Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
Directed by: Werner Herzog
Documentary - 98 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Aug 2016
Documentary - 98 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Aug 2016
Is there any voice in the world more pleasant to listen to then Werner Herzog’s German-infused accent? It’s more intriguing than Morgan Freeman’s smooth voiceover or even James Earl Jones’s deep bass. A haphazard hopscotch artist when it comes to choosing documentary subjects, Herzog is difficult to pin down on where he will land next. From the man who studied the post-mortem of a couple mauled to death by a grizzly bear, and the man who crawled inside a French cave to study the earliest known human pictorial drawings, now explores the history and consequences of today’s digital revolution. Bordering on an ADHD attention span hopping around seemingly at random, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World feels like a combination of 60 Minutes exposés sewn together into a mostly cohesive narrative.
Beginning at the most logical point, Herzog travels to UCLA, home of the first node of the Internet. Set to music recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey, when apes discovered the obelisk, one of the Internet’s first experimenters, Leonard Kleinrock, recounts how in 1969, a small room in Los Angeles connected with another room at Stanford; learning what the first message ever sent online is an amusing anecdote for Herzog to kick off our adventure from the past into the modern technological landscape.
Beginning at the most logical point, Herzog travels to UCLA, home of the first node of the Internet. Set to music recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey, when apes discovered the obelisk, one of the Internet’s first experimenters, Leonard Kleinrock, recounts how in 1969, a small room in Los Angeles connected with another room at Stanford; learning what the first message ever sent online is an amusing anecdote for Herzog to kick off our adventure from the past into the modern technological landscape.
The easiest examples to extol the Internet’s virtues are its successes in crowdsourcing achievements. Strangers came together and solved a vexing medical mystery, you can look up the answer to just about any question as fast as you can type it, and there are fascinating hints at what is come; Herzog seems most excited about self-driving cars. Elon Musk shows up as an interview subject and rattles off a handful of wild ideas. However, for as much as Herzog is a proponent of the progression from analog to digital and from isolation to cooperation, he devotes more than half of Lo and Behold to the internet’s dark side.
A high school girl commits vehicular suicide and anonymous sociopaths bombard her grieving family with the shocking, gruesome photos of the wreck. Herzog wisely does not show them, but using the power at my fingertips, I found them in half a second and cannot fathom why 1) a callous jerk would upload them for all to see and 2) how evil a person must be to forward them to the family. The girl’s mother is convincing when she calls the Internet the Antichrist and the spirit of evil. Even more perplexing than the emotional trauma resulting from how the Internet can be used to inflict pain, the explosion of wireless cellular towers spur actual physical pain in sub-group of folks.
How have we never heard about this before? A very select group of people can feel the frequencies of our cell towers and it hurts them. Holed up in a gigantic radio telescope’s tower free diameter in West Virginia, these unfortunate few are separated from their families and their entire lives just to live pain free. The frequency feelers did not choose their plight, but the Internet addicts interviewed and described made choices to logon for 20 hours a day ignoring food, drink, and even starving their infants to death due to neglect and absorption into online video games.
Yes, the Internet is not all rainbows and butterflies but what would happen to our world if it suddenly disappeared? Citing the brilliant one liner, “Calamity is just four missed square meals away,” experts predict we could not return to our pre-connected lives; we have forgotten how to live that way. Should solar flares disrupt the communication grid or massive storms like Hurricane Sandy which plunged Manhattan into darkness become more frequent, many preach we would not merely return to a slower way of life. Food production, sanitation, and just about every other vital government service are tied to the Internet.
There are also hackers to be vigilant against, the problems with communicating to Mars should we ever launch a manned mission to the red planet, and the metaphysical conundrum about the Internet becoming self aware and annihilating the human race because it feels like it. Herzog covers it all. If you don’t think you have enough stressors in your life to work on, check out Lo and Behold and you can cherrypick your next ulcer. Lo and Behold is no Grizzly Man, Herzog’s greatest documentary achievement to date, but it’s no slouch. Much broader than recent Internet exposés including The Internet’s Own Boy and Zero Days, what Lo and Behold stiff arms in specificity, it makes up for in quantity. Too busy and meandering to focus on any modern issue in depth, Lo and Behold will grab your attention, intrigue you, and bewilder you.
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