‘Lo and Behold’ is made irrelevant by its subject
OCTOBER 17TH, 2016 — POST 287
Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is a documentary about the internet. When the internet is so inseparable from daily life, the movie very quickly becomes about everything. Told through a series of vignettes with subtitles like ‘The Internet of Me’ and ‘The Future’ in which interviews with people like Lawrence Krauss and Elon Musk come to constitute a specific interrogation of one part of the story of the internet — from its beginnings in a room in UCLA to its possible destruction by a solar flares.
One vignette in particular — on the internet’s “evil” — is entirely owned by a staged interview with a family who lost their daughter in a car crash, the gruesome photos of which were shared with the family. These photos were accompanied by hateful words, some so bad “we can’t repeat them here” Herzog says in voiceover.
“We can’t repeat them here”. These words landed strangely for me. Even with only oblique references made in this vignette to the content of the photos, of the words directed at the family, I had a pretty good picture in my head of both. With images and words as horrific as those alluded to literally clicks away online, the understandable restraint Herzog has in holding them back felt quaint. When that which Herzog is dealing with is no longer sacred (if it ever was), any cinematic sanctity feels misplaced.
“Have the monks stopped meditating?”
These words from Herzog ring out in voiceover over a group of orange-clad monks on their smartphones alongside the Chicago waterfront. As evocative a poetic remark this is, I couldn’t help feeling held back by Herzog’s own naïvety that seems to come from the place of a technology fetishist. “Does the internet dream of itself?” is one line of inquiry Herzog tries with a few interviewees, the answers to which at best feel like they’re humouring a question that feels as if it ought to be considered behind furrowed brows and steepled fingers instead of met with what would seem natural: “I don’t know what you’re asking.”
The “cast” of interviewees are lead down paths of similar navel gazing, the best moments occurring when they depart and provide concrete insights. Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun raises the efficiency of learning computerised, internet-connected systems posses:
”Whenever a self-driving car makes a mistake, automatically all the other cars know about it, including future unborn cars.”
Thrun also talks about the reduction of the scope of possible contributions humans are able to make when automated systems take over certain tasks. What exactly the scope of possible human contributions looks like moving forward isn’t penetrated by Herzog, seemingly content with letting the imagined spectacle lie for the audience to mull over. But the thing is, Thrun has been interviewed by Bloomberg, by Charlie Rose, and a bunch of others, all of which are available — where else — online. If Lo and Behold can’t do these ideas justice in appropriately interrogating them, the internet certainly will.
Professor Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA alludes to the erosion of critical thinking the internet has allowed — instead of working stuff out for ourselves, we just google it. And there’s some sense that Lo and Behold wants to be a critical treatise on the internet, a treatise that doesn’t open up space for critical thinking on the internet but rather about the internet. But the longer the movie plays, the more it is made apparent that to be about the internet, you truly have to be on the internet. Talking about the monks again:
“Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.”
Overlooking the fact that — given Twitter’s user figures, limited growth, and uncertain future — it’s pretty unlikely these guys actually were tweeting, this line pulls together the problems with Lo and Behold. Herzog doesn’t seem interested in doing the work to understand the thing before layering a pseudo-profound critical framework atop it. It’s not like we’re left wanting, we can pull up a web browser and interrogate the web with a rigour Herzog doesn’t — starting with online interviews with the very people rounded up in Lo and Behold. But if there’s better thinking happening elsewhere, why do we need Lo and Behold at all?
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