Mole rats, lions, robots and shrubbery
by Ken Cornwell
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
Directed by Errol Morris
If Michael Moore is the most famous documentary director working today, Errol Morris is perhaps the most respected and admired. He has a unique way of telling a story through visual poetry, utilizing a mix of archival footage and other visual bits and pieces to create a kind of collage of images. And yet, his work is able to go deep beneath the surface to explore the nature of the human condition and pose complex questions about the way we live our lives.
Morris’ work has tremendous range in its subject matter. He certainly doesn’t retread ground, focusing on an entirely new and unique subject every time he turns a camera on.
1992’s The Thin Blue Line explores an old murder case (and helped exonerate the falsely accused victim); Gates of Heaven (1978) takes a quirky look at owners of two California pet cemeteries; and The Fog of War (2003), his most recent work, is an intimate and powerful look inside the mind of Robert McNamara.
With 1997’s Fast Cheap and Out of Control, he again chose a unique subject with this fascinating look at four men with careers and interests outside the mainstream.
If you spend too much time watching TV, you start to think that everyone is a lawyer, detective or a doctor. But these men have followed far different paths. Dave Hoover’s childhood fascination with the movie serials of lion tamer Clyde Beatty led to a career as a wild animal trainer working with lions and tigers. Ray Mendez studies mole rats. Rodney Brooks is robot scientist who believes that artificial intelligence may be the most enduring creation of the human species. And George Mendonca is a topiary gardener responsible for a garden of fantastic animals and other creatures created entirely out of trees, shrubs and flowers.
Morris let us make connections between the characters. What do they have in common? On the surface there’s really nothing to connect them, but each shares a passion for their chosen work, a devotion that seems to inform the way they see the world. What is the route of their obsessions? Why are they so motivated? Morris is uninterested for the most part in figuring out how they got there. It is the fact of their devotion and the way each seems to work out the questions of human existence through, say, the way a mole rat behaves within its own society, or the way artificial intelligence can develop a “mind” of its own that seems to be the conclusion Morris wants to draw. And perhaps Morris sees a little piece of himself reflected in their lives: he is as devoted to making films as Mendonca is to maintaining his topiary animals.
As with his other documentaries, Morris uses his own techniques and unique way of telling a story. He employs the use of a special interviewing machine he’s coined the Interrotron, a kind of modified teleprompter that allows the interviewed subject to face the camera. Each man relates his story by directly addressing the camera (and therefore the viewer) creating a feeling of intense intimacy. They’re breaking the fourth wall and speaking to us. And inter-cut with the interviews is a variety of interesting images including old movie footage, archival footage, cartoons, circus images, and even dreamy, slow motion shots of each of the men working away at the things they do. This film, like all of Morris’s, just doesn’t look like other documentaries.
When Errol Morris accepted his long overdue Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2004 for The Fog of War, he said, “if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I’ve done some damn good here.” And looking back upon his body of work and the way he’s made people stop, think and reflect, it can be said that he’s done some damn good there too.
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