Werner Herzog
2016
98 minutes
This is going to officially be your least favorite Werner Herzog documentary. It was shot in 2016 and it aged like milk. Behold, as Herzog interviews a parade of tech bro geniuses such as Elon Musk about a future full of self-driving cars and trips to Mars and how different the world is now that social media has made us all hyperconnected.
To Herzog's credit, he includes plenty of the dark side as well. He interviews a family whose daughter was killed in a car accident. The crash scene photos including their daughter's corpse were soon leaked to the Internet and went viral, which naturally led to a lot of people harassing the family.
You're no stranger to consuming such content yourself, of course. You've seen plenty of gore on the Internet that was probably not good for your soul. You're remarkably squeamish when it comes to watching actual medical procedures, but sadly desensitized to a lot of things that happen in the wild. You've been spared the worst of encountering terrifying gore in the streets, but you've seen a lot of things in person you'd prefer not having any memory of.
It's hard to explain the draw of deliberately exposing yourself to such awful things. Part of it seems to be that it's important to desensitize yourself to this to lower the shock value a bit in case you need to act quickly in an emergency. If someone is shot or stabbed in front of you, it would be best if you're not so busy recoiling in horror that you fail to get to safety. It also seems important to actually see what such carnage looks like before you start flippantly mocking it or dismissing it.
You narrowly missed having a front seat for such carnage when you were in middle school. One Valentine's Day you stood waiting at the bus stop for your bus, which never showed up. You were baffled and very worried about being late for school through no fault of your own, not confident that you wouldn't be punished anyway for this. Finally a bus showed up half an hour late with a different driver, and you found out the tragic reason why.
Your bus route was actually your driver's second route of the day. On her first route, she picked up some of the children who lived farther out of town and dropped them off before picking up kids like you who lived nearer to each other and didn't have as far to go. When she was dropping off her first set of kids, one of the elementary school kids ran back around the bus to give the driver a valentine card with some candy. She didn't see him and she struck him and ran over his head, which sent blood and brains and skull fragments flying in front of your horrified classmates. Several of your friends got to witness this first-hand. You were amazed at how shaken they were, and they did not tolerate any of the latecomers who thought it would be funny to make light of things. You remember several fights nearly breaking out during the course of the day over callous comments from those who had not been there. It sent a shiver down your spine.
You also recall the time when you were driving a taxi and one of your friends and fellow drivers struck a drunk pedestrian, who wandered into traffic. The young man broke the windshield of the cab with his face. Your friend initially thought he had killed the man, who lay limp in the street in a pool of blood and dislodged teeth. Your friend was obviously terrified that he was going to be blamed for the accident and lose his license or be charged with a serious crime (thankfully he wasn't). You were unnerved by how completely shaken he was by this since this friend was one of the most outwardly callous people you knew. For months after the event he had nightmares every night and dealt with the stress by drinking extremely heavily to the point where it was difficult to be around him. Eventually he settled back down to a more "normal" amount of heavy drinking and rarely brought up the event, and for better or worse you never asked him about how it affected him in the long term.
Time to choose something different: