800 Words: Star Wars Episode VII – Directed by Werner Herzog

A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…

Cue John Williams music and title cards         

Episode VII – Spleen of the Infinite Void

It is an era of void and decadence. The iron fist of the Palpatine Empire, the great organizing principle of the galaxy, has fallen. And with it has fallen that illusory transcendence to which all men aspire but cannot achieve, for they must have an enemy to focus them towards the ecstatic, poetic, illuminative truth of the present moment.

Scene I: Luke Skywalker, returned to Tattooine, walking among the charred remains of Moss Isley Space Port he’d just reduced to embers and bones.

Luke’s Inner Monologue: Without the Emperor’s heroic evil against which I rebelled, I am but a wormhole to nothingness. The Empire is my one true love, and I shall always be its slave. I cry into my pillow at night, for it was the stupidities of the Empire which made us look towards greater dreams. I now shall devote all my remaining life to the resurrection of its glory.

Scene II: Lando, Chewy, and C3PO gaze out into the infinite frontier from the bridge of the Millenium Falcon

Lando Calrissian: As I contemplate eternity from my temporal vantage, all things seem an abyss. To see the senseless crimes the Empire wrought is to gaze into that abyss, to ignore them is to gaze into yet another. To ponder infinite time is to see a universe created in overwhelming anger and miserable chaos. The absurdity of the Galaxy is laid out before me, and I must bear witness to that which I see, though none shall listen.  

Chewbacca: In my quest to attain human speech I have attained the wisdom that all creatures are greater when they remain but dumb and free from understanding. The world remains a mystery we are free to ignore. Yet I truly thought that human speech would make me capable of great things, even of killing myself.

C3PO: My linguistic ability is a conduit to understanding, but whereof my programming cannot speak, I must be silent.

Scene III: Retired imperial stormtrooper played by Klaus Kinski standing by the side of the road on Yavin 4, he is missing two limbs and has a sign that reads falsely “Rebel forces veteran, need money for transport back to home planet of Dantooine. May the force be with you.” He has a mangy grey beard and is missing all his teeth, wearing only an undershirt, torn pants and one shoe. He accosts random passerby he sees and tackles him to the ground in front of the passerby’s children:

Stormtrooper: Do you not see that every stormtrooper who perpetrated these monstrous crimes was a human being negating the humanity of his inner worldspirit?!?!? It is not the stormtrooper who is a monster! It is his choice and lack thereof! By surrendering his will, he ventures deep into the obscene, fornicative willlessness of his pre-rational nature! We are blighted by the curse of nature, and all those who saw what we saw take our share of that curse upon ourselves. And like Oedipus we must realize the unalterability of our crimes and put our eyes out lest we see too far into the truth of our overwhelming and collective damnation!

(The stormtrooper smashes his long-since broken blaster into his eyes, rendering himself blind - causing the children to cry.)

Stormtrooper: Oh happy relief! Ecstacy of torment! Children! Gaze into the abysses that were once my eyes and see the collective sinfulness of men within these pits of suffering. Take that sin upon yourselves as I have and mangle your eyes before it is too late and you have unwittingly gazed into truth most horrible!

Scene IV: Han Solo piloting a fight cruiser in the Degoba System with R2D2.

Han Solo: I curse the present and search the galaxy for remnants of our glorious past. When fighting against the Empire, my identity as a scoundrel proclaimed me to the galaxy as a man of the future. Now I realize that I am but a half-broken conduit to the past, formed by Empire, blood, and iron. I am saturated with life yet there is a bell upon me that does not allow me to die. And like the Dutchman, I condemn myself to eternal wanderings. In such a vile, debased era, there is no other rational course. In an epoch without truth, we must go forth and reinvent it.

Scene V: Naboo. Queen Leia addresses a hundred thousand troops below from a balcony.)

Leia: The time when we fought against the Empire’s beastly magnificence was the only true happiness we’ve ever known. Now we know that happiness is only the absence of pain. We are now free to contemplate that we are but hamsters in a galaxy without a wheel. The enemy was not the empire, it was us! And we must now declare war, holy war, against ourselves!

(In an instant of collective, ecstatic madness, all 100,000 troops begin to kill each other. This goes on for three minutes against the backdrop of Popol Vuh’s music, until not a single troop remains alive. Werner’s camera lingers for the next five minutes, lovingly, on the rivers of blood and dismemberment.)

Werner Herzog on French

Jason Robards & Mick Jagger vs. Klaus Kinski

Fitzcarraldo is quite far from a great movie, but it has some absolutely incredible, primal, mesmerizing scenes in it. This brief scene, with Klaus Kinski, has got to be one of the most charismatic, animalistic pieces of acting on screen. I'm absolutely sure that I'd have felt the same way if the subject were pickup sticks instead of opera. And to think that Werner Herzog tried to make this material into a typical Hollywood ethnic schlock. Now THAT would have been terrible, might I present as evidence just the first 25 seconds of this video. Achen Vey.

Go the Fuck to Sleep:

Read by Werner Herzog


And Samuel L. Jackson

This is just crying out for a Brahms Lullaby type setting....don't mind if I do.

A Mid-Afternoon Protein Shake

(Evan sits in his office. As Jordan and Ethan look up building listings in Florida, Evan is having his customary mid-afternoon protein shake with Werner Herzog, Stephen Sondheim and Dave Chappelle)

Herzog: You cannot compose music if you are not willing to commit wholeheartedly to the ecstatic truth which displays the only greatness which the little people of the earth will ever see.

Sondheim: Does he always talk this way?

Evan: You have no idea.

Herzog: We are just a small collection of matter and anti-matter, put here by random chance and assembled by greater chance through electro-chemical wiring. We will not understand the greatness of the universe unless it is shown to us by force. You must insist upon it, or retire quietly into dignified silence.

Sondheim: Who cares about the greatness of the universe? Just get it done. If you're any talented, one in every three things you write will be any good, one in five might be great. But you shouldn't worry about quality, just write what you want and get it done.

Herzog: (to Sondheim) You do not understand the workings of the universe.

Sondheim: Clearly.

Herzog: You strive merely to represent the human, you care nothing for creation's grandeur or the greatness of untrammeled human aspiration. You care only for our little concerns, our bills to pay.

Evan: What's wrong with that?

Herzog: If you try to accommodate those problems it will kill your passion for true living. You must cherish all that is unvarnished within you. Only then can you be free to the universe's discoveries.

Chappelle: (whispers to Evan) Who the fuck is this guy?

Evan: He's made some great movies.

Herzog: I do not make movies, the universe makes them. I am but an inadequate vessel for their passage.

Chappelle: Shit man, this guy's fucked up.

Herzog: You of all comedians Mr. Chappelle, should understand that striving. You came up against the elusive poetic truth, and for a brief moment the universe aligned so that you could be the holy vessel through which Black and White humor united. Yet you realized that it could not last, and so you walked away so that you would only be remembered for your finest hour.

Chappelle: I just walked away from all the bullshit.

Herzog: Yes, yes you did. And that was your greatest accomplishment.

Sondheim: I have a real problem with this.

Evan: So do I.

Sondheim: You can't just say that the world has truths to discover. The world is what it is and we won't necessarily be changed by knowing more or less about it.

(in walks V.S.Naipaul)

Naipaul: You called?

Sondheim: Yeah. Just a second. If we're so small, why then do we have to emphasize how small we are against other things? Why can't we just make things by our own scale for the concerns that we little people have?

Naipaul: Because the condition of human beings is contemptible, and if we do not seek to understand something larger within the circumstances of each human being's life, we animals would hurl ourselves into the ocean for our despair at realizing our own hopelessness.

Sondheim: Alright. You're not helping.

Naipaul: That's ok, I just wondered if you had an extra Double A battery.

Sondheim: Oh, here you go. (reaches into Evan's desk, gives Naipaul a battery)

Naipaul: Thanks!

(Exit VS Naipaul)

Evan: But if we're just small beings incapable of greatness, what then is the point of making good art at all?

Chappelle: Fuck man. If I didn't do shit I'd just die of boredom.

Herzog: He has a point. The man has true vision.

Chappelle: Man, I just wanted to show race relations as they really were. Everybody's a little racist, and we know it. But we don't talk about it and that's the worst part of it all.

Evan: I'm not racist.

Chappelle: Sure you are. So am I.

Evan: No, I dislike everybody pretty much equally.

Chappelle: Well Sondheim definitely is. You ever see a black character in one of his musicals?

Sondheim: He's right. I just don't like minorities, poor people and non-New Yorkers. But what about Werner?

Herzog: Yes, I suppose it's true. I really have no interest in non-White characters except to show how oppressed they've been by the madness of white people.

Sondheim: And Evan, don't you find though that people have redeeming qualities that makes them worth the hell they inspire in one another?

Evan: Not often. The world is a dumb, sometimes dangerous, place. There are certain things that make life worth living, but not all of us had the good fortune to grow up next to Oscar Hammerstein and become Stephen Sondheim. So for most of us, great life-redeeming stuff is a little harder to come by.

Sondheim: I'll tell you what. Let's view this as an equation.

Herzog: OOOOOOH! I LOVE MATHEMATICS!

Sondheim: We all start at zero, we then have the frustrations that make life not worth it: bills, obbligations, stress, loneliness, misunderstandings, make your own list. So each of them is a -X variable and you have to subtract from zero for however much each of them affect you. We then have the things which make life better: entertainment or art, activity, sports, sex, friendship, occasionally even love. Each of those are a positive X. For most people, there's always enough that the +X will make the -X worth it.

Chappelle: That's the dumbest fucking equation I've ever heard! My three year old daughter could do better!

Sondheim: Be that as it may, that's my view of the human condition.

Herzog: Of course. You realize that your view has no Y-axis, but why would a middlebrow purveyor of mere entertainment ever think of anything more?

Evan: If Sondheim is middlebrow, then there is no high.

Sondheim: No Evan, he's right. I want to make art that everybody understands. I think that's the point of it actually. Whether you're a genius or a simpleton, or if you're refined or unwashed, you should be able to understand my shows. Werner is the first person who gets it.

Werner: Of course, I understand everything human because everything human is so banal. If every human is only capable of happiness or unhappiness, how could they ever strive towards anything greater than human happiness?

Sondheim: Why do we need anything more?

Herzog: Because there is more to the universe than happiness, and if we want a chance for lasting happiness we are compelled to find it. This is why I believe that there are two human conditions which dwarf our human states of emotion. One is the baseness of animal man, who contents himself with fornication and asphyxiation. He is a man unevolved and corrupted by nature, who does not perceive the transcendental within the possibilities of his life. This is the -Y axis.

Chappelle: This is getting too fucking freak-show for me, I'm leaving.

Evan: Don't leave yet.

Herzog: Then there is civilized man. The man who never ceases his quest for the sublime and gives himself over to the cause of redeeming mankind's vulgarity through his quest for greater truths than the commonplace mundanities of your grocery list.

Sondheim: Do you really take this seriously?

Herzog: This is the positive Y axis. And it is the only way which mankind is redeemed from the mundane concerns of his life. What good is happiness against a hundred thousand days of repetition and smallness? How can man ever feel anything but misery in such a state. It is only by refusing to settle for such trivialities that we may grow against our circumstances and feel less small against the gargantuan chains of fate.

Evan: Isn't it possible that you're both right?

(Sondheim and Herzog look at each other)

Both: No!

(Knock at the door. Enter Gustav Mahler.)

Mahler: Evan, I have been listening at the door for twenty minutes. You must know that they are both idiots. Do you not see death's cruel hand following us everywhere? It runs roughshod over our most detailed plans and it is only through death's infinitely loving though spare mercy that we may experience life's joys both profound and mundane. One strives for life, yet life does not strive for you or I or anyone else. Life strives for death. And it is only through death that you shall understand life.

(both Sondheim and Herzog recoil)

Evan: I hate to admit this, but that makes a certain degree of sense. It's just a shame that you apparently have to be a creepy douchebag in order to make sense of life.

Mahler: I do not shield myself from such insults! I strive to experience the full misery of life so that its joys may be so much the greater relief!

Sondheim: God, this guy's unbearable.

Chappelle: I like this guy.

Herzog: How dare you!

Chappelle: This guy gets it. We're here until we fuckin' die, we don't have any choice. So if there's a chance to understand shit, he takes it. If there's a chance for a fuckin' blowjob, he takes that too.

Mahler: Actually, I don't.

Chappelle: Why the fuck not?

Mahler: Sex reminds me too much of death's cruel stink.

Chappelle: Alright, well, you can take it too far. But if he weren't fuckin' batshit insane, he'd totally get it.

Herzog: Scandalous!

Sondheim: Just awful!

(Herzog and Sondheim leave)

Evan: They'll be back.

Chappelle: I'm gonna go too. I'm gonna take this Mahler guy to a girl I know. But keep workin, long as you don't take it too seriously you're gonna write whatever the fuck you want.

Evan: Thanks Dave. Let's hang out again soon.

Mahler (to Chappelle as they walk out the door): Have you ever read Pure Logic by Edmund Husserl?