Same Day. Different Rat.

Dear World,

If you need to choose one thing to manufacture more of, please manufacture more Werner Herzog. Or at least convince Herzog to make more appearances in East Central Illinois.

If memory serves, this is the second time that Herzog has appeared at Roger Ebert's film festival. Ebert and Herzog seem fond of each other, completely lacking the rancor that can sometimes make Herzog and his actors plot to kill each other.

Americans usually stereotype Europeans as jaded. But Herzog has done so many things that probably should have killed him, and yet has remained so willing to keep doing them, that he comes across as ingenuous -- as far from jaded as you can get.

After last weekend's screening of his friend Paul Cox's film Man of Flowers, Herzog appeared onstage with Cox to participate in the discussion. During the discussion, it took very little time for Cox to depart from talking about his movie to talk about the dire state of the world. "Our technological society cannot sustain itself," he said.

Cox's movie Man of Flowers was an always-pretty, sometimes interesting, but ultimately overmannered film about isolation and how it differs from loneliness. Since the time he made it (in 1983), he seems to have shifted priorities and concluded that the collapse of civilization takes precedence over both loneliness and isolation.

Herzog's reply was beautiful. "Yes, the world is ending," he said. "But in the meantime we are here to enjoy friendship, enjoy love."

Raised on American movies, where the emotional cues are so obvious, I can have a hard time watching Herzog films. They seem to come equipped with a whole different set of stimuli and responses.

Herzog goes for the fantastic, but he is an absolute stickler for not enhancing what is real. In his film Invincible, the central character is a Jewish strongman -- played by the real-life strongest man in the world. Originally, the script called for the strongman to lift 1000 pounds. So far, so good. But then Herzog did something no other director would do, and asked the actor (Jouko Ahola) if he could really lift 1000 pounds. Yes, Ahola replied -- but it gave him a nosebleed. However, he could lift 900 pounds without getting a nosebleed.

So, rather than lifting 900 pounds and calling it 1000, or throwing out the real weights and breaking out the styrofoam, Herzog changed the script to have Ahola lift 900 pounds. And Ahola really did it.

Yet, toward the end of the same movie, Herzog had the strongman's brother cry. Herzog did not insist on real tears, but instead stuck glycerine to the actor's face.

It's things like this that make me unsure of how to take a Herzog film. Maybe no one really knows how. Maybe everybody fakes it. Nevertheless, it's my pleasure to say that Stroszek, his selection for Ebert's film fest, was terrific.

I read a couple other Ebertfest blogs and was amazed to see them refer to the movie as anticlimactic. Granted -- the movie ends with a performing chicken, which isn't the most conventionally gripping climax to your three-act structure. Instead of leading the protagonists and antagonists to a preordained, satisfying resolution, the movie spends its runtime walking the line between hilarious and excruciating.

The movie could not have been made by anyone else, or with any other actors. It's impossible to summarize. It's about three Germans in Berlin (a criminal, a prostitute and a pianist) who have a hard time -- so they decide to move to Ed Gein's hometown in Wisconsin, where they have a harder time. Along the way, pimps force the title character to bow toward Mecca, and the animal magnetism of a dead deer is measured with a voltmeter. Among other things.

The deer in the film was a real dead deer, and the pimps were real pimps. One of them was called The Prince of Hamburg, and the other tried to entice Herzog into a contract to kill his (the pimp's) mother.

This might sound like a recipe for a mess. It's not. The movie is much more than a parade of mondo, due mainly to the sincerity of its presentation. Bruno S., the title character, pretty much played himself. He really played glockenspiel and accordion at the same time, and he really referred to himself in the third person. As a child, he really had to hold his sodden bedsheets above his head until his arms gave out, and then get a whipping. Even his truncated name -- Bruno S. -- reflects the fact that he went through Germany's juvenile justice system, where the offenders were customarily referred to this way.

In short, he was sincerely unable to fit in.

In the movie, the characters don't seem like they would mind if they could fit in. But they are so far outside whatever passes for the mainstream in a Herzog film (let alone in Germany or in Wisconsin), that even a life of crime is hilariously impossible.

I remember how Herzog chose the location for the film's finale. Years ago, he wanted to see how real Americans lived, so he went to Pittsburgh. Then, fearing the immigration authorities because his visa had run out, he flew the coop to Guatemala. Then, for God knows what reason, he doubled back in an eighty-hour marathon back to Pittsburgh.

Somewhere toward the end of the eighty hours, he got stuck in a loop around the town of Cherokee, North Carolina. During the second loop, he realized he'd have to come back there someday. He eventually did, for the end of Stroszek -- and its empty, burning tow truck doing loops in an empty parking lot.

People in the audience asked about the end of the movie and its chicken. Herzog protested that he didn't work in terms of straightforward symbols, where (for instance) the performing chicken might serve as a metaphor for society's demand that we dance for food pellets, or that we ourselves become food. Herzog said that he works at a deeper, nonverbal level. "I don't know what the chicken means," he said, "but I know it's big."

So here's to you, Mr. Herzog. To you, and your big chickens.