In Werner Herzog’s latest, Theater of Thought, the director largely known in his documentary work for discursive flights of wonderful pontification takes an American road trip to meet the scientists seeking to further understand, build around, and build into that thoughtful organ itself: the human brain. He interviews a variety of researchers, from those working on new forms of brain imaging, to those working on quantum computing at IBM, to a couple who study worm brains, and many more.

Early on, there’s quite a jump scare when the de-aging obsessed venture capitalist Bryan Johnson makes an appearance to show off his company’s brain scanning device. He puts a helmet on himself and a scientist, asks the man to lie about a math problem, and then says that the images taken of the brain can lead to an interpretation of where exactly the math problem, 5 + 5 = 11, went wrong in the mind. Fine. But anyone who is online enough to know about Bryan Johnson’s bizarre and vampiric self-experiments, in which he takes blood from his son and fat cells from other “donors” in order to appear younger, is left wondering why this early scene in particular is so matter of fact, why it leaves his, say, “quirks” totally unmentioned. One wouldn’t expect an inquisition, of course, and maybe playing it straight and letting the rest of his identity bubble beneath the surface of the scene is strangely more unsettling than a more direct question or two might have been. But Johnson seems like just the sort of Icarian figure that Herzog would normally obsess over, which makes it tough not to think that there is what at least seems like an uncharacteristically incurious, unprobing aspect to some of this, which does indeed come up during other sections of the film as well.

Some of Theater of Thought‘s richest moments are those where Herzog asks direct and goofy questions. Will we be able to talk to birds? How stupid is Siri? Questions like these seem to throw the researchers off guard, to cause their minds to short circuit, forcing them to wander a little bit off of their typical script or to see things from a bit slant. The director also brings up ethical issues a time or two, telling one researcher that if our thoughts become readable, he would prefer that they be kept private for 200,000 years rather than her proposed 50 years. He asks another whether successful telepathic experiments will lead to being able to make someone write a last will and testament for you. The scientist says that the control isn’t granular enough for that, but one has to wonder if there is a “yet” missing from his answer. Other than these instances, though, ethical issues are left largely unmentioned — a bit shocking as he talks to a researcher who has to a degree successfully controlled rat minds by firing light into particular neurons. Many of the experiments (perhaps not including that one) have seemingly beneficial ends, such as locating and rewiring or blocking pain receptors for people in excruciating chronic pain. But they all have a dark underside, of course. How long before a corporation tries to block the pain receptors of its workers in order to push their bodies past their limits? At the end of the film, there is a brief montage of each interviewee, with their sound cut out and Herzog in voiceover saying that each mentioned ethical concerns. But as this seems primarily based on the clips that make it into the film, we sort of have to take his word for that.

One effective trick Herzog does employ is the classic “let the camera keep rolling for a while after the last answer to make the subject sit with their words” maneuver. He only does it with a few participants, but it acts as sort of recursive punctuation, which lets their words hang in the air and loops you back through them. Herzog does not ask another question and he does not say cut — a rift in the social contract and in the interviewer-interviewee situation. This lets us watch their mind work, so to speak. We may not have brain imaging helmets like Bryan Johnson, but there is meaning in their expressions, in the discomfort or the patience that they wear on their faces, all further complicated by the tenor of their particular interaction with Herzog. There is a kernel of mystery in all this, in that we can’t truly know exactly what they’re thinking. This all points to something that escapes the general project of most of the researchers in the film: the unconscious — the undergirding, contradictory driving force of the speaking subject situated in a world of other speaking subjects.

As close as we may get to understanding the what and the how of our brains, there will always be part of the why that eludes us, and within that why, another nested what and how that eludes us just the same. Early in his explorations of the unconscious, Freud claimed that the dream always has an utterly mysterious “navel,” a point at which the dream totally evades interpretation. While Theater of Thought leaves a lot of important stones unturned, and fails to reach the philosophical-poetic heights of Herzog’s best, it does outline quite directly through conversation an immense wealth of knowledge, leaving a fertile ground for viewers to themselves find those short circuits, contradictions, and points of impenetrability.

DIRECTOR: Werner Herzog;  DISTRIBUTOR: Argot Pictures;  IN THEATERS: December 13;  RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.

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