The sequence that opens Werner Herzog's eponymous adaptation of Georg Büchner's play defines and encapsulates the entire film. The visceral has always been the most direct modality of artistic communication, perhaps even the most efficient. Even if this film means, for us, the first contact with Woyzeck, at the first glimpse of Klaus Kinski, beaten like a dog, wallowing desperately through a series of repetitive movements, like meat going through the grinder — we know it then, as if we had always known him: that is Woyzeck. And in fact, he cannot fail to appear familiar: Woyzeck is the man of old, of always, and, simultaneously, the promise of modern man, and its resounding failure.
Herzog's Woyzeck
The plot is simple; it would fit in a newspaper clipping, and I'll summarize it in a coarse manner. Woyzeck, a lowly soldier, endures a miserable life. His captain lays upon him moral sermons of a self-indulgent kind, while the local scientist/doctor uses him for buffoonish experiments, in exchange for a paltry wage. At home, his chaste wife presents him the gift of cuckoldry, with the help of the drum major. A man of a particular sensitivity and restlessness, Woyzeck, weakened by the diet imposed on him by the doctor, gradually begins to go mad. When the betrayal is discovered, it is the final straw. After being beaten up by the drum major, he takes his woman to the edge of a lake and stabs her to death. The real story from which Büchner took his inspiration is even more sordid. But his genius lies precisely in revealing by way of the grotesque, which is of fleeting interest, the true horror, which is imperishable.
Kinski would seem, at first sight, a bad choice to play such a character. How does a man larger than life wear the mask of one who never lived? How does the lion emulate the fly, the cockroach? But such fears are unfounded. (And, anyway, we are reminded, for instance, of his role in For a Few Dollars More.) Although passive, Woyzeck is not indolent: he exudes kinetic energy, there are within him volcanoes waiting to erupt, bombs waiting to explode. He resembles a man who set fire to himself and who is cruelly being showered with gasoline. There is in this, in fact, a great resemblance to the troubled relationship between Kinski himself and Herzog.
What is amazing is that Kinski's body never betrays the pathetic nature of Woyzeck: on the contrary, it makes it even more accentuated. The only near exception is in the fight with the drum major: Herzog had to cast a giant to play the part, and Kinski had to shrivel himself up the best he could, so that the scene could work. Here is a monumental bone structure, covered with tormented, sickly flesh. His eyes are all the more impressive because they are carved out from cavernous slots: his sallow skin reveals beneath it caves, cliffs, chasms. If this man transformed into a corpse, by a sudden stroke of black magic, there would still remain the solemn building of his skeleton, like the bones of an old elephant.
(This body differs in everything from Christian Bale in The Machinist, with his frail sparrow's skeleton. But in both cases the Flesh is consumed by the Idea. Richard Dawkins would say that it is the meme subduing the gene; Max Stirner would say it is the spooks that haunt the cathedral of Being. This self-flagellation finds its logical conclusion, and eventually becomes sexual fetish in Cronenberg's Crash and Lars von Trier's Antichrist.)
But, as it lacks heroic stature, this tormented body becomes merely grotesque. We do not doubt that this man, as he shaves his captain, could easily break his neck with his bare hands, if he so desired. And yet, he causes us disgust, contempt. The body of the drum major is heroic; Woyzeck's is beastly. Therein lies the disgust of his wife for him, and this is what explains the drum major's success. The latter is magnificent, like an Olympian god; Woyzeck is as monstrous as the old chthonic deities. Kinski's Woyzeck is Frankenstein's creature. Woyzeck is the Golem. Woyzeck is Grendel, the descendant of Cain, and like him, bound to shed blood. All this is contained — and is expressed — through the body of Kinski, who handles it like a burning firebrand.
There is also the fact that filming started mere days after the wrapping up of another of Herzog's projects, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, where Kinski also played the main part. Kinski, of course, was exhausted, and therefore, in perfect condition to play the role of Woyzeck. Herzog knew it. Herzog has always been clever, even when he has not been decent. It is curious to note the physical continuity between Nosferatu and Woyzeck: both have a body endowed with a force sabotaged by the deformity of its owner. They wield immense power, but must hide it, doomed to disgust others.
Herzog did the best he could with the meager resources he had available. In that which depends on him, his hand is firm, almost tyrannical, without the result being sterile or artificial. Cinema is the most expensive of arts, and he always knew how to get things done, even in the midst of great hardship or madness. One could not expect less of a man willing to steal a camera to go into the jungle to create masterpieces. In Woyzeck, the disposition of the actors on screen is always well executed. Herzog, despite his documentalist vein, knows his mise-en-scène well, that is to say, he is a true filmmaker. Certain scenes throughout the film even manage to be beautiful or unique: Woyzeck and his military training, Woyzeck killing his wife, Woyzeck running through a vast flowery field. Herzog is an imaginative artist, but he is also pragmatic and mercenary: as such, the Woyzeck he presents us with does not take great structural risks. The scenes are strung together in a logical, sanitized way.
Perhaps one could make the case for a new adaptation of the play? One which, in the right hands, could display more narrative entropy, in line with the development of the psychological thriller/drama in the last three decades. Herzog's adaptation is faithful to Büchner's spirit: it is mostly a report on the nature of the world, a satirical tragedy. Its characters are symbols manifest in objective reality. A new adaptation would need to be, I think, faithful to the play's form, and as such, more in line with an exploration of the individual: characters would appear to us as visions manifest in a subjective reality.
19th Century Schizoid Man
But until now, Herzog's film is undoubtedly the most representative cinematic adaptation of Büchner's play. It also interests me due to a certain a correlation between the temperament of the times that saw the birth of both works. Herzog catches the end of the 70's, the disillusioned decade par excellence, as a cumulative reaction to the 50's and 60's. Soon would come decades of complacency and colorful conformism, which would stifle this spirit with a sweet cloak. Büchner's Germany (or rather, the then fragile congregation of German states) has its similarities with this period: he lived during the hangover of the liberal revolutions, in a post-Napoleonic and post-Enlightenment Europe stirred by the spirit of revolt, and at the same time, displaying deep skepticism and distrust: that would change after the March Revolution of 1848, and with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the spreading of positivist ideals. Büchner would not live to see that: nevertheless, he describes in his letters, with a curious clarity for someone his age, the rapid evolution that was operated upon him — from idealist committed to the revolutionary cause to disappointed caricaturist of the human condition.
Woyzeck becomes the first plebeian hero (or antihero) in German literature: he represents the oppression of the masses, the yoke of the class. But there is another aspect of him, of seminal importance: he shows us as well the unique nature of the individual. However, Woyzeck is nothing like the heroes of Romanticism, the Lucifer or Prometheus of the poets. His nature is not heroic and tragic, as already pointed out, but monstrous and pathetic. His peers are the literary creature of Mary Shelley, a Hamlet perhaps, and even more the sad fools of Dostoyevsky. Indeed, he reminds us of a strange mix between The Idiot's Myshkin and Rogozhin. And, in this way, we are lead to an even more famous pairing: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Woyzeck reveals both the accuracy and impertinence of the picaresque hero, and the dreamer's helplessness and delusion. He is both a spiritual and earthly being.
As can be seen, there are many hats that fit Woyzeck. The original play remained unfinished, thanks to Büchner's premature death at age 23, and moreover, in a fragmentary state. Thus, it acquired a mobile, episodic, type of nature, becoming a task without end, a free association puzzle. Endlessly recyclable, it's not surprising that Woyzeck has become the theatrical object par excellence of the so called recuperation and detournement processes. Modernists took it under their wings and fell in love with it, seeing in it the mark of genius, without the sealed untouchability of finished work. They also found, on that unfortunate product of chance, the same release from form, the same deconstruction of canons, the same experimentation that they wished to attain by means of their endless polemics and manifestos. So each interpreted it as they pleased, wearing Büchner's talent as a mask (but such is the nature of theater, and other collaborative forms of art). The play allows for interpretive promiscuity, it is supremely democratic and current, because unfinished, and as such, ever likely to amendments, additions, updates; available to all, it is an open house, a muse with her legs wide open — it lacks the Olympic, aristocratic, distance of completed work.
I cannot help but wonder about the final result, had Büchner lived long enough to put the final touches on his work. When an artist dies prematurely, or denies at the end of life, his creation, we are undoubtedly faced with a tragedy, or, if preferred, a travesty of fate: just think of Gogol or Kafka. And what about the jewels erased from history's pages, as was the case with so many Greek masterpieces? Woyzeck is not, therefore, the only work to make me feel this way: I sadly shrug my shoulders, my literary sensibilities abated by the inequities of Time, when I come across other luminaries, such as Clausewitz's On War, Kafka's The Castle, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom.
Let us return one to Woyzeck, the man, now by way of Max Stirner, a figure that I always associate with Büchner for obvious reasons (and for others more obscure). Woyzeck is truly alone in this world. Symbol, metaphor for the masses, and yet separate from them, he is therefore that much more an individual. His ailment is not solitude, but not having the power to enjoy or use it. The crux of the problem is that he is alone but not alone. Separated from society, but not outside it: not banished to its fringe, but to its midst, as the Savage of Aldous Huxley.
In Woyzeck we have the vivid portrayal of the aftermath of great revolutions, whether cultural, economic, or political. We are left with the common human being, the sad creature who's carried away by them, but also stays behind. In fact, the truth is he always stays the same. He represents the marginalia of the additions and subtractions of the revolutionary process, the slag left after the big changes occur, and yet he is immutable, immortal, an inexhaustible source of exploitation, power, sacrifice. He is that which contributes to all, but from nothing receives benefit. The laudable ideas and philosophical systems of his age subdue him, instead of emancipating him. The Enlightenment gave to humanity, but not to Woyzeck; and the positivism that will flood the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth century, only takes advantage of him for its own quests, for its own causes, as Stirner would say. Woyzeck knows this: he replies dryly to his captain that the poor will have to work in this life and the next. He knows in his bones the eternal truth that presides over the human condition.
The captain and the doctor believe they are above Woyzeck, even spurring his madness for entertainment (a prophetic vision of our ludic society and the voyeurism of the masses, hyperbolized by the media), but are themselves selfish automatons, mere recipients of the Idea. They are as mad as Woyzeck, just not as unbalanced. Their words and actions (exaggerated in their clarity of intent by Büchner, which makes them almost like archetypes/caricatures) betray the truth. Behind the morality of the captain lies his melancholy and a bankruptcy of values; behind the scientific honesty of the doctor lay perversity and ambition. Here we see Hume's guillotine made reality: things are presented to us as they should be, and at the same time, they are revealed to us as they are.
Woyzeck is the only one to uncover the void that lurks behind the idea, and the bodies it inhabits, the society it sustains. He spies the storm to come. God is not dead yet, but it is dying; other sacred things will fade an disappear as well. Woyzeck anticipates the lack of foundation behind not only his life but the lives of everyone. Everything is false, supported on quicksand. Soon, the great minds of his time will also have access to this truth, and will be frightened or delighted by it. Schopenhauer speaks of it, referring to the veil of Maya; Dostoievsky makes his protagonists mad with the terror of nihilistic emptiness; Nietzsche catches this ongoing train, and will try to demolish the morality of old, seeking to replace it with another, more positive, system. The Existentialists will resume this demand, and among them, Albert Camus, who will search beyond the horror of the emptiness, and its negative meaning, into the horror of the absurd, which lacks any meaning at all, even that of nothingness.
Camus's Mersault reacts with the indifference of trauma to the absurdity of human existence, and only erupts when his final hour is nigh. Kafka's Josef K. acts smug right until his pathetic denouement. As for Woyzeck, he has to be pushed towards madness. (It is curious that the works of Camus and Kafka located the demise of their heroes in the courtroom: apparently Büchner's play was also to contain a final act taking place in court.) Anyway, humiliation and hunger open the doors of spiritual perception to Woyzeck. In this he resembles the martyrs of religion, and their visions, induced by delirium. Woyzeck is a martyr without religion: the truths which he accesses are therefore not divine truths, but the human truths. The Apocalypse he foretells in not that of Christendom, but of only of Man.
Marital infidelity as catharsis, reverberating through narrative as tragedy, or psychologically manifested through madness, is still a mechanism inherited from the Romantics. Büchner can not avoid it, just as Stirner, while setting fire to Western philosophy, is forced to use Hegelian dialectic (even if he is also mocking it). Even so, the effect that the betrayal of Marie has in Woyzeck's psyche is consistent, not just a stylistic requirement: she is literally the only thing that matters to him in this world, that is genuine, tangible. Love is the only real thing for Woyzeck. He distrusts all sacred institutions but this.
The betrayal will demolish this existential backbone, if we will. His god was love for Marie, and as such, it was also his reality. But, as the latter concerns of Dostoyevsky put it, if God does not exist, then anything is possible. In the nineteenth century this question always led to nihilism: Woyzeck goes so far as to kill his divinity. In the void that opens up before him, he does not see the freedom, the vast field of action, the infinite range of possibilities that others would see later. Because Woyzeck has not yet learned to know himself as reality, the source of his own values. This kind of man was still unborn: it was to be the modern man, but that will also be a resounding failure.
Thanks to his uniqueness, Woyzeck is on the threshold crossed by poets and the great ascetics. But he never gets to take the decisive step forward, and what is curious is that we do not expect him to do it, anyway. Our interest is not in seeing the rise, but rather the fall of Woyzeck. He lacks the spite of the rebel, which allows emancipation from society, and he lacks the talent of the artist, the intellect of the thinker, which give the ability to transcend it. His madness does not add to him; it only diminishes him. What's truly tragic is that Woyzeck is both an exceptional individual and a common man. Thus, he easily becomes a burlesque figure, because his loneliness leads only to alienation, which is stripped of dignity. This astounding energy he expends in copious quantities, he also dissipates in the great void that is other people, and their covenant, society.
Like any common man, his life is waste: all he produces benefits the Other (wether other Things or other Beings), not the Self. When he acts upon his will, whether pissing on the street, standing up to the drum major, or retorting to his superiors, he receives only outrage and cruel amusement in return, akin to a boot stamping on a lowly insect. His wife, the captain, the doctor, the drum major: Stirnerian avatars for the specters of family, the state, society, science, success, morality, entertainment, religion, even work. Woyzeck is a puppet operated by ghosts, a pawn in a game of spooks. For the lucid individual, the core of Woyzeck's relevance to modern man should always be this. He is almost like the Camusian Sisyphus, only that we cannot imagine him smiling at the top of the mountain, waiting for the rock to roll down again, in its endless, redundant cycle. Woyzeck is, then, the Sisyphus of the greeks, the original one. He precedes the discovery of freedom, of rebellion, of hope; and he is also that which survives them. Many tried to solve the universal problem posed by Woyzeck's existence: none succeeded. For all their intelligence, optimism and edification of systems, there stands at the end of the line the face of Kinski, like reality's own inexpugnable fortress: ugly, sweating, tired, the look of a hunted beast, of a beaten old mutt, the look of eternal defeat.
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