Werner Herzog’s Outsized Personality Keeps ‘Lo and Behold’ Interesting

In Movies & TV by Lee Gardnerleave a COMMENT

Perhaps it should not be slightly surprising that Werner Herzog made a documentary about the Internet. His public image is, at this point, half man, half social-media meme—eccentric filmmaking grandpa meets intellectual caricature prone to bringing up “the abyss” with a straight face at unlikely moments. But his late-career Q factor bears little relation to his core brilliance and ambition, nor to his idiosyncratic filmmaking prowess. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World displays an abundance of the former, less so the latter.

Herzog starts at the beginning, in the drab room at UCLA where the first message was sent over what we now call the Internet in 1969, and skips across nearly five decades of net-driven innovation. He alights in Silicon Valley to talk to futurist moguls like Sebastian Thrun and Elon Musk, and he examines the highest heights that the last half century of innovation have unveiled: crowdsourced research, robots edging up to intelligent autonomy, the prospect of interplanetary colonization.

He also examines the less encouraging aspects of our net-connected society. A family recounts the trauma of having viral photographs of their daughter, nearly beheaded in a car crash, wind up in their inbox. He meets a recovering Internet addict who spent 16 hours a day playing video games, watching porn, and “just waiting for the timer to run out” on his real life. Herzog also pokes at the clay feet that support the tech colossus on which we now so heavily depend. He talks to hackers and privacy experts about the lawlessness built into the Web and the utter illusion of security therein. He delves briefly into the phenomenon of solar storms, which will—not might, but will—eventually reset our plugged-in society back to the Middle Ages in a blink.

It’s heady stuff, but note the word “reveries” in the subtitle. Herzog covers a lot of ground, and uncovers many fascinating gems, but he soon has to move on. For instance, did you know there’s a patch of rural West Virginia that, thanks to a large radio-telescope installation, tamps down all electronic signals as much as possible for miles around? And that the area has attracted a cadre of new residents who believe the omnipresent electronic signal tech of modern life is a threat to their health, some of whom live in Safe-like refuges? That could make a fascinating film on its own, but here it’s a relative blip in a somewhat scattered-feeling filmic essay.

It doesn’t help that Herzog’s subject is one of the more uncinematic topics available: boxes, wires, screens, and talking head after talking head. Even the robots, for all their activities, are undemonstrative. At one point, his camera focuses for what feels like a very long time on a tweedy older professor scratching out impenetrable equations on a narrow band of chalkboard. He still finds those bits of weird magic that come from sticking ordinary people in front of a camera, as when the Catsouras family calmly discuss their Internet-fueled nightmare while posed as if for a portrait around a luxe dining-room table sporting large trays of pristine, perfectly orderly pastries. But these tantalizing moments whip by all too soon.

Herzog himself never appears on camera, but he is always at its shoulder, asking questions in his cultured rasp and throwing the occasional wrench into the orderly reality in frame. To a young robotics expert cradling one of his creations, he unexpectedly asks, “Do you love it?” (The man says he does.) The director startles Musk, the force behind commercial spaceflight company SpaceX, by spontaneously volunteering for a one-way mission to Mars. He does not seem to be kidding at all. For those collecting more meme fodder, we get to hear Herzog dismiss a generic UCLA interior with “The corridors here look repulsive.” He also makes mystified reference to “a malevolent druid dwarf” at one point.

Herzog’s outsized personality and penetrating intelligence keep Lo and Behold from the tedium of a dry survey. There are some surprising omissions—there’s hardly any acknowledgment that social media exist—but the questions he entertains are worth all of us asking ourselves. And in the end, he’s like any of us: one person trying to make sense of a tech-enabled world now changing faster than he can comprehend. Even if the snapshot is out of date in two years, it’s worth taking time with.

The Public Cinema presents Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World at Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) on Wednesday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. Admission is free. 

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