Dir. Errol Morris
Rated G 82 mins
Releases June 11
Scr. Verona Cinema, Oxford St. Paddington

Non-fiction filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time) has made his most complex film to date about the vagaries of human existence and the obsessions we cultivate to deal with this sense of our own mortality. With staging and editing so over-elaborate it achieves a "level of documentary absurdity", Morris crosscuts between the career obsessions of four men and surreal circus sequences. Ironic use of audio and visual montage - with overlaying anecdotes, dissolves and gaps, painstaking slowmotion, music that glides from Phillip Glass to vaudeville, visual textures ranging from grainy black and white stock footage, to colour Super-8, 16mm, 35mm and video - makes Fast Cheap and Out of Control a superbly multilayered intertextual work of obsession itself. An elegy to his late parents, Morris's film struggles to comprehend what drives us to do the things we do, when memory and mortality so quickly erase our greatest achievements.

Once again, Morris focuses on the stories of seemingly disparate, fringe-dwelling males, drawing them together through a loose associative logic. Their intense stares and self-conscious monologue express both a passion for life as well as its absurdity, each having dedicated his life to a fundamental contradiction. Ray Mendez is a photographer fascinated with molerats - mammals that behave like insects, living in underground colonies like termites. George Mendonça is a topiary gardener who painstakingly prunes privet into the shape of animals. Australian Rodney Brooks is a robot scientist trying to create sentient silicon-life, which he believes will replace carbon-based lifeforms. Dave Hoover is a lion-tamer who's life is the daily risk of death, man against the jungle, in a cage in the big tent.

Brooks, head of MIT's robotics lab, speculates that personality is reducible to a simple set of feedback loops and subroutines. The complex behaviour of his robots, like Mendez's molerats, can be broken down to a few basic understandings and rules. Like insects, the robots trip-over, fall, collide and occasionally get stuck, but their uncoordinated scrambling action allows them to cope with an unpredictable and unknown environment. Sharing each others senses, many robots can navigate such a changing environment, leading to Brooks' proposition that Space-exploration would be better achieved with thousands of tiny, scrambling robots - 'fast cheap and out of control' - instead of a single multi-million-dollar probe. Somehow the basic interaction between his robots gives rise to a global effort - a sum greater than its parts. This introduces the issue of whether human consciousness is like the robot's elemental sentience, a basic form of language. That human civilisation is based on the individual's awareness that another sentience exists and is aware of our existence. We live our lives dependent on the recognition of others. Similarly, we seek to make others dependent on us, in order to reaffirm our existence and importance.

Historically, humans all starve together than kill 57 out of 58 children as the molerats unhesitatingly do. When a molerat is attacked by a snake the other molerats wall off and sacrifice the unfortunate victim, whilst humans would all attack the snake. This leads Morris to examine another paradox. How much of life is motivated by death? An awareness of death's inevitability is to acknowledge that living is to risk death, to stick your head in the lion's mouth as Dave Hoover does. Perhaps this is why so many feel the need to build, to create, to leave a legacy - whether it be plant, animal or silicon life. Is this a need to impress our contemporaries, those who follow, or simply a search for companionship? The futility of this struggle is emphasised by George Mendonça, who describes how nature destroys the animal-shapes he creates, wiping out years of work even as he lives. Hoover resignedly states that the world of his hero Clyde Beatty, is gone and cannot be recaptured again. Brooks is content to consider human endeavour as the means to silicon-life, an important, but ultimately transitional phase. It is Mendez's molerats which provide the most endearing outlook - that the meaning of life is just to feel alive - to roll in communal faeces, have several partners and children, eat, sleep and let the snake do the worrying about when it's going to get you.

Morris uses the circus as a metonym for humanity, our attraction to the extraordinary moment, to be in that narrow beam of limelight. The desire to transcend life in epiphany or legacy is always inscribed with a certain absurdity. In creating and perceiving systems of order, we construct identity and self-worth, the ephemeral reality of which we conveniently ignore. Fast Cheap and Out of Control is moving because it conveys the sadness that our lives are but passing curiosities; like the circus act they have little enduring meaning. There is no guarantee that such cultural rituals will matter to those who follow, who in any case are more likely to be molerats and robots than humans. In the end, perhaps life is best lived in the love and admiration of those we love and admire.

eugs
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