“My Best F(r)iend”
by Spencer Byham-Carson
“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal…”
– R.D. Laing
Last week over three sittings, I watched the Werner Herzog documentary My Best Fiend about his multi-decade relationship with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski made five films together over that time, but the two met much earlier in life while sharing a boarding house. There is a scene early in the film where Herzog returns to the boarding house, greeted by the two tenets of the now chichi apartment. Herzog walks through the kitchen and subdivides it into 4 different rooms saying “Kinski lived here,” then points to the other side of the hall, saying, “and me and my mother and brother lived here.” These rooms no longer exist. He stands in a kitchen that Nancy Myers would die for.
There are no remnants of his childhood, or these earliest memories of Kinski. He points down the long kitchen and describes how once Kinski ran down the entire length, long enough to really get some speed, rammed his shoulder into the door, and crashed onto the floor of the dining room where a thirteen-year-old Herzog sat with his mother, the land-lady, and a local theatre critic. He finishes the scene with narration tinged in an aged awareness and a bit of surprise, “At that moment I did not know that we would go on to make five films together.”
I feel two ways towards actors:
I think actors are fucking insane. I would know. I’ve dated a few. I live with one. I am one.
You megalomaniac. How full of yourself do you have to be? Every actor is desperate for attention, which they lacked as a small child. They are the babes whose parents caved at every attempt to have them cry it out. “We won’t sooth his wails tomorrow…” they said.
I think actors are beautiful. I would know. I’ve dated a few. I live with one. I am –
They possess a hidden power of communication. Theatre and film continue to exclaim their fraudulence: the visible sandbags and stage-hands, an edit to a new CGI-Shot, and yet a good actor can suspend your disbelief for a few hours until you exit under the marquee and into the rain.
In My Best Fiend, Herzog expresses this duplicitous, and sometimes bi-polar, relationship that I too feel towards actors. Although a liability and a danger on set, Herzog’s clear admiration for Kinski has you fall in love with the actor through the same medium the director did as a child — film.
While there is plenty of footage Kinski stomping around set, screaming about his coffee not being hot enough in the Peruvian mountains, and nearly killing an extra with a dulled sword—enough fuel to make you hate the man, or at least want him to shut up— Herzog also spends time marveling in the specificity of his performance, replaying, over a dozen times, a scene of him waking up drunk on a table as a soldier. Herzog recreates the experience of him as a young man rewatching the scene over and over again, falling in love with the man on the screen, and forgiving him for his delusions.
Is the brilliance worth the madness? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Although he believed that each partnership would be their last, Herzog absolutely thought so. Kinski died of a heart attack at the age of 65.
“His life was not a candle but a bonfire,” Herzog says to end the film.
If I was directing any one of those productions, I would’ve fired Kinski. I do not have the patience for any of those antics. I do not think that so-called genius forgives being an asshole, but that’s because I’m not a genius.
I am a jealous Salieri surrounded by people I raise to the heights of Mozarts.
“I could never do that,” I catch myself saying while I watch my best friends.
In R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self, he breaks down what would previously be described as “ravings,” into collected recordings and interviews with Scottish mental patients, transforming them into empathetic and understandable thoughts.
Laing describes some delusions as “explosions outward,” a la Kinski, and “implosions inward,” similar to me.
There is nothing sexy about being a depressed artist who doesn’t create out of self doubt.
My best friend, Pria, called me on the phone yesterday to discuss casting for our next show. She said, “Spencer, I wouldn’t have the courage to say this to your face but since we’re over the phone – you have to be confident in yourself.”
Something she’s told me many times before.
I find myself artistically inert. Envious of any expression I see. Craving an outlet to be heard or noticed. So allow me to rave.
losing our grip on purpose 