R.I.P. Joseph Ratzinger – Pope Benedict XVI.
R.I.P. Pelé.
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Little Dieter Needs to Fly
When Dieter Dengler was a boy, the Allies bombed his village in the Black Forest. He was awestruck. He immediately felt that he must become a pilot.
I never wanted to go to war, he tells Werner Herzog in this documentary. But he had to, to fly.
He traveled to the United States. He joined the Air Force, was made to peel potatoes for two years, and figured out that to fly he needed to join the Navy instead.
In due course, he was sent to fly over Laos. He was shot down and taken prisoner. He escaped.
Most of the documentary shows the older Dieter back in Laos. He recounts his harrowing months as a POW. He re-enacts certain episodes.
(
Uh, oh, he says in this scene,
this feels a little too close to home.)
He revisits ricefields, riverbeds, jungle trails, villages. He is supplied with props. He gives a short demonstration of lighting a fire with bamboo, and another of getting loose from a set of handcuffs.
Some of the props are human beings: locals who have been hired to dress up as soldiers or villagers.
It gets weird. Dieter recalls an especially nasty confrontation which resulted in the maiming of a villager. After he tells this story, Dieter embraces the villager-prop who has been standing next to him.
You still have all your fingers, Dieter notes.
By the time these people appear in the movie, we’ve been primed to accept their status as foregrounded props. In an earlier scene at an airfield, Dieter has been posed next to a mannequin. The mannequin is irrelevant to what the scene ostensibly is about – piloting – yet it dominates the sequence.
Like the mannequin, the performers who are dressed as villagers and soldiers pose silently next to Dieter while he does the talking. They are almost purely decorative – more decorative, anyway, than the locals employed by Herzog in such jungle movies as
Aguirre and
Fitzcarraldo.
There is another layer of artifice. Yes, it’s Dieter who speaks, and yes, the movie recounts the story of
his life, but it’s uncertain to what extent he is the author of what he says. It turns out that some of his speeches are due to Herzog. (This isn’t revealed in the documentary itself.) And some of Dieter’s behaviors – e.g., obsessively opening and closing his front door to remind himself that he is free – also were invented by Herzog. Even though Dieter is a memorable individual, it turns out that in some parts of the movie, he is Herzog’s puppet.
How free is Dieter, really?
His participation in the documentary is consensual, yet it is Herzog, not Dieter, who pulls the strings.
He is no longer in shackles or without food, but his daily existence is arranged as if he were terrified of reverting to those conditions.
Moreover, even before he became a prisoner in Laos, he was governed by a compulsion. He
needed to fly.
He reminds me of no one else in the movies so much as the Japanese WW2 aircraft designer in Miyazaki’s
The Wind Rises – another character who has experienced the horror of cities’ destruction, and who nonetheless goes on to contribute to bombing and killing. The aircraft designer and Dieter are both drawn irresistably to a particular craft. A vocation. Or so one would wish to call it, without quite being able to: each of these craftsmen is insufficiently reflective upon, if not totally insensitive to, whether his craft is to be used for good or ill.
Modern warfare – technically sophisticated, ultra-destructive warfare – would be impossible without such dedicated craftsmen as these.
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I am reminded of one other Miyazaki movie:
Porco Rosso. Dieter visits an apparently unending “graveyard” of disused military planes.
A heaven for pilots, is how Dieter describes it.
There is a heaven for pilots in
Porco Rosso. Those who have seen that movie will know what I mean.
Little Dieter opens with this quotation from Revelation 9:6: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” Like Porco, Dieter is a survivor who thinks constantly of those who have died, who wonders why he still lives.
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After Dieter died in 2001, Herzog released a “postscript” consisting of footage of Dieter’s military funeral. Then, ten years after the documentary’s initial (1997) release, Herzog brought out a feature movie about Dieter’s experiences as a POW:
Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale. I haven’t seen that movie. I wonder if it shows Dieter in a different light.
Does Herzog regret having used Dieter as his puppet? His protagonist in the documentary
Grizzly Man (2005) is not used in that way. Herzog makes interjections in that documentary, too, but it is always clear that they’re his: there is no blending of his voice and the protagonist’s. (Of course,
Grizzly Man’s protagonist died before Herzog became involved with his story.)
For more on
Little Dieter,
Grizzly Man,
Rescue Dawn, and other movies, see
this book.
