Stroszek (1977)

1 year ago

Stroszek (1977)

EDUCATED ANIMALS

by Ben Mauk

“My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that international tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way…. To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.”

- David Foster Wallace

It’s a winter night in Santa Teresa, a small town in the Peruvian Andes. It is a cool and dry July. My girlfriend and I are hiking the Salkantay mountain trail to tourist mecca Macchu Picchu. We’ve made camp in the yard of a half-completed hotel, erected after one of the area’s frequent landslides decimated the town four years ago. It’s a surreal and oddly barren jungle landscape.

Our tour group has discovered a wild monkey. We take turns letting him crawl adorably across our backs. I let the critter doze off inside the hood of my jacket in a moment straight out of a Disney movie. Our guide tells us that these monkeys are neighborhood pests that steal food from dinner tables and suffer the wrath of children armed with rocks.

A family of French expats approach us. Their daughter, a cherubic seven-year-old, is dying to pet this monkey. She’s looking at him like he might start granting wishes. When the hiker holding the critter extends his arm, she beams. Without warning the monkey screeches and leaps to the girl’s neck, scratching violently at her dress and arms. He races around her body, teeth bared, and only after what feels like a very long time does someone manage to grab him and toss him away from the camp. For a moment the girl’s face is frozen in shock. Then she makes a horrible, primal noise—worse than any scream—and we fall into chaos.

This all went down about a week after I asked to write about Werner Herzog for A Bright Wall In A Dark Room, and the events now seem inextricably linked. Because really, what a Herzogian story, hinging as it does on the filmmaker’s favorite myths: that nature is beautiful and can therefore be tamed; that we can ever understand or feel at home in a foreign landscape; that the external world is not perpetually out for blood.

Herzog’s whole oeuvre might be described as a series of inquiries into these sorts of myths and the consequences of believing in them. In Stroszek (1977), the killing landscape isn’t his usual rainforest, jungle or desert, but the wheat fields of Wisconsin. The existential abyss is here cloaked in cheap beer, shotguns and mobile homes. Stroszek is Herzog’s American masterpiece, and in it his obsessions take the form of two American myths.

The more overt one is that of Horatio Alger—the notion that anyone can come here and, with hard work and determination, make a new life. In one early scene a premature baby, disadvantaged by birth, is seen firmly gripping onto a doctor’s life-giving hands. In another, a German whore claims that “everyone makes money” in America, and sure enough she’s soon slinging coffee at a highway truck stop. And then there’s the happy shot of our protagonist Bruno enjoying home ownership, playing accordion in the Railroad Flats prefab house on which he’s just made a down payment. The characters in Stroszek believe deeply in the Alger myth and are briefly witnesses to its truth.

According to Herzog, Stroszek “is a film very much built around” Bruno Schleinstein, a formerly institutionalized Berliner whom the director discovered in a documentary about street musicians. Bruno plays a character named “Bruno” who, like Bruno, was orphaned as a child and now lives at the bottom of a beer stein. He’s a man with a cracked psyche and a sensitive, musical soul.

After being released from prison in the first scene, Bruno (the character) attempts to “start a new life” with his girlfriend Eva, first in Berlin and then by immigrating to Wisconsin. In both landscapes he is abused, physically and spiritually. Home ownership and blissful cohabitation both prove temporary. As Bruno’s paltry coffers of money and luck run out, we are reminded less of Horatio Alger than of Steinbeck’s feckless Joad family—another old American yarn.

Bruno Schleinstein’s somber, ageless face and strangely declarative way of speaking make him a wonder to watch. “[Bruno] has such depth and power,” Herzog has said of him, “and he moves me so deeply like no other actor in the world.” So it’s viscerally painful to watch scenes (some little more than re-creations of events from the actor’s life) in which Bruno is beaten up or made to feel small. The actor, a decades-long veteran of institutions, clearly feels these moments to his core.

The second American myth at workis that of the western hero. From a brief plot description, Stroszek sounds like a film that might star Clint Eastwood. To start with, it opens with a likable criminal’s release from prison. The con dismisses a stern lecture not to run afoul of the law. Then, to escape bad connections back home, he heads to the American (mid)West with a pretty girl and a loyal sidekick, where eventually he returns to a life of crime. At story’s end he is destroyed, shotgun at his side.

But if Stroszek is a western, it is a cracked and perverse one. Its landscapes are not romantic Sergio Leone vistas but bland Wisconsin forests. And Bruno might be the least Eastwood-like figure ever set to celluloid in everything from appearance to a penchant for waltzes to an utter lack of volition. The grand sum of his final return to crime is thirty-some dollars, earned by robbing a barber shop. It is only by a twisted bit of black comedy that our hero does go down “guns blazing.”

In Herzog’s world, cowboys are victims. Over the course of the two-hour film Bruno is beaten up by pimps, cuckolded by truckers, emasculated and abandoned by his woman, screwed by pencil-pushing bankers, insulted by his boss and misunderstood by friends and strangers. Late in the film, Bruno shows Eva a twisted hunk of metal he’s constructed as a “schematic model” of “what it looks like inside Bruno.” This final, failed attempt to create some kind of map of his abusive world, and to communicate that map to another, haunts the film to its elegiac end.

It sounds like Herzog must hate America. But he doesn’t. The film is neither anti-capitalist nor anti-American. (Germany comes off worse than the U.S., and most of the Americans portrayed—often by midwestern non-actors—are genial and kind.) In fact, there’s nothing disapproving or dogmatic about Stroszek at all.

Rather, while being blissfully funny and remarkably beautiful, Stroszek tells a story about how hapless people are shaped by the larger landscape around them. They can try to conquer the landscape, but no victory can be permanent. So, when they can’t shake it in Berlin, they try America. And if an earthquake levels your Andean town, you rebuild it. And if a monkey seems tame, you pet it.

“I do not care about themes,” Herzog says. “I care about stories.” As if you could separate the two. Stroszek finds time for inspired digressions about preemies, pimps, bank robberies, Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, a two-man land war, truck-stop prostitution, a murdered farmer, and a tractor at the bottom of a lake. What Herzog doesn’t care about is staying on-message. His themes may be disturbing for lacking any sort of easy cohesion or moral certainty, but they are present.

I revisited this film because I am myself a recent immigrant to the Midwest (Iowa, not Wisconsin). It’s not as bad as Bruno found it, but I wonder: can you ever feel at home in a new place? Are all landscapes foreign and—like even the cutest Peruvian monkey—ultimately dangerous? Are you doomed to be a permanent immigrant, belonging nowhere, a late-date American (to quote the epigraph that begins this essay), “alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit?”

And I haven’t even mentioned the dancing chicken.

Ben Mauk is a writer. He lives in Iowa City. The epigraph is from “Consider the Lobster” (PDF). The Herzog quotes are from Paul Cronin’s incredible Herzog on Herzog. The little French girl was shaken but O.K.