Into the Inferno (2016) and
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

Herzog, in his mid-70s, continues to make excellent new work at an absurd pace. These two are ostensibly documentaries about volcanoes and the internet, respectively, but they work more like essays or poems which begin with the idea of something (e.g., volcanoes, the internet) and then spiral out associations from there. Into the Inferno has talking-head scientists explaining how magma works and all that, but Herzog is perfectly happy, when visiting a volcano in North Korea, to spend a good chunk of time on North Korean politics and culture. So you’re watching along, enjoying the insights, and suddenly you ask yourself, wait, why am I learning about North Korean history in the middle of a volcano documentary? And then you’re like, whoa, hold on, is there some metaphor at work here? And right about then, Herzog’s back to talking about magma, and the moment passes. Then all of a sudden he’s talking about cargo cults, and you’re like, wait a minute...

Lo and Behold is even looser in its organization and freer in its range of attention. We see the dingy UCLA office where a computer called up another computer for the first time, and we hear Elon Musk talk about connectivity, but Herzog also visits the National Radio Quiet Zone to talk with people suffering from electromagnetic sensitivity, conducts an absolutely devastating interview with the family of a girl whose gruesome death was photographed and shared on the internet by a couple of assholes in the employ of the California Highway Patrol, and—a favorite moment of mine—asks a young Carnegie Mellon student if he in fact loves the robot he and his team have designed. “Yes,” the student answers. “We do love Robot 8.”

There are certainly critiques available for Herzog’s documentaries. He prefers grandeur to details, poetry to prose, and so sometimes you get the sense that inconvenient data is being elided. He’ll let a MOOC proponent enthuse about the phenomenon’s potential, but won’t talk about the problems, for example. And some will be annoyed when he inevitably comes around to his portentous voice-over moments, which are so easily parodied. Ever since seeing Into the Inferno, I’ve taken to loudly announcing in a strong German accent that “Zee depthless abyss of molten lava reminds us zat all human endeavor iss futile.” Personally, I’ve for decades considered these Herzogian pronouncements a feature, not a bug.

—Published previously at the author’s blog (31 December 2016); appears here with his permission.

Joel Brouwer

is a poet, photographer, critic, and professor, not necessarily in that order. He is the author of Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), and three books published by Four Way Books: Centuries (2003), And So (2009), and Off Message (2016). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, McSweeney’s, New England Review, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Progressive, Tin House, Washington Post Book World, and other publications.

Brouwer has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at The University of Alabama, where he is chair of the Department of English.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Joel Brouwer: 100-Word Story as Prose Poem, an interview in [100 word story] (September 2011)