Theatre of Thought

Werner Herzog's Theater of Thought is set as a road trip across the United States. There are several clips of American highways from a driver's perspective. A ramble across long distances is an apt metaphor for the film. It is an interminable set of interviews with engineers working on new technology related to the human brain. Checking my watch part way through, I realized that I had no idea whether I was closer to the beginning or the end of the film.

Toward the end, Herzog shows the face of each of the researchers he interviewed up to that point, and voices over that not a single one could explain to him what consciousness is. Herzog was interviewing the wrong people. Neuroscientists are interested in the neural correlates of consciousness, and engineers want to figure out how to enhance people's abilities. If Herzog wanted to understand how mere matter creates experience, he should have started with his title. Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, has often used the metaphor of a theater to describe the way some people think the mind works: there is a little mini person inside everyone's head who is looking at the images passing by the senses. As I was watching, I kept expecting the next interviewee to be David Chalmers, a world authority on the problem of how the brain makes consciousness.

Instead, we get Herzog asking engineers to describe their inventions, and then suddenly asking them questions like, "Do fish dream?" or "Can we use your invention to ask someone who has just died whether they are in heaven or hell?" You can see the shock on the faces of the interviewees. One says that those speculations are better discussed over a beer.

The best part of the film was a digression. We see tightrope walker Phillipe Petit of Man on Wire fame performing outside his home. Although he is now an old man, Petit is graceful and serious as he struts along on the very wire he used above the World Trade Center in 1974. But then we have to get back to the march through interview after interview of scientists. Herzog's eye for humor provided occasional relief, but not enough to make the long film worth it.

This includes some of the most fascinating interviews of Herzog's career. It also features.... Philippe Petit the daredevil tightrope walker who crossed the World Trade Center towers in the 70s (of course they're friends) and a guy who writes and performs songs about how the brain works, and those didn't have as much bearing on the rest of the film despite the connections to ideas involving fear or the lack of it. There are a couple of instances where, forgive the phrase, my mind wandered.

But my criticism of those few minutes doesn't take away too much from how much insight and inquiry - and as has to be in science what's most thrilling is what we don't fully know yet, or what is on the precipice or being - and seeing things like how nerve science has led to Parkinsons sufferers being able to walk mostly normal again or that potential technology of the brain implants that can help (some of) the blind to see again, it makes for a unique documentary experience.

I especially loved the interview with the husband and wife scientist couple (of course they try to talk about anything but science at dinner) and how remarkable something as seemingly common now for brain surgeons as removing pain from one's body is in our day and age. Overall what I got from Herzog's questions, the answers, and his own musings is that he still remains "mystified" by how the mind works and what "theater" our minds make.

This is not some grim spectacle like some of you may expect from this director; there's hope and heart and what possibilities science has for us, whether it is brain surgery or the study of tiny organisms on a dish, it's Herzog at his most humanistic while investigating the known and unknown and yet to be known.