Ecce Herzog!
For nearly fifty years, German filmmaker Werner Herzog has been
challenging, entertaining, dazzling, annoying, and infuriating filmgoers and
critics around the world. Every film he releases is a special event in the
strictest sense of that overused adjective.
With his affable craziness and his unique mellifluous
Bavarian diction, there is simply no one like him in the movies. I doubt there will
ever be. Even when the work is not good (which is seldom, as in say, Nosferatu and Scream of Stone), Herzog defines sui generis.
Herzog still makes fictional features, but it’s his
documentaries that seem to draw the most attention, at least in this country,
with classics such as My Best Fiend (about
his uproariously conflicted relationship with Klaus Kinski—a man he thought
should be murdered), Grizzly Man, and
Encounters at the End of the World.
Herzog seems to me to be an extremist of the human experience
(i.e., Fitzcarraldo, where he dragged
a full-sized riverboat over a steep hill in the South American jungle), but his
latest documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries
of the Connected World is a reverie, an almost quiet and detached look at
the Yin and Yang of the new world we have created with the Internet and its
related digital technologies, including AI and robotics.
The film is divided into ten chapters, stepping back and
forth contrasting such techno-utopians as Elon Musk with a variety of techno-dystopians,
each with a different perspective on the Internet. It opens with the birth of
the Internet in a non-descript room on the Stanford. campus (now plaqued as a
landmark) which contains the very first server.
From there, it turns to the Internet’s dark side with the Catsouras
family, who were psychically assaulted by hackers who posted photos of their
dead daughter, Nikki, online, mocking their grief. The Catsourases honestly
believe the Internet is a tool of the Antichrist, an accusation I believe deserves
some credit.
But alongside the awfulness, there’s geeky joy and wonder. But
it’s wonder plagued with anxiety. In the end, we’re left with nervous questions
about where this new world had led us and where it might lead us still.
Among the other characters we meet is an engineer who
devises robots to play soccer well enough to someday, he hopes, beat Brazil (which
is all very clever but . . . why?)
Some of these new techno-tricks may actually make some
people sick. Herzog visits one small community of souls who have been driven
off the grid due to their allergies to digital technology. They’ve take up
residence near a large SETI telescope because it’s the only place where they
can avoid the damaging effects of electromagnetic waves. If those solar
flares—discussed in another chapter—ever wash over us and shut down the entire
world’s telecommunications system, those folks may be the only humans left standing.
But “no one ever gets the future right,” as one cosmologist
says. The Internet was only sparsely predicted in the popular culture of
science fiction, which was busy predicting flying cars, jetpacks and vacations
on Mars. Stanley Kubrick et al were off by a cosmic mile, it must be admitted. What
we have is the Internet and its associated technologies to show for it all. We still
remain earth-bound.
Lo and Behold isn’t
one of Herzog’s most electrifying films. It’s impressionistic rather than
thorough and many viewers will already be acquainted with some these debates. In
this film, Herzog seems a little like your strange but adored uncle who’s just
turned on his first computer for the very first time: “Wow! Whoever thought!? Lo and Behold!”
With his distinct narrative style (parodied by everyone,
including himself) Herzog is the best of companions to this dangerous new world.
Wherever he travels, Werner Herzog is your perfect tour guide.
Copyright 2016 by
Thomas Burchfield
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