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The title's stark pun suits the sardonic bent of Frederick Wiseman's montage, portraits and statues of scientific luminaries yield to the quizzical gorilla in its chain-link cell. "That's what makes it so good, complexity." Scan of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, great apes watched in cages by humans watched in the cage that is the screen. Much is done in the name of the search for knowledge, General Ripper's "precious bodily fluids" are an ongoing concern. (Antiseptic spaces are filled with prodding and milking, "now we'll just let nature take its course.") The operating table is never far, an orangutan is shaved before surgery, moans painfully afterward in its tank. Dispassionate jargon, piercing shrieks. "Does he resent it?" "Yeah, generally he does." A pendant to Titicut Follies, with bottles and diapers for baby inmates. The desire to learn, the urge to dominate, what adds to humanity and what detracts from it. Language is a question of pushing buttons to get grape juice, evolution here just means which species has power and which doesn't. (Up and down "the old ladder," as Albee would have it.) Pièce de résistance, the detailed transformation of a spirited capuchin monkey into a slice of frozen brain matter, a cluster of dots whose abstract beauty is not lost on the researchers peering through the microscope. "All research is useful," it is declared, Wiseman's unconvinced punchline is an existential anagram of 2001: A Space Odyssey: Jet in the stratosphere, men in zero gravity, the flicking tongue that suddenly splits the impassive simian gaze. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |