Review: Encounters at the End of the World (2008)

Encounters at the End of the World (2008)

Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is an astounding, beautiful film. It’s one of those movies, like many directed by Herzog, whose images and philosophies will haunt you long after the viewing.

Antarctica is the destination for people without attachments to the rest of the world. It is as if these dreamers, as Herzog refers to them, gave up looking for purpose in the mainland and so fled to one of the planet’s last great frontiers. There are many environments that Herzog takes us to that appear wholly alien. He shows us the odd world that exists under the sea ice and a frozen landscape that appears inhospitable, yet it attracts the most interesting people. Many of the researchers and workman that are spending the summer of 2006 in Antarctica carry with them very profound, and often very poetic, worldviews and philosophies. At the core of the film, however, lies a perplexing dichotomy of human determinism colliding with the chaotic randomness of nature.

Herzog likes to find chaos and violence in nature to show that the outside beauty is only an aesthetic. Nature is vile and putrid, like the microscopic organisms that a cell biologist studies under the Ross Ice Shelf. The biologist describes, in striking detail, all the mandibles, hooks, teeth, and tentacles that these tiny organisms use to rend and tear flesh. Life, at its most basic level, exists in a world of horror and violence. Yet it is easy for us to step away from it and observe the otherworldly beauty of the ice and its gleaming surfaces underwater or in the vents blown open by steam from a nearby volcano.

One discourse raised by the film really struck a chord with me: why it is human nature to attribute meaning to actions or forces that are seemingly without meaning. As a species, we seem programmed to want an explanation for everything. We want to know why the penguin, which leaves its group to embark on a suicidal three thousand mile march to the continent’s center, will always walk in that direction even if someone were to bring him back to the masses. Is he crazy? Delusional? Or does he know something we don’t? Herzog seems content to let the mystery be. It is more interesting to imagine why than to know why. That is true beauty.

The other striking example of this phenomenon is the science team performing research on neutrinos in the South Pole where there are no interfering electrical disturbances of the type found in the rest of the world. These particles are not well understood and are, in fact, barely identifiable. The lead scientist explains that he cannot explain them. They exist, he says, and he can measure them, but he cannot touch or manipulate them. It is as if they exist on another plain of the universe. Leave it to human beings to go to the end of the world with hundreds of thousands of dollars of technology to study a particle that barely exists and with no real purpose or gain in mind for the research. We do it just because we can, or feel we should.

A couple of the people we meet in Antarctica have stayed with me long after viewing the film. There is something enchanting about the Russian man who values his freedom so strongly after fleeing the Iron Curtain. He is unwilling to tell us about the escape, but he casually shows us the contents of a backpack which he keeps packed with everything he requires for survival, including an inflatable raft, so that he can leave at a moment’s notice. This man’s perception of freedom is something the rest of us could never fully appreciate. And I am deeply moved by the young linguist who became so distraught after personally witnessing the death of a language during the writing of his dissertation that he fled to the edge of the world, to a continent without any native languages. Herzog cites a very apt analogy comparing the loss of a language to the loss of species diversity; except an extinct language results in the loss of cultural diversity. Is either loss more devastating? A scientist would argue that the loss of a species is far more significant, because all life depends on biodiversity, and human beings become progressively threatened with each hit to the species pool. A philosopher, however, may argue that the loss of a culture is far more significant, because culture, after all, is what makes us unique. It is what identifies us as human.

I’m not sure why these two dreamers stand out in my mind. Perhaps they represent something profoundly fragile about the nature of human existence: an existence that Herzog, and many scientists, purport is unsustainable. This is, on one hand, very frightening, as we grant so much value to our history and culture, and the fear of losing it is alarming. Yet when we look at this assessment from a biological perspective, or even a universal perspective, it seems perfectly natural to view humanity as a definite period with a beginning and an end. I do not leave the film feeling pessimistic, or with a grim worldview. I leave with a calming confidence that not knowing all the answers is okay.

Professor P