The French novelist Andre Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.” […] After I short Family Romance, LLC in Japan, Japanese television started to get interested in the phenomenon that nowadays, from an agency that employs some two thousand people, one can rent out a missing family member, say, or a friend for the afternoon. The founder of the agency, Yuichi Ishii, played the lead in my film. He is hired by the mother of an eleven-year-old girl to pretend to be the divorced father of the girl, who is anxious for contact with him. Because the parents split up when the girl was only two, she has no idea what her father looks like. Incidentally, the girl in my film isn’t the actual daughter but a well-instructed nonprofessional actress. Yuichi Ishii was interviewed by NHK television on his enterprise and asked to refer them to a client who had used the services of this agency. NHK then interviewed an elderly man who for one of his lonesome days had hired a “friend.” Straight after the show, the internet was deluged with people pointing out that the “customer” hadn’t been a customer at all, that Ishii had provided the station with an impostor, a cheat from his own agency, who had merely pretended to be a lonely man. The station apologized publicly to its viewers for not having done its homework properly. To lose face like that is the worst possible embarrassment in Japan. So far, so good. But now it gets interesting. I have what follows only on second hand. Yuichi Ishii defended himself with the argument that he had deliberately sent in an actor from his own agency because a true customer, a real old man in miserable solitude, would at most have spoken half the truth. A real customer, to save face and not give too much insight into his innermost being, would presumably have put a gloss on everything, would most likely have lied at least some of the time. But the “swindler” provide by Yuichi Ishii, the “cheat” who had played the part of the “friend” to lonely people hundreds of times, he knew exactly what was going on in the heart of the lonely person. It was only from the swindler that the real truth could be gleaned. And that doesn’t exist, and so I call it “ecstatic truth”.
Is it possible that parts of Herzog’s Every Man for Himself, maybe even the story above, which he has “only on second hand“, also constitute ecstatic truth?
Nehaveigur 