetual sincerity machine. His critics insist that he’s a megalomaniac, and that’s almost certainly true—but it’s sincere megalomania. His arrogance is not misplaced. He lives in an inflexible world of complete moral certitude. He authentically believes that all of his values are 100 percent correct. Granted, this is an oddly common perspective within partisan politics; it’s always shocking how much blind confidence people absorb from party propaganda. But the difference is in how people present that certitude. When Obama5 or Sarah Palin or Rachel Maddow or Glenn Beck speak, we take for granted that—at the very least—they are partially (and consciously) lying. They are asking us to view their sentiments through preexisting filters we have all inherited through media; we take the verbatim sentences, consider the person’s larger motive, search for code and subtext in the specific words and phrases, and triangulate the true meaning. But Nader doesn’t work like this. Nader speaks literally, and that makes him superfluous.6 He delivers accusations in an unpackaged, unbendable manner: “The auto industry is killing people. Power has to be insecure to be responsive. Game six of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was illegitimate.” That type of talk is antithetical to the thinking of all political animals. This is why Eric Alterman hates Nader so much, even though they fundamentally agree on many, many points. Alterman cannot fathom that the motives a man gives for running for the presidency could be identical to whatever his true motives are. Nader’s reasons for running in 2000 (and in 2004) were unvarnished extensions of what he claimed to represent. He was not psychologically troubled. He was literal, which is received by the public as the same thing.

  2B Cinema verité literally translates as “cinema of truth.” Herzog, of course, hates cinema verité, claiming it’s “devoid of verité.” In 1999, he wrote a ten-point manifesto titled “The Minnesota Declaration,” probably the only document in film history that attacks cinema verité techniques while complimenting Jesse Ventura. His essential point was that cinema verité provides “the accountant’s truth” and that cinema verité auteurs are like tourists. Keeping this in mind, I think it would be very interesting to see a Herzog movie about an accountant on vacation.

  Any film consumer recognizes cinema verité the moment they see it, even if they’re unfamiliar with the term: It’s the kind of naturalistic, shaky, provocative camera work that feels like orchestrated news footage. You often see it employed in exceptional rock documentaries (Don’t Look Back, Gimme Shelter), but also in fictional narratives dependent on the aura of reality—Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, the opening combat scenes from Saving Private Ryan, most of the mumblecore movement, the 1971 dissident project Punishment Park, and both the U.S. and UK versions of The Office.7 Whenever we watch cinema verité movies, we unconsciously think of them as more lifelike than conventional film, simply because they’re made to look cheaper and more amateur than they are. This is why Herzog hates cinema verité: It’s more realistic, but it’s not remotely literal. It’s the least-literal filmmaking there is.

  I am a huge fan of the NBC program Friday Night Lights, despite the fact that I don’t like what it does to me. I don’t like the way it manipulates my emotions. Here is a show about a high school football team in Texas, packaged as a melodramatic soap opera. While certain aspects of the program are legitimately well done by any standard (most notably the relationship between the head coach and his wife), much of the action involves implausible characters doing unbelievable things (showing up to football practice drunk; accidentally murdering people; winning or losing every game on the final play of the fourth quarter, etc.). But even when the on-screen action is ridiculous, it always has a
physical impact on me—the combination of the music and the imagery consistently makes me feel like I’m on the verge of tears. Friday Night Lights can make my stomach hurt, even when my mind says, “This is silly.” So I wonder: How much of this reaction is simply a product of the show’s relentless use of cinema verité style, fused with my own self-imposed confusion over what truth is actually supposed to look like?