The Oddities and Frights of Errol Morris’ First Person

Posted by Netzley in Culture on 08 3rd, 2008 | no responses |

Screw life imitating art. Forget art imitating life. What about art scaring the poo out of life? Or art making life so paranoid and hyper-neurotic that it urinates itself when it’s alone for more than five minutes in a room with less than sufficient lighting? Think of the last piece of art that made you leery of leaving the house. Can you conjure it up? Have you seen one lately?

Of course, we all have those special pieces that reside trench-deep in our psyches. For me, it’s George Stubbs’ 18th century painting of the race horse Whistlejacket with its eyes all wide and wild. It’s a long story.

For others, there was that satanic Teddy Ruxpin doll with the cassette tape injected into his back.

Others still are not crazy about clowns.

But what about when the art is regular people? Like pilots, museum curators, authors, scientists, and game show contestants?

Errol Morris’s short-lived television show First Person did this. He created moments of terror through real people and moments from their lives, and all of this done primarily through dialogue and eye contact. Morris is a documentarian best known for his hands-off approach with odd and subversive subjects like pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven) and wrongly accused death row inmates (The Thin Blue Line)–the latter film’s evidence exonerating the inmate shortly after its release.

(NB: The Thin Blue Line should scare anyone with a driver’s license into not committing any sort of crime in the state of Texas. Watch the film to find out why.)

In First Person, aired on the Bravo Channel back in 2000, Morris brings the large scale documentary into the television format. In a half hour, Morris was able to make me terrified of things I’d never thought to be terrified of only because I was ignorant of them.

To draw an analogy: it’s like feeling your way around a dark warehouse full of items that you press up against but don’t know exactly what they are. At some point, the lights come on and you’re face to face with a decapitated head in a fluid-filled jar. Stumble. Crash! Gasp! Now you’re caught up in the skeleton of a man who suffered from fibrodysplasia ossificans progresssiva, a disease that slowly turns the entire body into one giant bone.

Doesn’t do anything for you? No poo in the seat yet? Fair enough.

Meet Clyde Roper. One of Morris’ subjects, Roper is obsessed with meeting an architeuthis, or a giant squid. As a squid expert, he knows more than anyone would ever care to know about squids. Yet, his love of the giant squid, and squids in general, is the kind of passion that makes you take a step back for fear of spontaneous combustion. He unabashedly admits that he would give everything to be in a submersible, plunged way down into the depths and come face to face with a giant squid. He wants to be a victim of the squid. He wants the squid to pop his safety bubble so as to get a closer look at how the magnificent tentacles work. And here’s what makes this interview fork off from your more quotidian interviews. Most scientists would realize that in order to share knowledge, you must be alive. Roper is so enthralled with the idea of an inky death that he’s practically beginning for it to come to fruition. Then there’s the fact that a giant squid has two eyeballs the size of a human head. They have a giant beak like a parrot with which they eat their prey whole. If you were to be eaten by a giant squid, and you weren’t luckily cut in half by the beak, you would go into the esophagus, which passes in between the two halves of the squids brain. How does a creature like this exist!

I mean, I live in Missouri, a landlocked state, and after that episode, I was wary of a giant squid cracking my skull with its parrot beak or suctioning my organs from my torso with its tentacles.

Raise your hand if you’re afraid of flying. You’ll second-guess air travel after you watch pilot Dennis Fitch recount, with tears in his eyes, the time he was trapped in a doomed DC-10 that lost all control after its hydraulic lines were severed. Fitch’s plane was caught in what is called a phugoid cycle, like a sine wave that’s losing its verve and drooping on each successive drop. The plane eventually crashed on a runway in Sioux City and killed close to half the passengers. Fitch says that those investigating the tragedy afterwards said the plan should’ve been impossible to fly.

What makes Fitch’s story so sad, and for me, distressing, are the cold facts of inevitability. The hydraulic lines were severed after an engine exploded. The engine exploded because there was a faulty piece. The faulty piece came from a factory, worked by, yes, men and women. It’s hard to escape the reality that your life is constantly in the hands of hundreds, if not thousands of other people.

Keeping things creepy is the direct eye contact the interviewees have with the audience. This is due to Morris’ “Interrotron,” an invention of his own design. The “Interrotron” is a relatively ingenious set-up composed of a teleprompter projected onto the camera’s lens at a 90 degree angle, but instead of words, one sees the face of Errol Morris, thus creating a two-way camera. We have the Errol Morris view. And the interviewees speak directly to us, pleading their lives and stories. Morris is never in the same room with these people. It tends to create more of an open dialogue with people. There’s some part of the human spirit that’s not afraid to tell someone on a screen a deep dark secret. The revealer is in no position to judge you if they are only an image.

If you’re in the mood―no, wait, scratch that―even if you aren’t in the mood to be scared, search out these DVDs, rent them from the library, steal them from your ex-girlfriend. Watch them and be slightly jealous, or relieved, that your life is not a pageant of oddities.

Maybe that’s the key to Errol Morris’ subjects: they all love what we, the drooling syndicate, have been trained or conditioned to view as abnormal or unacceptable. It’s just that, their love is embracing a rabid borderline. And ours merely has the tenacity of a valentine candy.

Enjoy.