"Cheap, Fast, and Out of Control"
 A Film Review by
 Linda Lopez McAlister
 on "The Women's Show"
 WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL
 November 29, 1997

 I couldn't find anything that even remotely resembled a "women and
film" type movie in the Tampa area yesterday (that I haven't already
reviewed, that is).  So forget that that's the title of my segment of the
women's show and let me tell you about a really interesting and
entertaining documentary that's playing at just two screens in the area.
It's called "Cheap, Fast, and Out of Control" and it's certainly worth
your time and money if you are up to seeing a film that requires you to
think about the issues presented rather than spoon feeding you the
filmmaker's predigested answers;  that invites you to make connections and
comparisons between things you've probably never put together before;
that avoids the usual linear narrative line in favor of a more postmodern
play with voice over and images; and that does in fact touch upon some
questions of gender and some issues of control of nature of interest to
feminists.

 "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," is the work of long-time
documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (who previously did "The Thin Blue
Line" and "A Brief History of Time."  What he does here for starters is to
interview four men at length--a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener ,
a zoologist who specializes in an African rodent known as the naked mole
rat; and a professor of robotics at MIT.  It's hard to see, on the
surface, what these four men have in common.  Thanks to the way Morris
works, as the film rolls, and for a long time after you leave the theater,
you will be finding answers to that question and the additional questions
that one spawns.   What he appears to have done is, first,  get his
footage of  the interviews, done in straightforward  talking head style,
and then get footage of them doing their various things-- under the big
top, in the garden, and in their respective labs.   Then  he raids the
film archives for some other, sometimes surprising, film clips and he sits
down at his film editing machine and creates this incredible documentary,
first simply giving an exposition of who these men are and then creating
ever more complex structures through juxtapositions and overlappings of
sound and image.

 What is the film about?  That's for each viewer to think through
for oneself.  Thematically, it's about interactions between human beings
and nature.  Two of the interviewees have spent their careers trying to
keep living things under exacting control--the man who earns his living as
an old-style wild animal trainer in the circus, complete with Clyde Beatty
costume of jodhpurs, whip, chair, and pistol at his side, and the man who
has spent his entire life fastidiously hand-clipping plants into the form
of giant elephants, giraffes, bears, and other creatures.  Both seem to be
in the twilight of their eras.  No one is poised to follow in the
footsteps of George, the gardener; no one these days has the patience to
use the hand tools, to put in the years it takes to create these animals
with no metal scaffolding underneath, as he did.   And though there are
still wild animal acts in circuses, they no longer come in the heroic mold
of the Clyde Beatty of  Dave Hoover's youth, able to vanquish all villains
human and otherwise, and to bend ferocious creatures to his will.
Hoover's replacement with the Clyde Beatty Circus is an attractive young
woman whose relationship to the animals in the ring is very different--she
kisses and caresses them rather than threatening them.  Hoover, patriarch
to the end, claims nothing will happen to her as long as he's there, a
claim that rings particularly hollow.

 The two scientists are much more self conscious about the
relationship between human beings, animals, and non-living things, as you
might expect.  The one, who has spent nearly his whole professional life
studying the naked mole rat, did so because people had always believed
that mammals and insects were so different in their life patterns that
there was no link between them, but someone discovered these subterranean
rats whose life style is virtually identical to that of termite colonies.
He studies them from a zoologist's perspective, but also for what they
teach him about human beings and about himself.

 The robotmaker has taken a whole new approach, apparently, to
robotics, one in which the scientists do not program the robots to do a
particular task.  They create them to perform certain moves, of ever
greater complexity, to interact with one another, and to see what they
will do, given their "nature."  So they are "out of control" in the sense
that there isn't some human directly controlling the robot by sending
commands to do this or do that.   He wonders whether or not that's the way
other organisms, including humans, actually function.  He wonders if
someday this type of robot, hugely more complex than now, might not be the
next form of "life" in the universe, our legacy to the future.  You'll
wonder that too by the time you've finished watching this unusual and
fascinating film, "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control."

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Fil

Linda Lopez McAlister is Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy at
the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

Copyright 1997 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please
do not reprint this review without prior consent of the author: mcaliste
chuma.cas.usf.edu.