This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 10, 2010 - In one of the least expected trends to hit the Internet, a handful of short videos have appeared in the last few weeks on YouTube and elsewhere satirizing Werner Herzog, the German film director known for treating each of his films as a Sisyphean struggle for survival.
The videos – none of which is particularly clever – follow a similar pattern: A familiar subject – the children's books “Curious George” and “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” and the videos that started the meme, football coverage in a short produced by “Salon” as part of its Super Bowl coverage – is matched by an overwrought narration delivered in a (poor) Bavarian accent.
What's interesting about the appearance of these videos is not what they're saying about Herzog's work. (Revealingly, most of the places I saw these posted identified the director solely by recent films like “Grizzly Man” and “Rescue Dawn,” making no reference to his more formidable films of the 1970s.) Rather, they're significant steps in the process that Herzog himself has taken in recent years to mock his own reputation.
But there's a thin line between poking fun at one's own somewhat exaggerated public face and lapsing into outright self-parody. With his recent “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” Herzog, like David Lynch somewhere around the time of “Wild at Heart,” has crossed it.
With its overextended title and an equally strained background (the producers reversed themselves and finally claimed that the film is neither a remake of or a sequel to Abel Ferrara's 1992 “Bad Lieutenant” and even hint that this could be the start of an entire series of films about Bad Lieutenants in various locales), Herzog's TBL:POCNO is the rare film that is almost beyond criticism.
The only way to properly convey the jaw-dropping absurdities compiled in this film would be to describe them, but of course, the Spoiler Police prohibit that line of action. Let's just say that if you make it through most of what is a fairly pedestrian police procedural, occasionally interrupted by “Twin Peaks”-like flourishes of self-conscious weirdness, you'll be rewarded with no less than three major affronts to logic and taste as Herzog manages to pack everything from a climax heavy in contrived symbolism to a ludicrously melodramatic ending, capped with a coda that raises the bar in pretentiousness.
Is Herzog playing a joke on us, undermining the cop-movie genre with intentional surrealism, or is he trying to sell us a contrived and watered-down version of what audiences have come to expect from him? Invention or exploitation? Creativity or self-parody? Do fish have dreams?
The Lens is provided by Cinema St. Louis.