Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog

Kit Stookey

“I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the 20th century.”

–Werner Herzog

Sorry my dude, but you’re going to hate this essay.

*

One of the main differences between you and Werner Herzog is that while he is content to make monotone statements about the indifference of the universe to all that will listen, you have a stubborn proclivity towards believing that everything ultimately trends towards order rather than chaos. Despite all evidence, part of you believes that good and evil balance out, that punishment comes to those who deserve it, that eyelash wishes can come true. So, you were well prepared to be on the side of most of the researchers in Cave of Forgotten Dreams who use the art on the walls of Chauvet Cave to argue for an inherent spiritual connection between Paleolithic man and people today.

At first, staring at the magnificent art of bison, lions, horses, and other animals who seem to gallop across the cave’s walls, you are totally compelled by their narrative. These are animals you recognize, depicted using tools not so different from ones you have access to today, fighting and running, telling stories upon stories in each section of the cave. One woman talks about practically hearing a lion growl at a potential mate, and you can almost hear it, too. The scientists show a cave bear skull, placed on an altar-like structure in the cave, and you can’t help but think of not only the many flavors of pagan you know (too many queer witches to shake a stick at), but of your younger brother, a new Christian after a lifetime of atheism. A woman with a bull head reminds you of the myth of the Minotaur, reminds you of the hours you spent pouring over the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths when you were a kid. Like the ancient Greek and like you, the people who painted the cave walls were trying to make meaning out of a harsh world using the tools they have available to them. Even Herzog gets sucked into their narrative, at least for a moment. On inspecting one of the most beautiful walls of the cave, where horses and bison are overlaid on each other, he remarks on how they give the illusion of movement, like “proto-film,” perhaps even seeing a piece of himself and his creative process thousands upon thousands of years ago. One scientist argues that homo sapiens—comprising both modern and Paleolithic man—should be called homo spiritualis. Even its score leans into the spiritual and religious, its organ and choir reminding you of Sunday mornings sitting in wooden pews. In this instance, you’re all for it. You want to believe.

Ultimately, though, you just can’t. All because of a crooked pinky finger.

*

Days before watching this film for the first time, you had your first transabdominal and transvaginal ultrasounds. A quartet of women huddled around your splayed legs in a darkened exam room, each taking turns alternately wiping a plastic probe across your lower abdomen and inserting another probe inside. Participants in an “ultrasound training weekend” for midwives, these women made comments not necessarily for your ears, but for each other, trying to show their learning. They talked about the placement of your IUD, your bladder constantly filling, how close you were to ovulating, how your retroverted uterus made it more difficult to find everything they were looking for. You tried to position your head on the exam table to get a better look at their screen, but you couldn’t make any meaning out of the shifting black and white blobs.

Unfortunately, you had volunteered for this training not merely out of a spirit of generosity, but to learn more about yourself. From 2019 well into 2020, you injected testosterone into your thigh just about every other week. There were often gaps—sometimes large ones—in between injections; seemingly unlike every other trans person on the planet, the longer you were on testosterone, the more doubts you had about your gender, about whether you were making the right choice. You rejoiced when your voice dropped and finally matched the expectations you had from puberty, but nervously plucked at new, bristly chin hairs and spent ages in front of the mirror, trying to decide if your hairline was receding. You were grateful when your period stopped, but also terrified. The waiver you signed at the informed consent clinic said that you should still use contraception during certain kinds of sex to prevent pregnancy and also that testosterone could impact your fertility. You didn’t freeze your eggs—you were pretty sure that you weren’t going to have biological children; you hadn’t dated a cisgender man in years so there was no reason to assume the “traditional” option would be available to you, and something about sperm banks always creeped you out. Ultimately, pretty sure didn’t feel sure enough—you knew you wanted to have kids well before you could name any gender feelings, and there was still no official research that you knew of about fertility after exogenous testosterone use. So, you stopped taking your injections. It still took you more than a year after you stopped to get rid of your sharps container, crowded with used needles. It took more than a year for you to truly accept you weren’t going to take testosterone anymore.

You saw most of the effects of the hormone therapy quickly disappear, save for a few extra blonde chin hairs and the occasional voice crack when you’re excited. You know most people see you as a woman, and you’re pretty much okay with that—you don’t want to change yourself just so that a stranger might read you as “other.” You have no patience for squeezing yourself into suffocating binders or wearing pants instead of dresses when it’s hot outside. You’re over the idea of trying to change your personality or interests to seem less feminine and therefore possibly get gendered correctly by strangers—IPAs are pretty gross! Christopher Nolan movies all bore you to tears! Still, you were hoping that something would show on those ultrasounds. You’re still afraid of being infertile, but you wanted something to show for your months on testosterone, for your constant ruminations and anxieties about gender. 

Instead, your body looks just like that of a typical cisgender lady with an IUD. You might as well have never even thought about testosterone.

*

There’s a couple parts of Cave of Forgotten Dreams where Herzog pushes back on the scientists’ narrative that Paleolithic humanity is not only knowable but inextricably connected to who we are now. In one of these parts, one scientist talks about using the digital map to “create stories about what could have happened in the cave in the past.” Herzog compares using a map to create stories to using the phone directory of Manhattan to understand the innermost thoughts and feelings of its people: “Four million precise entries, but do they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their hopes? What are their families? We’ll never know from the phone directory.”

This analysis doesn’t land with you so early in the film—you have a lot of trouble taking Herzog seriously, someone who seems more meme than man. You only see his point when a scientist singles out one artist—a man, six feet tall, with a crooked little finger. A pair of woman scientists identify him by his palm prints throughout the cave, pinky finger splayed out for all to see.

These scientists touring the cave, remarking on the specifics of a stranger’s anatomy takes you right back to the darkened exam room, to its crinkling table paper, the cool gel on your belly, those women making pronouncements about your body. His height and the bend of his finger are all that you and the scientists can know about this man. You cannot know if he believed in the transformation between humans and animals, as one researcher suggests was common among Paleolithic people. You cannot know if he thought of himself as a “man” at all, or a woman, or something else entirely. You cannot know someone’s soul from their art, much less from their biology—be it a crooked little finger or a uterus. The basic facts—the entries in the telephone book—are ultimately all that these researchers can know.

*

The second time Herzog tries to articulate his point is in a hasty “postscript” to the film, where he shows “mutant albino crocodiles” only twenty miles from Chauvet Cave. He implies that we have as much similarity to Paleolithic humanity as these crocodiles. 

“Man, do they thrive,” he says, watching them swim in waters warmed by the runoff of a nuclear power plant upriver. 

Of course, the postscript is fake: these mutant albino crocodiles are actually albino alligators, imported from Louisiana so Herzog could illustrate his point. Regardless, he has to admit how well they’re doing in these new waters.

Being understood—especially by strangers, especially thousands of years from now—is out of reach for you. The universe may not be as orderly and comprehensible as you would hope. Still, maybe like these alligators, you can thrive.

Kit Stookey is a genderqueer person living, reading, writing, and bothering their cat and boyfriend in Pittsburgh, PA. They've been previously published in Across the Margin. You can find them on Instagram and Substack @kstookley.