The easiest way to hypnotise a chicken, according to Werner Herzog: “With determination”
Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wonder how someone would hypnotise a chicken?” No? Werner Herzog has. In fact, he claims to know exactly how it’s done.
Over the years, everyone’s favourite oddball German filmmaker has delighted and mystified cinephiles in equal measure with some of the things he says and does outside of his work. His movies and documentaries are often inscrutable enough, but in real life, Herzog has a habit of compounding that weirdness with baffling quotes and bizarre opinions that only he could conjure up out of the ether.
A great example of this, of course, is his long-running fascination with chickens, which may even be classed as an existential fear. In his 1977 film Stroszek, Herzog included footage of a chicken dancing in front of a colourful backdrop in an eerily abandoned amusement park. It was part-funny, part-unnerving, and altogether strange, which suited Herzog’s sensibilities perfectly.
According to the man himself, though, the dancing chicken reached deep down into his soul and made him confront the abyss at the centre of life. “It’s a very bleak image, accompanied by the rather miserable feeling that if you came back a year later, the animal would still be there, dancing away,” Herzog mused in A Guide for the Perplexed.
This image of a brainless animal with no agency dancing itself into oblivion frightened Herzog, who said, “You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity.” Now, you may think this is a ‘fowl’ thing to say about our feathered friends (sorry), but there’s a method to Herzog’s madness here. To him, their inherent lack of brain power is existentially horrifying, which led him to remark, “I kind of love chickens, but they frighten me more than any other animal.”
For Herzog, there is a great metaphor in the empty, soulless eyes of a chicken. He once wrote that “chickens are living manifestations of death” because humanity breeds them specifically to be domesticated, killed, and eaten. This is an undeniably bleak existence for any living creature, but the fact that they don’t even have the basic comprehension to know what is happening to them is even more profoundly desolate. With nary a hint of irony, Herzog concluded, “When we look into their eyes, we see the part of ourselves of which we are most afraid – our ultimate destination, death.”
OK, so we’ve established that chickens freak Herzog out, and when he looks in their eyes, he only sees the grim spectre of death. But where does hypnotism come into it, you may ask. Well, as Herzog is wont to do, in the middle of one of his diatribes about the horror of a chicken’s existence, he randomly claimed, “By the way, it’s very easy to hypnotise a chicken. They are very prone to hypnosis.”
Herzog didn’t elaborate on this claim, but assuming he wasn’t joking – which, to be fair, he rarely seems to be – fans surmised that he believes chickens can be put into a trance because of their tiny, minuscule, vacuous brains. Years later, though, during a Reddit AMA, a fan finally asked the man outright to back up his claim and tell the world the easiest way to hypnotise a poor, helpless chicken.
Herzog being Herzog, he duly revealed his secrets: “Calm the chicken down. Put its beak on the floor, and then, with determination, draw a line of chalk away from it. Release the chicken, and you will see it will be hypnotised.” Foolproof, right? Well, maybe – although I wouldn’t try it at my local farm.
