Werner Herzog’s Web

What happens when

the iconic director

makes a promotional

film about the Internet

What happens when the iconic director makes a promotional film about the Internet

By Jason Tanz 07.19.16

W

Werner Herzog gazes solemnly at the metal exoskeleton. The set of robotic arms lies slumped in a laboratory on the UCLA campus, surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and abandoned shelving units.

Unceremoniously named Exoskeleton Prototype 3, the device is designed to serve as a “human amplifier,” a tool that responds to neural impulses in a pilot’s skin to reinforce natural arm movements. Herzog nods at the machinery before a guide moves him along, continuing an impromptu tour of the engineering department. It’s hard to tell if he’s impressed. The exoskeleton is the kind of invention that promises a magnificent cyborg future, a time when humans will interact with machines as seamlessly as they use their own limbs; but here, under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, it already looks like a relic, an artifact tossed into a future civilization’s storage unit and forgotten.

Herzog once called social media a “massive, naked onslaught of stupidity.” But his new film has a wary reverence for the Internet.

Herzog himself requires no amplification. The swashbuckling German director has made more than 60 feature films and documentaries over the past half-century, and his extreme commitment to his art has made him one of the most beloved—and mythologized—figures in independent cinema. He once spent nearly two years in the Amazon jungle trying to tow a steamship over a mountain for a film (1982’s Fitzcarraldo). On another occasion, in another jungle, he threatened to shoot the star of one of his movies to prevent him from walking off the set (Klaus Kinski in 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God). Now, for his latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Herzog has charged headlong into the strange wilderness that is the modern Internet.

The new film begins one building over from here, in room 3420 of UCLA’s main engineering building. That room houses the first machine ever to send an electronic message via what would become the Internet. (The message—“LO,” an interrupted transmission of the “LOGIN” prompt—gives the film its title.) “The corridors here look repulsive, and yet this one leads to some sort of a shrine,” the heavily accented Herzog says in his opening narration. He calls the room “ground zero of one of the biggest revolutions we as humans are experiencing.”

Internet Etiquette, with Werner Herzog

Herzog’s films often invoke such reverent language, but it’s surprising to hear him applying it to the world of technology. Until recently, the director showed very little interest in the Internet. He has called social media a “massive, naked onslaught of stupidity” and prides himself on using his cell phone only in emergencies. More to the point, his worldview couldn’t be further from the triumphalism so prevalent in Silicon Valley.

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A philosopher at heart, Herzog is drawn to extreme environments and situations that drive his characters to the brink of extinction or madness—death row, the wilds of Alaska, the jungles of Southeast Asia. He suffuses his work with an almost comically bleak outlook, which he expresses in beautiful, if often overwrought, dictums. Here he is in 1982, speaking into a documentarian’s camera while filming Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian rain forest: “Taking a close look at what’s around us; there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” Here he is staring into the eyes of a bear 20 years later, at the end of his documentary Grizzly Man: “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I can see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” And here he is at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, filming his documentary Encounters at the End of the World and musing on climate change: “Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next.” Herzog and techno-utopianism would seem to go together like Schopenhauer and a Snapchat account.

Yet this flamboyantly dour Bavarian Luddite has given Silicon Valley something more grand than hype: a film that treats the Internet not merely as a heroic accomplishment or terrifying threat but as a once-in-a-millennium existential event. Herzog has never concerned himself with what he calls the “accountant’s truth” that a journalist might try to nail down. He has always chased what he calls “ecstatic truth,” and in this case that might just make him the perfect filmmaker to convey the full weight of this moment in history—a moment when our machines are growing inseparable from our selves, when networked intelligence is challenging our notions of what it means to be human, and when the digital underpinnings of society are evolving faster than we can comprehend.

“Werner is one of the few directors who can step back and look at the really big story,” says technologist Danny Hillis, one of the film’s many subjects, “the story of what humans are becoming.”

Herzog’s Technology Koans

After a long career of making operatically grim pronouncements about nature and humanity, the German filmmaker has turned his camera—and his voice—to the subject of tech. Here are a few choice quotes from his new film, Lo and Behold, and from his recent interview with WIRED. —Blanca Myers

On the Internet-killing danger of solar flares

“Our sun: the giver of life. At the same time, it is hostile, destructive. Protuberances unimaginable in size are being hurled into the universe. These flares may become the undoing of modern civilization.”

On self-driving cars

“Who is going to be liable in case of an accident? The onboard computer? Its designer? The GPS system? The Internet? Or the driver who eats his breakfast?”

On Twitter

“Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.”

On colonizing Mars

“It is doable, sure. But should we do the doable? That’s my question. I think we should not.”

On visiting a National Radio Astronomy Observatory

“In the visitor center you can roll your coins into a funnel, which resembles a black hole. Your coins, indeed, disappear irretrievably.”

On the many people who imitate him on social media

“I take all these imposters and doppelgängers as my unpaid bodyguards.”

On his cameo on The Simpsons

“It was a fine experience, and ultimately I knew doing that would mean my apotheosis in American pop culture—transforming into some sort of a god.”

On the Internet

“The Prussian war theoretician Clausewitz—Napoleonic times—once famously said sometimes war dreams of itself. Could it be that the Internet starts to dream of itself?”

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Herzog grins as he takes a seat in a conference room at UCLA, which has been set up for an event later this evening. His eyes droop, but his skin is remarkably smooth, like the surface of a slightly underinflated balloon. And then there’s that voice—silky, portentous—you can imagine it coming out of a GPS system giving driving directions to Valhalla. “I like to look back at the evolution of modern human beings,” he says of his interest in the Internet. “Using fire or electricity was an enormous step for civilization, and this is one of those. And I think the poet must not avert his eyes.”

Lo and Behold is a strange film, and the strangest detail may be the fact that it is, at heart, sponsored content. Its origin goes back to late 2014 when Jim McNiel, newly installed as chief marketing officer of an Internet security and assurance firm called NetScout, was seeking a high-profile way to promote his company’s new brand positioning: Guardians of the Connected World. McNiel hired an ad agency, which pointed him to a public safety campaign Herzog had recently shot for AT&T called “From One Second to the Next.” It illustrated the dangers of texting and driving in a series of almost unbearable interviews with victims and perpetrators of car crashes. The 35-minute film became a huge success, racking up more than 3 million views on AT&T’s YouTube page. So McNiel got in touch, and the two started talking: Perhaps Herzog could shoot a series of online shorts for NetScout, demonstrating how much we depend on the Internet and the catastrophes its destruction—or even its interruption—might unleash?

This, it turns out, was an apt pitch for Herzog, who has described civilization as a thin layer of ice atop a roiling, chaotic ocean. When McNiel told Herzog about a February 2015 service interruption in Arizona that crippled everything from gas pumps to ATM machines, the director saw the cinematic possibilities. “I’ve seen it in New York with Hurricane Sandy,” Herzog says. “My wife was there, and she says within two days people became like zombies that cannot connect with their cell phones because the towers are down. And they cannot even use a toilet. Tens of thousands of people roaming the streets in a daze in search of a toilet.” (Presumably this is that non-“accountant’s truth” Herzog talks about.)

Almost immediately, the project began taking on grander proportions and treading into murky philosophical waters. One of Herzog’s first interviews was with Ted Nelson, a technology pioneer who coined the term hypertext in the 1960s, about his unrealized, vaguely spiritual vision for what the Internet should have become. Speaking with him on his houseboat, Herzog realized that the interview could only be understood as part of a larger, organic story—about the birth of the Internet and the ways it threatens to transform humanity. A few weeks later, he went back to NetScout and told McNiel that, for a modest budget increase, he wanted to make a feature film.

McNiel, a Herzog fan since Fitzcarraldo, says that he was personally delighted by the idea. But NetScout’s overall response was … wary. The company’s executives had thought they were making a series of shareable videos celebrating the Internet and, at least implicitly, the company’s efforts to protect it. Now Herzog wanted to make a 90-minute film that would have to be shopped around to distributors, festivals, and streaming services and would only flash NetScout’s name briefly, twice. Where was the ROI on that? How was it going to help the company sell application and network performance-management products?

“It was a big ask,” says McNiel, who says he can’t think of another corporation that has sponsored a feature documentary that wasn’t a commercial. “But I am confident that the film stands on its own and will make people think, and if they can associate that with our company, that will be positive.” The company gave Herzog a green light.


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Herzog moved quickly, interviewing dozens of experts and regular citizens impacted by the Internet. The film celebrates a number of technological triumphs—including self-driving cars, soccer-playing robots, and crowdsourced molecular research. But much of the movie is meant to unsettle. At one point, Herzog visits the family of a girl decapitated in a car accident who were inundated by lulz-seeking trolls mocking their loss. (“I have always believed that the Internet is a manifestation of the Antichrist,” the girl’s mother says convincingly.) He interviews the residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, a town with no cell phone towers that has drawn a community of people whose “electrosensitivity” led them to pursue an Internet-free existence. He visits an Internet-addiction treatment facility, where he hears, thirdhand, about a couple whose baby died while they played videogames. (Herzog, who insists he is not a journalist, does not judge or question the veracity of any of these accounts.) Herzog retained final cut while granting McNiel veto power, a privilege McNiel used only once, to excise some of the more horrifying troll comments, a decision Herzog now says he agrees with.

Even the film’s conventional talking-head interviews end up going in strange directions, thanks to Herzog’s knack for unexpected provocations—and letting the camera roll as people squirm. At one point, as a young roboticist breezily enthuses about his favorite soccer-bot, Herzog stops him in his tracks with the question “Do you love it?” He repeatedly asks his subjects whether the Internet dreams of itself, a question inspired by a remark Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz once made about war. And at one point Herzog gets Elon Musk to admit, after a long, uncomfortable pause, that the tycoon remembers only his nightmares.

In the finished film, astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz speaks with Herzog about the Internet-crippling risk of a solar flare. But Walkowicz says their full conversation covered much broader territory. “We spoke about the Internet as its own entity,” she says, “a manifestation of human consciousness that is almost a separate being—that’s comprised of human activity but has a life of its own.” (Walkowicz was particularly primed for Herzog’s metaphysical approach. Look carefully and you can see a tattoo across her left shoulder of one of the 30,000-year-old cave paintings in Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.)

That part of Walkowicz’s discussion didn’t make it into the film, and it’s in good company. Herzog and McNiel say there are many hours of unused footage, covering everything from bitcoin to cognitive computing. In fact, the two hope to use some of that material as the foundation of a new documentary television series, which they have begun shopping around to the likes of Amazon and Netflix. Discussing his hopes for the show, McNiel draws inspiration from another legendary example of televised sponsored content: “I think we have an opportunity to create our own Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.”

Herzog on Lo and Behold

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One great irony of the German director’s newfound interest in technology is that, while Herzog may have mixed feelings about the Internet, the Internet has long had a special place in its heart for Herzog. William Pannapacker, an English professor at Hope College in Michigan, once spent a year watching Herzog’s entire oeuvre. “I started, almost beyond my control, doing imitations of things Herzog would say, in my daily life, in the voice, out loud,” he says. “I started thinking in Herzogian ways, and I felt like I needed an outlet for that.” Pannapacker set up a Twitter account, @WernerTwertzog, where he now publishes to his more than 37,000 followers such faux Wernerisms as “Death is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” and “Camping is important for remembering that nature is disgusting and wants to kill us.” On September 5, he will celebrate Herzog’s birthday by hosting the third annual Tweet Like Werner Herzog Day. Last year, hundreds participated, marking their contributions with the hashtag #twertzog. (A representative sample: “I do not plan my tweets. Very often they come at me with a great vehemence. They are remorseless, like beasts of the jungle.”)

Pannapacker is merely the most dedicated online Herzog mimic. The Werner Herzog Valentines website adapts some of the director’s bleakest musings for romantic purposes. (“The birds do not sing to you, my valentine, they just screech in pain.”) The Werner Herzog Inspirationals Tumblr account places Herzog quotes in ersatz motivational posters. (Example: a photo of a well-appointed living room, with the caption “Outside there is a storm and inside there are mice.”) The comedian Paul F. Tompkins routinely imitates Herzog on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast. “Do you know what I like about high school girls?” he recently asked host Scott Aukerman, in a nod to the classic line from Dazed and Confused. “I keep getting older but they do not realize the futility of existence yet.” Herzog may be an art-house film director, but he is a blockbuster meme.

Despite Herzog’s repeated claims that he lacks a “sensory organ for irony,” he clearly has a sense of humor about himself. In recent years, he has shown up in an unpredictable series of cameos, most of them poking fun at his severe persona. Voicing an alien on the animated series Rick and Morty! (“I’ve dwelled among the humans; their entire culture is built around their penises.”) Portraying a grown version of Willy Wonka’s first victim, Augustus Gloop, on The Simpsons! (“The tube. My God. Every night I see the tube!”) Hamming it up as Tom Cruise’s nemesis in Jack Reacher! (“I was in prison in Siberia. I spent my first winter wearing a dead man’s coat, a hole in one pocket. I chewed these fingers off before the frostbite could turn to gangrene.”)

Mike Schur, cocreator of Parks and Recreation, wrote a guest role for Herzog as a madman trying to sell a haunted house to a young couple and was shocked when he agreed to do it. “He’s like a free-floating radical,” Schur says. “He’s in the class of Christopher Walken or Bill Murray, those guys who pop up rarely, and it’s news when they do.”

There’s no great mystery as to why Herzog does these things: He enjoys them. “I was hired for spreading terror among the audience, and I knew I could do it,” he says, smiling, of his Jack Reacher performance. “The main sequence where I’m really threatening, it was castrated twice by the studio because it was so terrifying. They scaled it down twice, and I’m still spreading horror.”

The Herzog Meme Machine

We usually think of geniuses as people who are inimitable, but part of Herzog’s genius is that he is so readily and unmistakably mimicked. And the Internet loves imitating Werner Herzog. Amateurs crank out memes that put a campy Herzogian spin on everything from Where’s Waldo? to Hollywood blockbusters.

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Herzog’s films often focus on protagonists, driven by hubris or obsession, who are drawn to environments that ultimately cut them down to size. Aguirre, the Wrath of God ends with a conquistador, played by Klaus Kinski, on a motionless raft in the middle of a turgid river, surrounded by dead bodies and squirrel monkeys, raving about the empire he still plans to construct. In Fitzcarraldo, the title character successfully drags his steamship across a mountain, only to be swept away by the rapids on the other side. Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell fancies himself a friend and protector of the bears he lives among, until one of them devours him. “Unfortunately, this misconceived idea cost him and his girlfriend their lives,” Herzog says. “We’d better do some coherent thinking before we face a bear—and step so close that we can touch his nose.”

That’s more or less what Herzog hopes to accomplish with this film—to challenge us to think hard about this force of nature we have unleashed, to not be facile or glib about our relationship to it but to respect and fear it as we would any other jungle. As Herzog and I chat in the UCLA engineering department, masked researchers glide silently through a clean room in a nearby corridor, constructing tiny semiconductors. In a classroom down the hall, undergraduates in Dropbox and Github T-shirts attend a workshop. If they’re at all typical, there’s more than a little hubris and obsession in their plans and more than a little romance in their thinking about the world they are helping to create.

After an hour or so, Herzog is eager to get back to his wife, Lena. (By all accounts, despite his grim pronouncements, Herzog is a warm, downright cuddly humanist at heart—Lena refers to him as her “fluffy house pet.”) I have something to ask him before he goes. It’s my own stab at a spiritual successor to his question about whether the Internet dreams of itself: Does the Internet need us?

Herzog pauses. The silence goes on for a while, like the awkward moments in one of his own documentaries when you can watch his subjects mentally feeling around for a response. “It’s a beautiful question,” he finally says. “I don’t think it does.” In the magnificent cyborg future we are building, the relics tossed into the storage unit—that could be us. If Herzog’s films teach us anything, it’s that while we may fall in love with our sublime, ecstatic visions, our affection is always unrequited.

Watch the trailer for Lo and Behold

Editor at large Jason Tanz (@jasontanz) wrote about the rise of machine learning in issue 24.07.

This article appears in the August 2016 issue.

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