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  Chicken
Out of Hell
A
Column by Andrew Hamlin
My Best
Fiend, a film by Werner Herzog
He stands
declaiming himself as Jesus—not on a
streetcorner, not under a gutter, but on a stage,
and if you did not "know" Klaus Kinski the first two might seem
a more fitting place for him—barking the
news of "his," Jesus's that is, return
to earth. Someone approaches the microphone to
speak, visible only as a sliver of hand hanging
from a black long sleeve—Kinski swats back the
interloper with a fling of one arm like a landing
bird fluttering its backward wing. He bellows
that he is not "the Jesus of" a long
list of things mostly to do with the bourgeoisie
; it is, at least, the cadence of a practiced
preacher, though of course most preachers stop
short, rhetorically, of painting themselves
Jesus, or implying that they deserve to be nailed
to a cross. A man with a prominent nose obtains
the microphone, and comments with smug
smoothness: I am not the most well-spoken man in
the world, but, it seems to me that if Jesus was
really here, he would hear people out instead of
shouting them down.
No…no,
replies Kinski, growing more
intricately ragged with each negation. No…He
would not shout them down. He would go, and get a
black leather whip, and He would take this whip,
and BEAT them in their BEASTLY faces!
Or words to that
effect, translated and subtitled from the German.
The crowd roars, and the movie goes down the
drain. This isn't necessarily the movie's fault,
though Kinski, the film's nominal
subject, does get yanked away just as I got him
on my tastebuds. But all these people remembering
Kinski have, even so many years
after the fact, the relieved look and laughing
eyes of a lover slamming and locking the
apartment door, exhausted after a fight. Fair
enough. The fellow almost killed by the actor
with a savage blow to the head on the set of Aguirre,
the Wrath of God (1972) (only his metal
helmet saved him) is entitled to a few yucks on
the house. Earlier, when Herzog walks through
what was once a small pension he shared with Kinski and his own family, he
indicates Kinski's room—now part of
a large kitchen. But the measurements from
Herzog's hands show you that the bedroom was
quite small. The narrow window still visible must
have suited it well. The former resident and the
current residents move to the other side of the
kitchen, but the camera pans slowly back over to
that narrow window, a bowl of vivid fruit resting
before it as in a still life. In such a
meditative moment it is possible to catch Kinski's reverberations, to
feel how he may have felt playing with the
butterfly, somehow never scaring it away, in a
funny, earthy, and succinct clip near My Best
Fiend's end. Most of the film, though, goes
to show, perhaps not purposefully what a huge
hole is left when a person dies, since Herzog's
reminiscences, and those of others, make
interesting listening but only whet the appetite
for more Kinski. The living are but
tourists, inwardly and outwardly, at the lip of
craters left by the man who smashed through one
side of the world and out the other.
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Andrew Hamlin
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