Tragic blimps, cooking mice, and epic penguins

Werner Herzog and The Current Thing

Tragic blimps

There’s a clip that goes viral over and over of a man standing in the jungle. Out of the bushes a silverback gorilla charges, the man stands unintimidated and the gorilla turns back.

Takes a lot of guts to do that.¹ A lot of guts to film, too! So I guess it’s not too surprising that the man² who survived filming the charging gorilla met his end while attempting to film the rainforest canopy from this beautiful single-seat blimp.

And having witnessed this death, the man who built that blimp was racked with guilt and hoped to set things right by building another blimp so that he could film the rainforest canopy himself. The builder of both blimps was Graham Dorrington³, his documentarian became Werner Herzog, and I have not been able to figure out who funded the whole thing but whoever it was they did not have enough money to do it safely but exactly enough money to do it interestingly.

The White Diamond is free on YouTube, and makes a great meditative watch with young kids on a sick or rainy day.

Cooking mice

Mouse Hunt (1997) is an absolutely incredible kids movie, something like Home Alone but with the child-as-adult fantasy replaced with practical adult fears. It’s great fun, and somehow it ends like this:

Nathan Lane, the professional chef, with an anatomically conventional mouse on his shoulder taste-testing for him. I saw this movie in theaters once as a child, then again a few months ago, and I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten this scene. Because of course 10 years later this short closing scene would be expanded into the full-length Ratatouille.

What’s weird about it is that neither I, nor ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, can find any explicit link between these two movies. But it seems impossible to me that Ratatouille could exist if Mouse Hunt had not ended in the bizarre way that it did. Right? Though I suppose dirty mice and clean cooking are an obvious juxtaposition, maybe it’s coincidence…

Epic penguins

Another great Herzog movie which children can sort of tolerate is Encounters at The End Of World. The most famous bit, which seems to go viral every now and then, is this lone penguin who determinedly marches the wrong way, away from his colony, away from the ocean, towards the certain doom of the interior mountains on his own.

You can watch the penguin part here, or read the transcript in this footnote.⁴ The other day, January 23 2026, the Trump White House tweeted this:

Herzog is obsessed with insanity, which he refers to (in the penguin clip and elsewhere) as “derangement”. As with Mouse Hunt and Ratatouille, I suppose it’s possible this image of Trump is just a convergent riff on the paradox between the grandeur of mountains and the comedy of penguins. But it seems much more likely that the staffer who made this has seen the movie, or at least the penguin clip. The combination of Trump’s Greenland adventures and the “derangement” token pulled it into their context, and we get this astonishing little artifact to psychoanalyze.

EDIT: it seems the official accounts of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy and Homeland Security and various other right-wing accounts have also posted penguin memes which make it clear that everyone involved has seen the Herzog clip.

Epilogue

The Gray Area with Sean Illing interviewed Werner Herzog in 2024. Here’s the transcript starting from 52:33

[Sean] You ask people at the end of Lo and Behold, if they thought the Internet dreams of itself… [Do you] think the Internet dreams of itself?

[Herzog] Well, that’s the deepest of all questions, I think, and not really fully answerable. I have to admit it is just a projection of a statement by a war theoretician, Napoleonic time, a Prussian war theoretician, von Klausewitz.

And apparently von Klausewitz once in his study on war, which is still a revolutionary insight into war, into warfare, he said it seems that war sometimes dreams of itself. It’s a stunning statement. And I extended it does the Internet dream of itself. The strange thing now is that experts on von Klausewitz told me von Klausewitz never said that. Maybe I invented it and talked myself over decades so much into it that I believe it was from Klausewitz.

So it’s very odd how our memory is shifting and shaping its own world, shaping its own quotations from books.

But it’s the deepest of all question, does the Internet dream of itself. And you can extend it, does artificial intelligence dream of itself, and that’s where it gets interesting.

The Herzog of YouTube

I’d be curious to know if there is a “Herzog of YouTube”. Famous YouTuber Tim Scott did some blimp stuff too, and obviously he has different goals than Herzog, but this A vs B is interesting to me.

You might also like The Auteur, The Cat, and The Flood of GPUs or Disneyland on VHS.

1. The man confronting the gorillas is Adrien Deschryver. The documentary is beautiful, though the ending is quite tragic.

2. The man filming the confronting of the gorillas, who later crashed a blimp into a tree and then fell out of the tree was Dieter Plage.

3. You can see photos of the trip taken by Herzog’s wife, as well as Dr. Dorrington’s blimp sketches here. If you watch it and become taken by “the rooster man” as I was, you can read more about his experience here. He is easy to find on Facebook, fun to chat with, and has a nice dog.

[Herzog] Is there such thing as insanity among penguins. I try to avoid a definition of insanity or derangement. I don’t mean that a penguin might believe that he or she is Lenin, or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go crazy because they have had enough of their colony?

[Penguin expert] I’ve never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They do get disoriented, they end up in places they shouldn’t be, a long way from the ocean.

[Herzog] These penguins are all heading to the open water, to the right. But one of them caught our eye. The one in the center. He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice, nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight towards the mountains, some 70 km away. Dr. Aimley explained, that even if he caught him, and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains. But why?

One of these disoriented or deranged penguins showed up at the new harbor diving camp already some 80km away from where it should be. The rules for the humans are: do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still and let him go on his way. And here, he is headed off into the interior of the vast continent. With 5,000 km ahead of him, he is headed towards certain death.

4.