What came across to me in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control was the four men trying to control their environments, and by doing so they could exert control over their lives.\u00c2\u00a0 They did not appear God-like to me, but rather they strove to counter-balance the influence of God or nature or whatever you want to call it (I call it God, but nowadays that’s not PC) in their lives.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Topiary Gardner<\/strong><\/p>\n The topiary gardner literally created the animals from the shrubbery he tended to.\u00c2\u00a0 He seemed to love those animals the way a mother loves her child.\u00c2\u00a0 He nurtured their growth by preening out the unwanted branches while encouraging the new leaves to grow.\u00c2\u00a0 He waited for the rain that would feed them and\u00c2\u00a0turn them into what he was hoping they\u00c2\u00a0would become.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I noticed in several shots that right after he pruned them into their perfect shape, it would rain and you could see\u00c2\u00a0the new growth that threatened to ruin the smoothness and perfect shape\u00c2\u00a0that he had created.<\/p>\n The Naked Mole Rat Man<\/strong><\/p>\n This man bothered me because he took the mole rats out of their environment in Africa and transplanted them into the zoo.\u00c2\u00a0 They could have very easily died in their new, alien\u00c2\u00a0environment.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Then what would he have to study?\u00c2\u00a0 Most likely he would have found some other poor, unsuspecting creature to “observe” in the name of science.\u00c2\u00a0 For me, he represents the ultimate in man’s selfishness and disregard for other life forms.\u00c2\u00a0 He became detached from the mole rats as\u00c2\u00a0creatures and saw them as merely objects of interest.\u00c2\u00a0 People do this to each other all the time in the name of science or ethnic cleansing (think Hitler or\u00c2\u00a0slavery\u00c2\u00a0in the US).\u00c2\u00a0 This\u00c2\u00a0 was very scary and I think Morris intended to show this potential in man.<\/p>\n The Wild Animal Tamer<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m an animal lover and hate to see animals subjected and lowered to being beaten and forced to perform for mankinds’ benefit.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Like the naked mole rat man, the wild animal trainer was hard to\u00c2\u00a0watch.\u00c2\u00a0 I kept hoping that one of the lions would eat him\u00c2\u00a0or\u00c2\u00a0at least maim him to the point that he would have to retire.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Perhaps this guy was the most eager to manipulate his environment or at the very least, try to mitigate the effects it had on\u00c2\u00a0him.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u00c2\u00a0had to employ animal psychology in order to dominate the animals.\u00c2\u00a0 However, we all know that those animals could have turned on him at any time.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know if taming the animals made him feel like more of a man, or if it was just an adrenaline rush and he was a\u00c2\u00a0thrill junkie.\u00c2\u00a0 I think Morris included him because he was the “ultimate manipulator” of his environment.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s interesting to me that he was not hurt more seriously than he was the time that the lion caught hold of\u00c2\u00a0his watch and sent him to the hospital for three months.<\/p>\n The MIT Robotics Engineer\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The role of the robotics engineer was to highlight the ego of man.\u00c2\u00a0 I mean to think that man is capable of giving life to an inanimate object through the construction of some metal and binary loops is completely insane and laughable.\u00c2\u00a0 This guy has an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore.\u00c2\u00a0 This guy was so completely ridiculous as to make him pitiful.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s the guy that never gets the girl and doesn’t know why.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0He may\u00c2\u00a0have really be lieved he was\u00c2\u00a0God (that’s a role reserved for doctors who think they’re God and lawyers who think they can beat God.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s a whole other dynamic).\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, I digress.\u00c2\u00a0 How could this guy reduce the beauty and mystery\u00c2\u00a0of life to a set of feedback loops and metal legs?\u00c2\u00a0 It takes more than that to create a life.\u00c2\u00a0 Every being needs a soul or an essence.\u00c2\u00a0 That is what was missing from the robots.\u00c2\u00a0 They will never have a soul.\u00c2\u00a0 They will never have a temper or appreciate the aroma of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven.\u00c2\u00a0 As I’ve said before, this man was the most dangerous in his belief that he could create life.<\/p>\n On a final note, I noticed the numerous times that things were being expelled from things.\u00c2\u00a0 For example, the men in the circus were shot out of cannons, bullets were shot out of guns, and the mole rats seemed to burst through their tunnels.\u00c2\u00a0 It made me think of childbirth.\u00c2\u00a0 I wonder if it’s a mere coincidence that Morris chose to portray men in the film “giving birth” to their creations.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s interesting that no women were interviewed or profiled.\u00c2\u00a0 Not sure what that part means or if it was even his intention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What came across to me in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control was the four men trying to control their environments, and by doing so they could exert control over their lives.\u00c2\u00a0 They did not appear God-like to me, but rather they strove to counter-balance the influence of God or nature or whatever you want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/carmenc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}