Errol Morris's film Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control (1997)is 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. 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 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. In this way, Morris suggests much about what binds us all together in this world.
The one thing that connects these men most is their enthusiasm for their particular point of interest. Each man seeks to control some aspect of the world and to reshape it in a way that serves his particular view of the world. Another element that binds them together is that they are alone in their obsession. The maker of topiaries creates his particular form of ephemeral art, and Morris shows this to be a dying art. He has no apprentice, and it is suggested that what he does is a thing of the past and not something anyone is learning for the future. The lion-tamer similarly is the last of a dying breed. The mole-rat specialist and the robotics exert are men looking to developing knowledge for the future, and they are shown not to be tied to the past as the other two are but to be just as alone for most of their lives as they have worked to create something that did not exist before.
The style of the film is highly self-conscious and self-referential. The film is shaped in a series of sequences shifting the central idea or issue and then exploring it with each of the four men, and the interview...