Herzog in the Jungle of Truth

Sam Shpall ponders the enigma of Werner Herzog and his new book, “The Future of Truth.”

By Sam Shpall November 24, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Film

IN 1984, ROGER EBERT called Werner Herzog “the strangest of all living directors”—a designation, many would argue, he still holds four decades later. Though his wackiness is as undeniable and inimitable as his voice, Herzog’s reputation as an oddball can obscure the seriousness of his cinematic achievements. His colossal filmography offers an array of tones, methods, themes, and especially genres. His wide-ranging achievements across documentary and fictional filmmaking, and sometimes in between, are probably peerless.

Fans of the Bavarian auteur may not know, however, that in addition to his prodigious cinematic output—70-plus films since 1962 and counting—Herzog has also directed quite a few operas and published more than a dozen works of prose. His latest book is a memoir-sprinkled essay portentously titled The Future of Truth (2025). It is billed as “an answer to one of humanity’s deepest, most eternal questions,” which the reader guesses must be the question that titles the book’s opening chapter: “What is truth?” The question is apparently of renewed interest in our post-truth era of deepfakes, echo chambers, and ChatGPT-produced workslop.

Herzog’s extraordinary career as a poet in many registers, his received status as a one-of-a-kind seer, his well-known commitment to a cinematic philosophy of “ecstatic truth,” and even the book’s attractive cover image derived from a famous scene in Encounters at the End of the World (2007), depicting a solitary, possibly nihilistic penguin in an arctic landscape (contemplating the eternal verities, to be sure), all conspire to prime the reader’s expectations as they approach this slim volume. One anticipates a bracing encounter with a loony blend of insight and delight.

Unfortunately, The Future of Truth has little of interest to say about the future, and almost nothing intelligible to say about the nature of truth. More importantly, it’s not very much fun, at least not relative to the best of Herzog’s literary (let alone cinematic) works, which amuse and surprise even when their general mood is somber or disturbing. Many of the book’s ideas and anecdotes are recycled from the author’s previous sallies. This makes it an unwitting emblem of our epistemic epoch, in which the pursuit of truth is endangered by a relentless, anarchic flooding of our informational zones. The main lesson from the book, though, is that even great artists tend to fail spectacularly when they overstretch. To give Herzog his due, it must be added that he has taught us this lesson several times already.

One problem is the author’s lack of interest in delineating a subject matter, narrative, or argumentative posture. The reader confronts a grab bag of loosely connected claims, loosely supported, at times, by loosely connected stories. Consider Herzog’s point of departure. He is convinced that nobody knows what truth is—not philosophers, not mathematicians, not the pope. Not even Werner Herzog. Nonetheless, the “question of truth” has accompanied the great director throughout his career, and he has come to something approximating a perspective:

I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose; it is what distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields.

About this most direct statement of Herzog’s credo, one wonders: If truth is a seeking, what does it seek? If it’s all about the journey, why do we care to get things right? And aren’t some things visible even in a poorly illuminated forest? What if the forest is a jungle, and there’s an opera to put on?

These would be legitimate questions if The Future of Truth were in the business of providing an answer to some identifiable issue about truth, or to any issue at all. The reader quickly ascertains that here they are silly questions. Herzog is, as always, playing his own game. He is governed not by norms of inquiry, nor by any grandiose pragmatic theory about what truth is, but by the artist’s imperative of self-assured free association.

Although Herzog is fond of railing against psychoanalysis, vaguely psychoanalytic methods have on many occasions suited his material. Put differently, he gravitates toward the enigmatic and approaches it with a dreamlike poetics. There are the nightmarish metaphors of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); the reconstruction of Timothy Treadwell’s images, and self-deceptions, in Grizzly Man (2005); the life-story montage of his highly entertaining memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2022); the meandering thoughts accompanying his peregrination in the book Of Walking in Ice (1978). Devotees may ask: why not leave rationalistic baggage at the door and buckle up for another stream-of-consciousness joyride? After all, unpredictability is a characteristic feature of imaginative association, and, often enough, a corresponding virtue in creation. Perhaps it could also be a virtue in the pursuit of truth?

One of the most celebrated and splendid of all Herzog scenes is the meeting between Kaspar and the logic professor in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). The professor sets out his (humorously mangled) version of a venerable puzzle:

Let’s pretend that this is a village. In this village live people who tell only the truth. Here is another village. The people here only tell lies. Two paths run from these villages to where you are standing, and you are at the crossroads. A man comes along, and you want to know which village he comes from, the village of the truth-tellers or the village of the liars. Now in order to solve this problem, to solve it logically, you have one question, and only one. What is the question?

The logician represents much that Herzog disdains. He’s convinced that the puzzle has a singular answer, an answer that illustrates the power of formal rules; he wheels out this answer like an incantation and a cudgel. Since the puzzle’s formulation has been butchered, our foundling is able to hit upon a supposedly forbidden, yet excellent, solution:

KASPAR: I should ask the man whether he was a tree frog. The man from the truth village would say, “No, I’m not a tree frog,” because he tells the truth. The man from the liars’ village would say, “Yes, I’m a tree frog,” because he would tell a lie. So I know where he comes from.

LOGICIAN: No, that’s not a proper question. That won’t do, I can’t accept it as a question.

The scene radiates lyrical charm (thanks in large part to the legendary Bruno S., an actor who was no less talented than Herzog regular Klaus Kinski and much easier to admire); even crotchety academics must crack a smile. And the message is clear: the intuition of the untutored transcends the narrow reality of the bookkeepers.

Of course, neither this episode nor any other shows that lack of discipline is itself an end. The hard truth is that Herzog’s digressive intuitionism, arguably a handmaiden of some of his greatest reveries, is simply grating when he turns to more traditionally intellectual projects. In the representatively bewildering chapter “Fake News: A Brief History,” Herzog spends 11 pages winding through Wikipedia-lite discussions of Ramses II, Numa Pompilius, and Nero and Sporus on his way to a thesis about the relevance of Elvis Presley. If this sounds like a tantalizing scramble, avert your eyes from the uninspired upshot:

Nero and Elvis: They are both widely mythologized public figures. I am not suggesting that Elvis was anything like Nero, except that they both were able to exercise the popular imagination considerably. In Tokyo to this day, it is possible to admire the competing Elvises in costume and guitar in public parks, a hundred of them or more.

Herzog is keen to point out that none of these impersonators is in fact identical to Elvis. True enough. Having made that clear, he can promptly pivot to the case of the Donation of Constantine, perhaps the most consequential forgery in history. Go on … “All this is just to say how much our views of people and events can be distorted by preconceived opinions and perspectives. Often, the truth is merely a construct of our prejudices. I am thinking here of Mike Tyson.”

As it turns out, Tyson is something of an expert on Pepin the Short and the preceding kings of the Merovingian dynasty, which the reader wouldn’t have expected. Incidentally, Herzog would like us to know that Tyson still denies the (alleged) rape that landed him in prison, though he fesses up to all manner of other misdeeds. And relatedly: Have you stopped to think about the risks of deepfake technology? “The subjects [of deepfake porn] are usually female film stars whose faces and voices have been spliced onto the bodies of actual porn actresses. The possibilities, if you adapt them to, say, the political arena are terrifying.”

For many readers, deepfake pornography will be a scary phenomenon independently of its potential uses in politics, and sidelining the perspective of rape victims will be scarier still. The most noteworthy thing about this chapter’s banal opining, in other words, is what seems to be ending up on Herzog’s cutting-room floor. One marvels at the abundance of more deserving candidates in The Future of Truth somehow spared this fate.

It is a peculiar irony that this short book is so much longer than it deserves to be, as Herzog’s truth-telling has elsewhere realized a tremendous economy of expression. I am thinking here of Lessons of Darkness (1992), his 54-minute documentary about the Kuwait oil fires. A symphonic conductor of moving images propels us through an eerie emotional progression, from sorrow at the horrors of war to a kind of detached aesthetic thrill. Eventually, the viewer feels like a god contemplating the beauty of hell.

¤

The Future of Truth is now and again entertaining, but its amusements generally come at the expense of its author. By the time we reach the penultimate chapter (“What Is to Be Done?”), Herzog is ready to offer some scattershot recommendations, and here he is really cooking with gas. “We need to reinvigorate critical thinking.” Not, sadly, with books like this. “Instead of spending our lives in an echo chamber of our own preferences and prejudices, it’s a good thing to listen to others from time to time.” What of the tension between listening and repetitive monologizing? “Read more. A three- or four-sentence tweet can’t possibly do justice to a complicated reality.” And the kicker: “Truth has no future, but truth has no past either. But we will not, must not, cannot, give up the search for it.”

These last two sentences comprise, mercifully, the entirety of Herzog’s final chapter—a disarming whimper of an ending in the context of so many more memorable conclusions. Consider the last lines of the underwatched Stroszek (1977), a perfect bird’s-eye commentary on the titular Bruno Stroszek’s American trip, whose escapades eventuate in a barbershop robbery of $32 and an endless ride on a chairlift with a frozen turkey: “We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire. We have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, we can’t stop the dancing chicken. Send us an electrician out here. We’ll be standing by.” The truth about the American dream has rarely been expressed with such unparaphrasable wit.

The book does contain one intriguing chapter, in which the author directly discusses his conception of ecstatic truth. It begins with a swipe at the practitioners of cinema verité. According to Herzog, these filmmakers are fools who “claim for themselves the concept of truth” by equating truth with facts. He elaborates:

This school of documentary filmmaking is an antiquated form of cinema that offers no profound insights. Cinema vérité, I have said, offers you the accountant’s truth. Ultimately, it was a reaction to the chaos of the 1960s, in particular the Vietnam War, but that type of thinking and filmmaking has a tenacious hold on life.

On the one hand, these claims are narrow-minded and historically suspicious. On the other hand, they are comprehensible. Despite his earlier pronouncements, Herzog does claim for himself a privileged truth: “I have always insisted that you need stylization, invention, poetry, and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth,” a layer that, we are told, exists “far beyond the reach of fact.” Taken literally, the truth-fact dichotomy is a red herring. What could be true besides that which is in fact the case? Moreover, the metaphor of a deeper layer exposes the shallowness of the view that truth is best understood as striving, as an activity rather than an end. If there are deeper truths to locate, and if deep truths are better than shallow ones, then both the destination and the journey clearly matter. Notwithstanding these confusions, the passage is helpful for its crystallization of Herzog’s self-conception: as a freewheeling Kaspar whose inspired vision surpasses that of the sleepwalkers, and of all those who have lost the capacity to dream. (A revealing line from Every Man for Himself: “I have no dreams. […] Sometimes, when I wake up, I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films.”)

The chapter is enjoyable not because the notion of ecstatic truth is original or enlightening but because Herzog spends most of his time talking about his films, something he can claim to understand reasonably well. Not too well, though. Herzog’s most accomplished works express a wondrously inventive fascination but also a primal kind of humility. They help us to see and be enchanted by the small, precarious light of spirit as it stands before an awesome, fearsome cosmos. This admirable feature of his art is evoked in the best passage of this not very humble book. The passage describes the spontaneously birthed postscript to Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), Herzog’s epic meditation on the Paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France:

On the Rhône, no more than fifteen miles from the cave as the crow flies, there is one of the biggest nuclear power plants in France. When we were done shooting […] I stopped off on the way home at a huge tourist resort where the reactor cooling-water was used to make a steamy abode for several hundred crocodiles. […] I came upon a small aquarium that contained two juvenile albino crocodiles. Straightaway I unpacked the camera and started filming, not even knowing if there was any connection to my film or how I might link it. But the result was perhaps the most astonishing and outlandish thing I have ever done, and of course I posit a loose sort of connection to the film, which is to do with the various types of seeing; so, here, with the question of how the crocodiles would see the paintings, should they ever succeed in escaping. Then reality overtook my speculation. A year later, six crocodiles broke out, and five of them were spotted by a helicopter on a harvested cornfield. The sixth has not been found. Perhaps it has made its way to the Chauvet Cave?

We know the truth about this documentary’s ending. Herzog made it up, in more ways than one: the albinism of these creatures has nothing to do with radiation; they aren’t native to France but are, rather, imports from Louisiana; they aren’t even crocodiles. The truth about the lost albino alligator’s aesthetic sensibilities, by contrast, may remain forever elusive. Our ignorance opens like a chasm, indeed. Some comfort can be taken in imagining a meeting between the director and the gator in sunny Los Angeles—the city “with the most substance” in the United States, the former has said—an image no more fanciful or delightful than Werner Herzog deserves.