Morris though seems to be a curious man, and I've only come to understand the depths of his curiosity recently, both through reconsidering my first impressions of him and by watching him work through his thought processes via Twitter. His fanbase and his early work had set off some red flags in my head, and I'd begun to view him as a cynic interested only in mocking the weird people of the world. I of course am not always above laughing at weird people, but I'd hate to make a career of it, and that's what I thought Morris had done. I think it was VERNON, FLORIDA which set off those concerns. I liked GATES OF HEAVEN pretty well, loved THE THIN BLUE LINE and even enjoyed bits of VERNON, FLORIDA, but there were those slippery segments focusing on the bizarre everyday existences of people Morris had happened upon that gave me pause. In them, Morris seemed to be encouraging us to watch and shake our heads in unison with him as he pondered from above what a strange universe we inhabited. And I'm not interested in that. So watching FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL was revelatory in a sense, because I feel like I understand Morris' sensibility more than ever now and am finding myself more and more impressed by it the more I experience it. I'd like to give VERNON, FLORIDA a rewatch sometime soon, but unfortunately that will have to wait.
Another tangential concern of mine that informed my viewing of this film was my increasing dislike of documentaries. Or the American doc cottage industry, I should say. The phenomenon probably dates back farther than I know, but I've noticed lately that a good few 'independent' documentaries seem to follow the same basic structure of introducing a problem, sharing a bit of context, and then reassuring the presumably liberal viewing audience that their proposed solution to the problem was right all along. AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH could be accused of performing this pacifying gesture, although I think it's a bit more complex than that; but a real offender in that inglorious category would be Davis Guggenheim's WAITING FOR "SUPERMAN," which seemed to exist only to remind us that the American education system is, indeed, broken, and that we should be proud of ourselves for simply wanting it to get better. Stoking liberal concern is its own niche market, and I'm tired of being coerced into caring — and being tricked into feeling informed about — issues far too complex for a documentary to fully cover. Some documentaries do their best to pack in as much information as possible to provide as complete a picture as possible (e.g. INSIDE JOB), while others use a personal narrative to illustrate the real-world effects of systems of power (TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE), but ultimately high-profile American documentary has reached something of a dead end in trying to depict a world increasingly operating behind drawn curtains. We want to know everything but are unwilling to do the work to understand it (enter here the TED talks phenomenon, a real gem of marketing genius that flatters us into thinking that our modern inclination toward binge-viewing can be used for self-improvement and education. Who needs school?).
Errol Morris doesn't want to show anything we already know. We might know *of* the things he's sharing with us, but he's dedicated to challenging whatever understanding we think we have of them while also engaging us through the language of film. FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL is a barrage of contrasting visual schema, from old serials to cartoons to POV nature documentary shots to arthouse tracking shots of people in motion. Canted angles and slow-/fast-motion sequences disrupt our placid absorption of the images before us. Sonic bridges link voiceovers to images with no apparent connection to the spoken words. Musical accompaniment ranges from orchestral to Autechre-esque sound collages to uneasy combinations of the two. Morris' documentary isn't meant to go down smoothly, and this is expressed through his filmic onslaught. His restlessness creates a search for new meaning very much in tune with the fragmented narrative and its subliminal links between the subjects presented.
And what a cast of characters we're given to reckon with. The mole rat expert looks a bit like Morris himself, which is probably accidental but hey who knows. Each of these men have a deep understanding of their subjects of interest, but it's the interplay between them that yields depths of meaning a mere descriptive documentary could only intimate. On some level each of the participants seem concerned with how intuition guides their crafts, and how human guidance can lead to unexpected reactions in the environments they occupy. But they don't always phrase it in this way, more often sharing anecdotes of times when they solved problems or looked at them anew in order to facilitate whatever task they'd approached. Their life stories are testimonies to the unpredictable powers of human intelligence, a subject quite relevant in a film more than a little interested in what lies beyond the merely human. Animals also have intuitions and unruly irregularities, throwing into question how unique our 'personalities' really are. And then there are robots. How can we ever hope to begin to understand their capabilities? The robotics expert seems comfortable with the knowledge he's acquired over the years, but understanding of his field only delineates more clearly the area beyond which robots are shaping the new realms of science and consciousness.
There's a contrast at work between the singularity of human experience and the unknowable shared hive minds of insects, naked mole rats, and robots. Animals like the lions and tigers fall somewhere in between, and their own familiar subjectivity only serves to establish how genuinely foreign the lower-order animals' is. The robotics expert claims that robots could be made to work like colony creatures, but the film doesn't seem to be especially interested in proving this (the aimless scrambling of the insect-like robots becomes absurd as it fails to prove what the scientist believes irrespective of their performance). But an idea needn’t be realized in order to excite, best expressed through the titular theory that having a hundred or so small robots on Mars would allow for greater innovation and risk-taking than one large and expensive robot limited by its value. In an epoch of superbanks and Too Big to Fail blockbusters, this kind of logic has a special resonance as we try to imagine a world as innovative as free marketeers falsely assure us they can provide.
I'm finding it hard to even say what this movie is about, which is perfectly delightful to me given my annoyance with one-issue one-answer film tracts. I've read a bit about essays films lately and I find the idea fascinating. SANS SOLEIL and NIGHT AND FOG are among my favorite films, and I doubt it's coincidental that I responded to FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL's digressions in a similar way. Is Errol Morris an essay filmmaker? I'll have to get back to you on that. But he certainly understands there's more to film than sharing images and information sequentially like a textbook. I can't imagine most people would see similarities between these four guys beyond their shared immersion in highly specific hobbies/careers, but Morris manages not only to depict them as four of a kind but also pioneers in their own way, men who deal in filtering the collective unconscious into something idiosyncratic and useful in their lives. Maybe that's what this film is about: dealing with the collective unconscious. Films are an artform especially well-suited for capturing what compels and fascinates us as a people (robots and lion tamers, in this instance), and this film seems like a metatextual acknowledgement of that (another key feature of the essay film, in my opinion). Each of these men seem obsessed by a higher calling, though that calling isn't politics or religion or social work like it might be for others. They tackle the bigger issues of life and humanity through their intense focus, a theme repeated from GATES OF HEAVEN and probably personally exciting to Morris, a philosophy student in his younger years.Something else I found interesting, unintentional though it must’ve been, was the different ways the men talked about their passions. The topiary artist and lion tamer were the older of the four and described their vocations in terms of how much work it took to master them, and how their current mastery was built on years of trial and error. This seems to me to be the way older men explain anything they love, through the work their passions took to realize. As if nothing worth having is worth not suffering over. The younger two seem more concerned with abstraction and emotion, and the ways their work makes them feel. Each ponders at length how their respective objects of interest represent the world's mystery to them. You get the sense that they see their obsessions as just that, rather than catalysts toward mastering a related skill. I think this is a generation gap in how certain American men view work and themselves, and maybe a move away from the dreaded Protestant work ethic that still dominates our lives despite our creative attempts to escape it. Would men my age disregard the labor aspect altogether, or see it as a necessary evil in exploring what interests them?
So it seems I'm an Errol Morris fan now. This was a mysterious film, and a speculative viewing experience I don't often get in dealing with a culture full of facile answers. THE THIN BLUE LINE was a formative experience but it took until now to reconcile Morris' diverse documentaries (and THE DARK WIND, a slight though impressively existential thriller) as a unified body of work. I'm now confident in his abilities as a thinker and filmmaker, both of which I'd doubted before. His FIRST PERSON series is coming up soon on my Queue and I'm looking forward to it, now too so I can see more of the Interrotron used to such uncanny effect in FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL. Until then I have Patricio Guzmán's BATTLE OF CHILE series to occupy me, which seems like exactly the kind of in-depth, longform documentary that I've been craving.
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