"The corridors look repulsive, but this one leads to a shrine."
Werner Herzog utters these words in his unmistakably austere Austrian monotone during the opening moments of Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, the documentarian's attempt to paint a portrait of the vast, and amorphous web and its impact in our lives, while leading us down the fluorescent-lit hallways of UCLA’s Boelter Hall.
Herzog's camera pauses at the doorway of Room 3420: the birthplace of the internet. It’s a linoleum-floored, four-walled classroom with baby food-green walls. Inside, Leonard Kleinrock, an early internet pioneer, gestures to a tall, rectangular box standing unceremoniously in the corner of the room. Inside this machine, Kleinrock notes, is where the first online message was sent. It looks like a cross between a school locker and a control panel from the Apollo 11. But as the camera moves in closer, Kleinrock opens the machine, revealing a tangle of weathered metal, wires, and fans. “It’s so ugly on the inside that it's beautiful,” Kleinrock says grinning into the camera.
“So ugly on the inside that it's beautiful” is a pretty good way to sum up Herzog’s latest documentary, which concerns the internet and has its official premiere tonight at Sundance. Lo and Behold is Herzog’s attempt to paint a portrait of the vast, and amorphous web and its impact in our lives. And while the film doesn’t always succeed in distilling the enormity and complexity of the internet into a coherent or gripping narrative, its portrayal of the internet’s pioneers, victims, fringes, and wonders does something perhaps more important: it humanizes it.
This success may, in fact be accidental, brought on by the fact that Herzog, 73, freely admits that he rarely, if ever, uses the internet. Herzog's clean slate approach to his subject certainly shows in the film on occasion. The starkly displayed title cards that introduce each new segment non-ironically refer to his subject as ‘the net’ — ”THE GLORY OF THE NET,""LIFE WITHOUT THE NET,""THE END OF THE NET” — and the filmmaker’s curiosities are diverse enough that the film is cursory at times. Herzog, for example, marvels at well-hyped and covered pieces of technology like self-driving cars and fairly common computer hacker tricks with the wonder of someone encountering them for the first time. There's a nervous undertone at times, no doubt caused by Herzog's own relationship to technology (he owns a cell phone, but hasn't used it in the last year) and at times he reflects somberly on how quickly things change.
“Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting,” he says during one brooding meditation on the future of the planet.
Some of the film’s other movements go deeper though, tackling questions of solar flares and electromagnetic pulses that could topple modern society as we know it; the psychological fallout from crippling internet addiction and allergies to wireless radiation; and existential debates over whether or not ‘the internet can dream of itself.’ [Spoiler: Herzog suggests that if the internet can dream of itself, then that dream is surely a cold-sweat-soaked, hellscape nightmare.]
Herzog seems to enjoy pushing his carousel of experts, engineers, and scientists to look toward the future, especially as it relates to the fragility of our modern internet. The experts, for the most part, gamely indulge in theoretical speculation. It’s fun — and mildly unsettling — to listen to Tesla/Space X founder, Elon Musk imagine a dystopia in which an artificial intelligence designed to maximize hedge fund profits by shorting consumer stocks, goes long on defense stocks and attempts to ignite a global conflict. Or to discover that someone with the right acumen and access could gradually adjust the orbital vectors of our communications satellite in the hopes of disabling them. “We could already be in a cyber war and not know it,” one of the films experts says to Herzog with a smile that’s just big enough to be concerning.
The most poignant parts of the film belong to the moments grounded in the here and now. Herzog visits the family of Nikki Catsouras, an 18 year old woman whose pictures were spread across the internet and sent to her family after she was decapitated in a grisly car accident. The family, dressed in black and seated around a kitchen table with an open chair for their deceased daughter,