Boris Johnson, the Wrath of God

On the resurrection of the bloated Lazarus

This article was first published in The Critic in late May. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here for free, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.

Almost unbelievably, for the man is all of sixty years old, Boris Johnson’s favourite film is reportedly Dodgeball. He’s also a fan of The Pink Panther, cites the climactic massacre from The Godfather as his favourite scene in cinema, and has a habit of quoting The Terminator.

It is unknown if he enjoys, or has even watched, the Werner Herzog masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I think someone should ask him. If he has watched it, it would be interesting to learn if he views it as a romantic tale of a lone visionary defying the odds, betrayed by lesser men. If he hasn’t, it may serve as a cautionary tale; a study of the delusion and hubris of a man who can no longer distinguish madness from destiny.

In Aguirre, the titular character — played magnificently and malevolently by the blonde haired, blue eyed, deeply unstable Klaus Kinski — is a Spanish conquistador on a 16th-century expedition deep into the Amazonian rainforest in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. Facing difficult conditions in their forward march the expedition’s leader, Gonzalo Pizarro, orders an advance party of 40 men downriver on crude rafts.

From the outset, the journey is cursed: the river is swift and treacherous, the jungle shrouding the banks of the river are impenetrable, and hide unseen native warriors who pick the expedition off. Amidst this, a power struggle quickly develops between the leader of this group, Ursua, and Aguirre, appointed his second-in-command. When Ursua orders the expedition back, Aguirre leads a mutiny by telling the men that untold riches await them ahead, and reminding them that Hernán Cortés won an empire in Mexico by disobeying orders. Aguirre deposes his commanding officer and installs portly nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán as puppet emperor, declaring that they are founding a new Spanish empire.

The expedition is now carried on a single raft, and carries with it a haunting air of inexorable doom. Disgusted by de Guzmán, Aguirre moves from the mutinous to the murderous by offing both the new Emperor and Ursua, finally taking command of the expedition himself. The remaining men attack a native village, where several are killed. With supplies having run out, morale disintegrated and fever taking hold, their grasp on reality slips; they cannot be sure anything they see is real, either the wooden ship perched on top of a tree or the frequent arrow attacks that eventually kill everyone — except Aguirre, who floats on.

Kinski’s conquistador is both ludicrous and terrifying. He is mad beyond reason, becoming all the more outrageous as the inevitability of the doom that will engulf the group becomes ever more obvious. Yet Herzog avoids reducing him to caricature. Aguirre is beyond deranged; he is a rebel of Promethean proportions, gripped by a vision so absolute that no authority — not his superiors, not the Spanish crown, not the natural world, not even the collapse of the expedition — can dissuade him from pursuing it.

Perhaps Boris will see the parallel with himself; lazily adrift whilst plotting a miraculous return to politics like a bloated Lazarus, muttering about destiny, betrayal and empire whilst the current drags him even further into the backwaters of national life. Perhaps, given he is driven as mad by his own spectral ambition as Aguirre, he will not.

Aguirre is not just the story of one man’s madness, however, but a broader, brutal allegory about man’s will to conquer, his delusions of godlike strength, his greed, violence, and ultimate helplessness before nature, time, and truth. For a character so often read as mad, Aguirre is one of the few who actually grasps the reality of their situation. Unlike his fellow leaders, he is not driven by religious zeal or goldlust; he sees the futility from the very moment the expedition sets out, saying: “No one can get down that river alive.” Knowing the expedition is doomed from the moment it sets out, he decides to embrace destiny so completely that he transcends it; to hurl himself headlong into fate in such a way that he is no longer its victim. He attempts to become the Wrath of God, that he may no longer be subject to it.

Johnson’s premiership, however, was not predestined to fail. It began not in futility, but triumph; an enormous mandate, a broken opposition, and an electorate willing — desperate, even — to be re-enchanted by politics. What followed was not tragic inevitability but self-inflicted farce; scandals, lies, incompetence, and a premiership squandered as much by the man himself as any unseen, external enemies. Aguirre is both tyrant and victim, but the circumstances of Johnson’s aimless drift — and that of the Conservative Party too — are his alone. If Aguirre went mad in pursuit of a fantasy, Johnson drifted into irrelevance clinging to one: that his charm alone could substitute for serious governance. He was undone, not by the Wrath of God, but the folly of a fool.

In the film’s last scene, on a monkey-infested raft among his dead crew, Aguirre is still giving orders. He talks of building a bigger boat, annexing Trinidad, taking Mexico from Cortés and founding a dynasty that will rule the whole of South America. “I am the Wrath… the Wrath of God.” As he picks up a monkey, he asks; “Who else is with me?”

Answer comes there none.