Biped Follies

Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn is a gripping film with a troubling moral vacuum at its core. At the beginning rowdy, jughead airmen sit around training camp goofing and chortling at films about surviving in the jungle. They belittle the dangers they may face, and death and destruction, including their own, don’t cross their cramped mental landscapes.

At the end of Herzog’s film 90 minutes later, they’re doing pretty much the same thing. In between, we have seen aerial bombardment, starvation, imprisonment, daring escape, survival in a gruesomely hostile environment, murder, dementia and despair. But all’s well that ends well, and Our Hero, Dieter Dengler, a German-born American soldier, is rescued and feted appropriately by one and all. Dengler is a modern Errol Flynn: indomitable, defiant, sly, fearless and good with weapons—a survivor.

What we do not learn of and only grasp through apparently accidental asides is that the other prisoners we are supposed to sympathize with (and do) are secret CIA contract pilots (they worked for ‘Air America’) and later that continuing bombing by their fellow pilots have made rice growing impossible and thrown the province into mass starvation. But Herzog has no interest at all in what might be motivating his subject’s Vietnamese captors or the lack of sympathy of the villagers whose lives are being destroyed by these pilots. For the most part, they form an amorphous background of grinning, shouting savages, exactly as I recall the Africans in the Tarzan movies I watched as a 10-year-old, terrifying and yet dumb enough to be outsmarted by one white guy.

Yes, I know, I know, Rescue Dawn is not a documentary but an adventure story, and it’s a terrific one. The 911 hijackers’ story would make one too, so would we just sit back and enjoy that gripping tale without thinking about ‘politics’? In making his soldier-boy thriller, Herzog has chosen to airbrush away a war that killed a couple of million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, and permits his protagonist not even to notice.

Dostoyevsky wrote about his time in a prison camp and sketched unforgettable portraits of inmates he considered immune to punishment, such as Orlov, who faced beatings with icy equanimity and proceeded to break anew whatever rules had merited him the punishment—the Dieter Dengler of Siberia. But Dostoevsky also suggests that Orlov was not entirely human. He writes about another incorrigible prisoner, Gazin the child molester, who took pleasure in watching the last, mortal flutterings of the toddlers he murdered. Dostoevsky draws a parallel between the two: both are able to ignore the consequences of their actions because there is something alarmingly deficient in their souls.

In Herzog’s previous film about the disturbed bear-watcher Timothy Treadwell, there is an attempt to get inside this peculiar man and make some sense of him. Rescue Dawn couldn’t be bothered, and the end result is a film to inspire horny adolescent guys and set them up for army recruiters.