"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Errol Morris's film "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control", a documentary that takes four disparate individuals and features them and their unique jobs as part of an effort to suggest a number of ideas about America, about the future and about the value of personal obsession. The four men are Dave Hoover, a wild animal trainer; George Mendonca, a topiary gardener, Ray Mendez, a mole-rat specialist and Rodney Brooks, a robotics scientist. It discusses how the film has a non-linear narrative structure, intercutting interviews with the four men and developing an ongoing dialogue between the men and the unseen interviewer and how in a way that emphasizes what binds the four men together, while their jobs would seem to be such as to keep them apart in their different realms. It analyzes how the four men have their version of the truth and how they pursue it doggedly. It looks at how placing the four of them together as Morris does suggests that we each have our version of the truth as expressed in our own lives and our own choices, and just as these four obsessive men are brought to the fore to tell their stories.

From the Paper:

"The film is not static as might be expected from a work that is largely made up of responses by the four men. Their enthusiasm is itself infectious, but more than this, Morris gives movement to the work through his use of editing and music. The music in particular gives the film a lyrical tenor that suggests that it is a meditation by the filmmaker on the ideas being presented, and the filmmaker is shaping those ideas through the editing process. The four men are presented as essentially heroic, not in the sense of performing great feats, but in the sense of continuing with their particular obsession in the face of ridicule, potential failure, and other obstacles."

More papers on "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control":

• Essay # 15277 : "Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control"
• Book Review # 150348 : "Protagonists Feeling Out-of-Touch with the World"

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