🔗 Share this article

Now in his 80s, Werner Herzog stands as a living legend who functions entirely on his own terms. Similar to his quirky and captivating films, Herzog's seventh book ignores traditional rules of narrative, merging the distinctions between truth and fiction while exploring the very essence of truth itself.

A Slim Volume on Authenticity in a Modern World

This compact work details the filmmaker's opinions on authenticity in an time saturated by digitally-created deceptions. The thoughts resemble an expansion of his earlier statement from 1999, featuring strong, gnomic beliefs that range from criticizing fly-on-the-wall filmmaking for obscuring more than it clarifies to shocking declarations such as "choose mortality before a wig".

Fundamental Ideas of Herzog's Authenticity

Several fundamental principles shape Herzog's understanding of truth. Primarily is the notion that pursuing truth is more significant than finally attaining it. In his words puts it, "the quest itself, moving us closer the hidden truth, allows us to engage in something essentially elusive, which is truth". Furthermore is the idea that bare facts provide little more than a boring "financial statement truth" that is less valuable than what he describes as "rapturous reality" in guiding people understand reality's hidden dimensions.

Were another author had written The Future of Truth, I suspect they would encounter harsh criticism for taking the piss out of the reader

Sicily's Swine: An Allegorical Tale

Reading the book is similar to attending a campfire speech from an entertaining relative. Included in numerous gripping narratives, the weirdest and most remarkable is the tale of the Italian hog. According to the filmmaker, once upon a time a hog got trapped in a upright sewage pipe in Palermo, the Italian island. The animal was wedged there for years, surviving on leftovers of sustenance tossed to it. Over time the pig developed the shape of its pipe, evolving into a sort of translucent block, "ghostly pale ... unstable as a big chunk of Jello", taking in food from aboveground and eliminating excrement beneath.

From Sewers to Space

The author employs this story as an symbol, relating the Palermo pig to the dangers of long-distance cosmic journeys. If humankind embark on a journey to our closest livable world, it would require generations. Over this time Herzog imagines the brave explorers would be compelled to inbreed, becoming "changed creatures" with little comprehension of their journey's goal. Eventually the cosmic explorers would transform into light-colored, worm-like entities comparable to the trapped animal, capable of little more than eating and eliminating waste.

Exhilarating Authenticity vs Factual Reality

This morbidly fascinating and inadvertently amusing transition from Mediterranean pipes to cosmic aberrations provides a lesson in the author's concept of rapturous reality. As readers might find to their surprise after trying to confirm this fascinating and biologically implausible geometric animal, the Italian hog seems to be apocryphal. The search for the miserly "factual reality", a situation grounded in simple data, overlooks the point. How did it concern us whether an incarcerated Mediterranean farm animal actually became a quivering gelatinous cube? The actual message of Herzog's narrative unexpectedly is revealed: penning animals in tight quarters for extended periods is unwise and creates aberrations.

Herzogian Mindfarts and Audience Reaction

Were a different author had authored The Future of Truth, they might receive harsh criticism for odd composition decisions, rambling remarks, contradictory thoughts, and, to put it bluntly, taking the piss from the public. After all, Herzog allocates several sections to the melodramatic plot of an theatrical work just to demonstrate that when art forms include intense sentiment, we "channel this preposterous core with the complete range of our own sentiment, so that it seems strangely real". Nevertheless, since this book is a compilation of particularly Herzogian musings, it avoids severe panning. A brilliant and imaginative rendition from the native tongue – in which a mythical creature researcher is portrayed as "not the sharpest tool in the shed" – somehow makes the author even more distinctive in approach.

AI-Generated Content and Contemporary Reality

While a great deal of The Future of Truth will be recognizable from his prior works, movies and conversations, one comparatively recent component is his reflection on deepfakes. Herzog alludes multiple times to an algorithm-produced endless discussion between fake voice replicas of himself and another thinker in digital space. Since his own techniques of achieving rapturous reality have included inventing statements by famous figures and casting performers in his factual works, there is a risk of inconsistency. The difference, he claims, is that an intelligent person would be adequately equipped to discern {lies|false