I am not a short-fingered narcissist running for president, but a megalomaniac Spanish Conquistador lost in the Amazon. Still, it is easy to confuse us.
You could consider this as a belated diary about Columbus Native People’s Day. But it was the result of a lengthy meditation on part of the political scene…
One of the best known films Werner Herzog produced is Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (“Aguirre, the Wrath of God”), a dark, at times hallucinogenic, tale of a Spanish Conquistador who leads his men into the wilds of the Amazon in an underprepared & mismanaged search to be elected president of the United States for El Dorado. As played by Klaus Kinski, Lope de Aguirre is a brooding, ruthless & treacherous megalomaniac, willing to destroy anything to get what he wants, & never reluctant to extract vengeance at any possible betrayal, no matter how slight.
The movie is based, with some degree of fiction, on a true story. In 1561the real Don Lope de Aguirre assisted Pedro de Ursua in an expedition into the Amazon. Other worthies were Ursúa's mistress, Doña Inés, Don Fernando de Guzmán, and Aguirre’s own daughter. The historical expedition comprised 300 men. Somewhere along the way Aguirre convinced a majority of the men to mutiny with him, join in rebellion against the king of Spain, & sign a statement acknowledging him as "Prince of Peru, Tierra Firme and Chile”. According to one story, he reappeared in Panama leading the survivors of the expedition in an attack on the Spanish government, slaying the governor & countless innocent civilians before finally being killed himself.
According to Wikipedia, Kinski’s portrayal accurately represents the real Don Lope de Aguirre.
The story of the filming of the movie is almost as much an epic of obsession & madness as the movie itself. Kinski & Herzog constantly feuded, with Kinski at various times threatening to quit. Kinski later claimed that Herzog forced him to climb aboard a raft for a scene at gunpoint; when asked about it later, Herzog reportedly replied, “The gun wasn’t loaded.”
Despite all the conflict Kinski went on to star in four more of Herzog’s movies, including Fitzcarraldo which was also involves a journey down an Amazonian river.
The movie itself sucked me in the first time I watched it. One change Herzog made to the story was to introduce Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, a real person who participated in an earlier exploration of the Amazon, as the narrator. In the movie, de Carvajal is a feckless zealot who often laments his increasing powerless over the expedition (sort of like Paul Ryan). Don Fernando de Guzmán is a fat & lazy nobleman (sort of like Stephen Banner). Pedro de Ursua, the nominal leader of the expedition, is an experienced politician who constantly fights with Aguirre over the direction of the expedition (sort of like Paul Manafort). Doña Inés is a dark-skinned, black-haired beauty (completely unlike the blonde KellyAnne Conway).
(There is also a sinister man named Perucho in the movie, who willingly does Aguirre’s dirtywork, but he is too slender of build to resemble Chris Christie in the least.)
The movie starts with de Ursua given the commission to only follow one tributary of the Amazon for a few weeks, then return & report his findings. Upon reaching the navigable reach of the tributary, they build rafts & continue their descent, only to have one raft get trapped in a whirlpool. Unable to assist the men on the raft, the expedition is forced to spend the night onshore nearby; during the night, yells & gunfire from the raft are heard, & the morning light reveal all of the men on the raft are dead, with two missing. De Ursua wants to bring the bodies ashore to give them a proper burial; obsessed with the bigly riches of El Dorado, Aguirre arranges to have the raft “accidentally” destroyed with a cannon shot, throwing the bodies into the water.
Friction between Aguirre & de Ursua continues until Aguirre leads a mutiny against de Ursula, who is wounded in the action, and Aguirre replaces him with Guzmán as campaign CEO Emperor of the new country the expedition will found. Aguirre expects de Ursula to be executed, but Guzmán instead gives him clemency. His mistress Doña Inés stays by de Ursua’s side, & only she has the courage to speak out against him. Aguirre simply ignores her.
De Guzmán takes his new title too seriously: he dines on the low food supplies while the men starve, and when the expedition's only remaining horse annoys him, he orders it pushed off the raft. The men mutter how well the animal might have fed them. Soon afterwards de Guzmán is found strangled near the raft's outhouse. Now unshackled by everyone who prevent Aguirre from being Aguirre, he proclaims himself leader. Ursúa is then taken ashore and hanged in the jungle. The group stop to hold a campaign rally attack an Indian village, where several soldiers are killed by spears and arrows from the villagers, hiding in the jungle. The distraught Inés wordlessly walks into the jungle as if entering a garden to admire the roses and disappears. (We know that Conway would never walk away from the Trump campaign: she gets paid, regardless of the outcome, & besides where else could she find work so close to the election?)
After summarily executing a man for plotting to desert the expedition, Aguirre delivers a ferocious, bullying tweetstorm speech:
I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water more than his ration... will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees... then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. But whoever follows me and the river, will win untold riches. But whoever deserts...
Aguirre never does provide any detailed explanations about how he will achieve any of this, but it obviously what deplorables there may be amongst the surviving soldiers wants to hear. As for the rest of the men, they slip into an ennui caused by starvation, disease & lack of hope, despite the ostensible goal of reaching the riches of El Dorado. Gaspar de Carvajal narrates how one soldier believed the Friar’s inkwell contained medicine & drank all of his ink. They begin to disbelieve everything they see, like a ship perched in the branches of a riverside tree; Aguirre orders his men retrieve it so it can be refurbished, only to have the apathetic men disobey. When, the men are shot with arrows from unseen assailants, they are convinced these too are hallucinations, despite Aguirre’s shouts that they are under attack. The arrows dispatch the surviving explorers, including Aguirre’s teenaged daughter, but Aguirre somehow escapes harm.
The final scene of the movie is of Aguirre pacing around the raft, now empty except for a countless number of spider monkeys, which Aguirre ends up terrifying into jumping from the raft & swimming away. He delivers a final, haunting speech between loud sniffs:
When we reach the sea, we will build a bigger ship, and sail north to take Trinidad from the Spanish crown. From there we'll sail on and take Mexico from Cortés. What great treachery that will be! Then all of New Spain will be ours, and we'll produce history as others produce plays. I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God! Who else is with me?
It may not be ranting about voting fraud & stolen elections, but it has the same effect.
Many filmmakers have admitted Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes strongly influenced their movies, most notably Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Apocalypse Now, which was based on Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. So far no one connected to the Trump Campaign has admitted to even seeing this movie — which is likely, because it’s an art house movie, with dialogue entirely in German, & obviously of no interest to Americans like Donald Trump.
I hope the endgame of the Trump campaign won’t just as fatal for all involved.
