Juxtaposition Makes My Head Spin
It’s official: Errol Morris is a god among men! Just in case you didn’t already know, I figured I’d reiterate that his films (at least all of those I’ve now seen) are A-MA-ZING!
So let’s talk about Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, shalll we? I’ll admit, I was waiting for the moment when I was able to figure out what the title meant, I’m glad that it was something specific in the film it’s like if you cough you might miss it. But there were so many things about this film that I loved even if I’m not quite sure yet what they meant. I mean, when the camera filmed the circus audience from an angle that made it appear like they were in a cage… I got that one! Plus, the trainer guy was talking about how to the animals everything outside their cage is the cage. I think we do that as humans. We carve out for ourselves this little niche in the world and then we look at the big, wide world of change as some sort of trap.
But then we got the old man with the old fashioned shears in the topiary garden juxtaposed with the MIT guy who makes robots who could bring on the dawn of the silicon age. O.K. that was fascinating, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it just yet. There’s gotta be a reason why we can still hear the sound of the topiary shears even after we’ve moved on to another scene I just don’t know why?!? That’ll be my question for class… what’s up w/ the topiary dude?
Juxtaposition and overlap: it’s metaphor, is what it is. And it’s at the heart of the film, just as you’ve noticed.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:10 am[...] I agree 110% with (oh I wish I knew which blogs belonged to whom) the post on the blog All I Could Say Was about Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. I just can’t wrap my brain around it… yet. Let me watch it about nine times or so before I really get to know what I’m talking about, but until then, we’ll all just have to deal with my incoherent ramblings about one of the best films I’ve ever seen. [...]
April 1st, 2007 at 3:31 pm[...] Megs’s post points out some more great use of prison imagery, this time in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control in the form of cages. As Megs points out, the audience at the circus is in a cage, but this also, I believe, carries over to another audience — the film’s audience, or, us. Megs also calls the world outside our cage a “trap,” something that works very nicely with DUDE’S article, because, as he points out, staying in the cave or cage is our choice, and Megs has provided a nice motivation for staying there — we’re afriad something bad will happen if we leave our known world. This is seen nicely in The Fog of War, where McNamara is afraid, decades later, to speak against the Vietnam, even when he is no longer connected to the administration of the US government. [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 12:36 pm