Mark Richardson

Here’s one of those things:

I am a fan of both Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about a rubber baron who tries to drag a ship over a mountain in the Amazon jungle, and Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s 1982 film about the making of Fitzcarraldo. If I’m honest, I like the documentary even more than the film it’s about, which might have something to do with why I read so little fiction these days. Anyway, Burden of Dreams is a strange documentary because it basically tells a story very similar to Fitzcarraldo, but a “real life” version, in which Herzog actually has a ship dragged over a mountain in the jungle for his film about a guy who drags a ship over a mountain in the jungle. Both the filmmaker and the fictional character are portrayed as grandiose dreamers attempting the impossible. So you see both these movies, time passes, and you kind of forget which scenes happened in the fiction film and which scenes happened in the documentary. Someone brings up something about one or the other movie and you can’t remember which was which.

So then years later I hear this song called “Virgin With a Memory” by Destroyer and it opens with him asking himself “Was it the movie or the making of Fitzcarraldo where someone learned to love again?” He must have had this precise cognitive experience and thought enough of it to insert it into a song. Something very comforting about this to me, to know that I share these small glitches of consciousness with someone else in the world. Plus, great melody.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen either, but I don’t believe anyone “learns to love again” in either of those movies, that’s just Bejar being funny, as usual. 

Posted at 12:20pm and tagged with: Destroyer, werner herzog, writing,.