The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog

        Filmic language operates through juxtaposition: we interpret meaning by the proximity of images presented in succession. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog film in full, but the logic of cinematography is readily apparent in his The Future of Truth. Herzog’s book is a strange, little volume whose title makes it sound like it would be philosophy—and it kind of is—but it’s one that operates through association.

In the opening to the book, Herzog explains how philosophers have not been able to adequately define truth and so he has no grand ambitions for his own work. All the same, Herzog explores the idea of truth—not an objective truth, but an emotional truth that seems to govern our age. The circuitous route Herzog takes to get there is strange. The chapters are about topics as diverse as expeditions to the top of Mount Everest and Elon Musk’s mission to Mars and the plots of operas. There are a few common threads that pop up: fake identities, fake news, manipulation of reality through technology, but the way they weave together is primarily suggestive. Intuition guides us through.

Herzog shares vignettes that fit within the broader theme. For example, there is a chapter about Family Romance, LLC and Herzog elucidates the layers of deception involved in the project. (I should really watch this film). In reality, there’s a Japanese business that rents out people for special events—if you have someone unpresentable in your family (like an alcoholic father), you can rent out a stand-in, brief them on the background, and save face. In the film, which Herzog said was mistaken for a documentary, the actual owner of the business appears as a key figure in a story of false identities. At the core: everyone is lying. The hired father is a fake, but the woman he works for and her daughter share stories about a trip they never took. Deception operates throughout the film, but then also after the film there was meant to be an interview with Yuichi Ishii (the CEO) and one of the lonely men that uses the service. Yet, the lonely man selected never actually used their service and was in fact one of the rental family members. Herzog reports that it was a scandal and a loss of face. These layers of mistaken identity run through the text in an interesting way; it’s almost like the reverse of a doppelganger narrative.

Herzog also hops between moments in history to show the broader significance of ‘fakes.’ One chapter, for example, is a “history of fake news” starting with the very founding of Rome and depictions of Nero. It’s a weirdly humanizing take on the notoriously awful emperor; Herzog accounts his pleas for suicide and failed attempts. There’s a desperation in the account that’s quite moving—and then a weird account of the four other Neros who tried to take his place, linking them to the multiple Elvises romping around Japan’s downtown hubs. From there, Herzog jumps to Constantinople and competing popes and forged documents that were discovered during the Renaissance. Brief detour: Herzog talks about his meetings with boxer Mike Tyson, who—who knew—became an expert on obscure historical figures while in prison. After that, we get into Potemkin cities and the open secret of those papier-mâché towns and “Peace Village” in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a place built for 200 people with parks for families that has no occupants but is nonetheless swept clean every morning. Herzog links that to The Truman Show and the Enron sham, where they had a dress rehearsal for employees to pretend like business was going great. We hop back and forth and forward and side to side through these moments to, I think, contextualize our current moment of ‘fake news.’ There’s a chilling account, too, of Jean-Bédel Bokassa having one of his political enemies killed and eating half of him, the other half kept in the freezer.

The Bokassa section of the chapter is an incredible historical anecdote. He fathered many children, and in particular a girl named Martine with a Vietnamese woman. As an adult, Martine showed up and was welcomed by her father as her favourite. However, after that, another girl named Martine from Vietnam came forward and announced that she was his real daughter—the first was a fake. Martine2 brought forward an artefact and some knowledge that only the real Martine could have. Bokassa ends up accepting both and married them both off the same day in identical wedding dresses…well, before arresting both husbands and putting them to death. In Herzog’s account, the details are hazy: it sounds like perhaps there was a conspiracy of one husband to kill the child of the opposing Martine. The fake Martine got “sent back to Vietnam” but the private plane was back within half an hour. The power of this story is haunting and absurd to me. It’s one of those situations where the truth is stranger than fiction.

With all this about “Fake News: A Brief History”, what is intriguing to me is that Herzog shows a great deal of restraint. There could easily be a genuine political argument here, a discourse about the value of authenticity or our power to accept delusions. And yet, we are just given stories. Stories with a great deal of evocative power, but without definitive conclusions. This, I believe to be Herzog’s thesis throughout: truth is not that which is objectively provable, but some deeper core.

Towards the end of the book, there is some more discussion of Herzog’s own film projects and the implication to me is clear that he’s drawing on a different conception of truth, one he describes as “ecstatic.” The power of film, and stories more generally, is to elevate us to this ecstatic truth that reveals to us something beyond that which is easily comprehended through the lens of fact. It’s an argument that we’ve likely heard before about fiction, but something about Herzog’s presentation allows The Future of Truth to embody that argument. It’s the resonant quality of the anecdotes, the evocative power of the vignettes, the tracing of a historical thread so thin that Constantinople and Mike Tyson can appear in the same sentence. A connective tissue.

Happy reading, truth seekers!

Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini

Reviewing this text is a challenge for me because it is an unpublished draft of a play and it is written by my niece. I was glad to have a full conversation of my thoughts with the playwright, and I hope that this short review can do some justice to Godgiven by Miranda Kassidy Franceschini. Godgiven is a play about desire, manipulation, responsibility, and the persistent hunger for more.

The play opens with a meta component: Echo emerges onto the stage with a participatory experience, I imagine, similar to the actual Greek tradition. The introduction to her character is a creative and clever trojan horse for bringing up some of the trigger warnings in the play. Franceschini and I talked through the implications of this opening and how to sustain its promise throughout the play meaningfully (Echo promises to warn the audience of the more traumatizing parts).

From there, the play begins in earnest with a bar scene of various Greek Gods having a good time. After six months, Helios, Maia, Elektra, Alkyone, Merope, Taygata, and Kelaino are having one last night on the town. The opening is engaging and light, and I think Franceschini really nails the dynamics of an ensemble, with characters bantering and talking over one another. There’s a great energy and rhythm to it. Then, enter Midas—probably my favourite character in the piece—who is a sordid figure who has been feeding them drinks all night and attempts to lure some of the ladies to go along with her.

Knowing nothing going in, I fully expected Midas to be one of the central sources of conflict in the play, but Franceschini subverts that expectation. Instead, we see Arvika the following morning prepared to worship Her Radiance, Kassiopeia. If you’re like me, you have only a little working knowledge of Greek mythology—luckily it’s not that important to know the backstories. In any case, in the course of her worship, Helios literally bumps into Arvika and, in an unfortunate turn of events for Arvika, Helios is selected to be Kassiopeia’s High Priest.

From there, the play becomes somewhat like Doctor Faustus: Helios has powers he doesn’t know how to grapple with, made all the more challenging due to his reluctance. He’s under the direct guidance of Echo (Aspect of Truth), Midas (Aspect of Fortune), and Ikarian (Aspect of Justice). Again, I think the dynamic between the characters is what helps the play to shine. In particular, Echo’s humour and levity plays against Helios’ doubt and self-seriousness effectively. For example, when Echo introduces Helios to the idea of the confessional, it plays Helios’ skepticism against Echo’s blind optimism in a fun, critical scene. Sometimes I found Echo to be a bit much, but if the performer sells the exuberance well it works well.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the play, but it’s partly about Helios taking on the role of High Priest, partly about his love for a mountain foundling named Vertmont, and partly about Kassiopeia giving Helios the “gift of hunger” (I like that phrase and premise) such that he can’t really be satiated.

One of the things I noted about the script is that Franceschini could trust her actors and audience a bit more and scale back in turn. Several characters have lengthy soliloquies that, in my view, overexplain what could be shown through the performance or inferred by the audience. Sometimes the exposition works; there’s a sneaky moment early on when the characters are explaining their situation and one character justifies the exposition by saying, “my memory went away six drinks ago” (4). Moments like that feel contextually justified. Some of the monologues, though, narrate more information than is necessary and the subtlety of less-is-more would help those scenes shine stronger. Similar, there’s a moment of innuendo that Helios apologizes for, but I think letting the innuendo sit without drawing attention to it would be more powerful—at the culmination of the conflict between Helios and Vert similarly feels like it could be scaled back to feel more natural. 

Speaking of staging, I am very curious to see how this play would be staged. There are a number of moments in the text that open up for a great deal of creativity. For example, when Helios bumps into Arvika, he spills wine on her and then removes the stain with magic. In another scene, Helios disappears from a confessional, the confessional is lifted into the air by a giant, and the confessional goes up in flames. Actually, the play has a lot of fire and I don’t know how one of the characters is going to get incinerated into ash.

There are a few standout lines that give the play some extra poetry. A few that stood out to me are that “when the moonlight shines over the water, it’s like the sea is space’s mirror” (3) and “he knew better than to let weeds take what belonged to the flowers” (15). There’s also a play on “saviours” and “savourers” (49) that is pretty clever and fits thematically with the text. From a technical perspective, I think there’s still a fair amount of work to do on the play—it’s in draft form, after all, but the punctuation and spelling could be cleaned up for a stronger final product.

As far as characters go, I really liked Midas as an agent of chaos. The wild card factor is fun and she’s also a creep that preys on women. There’s a scene where she’s pitching a nunnery and she’s such a gross predator, but it’s presented in kind of a fun way that is hard to resist. I just wish the characters had more of a chance for an ensemble; the opening scene of the play offers such rich characterization and seeing them interact more throughout the play would be a nice addition (though there’s a logical reason it doesn’t happen…). Helios also has a really nice trajectory; he has a redemptive arc as a reluctant messiah type to someone who is actually pretty selfless. It doesn’t work out great for him, but it feels like a genuine transformation.

Plot wise, there’s a pretty effective escalation. There’s a moment (I think in act 4?) where there’s an unexpected twist that recontextualizes the play. It’s a pretty devastating moment for Helios and actually had me flipping back to a previous scene demanding to know how I hadn’t seen the twist coming and I think that was probably the best plot beat. The conclusion of the play was satisfying, though I wasn’t entirely certain about the villain’s motivations. There might be a bit more baked into the dialogue to show why Helios gets targeted the way he does—same for why Ikarian has a change of heart. Even a little hint in a previous scene could go a long way towards the payoff for those developments.

I sincerely hope that Franceschini gets to stage this play and would be genuinely curious to see how it gets staged. It’s a play of many possibilities. I’m really proud of my niece for breaking into the writing world and hope that this is the start of a wonderful journey for her.

Happy reading!

The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz

I’m interested in the revolutionary potential of joy, and to that effect I decided to check out The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz. The Black Joy Project celebrates and promotes diverse narratives of Black experience and in this text Cruz offers an overview of the projects aim, some of the diasporic history that necessitates it. 

The book is informative and offers good insight into some historical factors for the Black diaspora. In particular, Cruz gives some background into the Dutch colonization of Suriname, which I feel is underrepresented in historical accounts. While that stands out, Cruz provides excellent context for a number of countries and strives to reflect the experience of a number of Black communities; another highlight is pointing to Haiti as a model for historic revolution and resolve.

The book offers a reasonable balance of principles and specific initiatives. There’s an emphasis on joyful and small-scale interactions, including things as simple as having a photo booth at a conference to capture the joy of Black attendees, sharing Black joy on social media to keep it front and center, and so on.

When it comes to principles, there were a few things that stood out within Cruz’s framework:

1) Cruz emphasizes that we need to think beyond the revolution. If our prime motivation is for the revolution, Cruz points out that it’s somewhat short sighted—we need to think of the day after the revolution and envision the joy it will hold. That keeps us motivated and focused on our goals, not mired in the process and living just for the fight.

2) Drawing from the spirit of improv, Cruz refers to the “yes and” principle as our modus operandi in doing this work. It’s clear that there’s a history of trauma in a number of Black communities and ongoing injustice and suffering. Cruz takes a “yes and” to traumatic stories: for example, to the statement “America has continually mistreated their Black communities” Cruz might respond “Yes, and they’ve continued to thrive.” The “yes and” method is a way of returning to joy and focusing on what needs to be done. It’s also a way of highlighting ongoing success and next steps. The narrative does not get to end at trauma: the work and the joy both go on.

3) Put another way, joy has to come first. Like Gholdy Muhammad suggests in Unearthing Joy, when engaging in conversations around Blackness we tend to default to injustice, but that centers the injustice rather than the most directly impacted. I would argue the same goes for talking about Indigeneity—when we talk about colonization, we too often center the impact of colonizers and erase the rich and vibrant culture and contributions of Indigenous people before, during, and after colonization. Joy emphasizes the strength and vibrancy of racialized communities and resistance to the oppressive structures that try to break them. Cruz phrases this in a much more accessible way than I just have.

4) Connecting with nature is critical. Drawing partially on the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Cruz examines the significance of nature as a model for resilience and versatility. For instance, Cruz draws on the image of moss and describes its many uses, linking it to the idea of community and fulfilling everyone’s needs. They also link nature to food and our practices surrounding its preparation, explaining the power of connection it brings. At the grander scale, they highlight the Afro-Indigenous Soul Fire Farm, who enacts food and land sovereignty as an avenue towards BIPOC independence.

5) Connecting with each other and reframing our experiences through the lens of joy is also critical. There’s a moment in the text where they narrate a gathering of predominantly Black attendees at which one mother is expressing her distress: her son was killed at the hands of police and was sobbing and, despite the fact that Cruz did not speak Portuguese, they could understand the pain. The event then became a collective mournful song that gradually transformed into a celebration song. It’s was a powerful account of reframing trauma through a joyful connection.

        Overall, The Black Joy Project is an account of optimism and hope. It’s informative without being overly theoretical and it’s specific enough in the accounts of initiatives while balancing the need for principles. It’s an accessible book that emulates its own call for connection. In some ways, the book isn’t anything revolutionary—but at the same, it absolutely is.

        Happy reading! Be sure to share your joy with others in the spirit of celebration and connection!